Indymisanthrope
Well-Known Member
I agree with this a great deal, really. I think it's very difficult for us to square what aggregate data tells us against the lived experiences of ourselves and those around us. I actually encounter this a lot with the posts about how difficult it is for millennials, which I belong to as an '84 baby. Coming from a single income family in a semi-rural midwestern home as the second of four children, I managed to get a good, private college education with only $15k in loans, very little out of pocket expense, and a part-time campus job. 6 months after graduation I landed a job at a help desk making just north of $30k a year, got married, and bought a house at age 24 right as the recession was hitting in the summer of 2008. I held on to my job, got a couple of promotions, and managed to shift it into a professional career with a good salary and benefits. My modest home has appreciated in value, my loans are almost paid, and I'm trying to catch up to 401k savings goals. When I hear about how difficult my generation has it, I trust that the data I'm seeing is correct, but it's not the experience I lived here in central Indiana, or the experience my friends lived, or either of my younger siblings. I trust it exists, but it wasn't mine. Whether that's a testament to my luck, the diversity of experience within each generation, or a function of my specific geography, or all of the above, I don't know.I'm going to present this comment/question as a stupid middle aged-ish Baby Boomer. I keep reading posts about how Boomers sucked up all the wealth, were better off that everyone else, had it easier and so on. But I gotta be honest, and maybe I, and my circle of boomers I grew up with, worked our asses off.
I'm 55 and have never made more than $48k a year in my life, I didn't finish college because my immigrant parents couldn't afford it and the right opportunity, job wise, presented itself and I chose the money over education.........not a wise choice. I worked in and around my field of interest over the years and saved, took advantage of employer 401K's and whatever presented itself to make a little more. My wife and I bought a small house while she was working her way through college.
We made about 50K on that home to buy our current home, which we'll finally have paid off in another 18 months, praise the lord, in that time we've had 3 kids, raised them, put one through college, one is 3 years into college and I'm sure we'll make it happen for the third some how.
We had both my in-laws living with us when they couldn't afford their home anymore and physically couldn't work anymore. My mother-in-law still lives with us, we care for her, my father-in-law passed away a few years ago.
We've pretty much lived paycheck to paycheck as long as I can remember, it hasn't been easy by any means, but we do the things we have to do to keep a roof over our heads, food on the table and do better for our children.
I have no complaints about my life, I've made good and bad decisions, but people need to stop assuming what any given generation had or didn't have handed to them based completely on numbers on a spread sheet. We're all in this together and the blame game gets us nowhere, the sad truth of it is that inevitably we end up worrying about our own little corner of the sand box, our own little world because we, I, don't see anyone in government really giving a damn about me and my family.
So I work to make that little space a happy place for them for as long as I can and my concerns in life aren't about me anymore, but about my children and my childrens children and so on.
A bit of a rant and I do apologize, but reading over and over again how "I" had it easier is a little annoying.
One thing I will say about the experience I detailed above is that I was, for a long time, highly unusual in terms of my age at the company I work for. My company made a significant effort to sustain its employees as much as it could through the recession (which also coincided with some very fraught patent-related timing for us), but with the net result that lots of the older employees got to full retirement age with an intact pension, but there were very few younger employees in the ranks. Now my company is experiencing major growing pains as the older generation starts to exit the workforce and is replaced by a younger set that lacks the institutional knowledge they would have learned through that experience.All I know is the for decades we've separated people by race and religion.....apparently that segmentation is running out of juice, so now we're going to add a generational split.
In other words, I think a lot of the generational "split" isn't, at its core, about disputes as much as it's about a delayed handoff of the reins that would have occurred more gradually/organically had the financial crisis not happened.