This TikTok video was circulating on X today. I’m not sure how old this clip is but it features a young woman (Her Walmart vest says “Cat”) who is complaining that she’s working full time and can’t afford to live alone.

“I work five days out of the week, 40 hours a week,” she said. She continued, “I do not make enough to live on my own. I do not make enough to pay rent, water electric and eat. All by myself I would not be capable of doing that.”

But here’s where it takes a turn. “Twenty years ago when you were getting started, you could live on your own,” she said. But is that really true? Watch the whole thing. It’s only 90 seconds long.

GenZ joins the workforce in Joe Biden's America. pic.twitter.com/aFtp3DLbOB

— ✪ Evil Te𝕏an ✪ (@vileTexan) January 8, 2024

Lots of people have chimed in to point out that 20 years ago or even more they could not make it on their own either, at least not at first.

There were like 6 of us sharing a 2 bedroom apartment. We ate like absolute shit. It was years of that before I could live on my own and that was only because my fiancé had a job and we could split the bills. That was 35 years ago. Don’t know who’s been lying to you. https://t.co/0ViRaOhJDA

— Some Welder 🇺🇸 (@SomeWelder) January 8, 2024

Another one:

15 years ago, as a high schooler, my first job was $6.50/hr, bagging groceries. This was immediately after the Great Recession of 2008.

I could not pay rent with it, I could not afford a car payment, and I used my paychecks to pay cash to offset my community college tuition… https://t.co/FSZ1JCpsEJ

— Joshua Reed Eakle (@JoshEakle) January 8, 2024

The rest of the tweet reads:

…to offset my community college tuition while living with my parents.

Eventually, I used this position to interview for a position with more pay at a different company.

After doing this two more times, I finally was able to find a job that paid just enough to afford a shitty apartment and a crappy car. From there, things continued to progressively improve.

If you expect your first job to pay you enough to cover everything, you’re going to be unhappy.

This is not some new curse that Gen Z is experiencing; this is the normal plight of all young people entering the labor force for the first time, trying to find the value they can add to the world.

If you keep working hard, it gets better. If you quit now, it won’t.

Upward mobility is not dead, but it’s not handed to you on a silver platter.

Marc Thiessen:

How pathetic this girl is. When I graduated college I came to Washington with a few hundred dollars in my pocket and lived on a friend’s couch eating nothing but ramen noodles till I found a job. I got a place with two roommates and worked a second job as a waiter in a pizza… https://t.co/ZjziboO4MS

— Marc Thiessen 🇺🇸❤️🇺🇦🇹🇼🇮🇱 (@marcthiessen) January 8, 2024

The rest of his tweet reads:

…as a waiter in a pizza restaurant to get by. I didn’t pay off my college loans or have own place till I was 30.

So yes, you’re lazy. Suck it up, work hard, earn your way to a better life. No one owes you a damn thing. And for all our troubles today, you live in the most prosperous country in human history with more opportunity than anyone has had in human history. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, stop blaming others, and get to work.

Some people were just sarcastic in response.

Wait.

She thinks everyone was able to live by themselves in the past?

LOLOL https://t.co/efkNvADQqI

— RBe (@RBPundit) January 8, 2024

Others provided data suggesting the current situation is nothing new.

People should stop calling Gen Z lazy if they are doing so. Gen Z isn't lazy!

But still, the idea that it was much easier to afford rent 20 years ago isn't true. Average wages have increased almost as fast as average rent, with the slight divergence only happening very recently https://t.co/YJLwDYFMlD pic.twitter.com/CBJPoYp3GU

— Jeremy Horpedahl 🤷‍♂️ (@jmhorp) January 8, 2024

It wasn’t any better in 1986:

A Walmart minimum wage worker wouldn’t be able to live on their own back when I graduated in 1986, either. Minimum wage was $3.35 in NJ in 1986. I paid about $500 a month for rent for a far-from-luxurious one bedroom with a 15 mile commute. So, nope, she couldn’t live in her own… https://t.co/Vss3PWBnNv

— Lulu Addict 🐊 (@LuluAddict) January 8, 2024

Some people just tried to be generous. After all, she’s young and young people don’t know what they don’t know.

She’s where we were, when we were there.

She’ll figure it out, just like we all did. https://t.co/s9NYlGuYch

— Cap’n Jim Miller🇺🇸 (@FunnyJim1965) January 8, 2024

I’ll just add my 2 cents here. I graduated from Virginia Tech in 1990 but didn’t want to leave town because my girlfriend (now wife) had a year of school to go. I worked about 35 hours a week in a small bookstore off campus. I couldn’t afford to live alone even in the podunk college town of Blacksburg, Virginia where rent was really cheap. So I made arrangements to move into a 3 bedroom apartment with two other guys.

Right before we were supposed to move in, one of the guys backed out and I was left explaining to the owner on the phone what had happened and begging him not to a) change his mind about renting to us or b) make the other two of us cover the rent for the empty room. He agreed, thankfully, and for a few months it was just the two of us. Eventually we found a 3rd person to take the empty room. I think my rent was around $160 a month which sounds like nothing to me now but I think I was probably making $4.50 an hour at the time, so maybe $600 a month.

I lived there for a year and then moved home and found a job working for the federal government (I Was a Teenage Bureacrat!). My first job paid a grand total of $14,000 per year though I think after about six months I got a promotion that put my salary up to $16,000. I eventually wound up living in Washington, DC with my grandparents for the last few months before my then fiancé graduated. A couple weeks after she graduated we got married and went on a week long cruise (a honeymoon gift given to us by my parents).

While we were gone our family helped move some of our belongings into the rental townhouse we had found in Northern Virginia. The last thing they did before leaving was set off a bug bomb. We returned from our honeymoon and found literally hundreds of dead cockroaches lined up against the baseboards in every room. It was disgusting but at least they were dead.

We soon learned that one of our neighbors would beat his wife (we called the police several times). The neighbor on the other side liked to have late night parties every weekend that would go until 2 am complete with music that shook our walls and made it impossible to sleep. One day I came home from work and there were police cars everywhere in the complex. It turned out a serial rapist the police had been looking for lived about 150 yards from us. It really was not a great place to live.

So I couldn’t afford to live on my own and never really did. But things did improve over time. We moved out of the crummy townhouse with terrible neighbors and moved into a better townhouse with decent neighbors. In 1997 we moved to California into yet another small townhouse.

I still remember there was a brief moment after we moved to California and we’d both gotten several raises and we had no kids. Life was pretty good. We had plenty of money that wasn’t spoken for by our bills every month. But buying our first home changed all of that. We went from having spending money to being fairly broke for a couple years. And when we eventually sold that place and bought a small fixer-upper house it was the same thing all over again. We were married nine years before we bought that house and, between you and me, it was in pretty rough shape.

All of that to say, what this young woman is going through is not so different from how things were 30 years ago. I hope she will figure it out eventually and maybe look back on this video clip with a bit more wisdom than she has now. In the short term, find a roommate and get started living independently that way. And if you didn’t go to college, maybe think about taking some classes at a community college. There are lots of fields that pay better than Walmart. No one can solve this problem for you but you can solve it for yourself given 10 or 15 more years. But the reality is that between then and now there are probably going to be some crummy apartments, some disappointing roommates and some cockroaches.