How do I deal with Millennial disappointment?
August 3, 2015 11:21 AM   Subscribe

I'm 30 and, like a lot of Millennials, worse off than my parents were at my age. Rents continue to rise and I don't see a lot of (economic) hope for me and my partner. We're unbelievably blessed in many ways, but still probably closed off from the way of life we had growing up and mistakenly expected to continue in our own adulthood. Please help me work through this emotionally?

I didn't grow up rich, but I got a heavy dose of aspirational middle-class values:
- work hard in school so you can...
- go to a high-reputation college so you can...
- get a well-paying job so you can...
- buy a home so you can...
- start having babies!

And the cycle begins anew. Well, I "did all the right things," got a nice degree from a good school, got a decent job... but the combination of a horrible rent bubble and a big chunk of student loan debt mean that my partner and I are probably never going to be able to afford to buy a place in our home state. We're also probably not going to be able to afford to have kids any time soon, if ever.

We have a nice place that we rent, and we enjoy life. As I said before, we're extremely blessed with health, family, hobbies, and a lovely neighborhood. But I still feel like I'm "doing it wrong" -- not getting to be a full adult, not getting to feel really settled down, not getting to feel any type of basic security from the idea that we'll get pushed out of our neighborhood within a year or two because of rising rents.

I know that lots and lots of people don't have it as good as we have it-- but the contrast with the optimism I used to have is what's making this difficult for me. I'm in therapy, but my therapist doesn't have much to add when I talk about this stuff other than, "That sounds very hard."

Other folks who have been through this (regardless of age group), what has helped you?
posted by MetaFilter World Peace to Work & Money (41 answers total) 109 users marked this as a favorite
 
Gen-X here (we were pretty much shafted in the same way, only earlier, more often, and with less visibilty), and I also worked in theater, so I am in an unconventional circle to boot. And what helps me with this a lot is to turn away from the Facebook updates from my friends who have more conventional lives with kids and house ownership and what-not, and to look at "Oh, yeah, R still rents and isn't married and has no kids; E is only just now going to grad school; and C&N don't have kids and aren't married, and the only reason they even bothered to own a house is so they could rent it out on AirBnB upstate and use it as C's home base for photography shoots on the weekends. And D went from theater to becoming a nurse and he's transferred jobs twelve times in the last 7 years and has to tend bar on the weekends for extra money. And G&I still don't have kids and this is the first time I's going to be at home for more than 2 weeks because he finally got cast in something off-Broadway rather than being in Witchita Shakespeare Fest or whatever".

You know? By surrounding myself with other people that have "alternative" lives, or at least "don't have all the tick-boxes checked" lives, it reminds me that I am not the only one who is still single and still renting. That helps put the "but you should have kids by now" stuff in perspective for me, insofar as "well, I sure as fuck ain't the only one like this," which helps me remember that "and it isn't my fault either". I mean, I still struggle with that sometimes, but having a similarly-circumstanced tribe around helps a great deal.

So, an interesting suggestion - count up how many of your facebook friends look like they have all of this shit, and count up which ones don't. If you have way more who have kids and stuff, maybe hide some of them for a while. And pay more attention to the ones who are similar to you.

Good luck.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:36 AM on August 3, 2015 [28 favorites]


Look up the indignados of Spain. Learn. Fight back. It feels much better.
posted by Mistress at 11:37 AM on August 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


I'm 31, and while my partner and I have no interest in kids, or buying a home, I'm in the same boat. In fact, I think I'm across the aisle from you. Wave back if you see me!

Ahem.

Part of what's helped me is recognizing the pressure to do these things and separating that from what I really want out of life. The tricky bit is that I don't know what I really want, but I have a better sense of what I don't want.

A couple years back, I wrote into a podcast asking for some advice along these lines. The episode that resulted is one I go back to on a regular basis, and I might be due for another listen. Maybe it'll help you too.

No matter your status, I don't think anyone in our age group, or older, has any goddamn clue what they're doing. Realizing that is the first step. The second step is accepting that. Still working on that one, there.
posted by SansPoint at 11:39 AM on August 3, 2015 [19 favorites]


Apparently this is hitting a bunch of us hard- 7 users so far have favorited this question. I'm about to hit 30, and quite frankly even with my well paying job, I will not have my own apartment/home in the next 5 years. I'm realistic about this. So I sat down about 2 years ago (and I think about this often) and thought about what I actually wanted. I want old lady larthegreat to be able to live independently. I want my parents to be taken care of. I want to keep living in expensive city where I grew up. I want the freedom to occasionally travel. I like the idea of children, but the practicalities terrify me- and I don't feel a biological clock ticking for me. I don't want to worry about cars, I don't want to worry about hurricanes or earthquakes. I am uncomfortable being in cities & places where there are no visible minorities.

I then deal with the more ephermal loss of hope by focusing on the things I can control, and by projecting very very far out. Sure maybe lar-the-5yrs from now doesn't have her own house/apartment, but lar-the-old-lady is taken care of (I contribute to 401k etc.). I stay in touch with far flung family and friends- and those that do have kids I'm an awesome aunt too. I have friends who have similar goals (but work across far flung industries) and we joke about buying a brownstone in brooklyn to retire too (since it'll take us another 40yrs to collectively save up a downpayment).

The loss of hope is hard though. Having friends that are in the same place in life helps a ton.
posted by larthegreat at 11:45 AM on August 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


not getting to feel really settled down, not getting to feel any type of basic security from the idea that we'll get pushed out of our neighborhood within a year or two because of rising rents.

We're you guys in a lot of ways, or were a while ago, and we dealt with this by sacrificing huge parts of our comfort zone for trying to attain things we saw as more valuable. For us, that was getting into a house we owned. We traded our short term living in an awesome amazing neighborhood where we were getting priced out every 6 months by moving to a part of our city that…well…sucks pretty goddamn hard. Not walkable, not bikable, pretty unsafe, sketchy as hell meth-ed out neighbors (and we already had a kid at this juncture…not suggested). Just shitty and dangerous (we were actually on a first name basis with our local police dispatcher! RAD!). We did that for two and a half years. And man, oh man was it shitty. We decided that we'd try to get into a house with that 2 years of savings, and if we couldn't, we'd move back to a 'better' neighborhood.

Our rent was cheap enough we could actually save up enough for a house, even with our rather insane student loans bills, and daycare costs (which, again; we had to do some pretty creative, obnoxious schedule juggling to make work on the cheap).

But we just bought our first house in a B- neighborhood, thats up and coming to be up and coming. Maybe when the kids in high school it'll be a rad place to live. But we own, and our finances and our cash-to-live-somewhere is stabilized (our main reason for wanting a mortgage).

It was a terrible two years, and we actually lost touch with some friends and part of our social network because we lived so far away from our traditional area... but I'd do it over again in a heartbeat to have the house we have now. We're actually able to set down real roots, and get to know folks in our new neighborhood really well. Knowing we can't just get priced out and shipped off as renters is really relieving for us…and worth it. It might not be for you, but those are the kinds of calls you might want to start examining; what's the thing you need the most. For us it was a house, for you it might be living in a really nice area. Both ways you go, there are serious sacrifices and advantages to.

I'm not the kind of person that things millennials are just super entitled and want everything right now, but sacrifice for the long term isn't something many of my peers are good at…its not something I'm good at either; moving to that neighborhood came with a ton of stress and straight up depression. Most of my peers are pretty bad at looking at the long game and saying "this shit is going to suck. But I'm going to do it for x years, and then it might pay off. Its still risky, and I feel as a demographic we're pretty risk averse with our comfort.
posted by furnace.heart at 11:46 AM on August 3, 2015 [17 favorites]


I really hate that our generation has been sold this lie that you're not really a responsible adult who has "made it" in life unless you own a home. Preferably, a fully detached home (no! not a condo surrounded by the unwashed masses!) with a big ass yard and >2000 square feet of living space and a "gourmet kitchen." Even worse, those awful Quicken Loans ads that I've started to see on TV all the time that basically perpetuate this notion of "go ahead, buy yourself into a shit ton of mortgage debt, be bold! it's the American way!" Barf.

Look, the most responsible, adult-like thing you can do is to live within your means. For many of us, that means renting small places for a very long time. That's okay.

My suggestion is to try to spend as little as possible on the roof over your head and use your money for more impactful experiences. Yes, you can even have kids! You don't need to own a home in order to have kids. I know people in downtown Seattle who have kids and a spouse all living together in one-bedroom apartments. Families in many other countries do this and turn out okay.

Our notion of what adulthood looks like needs to change. My parents taught me the same aspirational middle-class values that you mention, yet they are underwater on their house, unemployed, and had to file for bankruptcy this year. They have nothing left in their retirement account. They lived WAY beyond their means on things like home and cars and vacations because that's what they thought they were "supposed" to do in order to show success. And now they're struggling to make ends meet when their health isn't very good. It sucks. Don't fall for that trap.
posted by joan_holloway at 11:48 AM on August 3, 2015 [59 favorites]


I think one thing that helps is to understand that the language of "adulting" is about pretending that anyone who isn't upper middle class or wealthy isn't really an adult.

You and your partner are adults and have been for a while most likely. Chances are, you are having trouble attaining that "middle class" aspirational track because your parents weren't wealthy enough to make up for the dramatic drop in state and federal government subsidization of college educations, mortgages, and babies over the course of your lifetime.

Only a very small fraction of people ever had the opportunity to follow that exact life path in any case. Most people in the last few decades had the babies first and bought a house second if ever. Or they dealt with always having some instability, some debt, some unpredictability.

You can't fix the political aspects of this all by yourself, but I think it does help to see that you can get some of these things, just not all of them and not necessarily in the "right" order.

Demanding to be treated like a real adult by whoever in your life thinks adult and rich are synonyms will really help too.
posted by sputzie at 12:00 PM on August 3, 2015 [14 favorites]


Like EmpressCalipygos, I'm in GenX and though we're smaller and not as noticed, we still get what you are facing, we're just 10 years ahead of you.

What does 10 years ahead of you look like?

Living situation:
- Most people I know rented until their late 30s or are still renting
- Those of us who bought housing bought shitty fixer uppers in ok neighborhoods or really small houses in great neighborhoods - a few people bought shitty fixer uppers in bad neighborhoods.
- Either way, look at what YOU need versus what society tells you you need; I have a LOT of friends who bought houses, got tired of the upkeep and getting repeatedly ticketed by the city for having an overgrown mess of a lot, and moved back to renting

Kids:
- Those who wanted kids tried for and often managed to have them. Some people weren't able to due to fertility issues and that sucked. Everyone said they started trying when they were emotionally/relationship ready (as in their relationship was at a good stable point). *Every last one of them* says that if they had waited til "they could afford kids" they would have never had kids. They're making the budgets work, but they're also all making sacrifices in some way. They're living in rough neighborhoods like furnace.heart, or in smaller houses, or with their parents (or their parents moved in with them!), or cutting down so bare bones that they never, ever, ever eat out, driving 10+ year old cars. But to them, the trade offs are worth it. If you want kids, stop looking at the finances.

Living in your home state:
- Not sure what is your home state, but if it's something like California, can you live in a nearby state and drive in/take the train once a month? Obviously that doesn't work for Hawaii, but would work for a majority of the contiguous 48 (apologies if you are not US-based).

Basically, I know it really sucks to realize you've been sold a bill of goods. We've all been sold a bill of goods. I dealt with it by getting pissed then getting ruthless in defining what I want versus what society tells me to want.

Your therapist doesn't sound helpful in this case; the next time you go in, maybe say to him/her, "It is hard. Can you provide some recommendations on how I can frame this so that I can deal with it constructively?"
posted by RogueTech at 12:03 PM on August 3, 2015 [10 favorites]


Thinking back, I want to second what sputzie said. Most of the people I know had kids while still renting (or are still renting now with kids). Some, who had kids young and have since sent them out into the world, always rented and continue to rent.

The script is flawed. Pick what you want to aim for and toss the rest.
posted by RogueTech at 12:07 PM on August 3, 2015 [7 favorites]


I just turned 30 last week and the last couple years have got me really thinking about where the hell my life is going.
I don't know if it makes you feel better, but I didn't finish school or really do anything the right way, and I'm having a life crisis too. I think that's just the way it is for our generation. Society is still telling us that we should be having children, working a good job, buying a house. That's just not how the world is anymore.
I agree with what someone said above regarding your housing situation.
My boyfriend and I moved from Brooklyn NY to Jersey City NJ because we were paying crazy amounts in rent and didn't get a lot for it. We live in a gorgeous apartment, but better than that, it's crazy cheap and we're saving up for a down payment on a house. No one visits us because they think we're too far away, there aren't the "conveniences" of Brooklyn but seeing our savings build up towards a house is so great! Instead of being an impossible dream we were depressed about, it's a tangible goal we can see in the near future.
There are some things in life you can achieve if you accept you'll be uncomfortable while working towards it.

I try to spend less time thinking about what I can't have and I make changes that I know will help me move forward. Unfortunately we can't have it all anymore, but we can prioritize and create a life that makes us happy.
posted by shesbenevolent at 12:07 PM on August 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


God it really sucks doesn't it? And it is hard to see friends who somehow appear to have "managed it," even when you know the reality is that they were either born to enough money that they would ALWAYS have managed, or they have made tradeoffs that you know you'd find unacceptable. (Or, like, have had some stupid ridiculous kind of luck that you could never in a million years count on when making your own decisions.)

Can you tell that I'm close to your age and have really been wrestling with this stuff lately?

The truly important thing to remember is that an entire nation's worth of industry is devoted to making you want the house and kids and cars. That pressure is nothing to sneeze at! But it's also not entirely real. When I am overcome with this kind of grief I take steps to consciously process and separate the pressure from my real desires, and to separate fantasy from reality.

For example, most recently, I have been having house-lust. Many of our friends are buying right now and their Facebook posts tend to gnaw at me a little. The thought process goes:

1) Pressure vs Desires: the social pressure is telling me I want a house. And I do sort of want a house, but WHY?
-Well, okay, I want to feel stable, I want to feel proud of my life, I want to have something to show off, I want to show that I have "made it." I want to live in orderly beautiful rooms full of carefully curated things.

2) Fantasy vs reality
-Owning a house would be more stable. But I am already proud of my life, because [x reasons]. I have so many things I can "show off" about my life, and if my friends don't see why they're great, well, fuck em. If I bought a house, it would not BE orderly beautiful rooms full of carefully curated things, because it would be my house, and I can't afford a beautiful stately home full of expensive furniture, and I'm a messy jerk a lot of the time.

Conclusion: You know what, what I really need is to start taking better care of my shit, and maybe look for ways that I can upgrade my super-cheap apartment, with some of the money I save by living in my super-cheap apartment. And then I need to invite some of my house-owning friends over for a dinner, during which i tell them about how my dishwasher got fixed for free, motherfuckers. ;)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 12:21 PM on August 3, 2015 [23 favorites]


For me, part of being able to reject (some of) the middle-class values that I marinated in growing up, has been realizing that the kind of extreme comfort and stability that many people of our parents' generation enjoyed was built on exploitation.

I think we certainly have the ability as a society, if priorities were to be reallocated, to offer a completely livable existence to everyone; but the type of suburban largesse that we imagine when thinking of a time past was so dependent on under-compensated labor from people of color, women, working class people, etc. That's not something I ever want to "ascend" into, personally.
posted by threeants at 12:22 PM on August 3, 2015 [38 favorites]


The big bill of goods is the economic system that is counting on breaking you. You get to have kids, you get to live in relative freedom, you get to take a creative approach to making it work. If you feel you must have it all, that is why you see a therapist. Remember you are entitled to your self, and esteem for yourself, that is important. Today I am wearing a tank I bought twenty years ago, it is just fine. Any more, gaming the more, upon more, upon more, new, shiny shit system is one of the acts that may save our world. You have some powerful thems, don't invite them to your personal party. Your parents are probably from the post WW2 era, when everyone got a ticky tacky house, and a chicken in their pot, a new TV, and a Chevy or Ford. It was a huge step up from the dustbowl, and the falseness of this prosperity put us where we are right now with our collective money made on war, and preparation for more war, and every tech advance right off the pages of our truly grim future. These times aren't appreciably crappier than others, but our hyper connected media access makes every little and large thing visible. We wake up in the cloying candy shop each day. Close this world down by degrees until what you see is beloved and yours.
posted by Oyéah at 12:30 PM on August 3, 2015 [11 favorites]


I think that the idea that owning a house is an "adult" thing to do in a way that renting is not was one of the things that contributed to the housing bubble.

I'll tell you, you might still not feel like a real adult even if you did own a house. I'm 40, own a house, and now have 2 kids, and I don't feel like a real adult.
posted by Anne Neville at 12:33 PM on August 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


Seconding Anne Neville. Punch line of one of my favorite Calvin & Hobbes strips (Dad to Mom, in bed at night):

"I don't think I'd have been in such a hurry to reach adulthood if I'd known the whole thing was going to be ad-libbed."
posted by acm at 12:39 PM on August 3, 2015 [16 favorites]


I try to acknowledge that what's right for me isn't what's right for everyone. I moved to a midsize city after college. A lot of my high school classmates have never left home and they have families and houses now. Good for them. That's not my jam. I've never owned a car. I barely drive. I've never mowed a lawn. Those things might sound crazy to friends who live in the suburbs but I like my life. I like that I can go out and drink and I don't have to worry about driving home or searching for parking. I like that when I'm in traffic most of the time, I can pull out a book and read because I'm not in the driver's seat.

I like Suze Orman. Following the economic crisis, she started talking about how we should look at a new reality where living within our means is the goal. If that means never buying a place but being able to save money, that's a lot better than owning a place and struggling to keep it out of foreclosure. It's about putting yourself in a position where you can sleep comfortably at night, in your apartment or co-op or whatever.

I have whined at my husband about how I thought I was doing The Right Thing but there are still jerks out there who have things I want. Then a woman who has children my age talked about how she thought it was sad that my husband and I have things her children don't have because they pursued advanced degrees that they're still completing. They thought they were doing the right things but that means they're not even going to be done with their professional training by 35. A friend got a law degree because she thought that then she'd always have a job. Now she's a stay at home mom. A lot of people try to do The Right Thing and get stuck because it's not The Right Thing For Them.

Focus on doing The Right Thing For You. Run your own race. No one can beat you at your race. If you run everyone else's race, you'll lose. If you run your race, you'll win.
posted by kat518 at 12:55 PM on August 3, 2015 [16 favorites]


I identify a lot with this, maybe so much so that I will be talking to myself rather than usefully answering your question. But I wonder if there is a narrative here that you ought to unpack a little: the idea that if you did everything right, and checked all the boxes, you would be rewarded with something...something that you have not received. There is not only a sense of disappointment, but a sense of having been cheated out of something you were promised in exchange for playing by the rules.

If I had to describe the Millennials in one phrase (obviously in lots of ways these generational narratives are bullshit, but sometimes they can be useful) it's that we're good kids.

The Boomers rebelled and the X'ers slacked...and we packed our college CVs with activities and played team sports and internships and volunteered and spent years living at home so that we could get a shitty entry level job to pay off mountains of student debt, and we were so busy and oversubscribed and anxious that we never stopped to think: hey, what is it I actually want? We had all of our rebellion wrung right out of us, and when we did do something a little bit wild, like dying our hair pink or skipping school to go to a protest, the Boomers were right there next to us, being like, "Hey, groovy, I did the exact same thing when I was your age, congratulations on engaging in some developmentally age-appropriate behaviors, by the way, the Vietnam war was way worse, check ya later."

I think, also, there's a weird way in which many of us were forced to parent our parents - a lot of us got burned really hard when our parents got divorced after their mid-life crises, or went into debt after chasing their dreams, and so we're skeptical about narratives of rebellion and self-empowerment. I often sense this when I read the answers to AskMe's: people are deeply hostile about the ideas of, say, leaving a steady longterm relationship to pursue whirlwind passionate love, or quitting a job that pays okay but is unsatisfying to search for something better. We believe, fundamentally, in playing by the rules, because we've seen up close the damage that can ensue when you don't.

As a result, then, both the X'ers and the Millennials are deeply conservative generations - not politically, but in terms of our relationship to society. We direct a lot of our frustrations internally. We hate conflict. We get anxious instead of angry. We are activists online and in the voting booths but we tend not to directly confront figures of authority in our lives. We're always running towards something and feeling vaguely worried that something bad is going to happen and we're not doing well enough. We want someone to tell us that we're doing okay. In other words, we're the unsurprising result of a school system that brainwashed us into spending every single second of our chasing A's and padding our resumes and competing against each other and trying to figure out where we stood in a hierarchical system, and then, as soon as we graduated from college, dumped so much debt on our shoulders that we had to immediately start worrying about working full time and paying the bills.

I think the only answer to the malaise so many of us feel is that we've got to get angry. We need to take a more adversarial relationship to, well, everything. The world is fucked up. It is not a loving and attentive parent. It does not reward good behavior. It is utterly indifferent and even hostile to your emotional well-being. Of course it cheated you into believing it would reward you if only you behaved and did everything you were told to do. That's how the authorities keep you in line. There's no report card at the end of life saying "Metafilter World Peace had perfect attendance at work every day and did everything she was told to do, good job, A+, here's some happiness." At the end of your life, you're just dead. It is a major mental shift to go from "Happiness is the reward I get for behaving and not taking risks," to "Happiness is something that is rare and precious and that I am going to have to fight like hell to get."

So yeah, if you want to be happy, you have to fight for it. But first you have to figure out what you actually want, as opposed to what you've been told you are supposed to want, or what you think everyone else is getting.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 12:58 PM on August 3, 2015 [155 favorites]


Oh, also: check out Mr. Money Mustache. You are already freer than you think you are.
posted by pretentious illiterate at 1:01 PM on August 3, 2015 [3 favorites]


Some thoughts from a 60's child - (that's the warning and disclaimer):

Dead on, Oyéah...

I'd say the model that OP's hopes and aspirations are built around is an outdated and broken model. Not your fault. Not anyone's 'fault'. The American Dream model - that of relative prosperity, a home of your own, children who go to college and exceed your lot in life, the nice car... etc, etc. for everyone - was a model that came out of the post-war 50's and rolled into the 60's. I think it started to fizzle in the late 70s and into the 80s.

Add to that, that today's media intensive world presents a vision of a life that most Americans do not live - in programs and especially in advertising. It's easy to think of things we "need" today that when I was a kid, were considered luxuries: air conditioning in cars and houses, color tv's (or more than one TV!), etc. Our media world has continued to raise the stakes, raise the standards in order to continue to sell. The recent housing bubble is another good example of the fallacy of the model: the financial world created a bunch of high-risk, exploitative loan systems to sell more homes. It backfired.

Were you raised with a different pervasive model, you might not be as disappointed (depending of course on the model).

Good news is, many of those things are still attainable (or redefinable), but probably not by the same course. Which begs the question... how? Wish I knew. I have a 16 year old. I will, and do, tell her that things work differently now - do my best to try to assess what works. I think flexibility, and leveraging your skills for marketability are important. People don't stay in a job for decades anymore: the old model of the right employer being your ticket to success ... maybe that's not it anymore. Business owners and stakeholders get wealthy. Wage earners don't. Freelancers and service providers can have a lot of stability - and a lot of ups and downs.

And this...

What hopes are the most important ones? You call out economic hope, and that's valid. But factor in hope for happiness, health, children (if you want), family.... and on and on. There are a lot of components to a happy, fulfilling life. Plenty of folks without much money who are happy and fulfilled. ($ helps tho, that's for sure).

And lastly, in the 'old dude' school of advice:

If you want kids, don't not have kids because you can't afford it. It makes me sad to hear that. Those assessments of what it costs to have a kid... they may be accurate for some over the long haul, but I think they're largely not representative. There are ways, and, in my book, they key is love. Children are raised in all kinds of circumstances, but loving parents are what makes the difference more often than not. Like I said, that's dad advice....

I wish you success!
posted by ecorrocio at 1:07 PM on August 3, 2015 [8 favorites]


I am a huge disappointment to my family. I was a smart working-class kid that got good grades, got into university (first in my family) and then when I graduated ... it all just stopped being predictably awesome road-to-aspirational-middle-class. No job post-graduation, so I took whatever short-term shitty jobs I could get. I bought an apartment with a huge bank loan because that's what I was told I needed to do. It was a shitty, shitty apartment and I rented out most of it to strangers. It never felt like home.

I met my partner, moved to a different country, got myself a creative job that's difficult to explain to my family and which carries huge amounts of financial insecurity. We rent and do not think we'll ever be in a position to buy.

And I am a huge disappointment to my family. But I am also happier.

It helps that I belong to a tribe of similar people: urban dwellers who shop in charity shops, who have jobs that are difficult to describe to our parents, and who are all the generation of also-rans. I am not unusual where I live or among my friends. And it helps that I have tried the whole apartment-owning, living-up-to-expectations thing and I know that it didn't make me happier or more grown-up.
posted by kariebookish at 1:26 PM on August 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


Everything changes. Everything has always changed. You have to adapt and you have to have the skills to adapt. Your parents and their parents could be one trick ponies. That career they chose allowed them a life as leisure consumers. You will not have that luxury. That doesn't mean you can't enjoy a decent standard of living or enjoy leisure but your values will have to change. My opinion is that that corporate career lifestyle is better off dead. I don't think people should fight to bring that back.

Your career options will need to adapt to the way the marketplace is now. You can't be a one trick pony - you will have to learn many tricks and you should be very good at them. The best options for work are going to depend on being an entrepreneur working for yourself instead of working for someone else. Most companies will farm out the work to contractors instead of having staff on hand. You should still earn skills that make you marketable to companies but you should also learn skills that can make you money on the side. I have friends that do roofing, carpentry work, make crafts or furniture for extra money.

This brings me to being a leisure producer instead of a leisure consumer. Your parents may have spent their free time going to see bands perform. Instead of that why not spend your free time playing in a band? The enjoyment is the same but you are making money instead of spending money. Any leisure activity can be turned around like that. Another friend teaches dancing on the side instead of taking dancing lessons.

Re-evaluate every aspect of your life from where you live to what products you use. You can whittle many things out of your life that you may think of as necessities but really aren't. A television and cable tv add nothing to your life. In a good city you can live without a car. A home is only a product that realtors sell.
posted by JJ86 at 1:27 PM on August 3, 2015 [4 favorites]


the kind of extreme comfort and stability that many people of our parents' generation enjoyed was built on exploitation.

Well, and also on massive investment in creating a middle class from both the federal government and the corporate sphere, both of which were slashed in the 70s and 80s. Your woes are structural; get political.

Also, can we please refrain from saying that GenXers "slacked" - that narrative was never true and is not a fair assessment of people sharing their experiences here. We were the leading edge of what is impacting the Milennials, as others have said above; we worked just as hard and built our CVs just as much, but were not heard earlier about the retraction of opportunity, because our generation is simply much smaller. We are just as disappointed, but are perhaps further along in accepting that the political economy has changed structurally.

I also think that there's a cultural-maturity piece that Americans and maybe Canadians are particularly prone to. Our definition of "adult success" was never a sustainable model for anything but a massively prosperous society. We shouldn't compare our lot to midcentury America - that was an aberration built on postwar policies and income levels. Compared to 1890, we're doing fine; compared to many European nations, we still have too much per middle-class person. Our expectations reference an aberrant historical period and therefore are somewhat outsized for the world we have.
posted by Miko at 2:02 PM on August 3, 2015 [44 favorites]


Hi, I'm a Millennial that did all the things on your list. I'm still scared that something horrible will go wrong and I'll lose everything.

My SO and I have worked hard to be employable adults, have painstakingly built up a financial safety net, and are generally frugal. We're very aware that we're only a major illness or long-term job loss away from going back to square one. At least we have given ourselves a fighting chance.

Being an adult now sucks. I don't know, maybe it's always sucked.

We recently relocated for work, sold our house, and temporarily moved back into an apartment. I was always taught that renting is throwing money away, but I actually feel much more financially secure than I did before. There's no albatross of unexpected house repairs or fear of foreclosure hanging over my head. In fact, we're going to stick with renting for a while.

How do you deal with this? I'd start by talking in more detail with your therapist or get a new one. "That sounds very hard" is not very helpful.

Weigh the benefits and downsides of frugality before making any cuts. The enjoyment of eating out once a week is well worth the ~$2000 we would save by only cooking at home. Like sure, cut cable if you don't use it and save a bunch of money, but keep the TV if you enjoy curling up on the couch watching Netflix.

I just try to be happy with what I have and focus on the good stuff. Luckily for me, I made the (poor financial decision at the time) to have a kid and he makes all the daycare costs and 50 hour weeks worthwhile.
posted by galvanized unicorn at 2:19 PM on August 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Being adult is about being able and willing to offer compassion to others. It has nothing to do with material abundance or procreation.

Coping with the economic situation requires acknowledging one fact up front: the economy is terribly, horribly unfair. Always has been. Yes, in many ways it's gotten relatively worse for non-rich Americans over the past several decades. But there always have been class divides and people that fall on the less fortunate end of the wealth spectrum. This has little correlation to how hard someone worked, how intelligent they were, or whatever -- if anything, it's correlated with how wealthy their parents were.

I think the first step towards coping is interrogating these Horatio Alger myths, and realizing that they are not just untrue, but harmful to your psyche. In my view, "conventional wisdom" or "popular culture" or "society" or "the media" or whatever you want to call it is waging a 24/7 public relations campaign to make you feel horrible about yourself. Don't buy into it.

This sounds even easier because you never said that you wanted these things. So spend some time thinking -- what do *you* actually want out of life? It would be one thing if you really, really wanted to be a billionaire. But it sounds like you're happy with your current life and just need to get that bourgeois propaganda out of your head.

Also, politics and economics are always intertwined, so perhaps there's something you could actually do to try and better your situation? Like, join a tenants' union or something. Or try and get some kind of rent control passed in your town. If nothing else, it might introduce you to people who care about the same things and can provide you some emotional support.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 3:55 PM on August 3, 2015 [6 favorites]


Preferably, a fully detached home (no! not a condo surrounded by the unwashed masses!) with a big ass yard and >2000 square feet of living space and a "gourmet kitchen."

Yeah, I never got this. Not only are you supposed to buy a house by the time you're 30, you have to trade up a couple of times even though your 1800 sf condo is perfectly fine. My ex wanted to trade up and I always resisted, and then we divorced, and I ended up buying her out of the house because we had paid off most of it. Now I rent it out and live in a little one-bath apartment with my SO and her daughter and it's awesome. (SO is from Scotland and she says the shame of not buying isn't a thing over there.) BUT, daughter's bummed about not living in a house sometimes... she can't really have a lot of friends over all at the same time.

Getting priced out of your neighborhood constantly is a good reason to buy, I guess. When I was originally saving for a house we lived in Little Saigon, where the rent was really cheap, there were great inexpensive restaurants and stores all over, and the people are pretty awesome. I kind of miss living there.
posted by Huck500 at 3:59 PM on August 3, 2015


If you don't feel like a real adult as a renter, you probably won't as a homeowner, either. It's more likely you'll think that a real adult would have a lawn, have a bigger house, live in the suburbs, or something else. This is not a new phenomenon- the Buddha talked about something like this 2500 years ago.

You might not feel much more financially secure, either. Homeowners have to pay for unexpected contingencies, like a dishwasher breaking, that a landlord would cover for a renter. Being house-poor is a real thing.

You probably won't have much nicer furniture and household stuff as a homeowner, either. That stuff is all Sold Separately. And people who have just bought a house aren't known for having a lot of extra money sitting around.

House prices aren't guaranteed to always go up, either. Neither is your income. If you're renting, and the rent goes up or your income goes down, you know you'll be able to move as soon as your lease is up- probably a year at most. There is no guarantee that you'll be able to sell your house for at least as much as you paid for it within a year.
posted by Anne Neville at 4:47 PM on August 3, 2015


For me (as another 30 year old dealing with somewhat similar issues), I've chosen to come to terms with the anxiety. Rather than jump right into line with outside expectations or fight them off completely. Push into the letdown. A lot of good can come from periods of temporarily crushed dreams and confusion, as long as they are handled self-respect and care.

30, somewhat arbitrarily, has become the time when "full adult" happens but that concept is mostly meaningless, unless you buy into a fairly rigid and myopic view of the world. What I appreciate most about aging is being forced to re-evaluate the goals I've set and the terms I've used to identify myself.
posted by AtoBtoA at 4:47 PM on August 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


i turn 30 in november! Damn me!

One place I have found a lot of solace is history. I'm listening to the Revolutions Podcast and watching The Great War and reading books about nature and it all really hammers home the idea that Life Is Bigger Than This. I'm not saying it will solve your problem. But, I enjoy it.
posted by rebent at 7:39 PM on August 3, 2015 [2 favorites]


Hello, Me! Ye gads, do I hear you. I'm33. First of all, at one point I made a list and yes: everyone I know who has the "real" job/house/kids thing either had major help and/or never left my sucky hometown. A few outliers are either a (fair) bit older than me, or made obvious sacrifices I wasn't able or willing to. I've started asking questions whenever it's even vaguely appropriate... wow, how did you swing that? etc. It's helped a lot.

We have a kid (ONE) and rent; we've moved 4 times in 3 years (none of them by choice); we looked into buying recently but
a) calculators confirm it's actually better to rent + invest (some great threads on AskMe about how renting is better helped a lot!)
b) we won't really have the money for a while yet - and that'd be an okay house in an okay 'hood in a country town (jobs???). If we got lucky. We can afford a trailer, okay?

I finally decided it was like Sesame Street (or Little Bill?): I live in a city. We have an old reliable car, and use public transport a lot, and walk a lot, and on weekends go to the farmers market/library/museum/beach/etc. We live across the street from a playground and know a bunch of the parents in the neighbourhood. It's not what I imagined, but honestly, I'm not sure what I imagined and this is pretty good.

Another thing that helped is threads like this and taking a firm hold of my internet consumption. Blogs need to be hobby related - not "lifestyle" - you know?

I like Mr Money Mustache, but in small doses. Remember - he admits that his audience is the six-figure crowd. Taking control of your finances is great, but he can have a tendency to make me feel really bad too. Be warned.

Oh and the kid*? How did we do that? I ended up married to an Australian and we moved back there for the wages and health care. Lucky to have it as an option, yes - but now I'm a 14 flight away from my family, forever. Lots of things sound a lot cooler and together than they really are. When we lived in the States we were pretty broke and had crap insurance; we wouldn't have had kids either.

Frankie Magazine has a series of books called "Shelter". My husband recently gave me one for my birthday and at first I was sort of... oh no, I sooooo shouldn't read this. But. BUT. When I started reading the stories I was pleasantly surprised to find them very honest and rounded. Cute couple with a little farm? Yeah, land owned by parents. Cute tiny house? In parents backyard, built by single mom living with her folks. Etc. I find a lot of the "looks together" envy dissipates when it's explained ;).

Hmmm... this is a bit all over. Feel free to MeMail me anytime for a whinge ;)

(*Everyone always says "kids" like it's none or several. You can have one.)
posted by jrobin276 at 8:36 PM on August 3, 2015


I know your question didn't actually use the word "happy," but like a lot of the commenters here, I'm going to answer you like it did. I'm not ignoring your actual question, because "why can't a household of two employed adults attain rent security" is a hell of a good one, but I don't think you're asking your therapist just about economics.

I just turned 31 a couple of weeks ago. Female, single, steady job, major US city, nice enough life all told. My anxieties are a little different than yours, but coming from, I think, a similar place. Fully acknowledging I do not have shit figured out yet:

1. One thing that helped me was thinking through, in fairly serious terms, "what if I never get what I think I want?" Like, just accepting that as a real, not even terribly unlikely thing made it easier to deal with, because it made me think: well, okay, what if I don't? Am I really making a deal with myself right now that either I get the Whatever and then I get to feel like I want to feel, or else just agree to be unhappy for the rest of my life? Why on earth would I do that, that sounds terrible.

And I don't mean to make this sound like, "be happy with whatever happens to you." But I did feel better going through the exercise of thinking not only, "how do I get [x] from here?" but "how do I build myself so that if I want [x], try my best to get [x], and never do get [x], I still live as a good and happy person?"

2. Because to me it sounds like what you're talking about are tied way up with feelings. As you're hearing from plenty of others, cultural signifiers of "adulthood" have very very different meanings to the people who have or pursue them, and a lot of their currency is arbitrary, and based on whatever value we assign it (so...I guess like regular currency, but even more arbitrary.)

But of course there's no Feels Like An Adult finish line. I bet there'll be moments for the rest of our lives when we feel like the Most Badass Adults in Adultsville a lot of the time, and times when adultness feels really, really far away. From my limited experience, if you know what you value, and what will make you respect yourself and your own actions, and live that life, it feels adult as shit. I'm not saying that's the same as happiness, or that people don't sometimes have dumb values (or values that seem dumb to them in retrospect), or that it's guaranteed to be resilient enough to survive the really awful shit that can happen to people--but purely as a path to Adultsville, I find value in it. (Most often after I've screwed it up somehow, let's be real.)

3. Also, no matter what you do for the rest of your life, someone out there is gonna want to tell you that you made the wrong choice. Speaking only for myself, there will long be some little tiny percentage of my optimism batteries that run pure cold fuck those people. Tiny tiny! But there are times when it'll be the last tooth in your mouth.


I could go on for a long time, but lots of others have better advice for you, and see above re: also not having my shit together. But I hope you get to be happy and I hope I get to be happy, and sometimes that sounds...very hard.

Also, maybe get that extension that auto-replaces "millennials" with "snake people," it's been like two months and it still makes me laugh.
posted by jameaterblues at 8:45 PM on August 3, 2015 [8 favorites]


I'm 32. I own a house in Connecticut. It makes me feel so happy to have this home when my friends come over on the weekends, and when I'm cooking, and when I think about the fact that my parents will likely someday leave their house full of stairs and retire here, to a first floor layout, when I decide I'm done living here. I like to think I'm taking care of it for them.

When I get home midweek and have dishes to do, a lawn to mow, a broken washing machine that is not a financial priority compared to my broken fireplace (because six months to winter!) and electric bills and "oh hey there's a giant hole in my basement floor, it seems, now that I've ripped up the linoleum..." It doesn't make me happy.

I share this just because it seems like the dream of homeownership is high on your list. For me, buying a fixer-upper has been a combination of very rewarding when project go well, and very trying when I realize I'm not going on vacation anytime soon, and should probably just cancel my gym membership (because time and money!). It's an all encompassing project. The yard just GROWS BACK ALL SUMMER.

Does this make me feel more adult? NOPE.

You've got to carve your own way, and know that there are pros and cons to all of these big life choices you are thinking of.

Here's the thing someone told me once. she was a woman in her sixties. She said "listen, life is long. You can do the career thing, the have a kid thing, the homeowner thing, the travel thing, the be a ski bum thing-- there's time for all of that. Just not all at once! But if you're lucky, and you take care of yourself, and you are blessed enough to live a normal lifespan, you can do all those things at various points, in turn."

So maybe don't focus on what order these things come in, but having all the things you want at one point or another in your life so you will have had the chance to experience them all.
posted by slateyness at 8:48 PM on August 3, 2015 [10 favorites]


Back just to add on with what someone above said: for the people your age who you know who've managed to buy houses, listen carefully when they talk. Very, very carefully. Because eventually you'll find that most of them did NOT have to come up with the majority of the down payment themselves. I think for the people I knew it came down to (anecdotally):

85% got all or a very large portion of the money from their parents (or other relatives)
12% got all or a very large portion of the money from an insurance payout when a family member died
2% came up with all the cash themselves
1% flat out inherited the house from someone else and didn't have to come up with anything at all.

My parents and my inlaws don't have that kind of extra money laying around. I'll bet you're in the same boat. Don't assume there's some magic trick you're missing - you're not. You just maybe weren't born with the same advantages that other people have.

Seriously, I felt so much better once I realized it wasn't some sort of moral failure that it took us 15 years to save up for a down payment.
posted by RogueTech at 10:25 PM on August 3, 2015 [13 favorites]


Consider moving to an area of the country - or the world - where your ambitions line up with your opportunities. Consider carefully, as some places have a very different tone than others. Admit that there are tradeoffs and costs with each choice. But make it a choice, even if the choice is to stay where you are.

The two extreme examples I'm familiar with are San Francisco, where average rents are around $4k/month, and Pittsburgh, PA, where the average home sells for $182k, or about $900/month. Pittsburgh has tons of things going for it, other than limited flights in/out, and crap weather in February, neither of which are changing soon.

If you're flexible on where you live, there are some interesting opportunities. If you're stuck in one place... yeah, it can get quite a bit harder, as the things we were promised as kids don't actually exist in all of the places we're likely to have wound up.
posted by talldean at 10:31 PM on August 3, 2015 [5 favorites]


Oh duh - when I say we almost have a down payment, that sounds so good, yeah? That amount right now includes about 30% our savings (like, ALL our savings), 30% early inheritance, 30% borrowed from my dad. We'd still need to save about 10k, but that'll take a couple years since we're paying my dad back and have daycare expenses (govt, subsidised, thank goodness - another reason we moved!) and my student loan repayments are starting back up so.... yeah. (And really, we could just give the money back to my dad and use the inheritance to sudden death my student loans... but having $$savings looks good when you rent, so we'll have to think about it.) Anyway, that's like, an 8% deposit + stamp duty on an ok small house in a sort of run-down small town with few job opportunities, so even with all that we'll probably invest it and not buy a house at all! And cross our fingers that we get a long-term lease situation here in the city ('cause I'll tell ya - nothing felt more like a massive FAIL than having a lease terminated with a 3wk old, even if it wasn't our fault!).

I also know someone who flat-out inherited a flat - in NYC, to boot! But he also had abusive parents and got kicked out when he came out and finished high school homeless. There's always more to the story. Always.
posted by jrobin276 at 10:51 PM on August 3, 2015 [1 favorite]


Back just to add on with what someone above said: for the people your age who you know who've managed to buy houses, listen carefully when they talk. Very, very carefully. Because eventually you'll find that most of them did NOT have to come up with the majority of the down payment themselves. I think for the people I knew it came down to (anecdotally):

Owning a house, starting a business, and all kinds of other nice things are a lot easier when you have some family money. (And not Rockefeller money, just a few tens of thousands will tip that balance.) And it is not just big ticket items. I know people whose vacations are paid for by parents, for example, and lots of people driving a car that was gifted or sold to them at a nominal price.

But you have to either know the person really well or be able to pick up on the small cues, because from the outside there is no way to see where the down payment came from or who helps with the holiday budget. I felt a lot better about what I have achieved in life once I started noticing, though, because I realized that I had been comparing myself to people in very different financial circumstances.
posted by Dip Flash at 2:30 AM on August 4, 2015


The CA housing bubble kept me out of a house (condo) until I was 40ish. I don't feel like more of an adult as a result of buying. Staying on one place and putting down roots did make me feel like more of an adult, but most of that was done while renting. Civic engagement does, too. Again, mostly done while renting.

House maintenance is a PITA.

But, I get it. It sucks. That said, having a house is unlikely to make one feel like an adult, and is neither necessary nor sufficient for happiness. All that consists in relationships and attaining goals (including but not limited to career goals).

Most of my HS friends are in suburban Chicago with more money than I have, and bigger houses and better cars and kids. They 'made it.' Thank God I got out!
posted by persona au gratin at 2:47 AM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


Back just to add on with what someone above said: for the people your age who you know who've managed to buy houses, listen carefully when they talk. Very, very carefully. Because eventually you'll find that most of them did NOT have to come up with the majority of the down payment themselves.

Yep, this. You know my friends C & N I talked about, who bought a house that they rent out on AirBnB? The only way they could do that is because N's father gave them the money, and a big reason he did that is because he and N's mom are separated and are in some weird passive-aggressive "who can be nicer to the kids" sort of weird war; so yeah, once they got this windfall, but the rest of the time they have to put up with N's dad who's a bit of a dingus, and they also have to do things like interrupt all their vacations to make calls to the local-to-the-house plumber because a renter just called them to say the toilet exploded or something.

Meanwhile, as a renter, all I have to do when my toilet goes funny is to call the world's most adorable super and I get to hang around in the bathroom while he's working and we talk about organic farming and he tells me about weird plumbing tricks he's tried and he cracks jokes about other tenants and it costs me nothing. I'm okay with that tradeoff.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:59 AM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


I haven't read all the answers yet and I'm based in the UK so the housing situation is different, but I've had a few conversations about this recently with my 30-year-old children.

When they were little, the families we knew who were home-owners (UK had a comprehensive public housing programme at the time, but with a noticeable stigma attached to it) had bought unwanted ruins and were doing them up. It's an exceptionally difficult thing to do with young children on many levels, it isn't something that just falls in your lap. Admittedly, mortgages and house prices were much more reasonable. Even so, the easiest way to get into home ownership entailed getting on the housing ladder at the lowest possible level, doing a lot of work to the house and selling on after two or three years to use the profit on buying something slightly better. Repeat as necessary. That was the option to buying a bigger derelict house and living without heating, walls etc while trying to keep everyone clothed and fed, which was no picnic. There was a truism going round that if you attempted to live in the resulting building site with babies and/or toddlers your marriage probably wouldn't make it, and I've certainly seen that play out many times.

The other thing is WE WERE SO BROKE. WE WERE BROKE ALL THE TIME. This is the thing I don't think my children realise. Nobody thought it was weird or shameful to economise on consumer items, clothes, heating* or even on food. By contrast there is a whole swathe of expensive desirable goods people can spend their money on today, and they are seen as essential to living a dignified life. They are not, you know. When one of my kids was looking to economise recently I mentioned her Sky subscription and said that television isn't actually a basic human need. Her thinking wasn't set up to realise that not affording certain things doesn't take anything away from you as a person.

* (Heating especially. Everybody used to economise on central heating when it was newish, they'd wear heavy clothing indoors during the day in winter because it was too extravagant to switch on the central heating for more than a couple of hours at night. That was fairly normal then. Can you imagine anyone doing that now?)

Somebody upthread said "The script is flawed. Pick what you want to aim for and toss the rest." This is really, really true. Consumerism needs people to be in a frenzy of buying all the time, and it needs this buying to be compulsive, emotional and deeply connected to self-image. Facebook comparisons as mentioned above contribute to the frenzy. Once you decouple your emotions from the level of convenience we take for granted these days your disposable income will increase, at least a little.

I apologise for being all "uphill in the snow both ways in my young day". When I first came to England I stayed with my Gran for a while, she lived in a miner's cottage, cooked on the range, had no fridge (kept the milk in a bucket of water in the pantry in summer), had an outside loo, kept the bedroom window open a crack all year, lived on white bread, broken biscuits and tea. Owned about 70 pairs of beautiful shoes, a lifetime collection. I had a marvellous time. Plus, I live in Nigeria sometimes with constant shortages of water, electricity, petrol, etc. I am living a physically comfortable life now compared to those times but the comfort is a minor part of what's good now.

The thing is, an open attitude that's also sensitive to waste is a powerful asset in adjusting your environment to suit yourself better. Neither is your parents' concept of success necessarily going to be fitting for you in your so, so different life circumstances.
posted by glasseyes at 6:18 AM on August 4, 2015 [5 favorites]


I am a few years older than you, but not much. For the past decade I have thought that owning a home would make me happy. I recently bought. It has not made me particularly happy. It's replaced one set of stresses for an equal, but different set.

I no longer worry about being priced out of the city I want to live in, or having a landlord tell me I can't have a dog, or not feeling invested in my own home enough to paint, renovate, etc. I now worry about how I can't travel like I used to, and that I can no longer just quit my job anytime I want, and oh my downstairs neighbor has told me he found *another* leak coming from us.

I bought into the idea that because I was a certain age, I needed to own a home to be who I wanted to be. I am starting to think that a lot of the reasons I gave myself for why I wasn't fulfilled weren't supported by the facts.

I'll give you another example. I worked with someone who... was not struggling to make it. Net worth in the millions, family with kids. He just renewed his lease for the 10th year here in SF. This is not someone who rents because they can't afford to buy a house. This isn't someone who doesn't understand the finances of ownership vs renting (and actually was working in real estate at one point). It's someone who decided that home ownership is not where they wanted to invest, both financially and emotionally.
posted by danny the boy at 12:16 PM on August 4, 2015 [1 favorite]


We have the house (just bought), the kid, the dog, but we live more modestly than just about all of my married/coupled friends. As mentioned above, going from renting to owning relieves some stress and brings on different stress, but it is a satisfying goal to reach for us.

We were able to do this because we bought a smaller, older, cheaper home than most of my peers (who also had significant family help). We moved out of our fun, exciting, increasingly unaffordable city to a lower COA area. We don't have any family money to help unless you count some help acquiring our first two older used cars. They do pay for an annual family group vacation, but it seems much more modest to me than some of my friends family group vacations in giant mansions directly on the beach.

I'm the most frugal out of all of my friends (I really really wish I had more friends who lived this way!) and my partner and I have maintained steady, "boring" career trajectories that we don't love but pay the bills. We tried to get into fields we loved by paying/borrowing for advanced degrees (while working part-time) but chose not to take unpaid or extremely low-paid work while waiting & hoping to land a hard-to-find job in our actual areas of interest. We both constantly fight that nagging feeling that we aren't "following our dreams" but at least we know we're paying our own bills and saving for our future.

I always thought I'd have two kids, but I think my biggest "millennial disappointment" (if you want to call it that) is that one child seems wayyyy more realistic financially and emotionally than two. I feel I was sold a "bill of goods" that having a child/children just magically works itself out in all sorts of ways that aren't happening so far with us, especially in the department of "work/life balance" and daycare affordability. I really, really want to work, but I also really really didn't want to leave my baby at 4 months old in the care of strangers for 11 hours a day 5 days a week. The numbers slightly improved with our move but that's still the reality, and I can't bring myself to consider doing this to another baby - despite the high quality of care we pay for - and I also don't feel it's responsible to quit my job (more flexible working hours are out of the question in my work setting). We could live on one income if we weren't saving any money or making any progress on paying off our student loans. I know a lot of people make that choice and are very happy with it, I just know it's not right for me. But the 2 parents working full time doesn't feel quite right either on a lot of levels, except financially.

It helps me to constantly remind myself that in the grand scale of the world, I am very, very, very rich and fortunate, and part of my life's mission is to continually improve the chances that more people have the same or better opportunities I've had (this is like 5% of my current job, the only percent that's kept me in the field).
posted by wannabecounselor at 12:07 PM on August 7, 2015 [1 favorite]


In addition to not knowing what resources went into down payments, etc., be very circumspect when making assumptions about what people own and have. Many people who have nice new cars and new TVs and devices are leveraged to the hilt - like, in crushing, scary debt. I'd rather have a lot less with the freedom of no debt than have a $40 or $50K debt hanging over my head - which is not at all uncommon. Don't assume they're doing that much better than you because of the toys - they may have mortgaged their future.
posted by Miko at 8:29 PM on August 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


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