The uncertainty facing my generation was not new to me. I have read an article similar to the one I am about to write. I saw the report. I've been watching TikTok.
But the life I was living was the biggest clue that our generation was facing a growing economic crisis.
I just wasn't ready to admit it.
Like many millennial men just entering their 30s, I happily identify as a stunted youth. As traditional markers of adulthood are pushed back, so too is our sense of ourselves as actual adults. Even though I am navigating the challenges and responsibilities of adulthood, I still feel like I am moving into my own world. I still feel like a child.
And the idealism about my future instilled in me by my parents was louder in my head than the everyday reality. It was as if my brain had split into two. I still believe in dreams, but at the same time I understand reality. As we see the housing crisis make homeownership more impossible by the day, and despite the inescapable burden of student debt, the path to financial security and stability is still within reach. That's what I felt. I was going to reap what I had sown.If I worked hard enough, tried harder, made myself more successful, more financially stable, more commercially viable, then I too could have my own little planet. can make it, right, Just as former Australian Prime Minister Robert Menzies promised generations ago.
But late last year, I began researching the economic situation facing my generation for my podcast, Who Screwed Millennials. And in those months, I grew in a way.
Through hours of reporting and recording, I realized that my parents' lives would never be mine, no matter how hard I tried to graft them onto them.
“When we grow up and go out into the world, we think, 'Oh, damn, we're screwed.' The world isn't really to our liking,” said one interviewee. , Dr. Intifar Chaudhry told me. “I think there's a huge disconnect between how we've been raised and how the world actually is.”
I have experienced the rental crisis first-hand since the COVID-19 lockdown orders were lifted in New South Wales. Rising rents and increasing costs of living forced him to move to three different properties over the same number of years. Each time, they move further away from the city, from their jobs, and from the connections to the people and places they built during their leases. Any thoughts my partner and I had of escaping the dangers of the rental market were shattered as we looked at our shared student loan debt and dwindling savings.
The latest Scanlon Report, which maps Australia's social cohesion over time, found that almost half of 18-44 year olds – Millennials and Gen Z – say they are “just doing well financially”; He says he believes that. They are only worth doing for a small amount of time in your life.
“When you start seeing that kind of change, it's really dangerous for any society,” Jill Filipovic, author of OK Boomer, Let's Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind, told me.
Filipovic said generational inequality is not just a fabricated culture war, but a visible economic and political divide that has the potential to exacerbate divisions.
I've seen this both online and in real life. While our elders blame younger generations for not pulling themselves up, I find myself going down rabbit holes searching for answers to why my friends and family are unable to create the lives they feel are promised to them. I'm watching it fall.
“I think it’s when people start to feel like they’ve been sold a gift certificate and start to lose faith in society, in government, in institutions,” Filipovic told me. “I don't think anything good will come of it.”
I I was a true child of the global financial crisis, and for the first time I saw my generation lose faith in the current state of the economy and take to the streets. I remember feeling like this was a dividing line when it came to economic inequality. For my generation to be optimistic about the future, the system needed to change. But over a decade later, here we are.
To find out how we got here, the podcast team and I called a man who knows a thing or two about the financial crisis.
Yiannis Varoufakis, a prophet of capitalism and former Greek finance minister during the Greek debt crisis, said he had noticed a complete change in the mood of young people over the past decade.
For Mr Varoufakis, at least when it comes to Australia's housing crisis, the problems and solutions are easy to identify. But he says we are stuck in the same political gridlock as seven years ago when he told Guardian Australia that negative gearing was “scandalous”.
The more Varoufakis talked, the more intractable the generational inequality seemed. But as I started projecting my own insecurities into the conversation, more questions shifted to “Who and what caused the housing crisis?” “Who's to blame if I can't own a house?” Varoufakis said with a more optimistic outlook.
“Every generation feels the end is near, and every generation has been proven wrong,” he told us. “But at the same time, it is important to identify the structural causes of apathy and the decline of cultural capital.”
He, like Filipovic (like), found optimism in the midst of crisis.
“The bad news for Millennials is that I don't think we'll ever get out of this. Not completely,” she said. “The good news for young people is that this doesn't have to go on forever. Millennials are a much more liberal generation.”
This more liberal generation is the largest voting group in Australia. Millennials and Gen Z make up 43% of the electorate, and they approach politics very differently. Chaudhry says they care about issues that directly affect them, not necessarily what the major political parties are campaigning for.
“Assuming Millennials continue to rise in politics, I think we will see a future where younger generations are better cared for and more invested in,” Filipovic says. “I don't think things are moving as fast as they need to be. But I feel optimistic about the trajectory we're on.”
I share this optimism. You can identify the logic within it.
But I also understand that it's easy to get consumed by anger and apathy.
So before I left Varoufakis, before he disappeared from my computer screen and I returned to my white-walled, moldy apartment, I asked him for advice. I asked him how young people can have hope and imagine a better future for themselves and generations to come.
“Well, young people especially don't want advice from old people like me.”
Borrowing from George Bernard Shaw, “Of course he said this sarcastically,'' Varoufakis said anger, or what he calls “insanity,'' isn't necessarily such a bad thing. Ta.
“There are two kinds of young people: there are wise people who try to adapt themselves to the world around them, and there are crazy people who try to adapt the world to their own ideas of how it should be. ”
“Please be angry,” he told me.
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