Almost nobody believes they make enough money to feel secure, and there is a reason for that. Until you have what they colloquially call F-you money, you really aren’t secure.
Before you get your undies in a bunch, I don’t think that means most people don’t make enough money. No “workers of the world unite!” from me. Rather, until such a time as robots and AI create superabundance and there are no limits to what is available, most of us have to work to survive. And contrary to people’s delusions, generally speaking people have to do less in order to live incomparably better than most human beings who have ever lived.
Life for most people across history has been what Hobbes called “nasty, brutish, and short,” a description that my detractors often use when they refer to me. Life was hard, famines common, and disease stalked us throughout our lives. If we met somebody from the 18th or 19th century and started whining, they would laugh in our faces.
Still, insecurity is a fact of life because scarcity of goods is a fact of life, and most of us have to provide economic value before we have access to resources. In other words, we work for a living.
Empower, the financial services firm, does a survey to see what kind of wealth and income people think they need to feel “happy,” and I interpret this to mean “financially secure and able to live a fulfilling life.”
The results are interesting, to say the least, and tell us something that shouldn’t surprise us but does: one generation in particular has totally unrealistic expectations regarding income and wealth.
No, I don’t mean Gen Z because Gen Z is too young to understand what anything costs in the real world. Food, rent, housing, child care…they are too young to have experience enough to make a judgment. Empower surveyed them, but I dismissed the results because it’s like asking a 5-year-old to pick a suit to wear to a job interview.
Nearly 6 in 10 adults say they can purchase joy, including 72% of millennials and 67% of Generation Z, according to a survey released Monday by Empower, a Colorado-based financial services firm. https://t.co/jNXUNS5TdJ
— The Washington Times (@WashTimes) November 22, 2023
It is the Millennials, who will likely be remembered as America’s Lightest-weight generation. (Yes, I do know that is unfair, but as a Boomer/Gen X straddler I demand respect for my cranky old man privilege).
People from all generations want to make more money–the kind of income that people think would make them happy is dramatically higher than the average household income in the US. This simply reflects a reality that people of most income brackets feel insecure financially–with reason.
But look at Millennial’s expectations compared to everybody else.
Millennial’s expectations are so far off the charts that they require 4x the income of everybody else to feel happy.
Four times. It is so out of line with everybody else that if you exclude them, the average for the survey would fall by more than half.
In other words, they are insane. Not just in the “that’s ridiculous” meaning of insane, but in the “disconnected from reality” meaning of insane. They are as disconnected from reality as the average schizophrenic who believes they hear voices.
A salary of $526,000/yr doesn’t quite put you in the top 1%, but it puts you comfortably in the top 3%. That means Millennials either believe it is realistic that they will make more than 97% of the country, or that they will never feel satisfied with their life.
A salary of $130,000/yr–the desired income for Gen X–is readily attainable if you work at it. Gen X is still in its prime earning years, although at the tail end of them, and a reasonably ambitious and successful person can make that if they choose to. It is above average, but hardly out of reach.
For reference I looked at school district professional salaries in Minneapolis. While they start low, the higher-paid teachers can get a salary of…wait for it…$230,000/year. That school administrator would, in fact, be in Gen X, making almost twice what the average Gen Xer would consider a comfortable salary. Don’t believe me? Follow the link, which is to the contract for 2019 to 2021. It is undoubtedly higher now.
Teachers in Minneapolis can make around $100,000, plus benefits. A married couple of teachers can clear $200,000 plus benefits, which is almost 3 times average household income for the city. Not wealthy, but not bad either.
Millennials, though, want $525,000/year, an income that few, if any, of them will ever achieve, dooming themselves to always feel unhappy and insecure.
Are we to blame them for this? Sure, but not solely. They have been sold a bill of goods, both in terms of what they should reasonably expect to want or get, and this is one of the reasons they feel oppressed all the time. Gen X grew up with grandparents who lived through the Depression or World War II. Millennials have parents who were raising them in post-Cold War America when the economy was booming unusually fast.
Add to that the constant pressure of social media, celebrity culture, influencers who make ungodly amounts of money for doing little, and an educational environment that pushes the idea that the society is oppressive. You have a recipe for entitled brats who make the 1960s Boomers look like monks.
The Boomers, though, should give us some hope for the Millennials. I think. I hope.
They matured, settled, raised families, and now are cranky old men and women. Perhaps this will happen to the Millennials.
Naah. Society will collapse before then, I am afraid. So I guess Millennials are screwed.
