For millennials, financial security feels like a fairytale. What will the next 40 years look like?

Claire*, 42, was always told: “Follow your dreams and the money will follow.” So that’s what she did. At 24, she opened a retail store with a friend in downtown Ottawa, Canada. She’d managed to save enough from a part-time government job during university to start the business without taking out a loan.

For many years, the store did well – they even opened a second location. Claire started to feel financially secure. “A few years ago I was like, wow, I actually might be able to do this until I retire,” she told me. “I’ll never be rich, but I have a really wonderful work-life balance and I’ll have enough.”

But in midlife, she can’t afford to buy a house, and she’s increasingly worried about what retirement would look like, or if it would even be possible. “Was I foolish to think this could work?” she now wonders.

She’s one of many millennials who, in their 40s, are panicking about the realities of midlife: financial precarity, housing insecurity, job instability and difficulty saving for the future. It’s a different kind of midlife crisis – less impulsive sports car purchase and more “will I ever retire?” In fact, a new survey of 1,000 millennials showed that 81% feel they can’t afford to have a midlife crisis. Our generation is the first to be downwardly mobile, at least in the US, and do less well than our parents financially. What will the next 40 years will look like?

  • octopus_ink@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    X’er here. I have what most would consider a good job, with good pay, and a good boss. I consider it a good job with good pay and a good boss. My spouse is unable to work, and we have two children. I’m currently seeking some skill or product I can develop without taking time away from my existing responsibilities such that I have a chance of not having to work until I die at my desk one day.

    With no shade against millenials, this is the only time I’m grumpy about being forgotten in the generational sniping that goes on. All these articles (like OP) about this very valid angst from older millenials and I identify with it pretty much every time. I know I’m not the only X’er who does.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      It’s the trouble with attributing it to any specific generation. It’s like people forgot that Gen Xers grew up reading the same dystopian sci-fi that we did that predicted this corporate shithole world. Neuromancer was written in 1984, when I was three years old. People forget that the cynicism of Gen X explicitly came from being such a small generation compared to the Boomers that it was just always a given that they wouldn’t ever have much political influence. Hell, it even affects a lot of Boomers, because this has been going on for a long time.

      Gen X gets forgotten, but they were honestly the first to really bear the brunt of this disease that’s eating at all of us, and thus it’s sad that they get forgotten. Cheers mate, and I hope you find that skill and succeed in your goals.