“In America, Every Generation Is Better Off Than Their Parents”
On the grimly amusing reality of millennials and the American Dream
A fourth-floor walk-up’s not so bad if the neighborhood is cool. You bought houseplants; you bought string lights from Ikea and clipped them along the bookcase; you found an end table on the sidewalk. You saved up for the Noguchi coffee table—your one big statement piece—and deferred your student loans. The record player was expensive, but it’s so worth it, even when the radiator bangs so much you can’t hear Aladdin Sane.
You have two roommates, and they’re OK, you get along fine, but you try to time your trips to the laundromat to the days when they’re both home, because watching the windows sweat at the Wash-N-Dry beats listening to people play Xbox all day.
“In America, every generation is better off than their parents.” You grew up hearing that. Your parents live in a leafy Midwestern suburb, in a five-bedroom house they bought for $196,000 in 1989. They have the cabin at the lake, but we’re not talking real family money, not what some of the influencers you follow call “generational wealth.” Your dad says he’s not rich enough to vote Democrat. You’re starting to suspect some of your coworkers do have generational wealth, or at least it seems like they must, because you’re always broke at the end of the month, but they go out almost every night. When you go out with them, they inevitably split the check in a way that sticks you with more than your share. It’s so goddamn infuriating, but you can’t say anything about it because you don’t want to come off as poor.
Better than your parents? It’s hard to imagine that future for yourself. Or no, it’s not hard; it’s easy, incredibly easy, because every day in the city you’re surrounded by Audis, and you’re walking past Audemars Piguet boutiques, and you’re smiling at doormen outside buildings with manicured trees. It’s all right there. You just can’t figure out how you’re supposed to reach it, even the tiny share of it you’d need to feel secure. Even after your promotion, you didn’t make six figures, and then the whole magazine was sold to private equity for its brand assets, and everyone got laid off. You flew home for a few days, and for the first time in your life, you consciously noticed how much stuff your parents have—how did they afford all this stuff?—and you almost started crying, like a complete idiot, when you found the receipt for some fancy wine opener they bought at the Grosvenor Court mall for $150.
It’s as if there’s a hidden door somewhere, and some people can find it, and some people can’t. How do some people know where it is? You’ve never put money first. You’ve always believed—you were taught to believe!—that there are more important things. So why do so many of your thoughts revolve around money? You have this group text, your favorite one, where half the gossip is about which of your friends have secret family wealth, which of your friends have parents bankrolling their whole lives. But then two of your friends from the group text got married, and somehow they bought a $3 million house in the city. And they’re both still in the chat, talking shit about other people who pretend not to be rich. How are they doing this? It's horrible to be 32 (when did that happen?) and still worried about making rent.
More Artifacts From the Millennial Canon
On that same trip home, you hung out with this friend from high school. Call him Matt. Unlike you, Matt never left your hometown. You remember him as a sweet kid, but you get the sense that he’s kind of a crypto bro now. Matt says everyone in the world is either a wolf or a sheep. The biggest revelation he’s ever had came when he realized he had to choose which one to be. He got this from a YouTuber who also taught him about the importance of eye contact in establishing dominance. He says he’s into Stoic philosophy, and he says that the thing about crypto is you have to get lucky only once. He follows aspirational Instagram accounts because he likes knowing how successful people organize their time. He exercises right after he wakes up because he saw an Army Ranger on TikTok who said 6 a.m. is when testosterone has the lowest viscosity. He has three computer monitors. He seems to spend a lot of time on Reddit.
Matt’s got a lot of interesting stats in his head, though. He's all data this, data that. Data is the edge. You get the data right, and your bets are gonna hit, 100 percent guaranteed. Did you know there are people making a killing on sports gambling just by exploiting differences in network lag time? It’s true. Get connected in a place with minimal lag, and you can get game updates a few fractions of a second ahead of everyone else. Take that advantage, write a script that places bets for you at superhuman speeds, and you’re basically taking money out of the dummies’ pockets and putting it in your own. That’s what wolves do. He hasn’t done it himself because he hasn’t had time to learn how to write the script. He’s pretty sure he could get ChatGPT to write it, though.
But check it out, Matt says. Did you know the total amount of student loans taken out every year doubled from 2000 to 2019? Did you know the share of young adult households with educational debt also doubled from 1998, when Gen Xers were in their 20s and early 30s, to 2016, when millennials were in theirs? What do you think the median home price was in 1998? Wrong, it was $153,000. What do you think it was in 2016? Wrong again, it was $443,000.
Or look at wages, Matt says. Real wages have barely moved in the past 50 years; the only way to get ahead is with a college degree, but unless your family can pay 100 percent of your tuition, starting adulthood with a college degree means starting with a ton of debt, in a world where absolutely everything is more expensive, and where average Americans lost a third of their net worth during the 2008 recession, and where inequality is so extreme that the richest 10 percent of American households control 93 percent of all stock-market wealth.
And you think you’re gonna get a job and play by the rules and retire with a pension? Matt laughs. He took a seminar in multilevel marketing last year, and yeah, it cost thousands of dollars, but when it pays off, it’ll be epic.
You talk about all this over dinner at the Tex-Mex place where you used to go all the time in high school. Matt says you should enjoy it before Trump deports the whole kitchen staff. He laughs when he says this, a little more than you’d like. But fuck it, he says. You have to choose whether you want to win or lose, and sympathy’s for losers. America is starting to fall to pieces, but an empire that’s falling to pieces is as much an opportunity as a threat. You can take some of the pieces for yourself, maybe enough to make you rich forever, maybe enough to let you escape from the impending collapse.
By the end of the second margarita, Matt’s gone off on some fairly wild tangents, stuff he must have gotten from Netflix sci-fi shows because it’s almost too bizarre for social media, if that’s even possible anymore. He says the planet’s dying, but a future’s coming in which people will live in space, or some people will, anyway. Rich people. It’s all about AI. You just have to read between the lines. This is the world Elon and Peter—he calls them by their first names—are building. AI will enable an elite aristocracy on the moon, or on Mars, or on an orbital ship-based society of some sort, to control a massive laboring class on a shattered, deadly, overpopulated Earth. The members of this aristocracy will live forever by transferring their consciousnesses into the cloud and then downloading them into new hosts whenever the old hosts die. The Earth-bound populace will live short, painful lives toiling for the benefit of their superiors in space, which sounds bad (Matt says, laughing), but if you think about it, it’s only the natural order, the intelligent profiting from the unintelligent.
This conversation almost makes you feel better, in a weird sort of way. For what feels like years, you’ve been stressing out over whether you’ll be able to afford to have kids or whether you should think about leaving the city. Pedestrian stuff. But Matt says we’re about to witness the total and unimaginably violent transformation of civilization itself. You don’t really believe this, of course, but if it’s sort of true, then you certainly can’t beat yourself up for not having a house yet, or for spending too much of your money going out and shopping online. If Matt is even sort of right, you’re caught up in forces so far beyond your control that you can’t possibly be responsible for what’s happening.
Over the tres leches, Matt says that’s nonsense. He says everyone is responsible, but only for themselves. He says the only question that matters for your entire generation is: Will you end up on the spaceship? How resourceful can you be as everything crumbles around you? When the day comes, will you be trapped in terrestrial misery, or will you have a place in the clouds, with the elect?
Somehow, you end up paying for dinner.
