Millennial Struggle Is Multinational
Ester Bloom and I have both written about The Guardian’s great new series The Trials of Generation Y:
The Guardian has been putting out fantastic articles and interviews all week—more than we could ever recap here, so please visit their site and check them out—and their stories about Millennials in the U.S., the U.K., and Australia illustrate how these economic challenges are, if not necessarily global, definitely multinational.
(It would have been interesting if The Guardian had pulled in stories from Millennials in countries that were facing different kinds of economic and social challenges, or from countries where opportunities for Millennials were growing. Maybe that’ll be the subject of later installments.)
If you’re interested in exploring The Guardian’s Millennial series, I recommend these two articles:
- Revealed: income for young British families falls as pensioners prosper
- Five markers of adulthood millennials have had to give up on
Here are a few quotes from the “five markers of adulthood” piece that hit me, as the Millennials (used to) say, right in the feels.
Millennial #1:
Will my only choice be to endure the stress of a constantly rotating stream of housemates, moving house every time a landlord decides to spike the rent or sell? Since moving to London five years ago to find work, I have already lived in five different flats and had 16 different housemates.
Millennial #2:
I rarely see this ‘millennial worry’ mentioned. I’ve done very well for myself, worked hard, have an excellent job and even managed to buy a property with a little help from my family. This has been at the expense of my personal relationships though, and I’m moving into a stage of life where there is no slack that can be picked up by a partner in the home. I am the only person cooking, cleaning, taking care of the bills, etc. and it is exhausting. Even finding time to date and rectify the situation is exhausting. I’ve had to be upfront and say on Tinder that I’m a workaholic to explain why I frequently cancel dates.
Millennial #3:
I’m lucky to have a decent job, but I’ve never had a contract that lasts longer than a year as they’ve always been fixed term. I think this means there’s little investment in me as an employee because they know I won’t be around for long. After about eight months I have to start thinking about applying for jobs, which is such a soul-destroying and confidence-sucking process.
I don’t want to quote the whole thing because that would probably be a copyright violation, but I hope you read the whole thing. There are stories from Millennials who want to be parents, Millennials who are parents, Millennials whose lives are worse than their parents’ even though they earn more than their parents did, and so on. Millennials who can’t date because their jobs move them around so frequently. Millennials who worry about signing leases because all of their jobs are short-term contracts followed by unemployment. So many Millennials with so many recognizable stories—and these are all U.K. Millennials, not U.S. ones.
Do you also see yourself in these Millennial stories? Or do you have another story you think is being overlooked, and should be shared?
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