Recently, the New York Times published an article about young professionals making six-figure salaries that claim they “still feel poor”. Now before you start cursing them or throwing things at the radio, let’s consider for a moment why people in their 20’s and 30’s might feel that way.
It’s no surprise that nearly everyone quoted in the story is living in a large metro area like Philadelphia, New York, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City. No one is quoted about how “poor they feel” making 120-thousand dollars a year living in Coleman, Wisconsin or Leesburg, Florida. The closest example to that, is a guy that decided to live in East Grand Forks, Minnesota instead of New York because he knew that a lower salary in the rural Midwest would go a lot farther than a bigger salary in Gotham. (He also avoided student loans by enlisting in the military out of high school and going to college on the GI Bill, while also getting a no-money-down mortgage through the Veterans Administration.)
The other theme that runs throughout the article are complaints these young workers make about not having the same financial security and lifestyle as their older co-workers. One 27-year old guy bemoans the fat retirement accounts, second houses, and vacations those in their 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s are taking. The article does not make clear if this guy has talked to those co-workers about what kind of life they were living at 27, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t have fat retirement accounts and vacation houses at that point in their lives. Yet, this guy (and many more in the same age range) somehow believe they are entitled to the same thing. His explanation: “Things are supposed to be better for each generation”.
A woman quoted in the article opines: “I’m 36, and I don’t have children yet. I should have a flipping life by now. I should be traveling. I should have a luxurious closet.” A 30-year old man making abut 150-thousand states: “We live in the richest country in the history of human civilization, so why can’t I eat out twice a week and have kids?”
Not surprisingly, all of this comes from two generations of Americans that is seeing a rising belief in what is coming to be known as “bougie socialism”. While younger Americans claim to be anti-capitalist, and anti-consumerism, their core sentiment is not “no one needs to have all of this stuff”, it’s instead “it’s not fair that I don’t have all the stuff those people have.” But what these generations seem to be missing, is that they actually do have a lot of the same “stuff”–and in most cases, more “stuff”–as their older, and perceived “richer”, elders. They are just choosing to not actually “have it”.
Here’s what I mean. On my IPod Classic, I have more than 18,000 songs. Nearly all of those songs were acquired through the purchase of compact discs (which still sit in multiple CD racks in my basement), borrowing the discs from friends, or checking them out from the public library to add to my ITunes library on my home computer. Meanwhile, the 27-year old jealous of my “fat retirement account” has access to 100-million songs on his IPhone at this moment. The big difference is he can only listen to those songs by paying $11 a month for Apple Music. And if he cancels that subscription, he has access to NO music because for all of the money he spent, he doesn’t own a single CD, album, or even mp3.
If I want to watch a few episodes of Seinfeld, I can throw in a DVD or a Blu-Ray that also sits in a rack in my basement, along with many of my favorite movies, holiday specials, and sports documentaries. That 36-year old without the luxurious closet can watch nearly every movie and television show ever made at any time. But again, that requires hundreds of dollars of subscriptions every month to not one but multiple streaming services, because each of them has come to the realization that by splitting up the entertainment universe, they can boost user numbers for everyone.
When I spend $25 at the grocery store, I usually end up with enough food for multiple meals. And what I don’t use sits in the fridge, the pantry, or the cupboard. The 30-year old dude making $150k spend $25 having his meals delivered by UberEats or DoorDash–at prices even higher than the restaurants themselves charge–most nights, he ends up with nothing in the fridge or the cupboard and thinks “Man, there is never anything to eat around here”.
I have a paid-for 2017 Jeep Renegade sitting in my garage that I use to get around. The person living in the big city relying exclusively on public transportation or Uber and Lyft to get around probably pays a less than I do to get around on an annual basis–but at the end of that year, again, has no tangible asset to account for that spending.
If companies still issued stock certificates, I’d have a stack of them in my financial file cabinet in the home office. I could also print out the prospectuses from all of those companies as well. With cryptocurrency being the preferred investment option of the younger generations because of its “edgy” reputation and promises of huge short-term gains, they have no tangible representation of their holdings. Instead, it’s just a page on an app keeping track of a series of ones and zeroes on a “blockchain” that few people understand or can explain.
To be fair, I wasted a lot of money in my 20’s as well on things that hold no financial value. When I moved from Green Bay to the Twin Cities, the owner of the bar where I usually hung out threw me a going away party and admitted he may not be able to retire anymore. But a good deal of that cash was also spent on things that to this day I still own. And some of it (like sports and music memorabilia) has increased in value over the years.
At no point in my twenties did I feel like I was “poor” because I didn’t have the lifestyle my parents–by then in their 40’s–were enjoying. I knew that I had to go out and earn those things and accumulate those assets over an entire career–just like they did. Maybe we in Generation X were lucky that there were few ways to “rent” that lifestyle back then, or to “subscribe” to things we couldn’t go out and buy whenever we wanted to.
Of course, that means we won’t be featured in any New York Times articles trying to build sympathy for our generation’s “hopelessness” of ever living the typical “middle class American life”. And it’s probably why few of my peers are running for political office promising to take away what our parents earned because we “deserve it” more.
