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Many work full time and earn enough to cover the cost of basic groceries (even if it means trips to three stores). But their salaries are losing ground to inflation, and their health care costs are skyrocketing. They’re cutting back on salon visits, social activities and fresh fruit runs — and they feel priced out of adulthood.

But so much about the lives of Americans has changed during the last three decades. In 1990, a wedding at 26, a baby shower (or two) by 28 or a first home around 30 was ordinary.

Also, yes, being a young adult now is nothing like the world we came up in. It's why I don't give young people advice. None of the advice GenX, Millenials, or Boomers could give doesn't apply to the world these young people are trying to survive in.

All I am saying is Luigi made things better even if it was momentarily.

What a wonderful world we have built.

So very true. At every turn homelessness is just a missed step away.

It's cruel to have a baby in 2026 anyway.

I'll start by saying that I absolutely don't mean to diminish anyone's personal circumstances. Being poor sucks.

I think one thing that a lot of these kinds of articles miss is that this is predominantly an American perspective. The US (and to a lesser extent Canada) seem to have had a disproportionately better quality of life in the past — I see a lot of anecdotes about how someone's grandfather was a postman and they had 7 kids and 2 houses and a boat and took 3 vacations a year, etc. and all on one income. This is absolutely not how it was at the same time in the UK, for instance.

I'm a Gen Xer, and in the mid 90s I was a software developer for a decent-sized company in London, and my ex-wife was a university professor — but we still lived "paycheque-to-paycheque". I was 30 and she was 35 when we had our Gen Z daughter. If anything I'd say she and her husband are doing as well or better than we were at their age — decent house, far too many TVs, 2 cars, pets, recently got married (with a much bigger wedding than I had) and thinking about kids. Maybe the difference is that they're in Canada.

I hate to say it, but I think this is the US catching up with the rest of the world.

Weird, all the data I can think to look for off the top of my head says Brits were very close to Americans in the past and are doing better now. The clear exception is stuff that measures hard cash but then Americans get no government healthcare and less benefits (and they have a more unequal society) which more than evens out. The perception that current generations are having it worse than future ones also seems pretty universal across the developed world. Did you by any chance have above average expenditures, like a large debt you had to repay?

"I suffered so should everyone else." Is this your outlook or am I off base?

Advice died with the 2008 financial crisis when no one knew why the market was souring and almost every news outlet was struggling to explain big loan and debt swap system. It became apparent that we live in unprecedented times and conventional wisdom was becoming obsolete.

I'd be so mad to be born today, shit I'm amazed all kids aren't massively depressed

In 10 years you will reminisce about 2026 as the good old days. And that is the saddest thing I've ever written.

It’s pretty amazing to see such right wing propaganda. I’ll bet you’re a separatist based on that… language.

Most of humanity at this point.

I hate to tell you, but they are depressed. They’re just young and bouncy so it’s more difficult to identify.

They aren't at that stage yet where they need to worry about these sorts of problems.

Absolutely.

My dad's roofing business was never the same after 2008, and it had endured since the early 60's. 2008 and the reaction to it by Obama and Bush is largely what turned me into a hopeless cynic. I plan for the worst in everything now.

Yeah… I see bad times ahead. But history shows things change civilizations fall and life uh, finds a way

Not at all. I'm just saying that for a lot of the world, this has been situation normal for a long time.

Maybe read it again.

Are you a separatist?

Absolutely not. Brexit was a massive fuckup that I can't believe the UK did to themselves, and I'm glad Alberta voted against going the same way (though I wouldn't be surprised if Danielle gets ousted at some point as that's what the right seems to like to do to themselves and they have another one later). I'm not sure what other separatism you might be thinking of if I'm honest.

What about my comment makes you think I might be a separatist? Or indeed right-wing?

Just walking around spending money at the mall on pointless shit is how Americans define a life.

None of the advice GenX, Millenials, or Boomers could give doesn't apply to the world these young people are trying to survive in.

The tough pill to swallow is that no generation alive today has any advice worth a damn for the times, as far as the civil contract goes. The last generation that did have any salient points to share already passed, and even if more of their teachings had stuck, they would still have been incomplete for the velocity of the modern world.

It is time for new solutions by all participant age cohorts, not a rehashing of incompatible nostalgia markers to keep fueling distractions.

Eat a billionaire.

But so much about the lives of Americans has changed during the last three decades. In 1990, a wedding at 26, a baby shower (or two) by 28 or a first home around 30 was ordinary.

it's such a weird world to me, that sort of life would have left me depressed and suicidal (am an older GenX) and yet it's apparently aspirational?

No wonder I've never fitted in anywhere.

I lived off grid in a mud brick cottage in the forest with my gf for over a decade, lived In various countries in SE Asia with her and now live in a modest cottage on the edge of a tiny town. I had a vasectomy when I was 19 and am now 58.

Also, yes, being a young adult now is nothing like the world we came up in. It's why I don't give young people advice. None of the advice GenX, Millenials, or Boomers could give doesn't apply to the world these young people are trying to survive in.

On the flip side all the ones I know directly through family are doing extraordinarily well, as are all my contemporaries and brother, sister and cousins.

My gf and I are doing ok, (travel the world 8 months a year and home 4 months) so that's something to be grateful for as well.

Hope everyone who is struggling comes out the other side.

Not going to get better though until societies leeces are drained though (the 1%) and the sledghammer of climate change is now striking humam civilization and those blows can only get worse.

I have to say I'm impressed that the 2 responses to my comment are one guy mad that I grew up poor in a bad economy and noticed, and one that thinks I'm a right-wing separatist.

It's crazy that somebody reported this comment as inciting violence while ignoring the violence that was perpetrated on the working class that led to this moment

I've got a cousin in his 30s who posted on social media today that the reason people are broke today is just because they spend too much. He argued that spending $3 for a bottle of Pepsi is the reason people his age are broke. If they just learned to control their spending, they'd all be rich.

Like, I don't even know where to start with this guy. How can you look at all these people struggling to find well paying jobs and afford to live - and then blame the problem on a $3 drink? It's the avocado toast thing all over again, except this dude is young enough to know better.

Sounds like something they picked up on TikTok.

Nah, 11 year old kids are on the streets protesting in France.

The kids are alright. And by alright I mean rationally and emotionally aware of their reality. And therefore kinda anxious, and often depressed.

As the late David Graeber tells us, the consumerism is a systemic issue; people buy pointless shit because their jobs are so pointless and soul-draining (he calls this spiritual violence) that the only thing they have the energy to do outside of work is buy dumb shit. Relevant excerpt:

In a sense, those critics who claim we are not working a fifteen-hour week because we have chosen consumerism over leisure are not entirely off the mark. They just got the mechanisms wrong. We’re not working harder because we’re spending all our time manufacturing PlayStations and serving one another sushi. Industry is being increasingly robotized, and the real service sector remains flat at roughly 20 percent of overall employment. Instead, it is because we have invented a bizarre sadomasochistic dialectic whereby we feel that pain in the workplace is the only possible justification for our furtive consumer pleasures, and, at the same time, the fact that our jobs thus come to eat up more and more of our waking existence means that we do not have the luxury of—as Kathi Weeks has so concisely put it—“a life,” and that, in turn, means that furtive consumer pleasures are the only ones we have time to afford.

Lets be honest, the current AI market with circular investments missing ROI is very similar to the housing market in 2008.

Hey, if you know someone who was working class between like 1900 and 1933 they might have something useful to say.