A few minutes ago I happened to run across a Twitter screed about how screwed and abused Millennials and Gen Z are, and how they're not going to take it much longer. It was just the usual stuff, but for some reason it prompted me to check it out using the simplest possible measure. Not income or wealth or homeownership or any of that. Just a single question from the General Social Survey: How happy are you?
This has been dead flat for 50 years. No matter how much it costs to live in New York or how much student debt they have, Millennials and Gen Z are exactly as satisfied with their lives as young people have been for decades.
When the unemployment rate is at 3.4% and the employment-to-population ratio (25-54) the highest its been since 2001, it is hard to take the whining seriously. It has been kind of eye-opening, in fact.
I do suspect that things have gotten much worse for the kind of person that writes for publication. So perhaps a selection effect?
"A few minutes ago I happened to run across a Twitter screed..."
I think I see your problem right there. Sta off Twitter and life will be better. =)
Wholeheartedly agree! Cesspool.
1+
Well yes, but every generation finds a new way to whine.
I suggest using the GSS data subset of "not too happy" for all of the age groups, then apply your usual polynomial trendline and report back. I think you'll see something very different than what you're showing.
People will always answer that they're pretty happy because they always are.
People were pretty happy during the Blitz.
This. Even some slaves managed to eke out happy existences with specific non brutal slave owners. Didn’t make the institution of slavery any less morally depraved just because a few slaves lucked out under it. Same with gay men who find happiness in societies that prohibit same-sex relations. As a gay man myself, I was quite happy in the pre-Lawrence world where the sex I was having was a felony, mostly because I just decided breaking the law was worth it… but I’m happier today knowing it’s no longer illegal (and I can marry whomever I choose on top of it).
This whole “well the people are happy so there must not be any problems” is a very odd take, since there are plenty of examples of happy people existing in even the most oppressive places on earth. Some North Koreans really are genuinely smiling at us from Pyongyang. Some happy housewives from the 1950s really are happier that their CEO granddaughters had way more career opportunities than they ever dreamed of. Happiness doesn’t equal contentment or a sense of security.
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If you're always navel gazing, you'll eventually find lint. Of course it doesn't help when you have a whole ecosystem (social media) telling you to spend all your time gazing.
Thus why we need far less "anectdote" reporting of the Reporter spoke to 10 people and spins a tale (not to say it is fabrication, rather it is laziness and statistical ignorance and innumeracy with an inability to distinguish anectdote from data), and rather more statistical reporting.
Hey it trended downward from 1992-2005 and from 2010-2022 😉
While i dont offer a better, simpler way to derive how happy everyone truly is or sense their level of frustration....this survey seems like a bad way to do it.
Happy doesn’t equal content with one’s lot in life. People often mitigate what problems they have with other things so the net effect is “happiness.” “Turn lemons into lemonade” and all that because you only live once and have to make the best with what you have.
Lots of people in adverse circumstances still report being “happy” most of the time, but it doesn’t mean that the adverse circumstances don’t have any effect or that the rest of us not in the adverse circumstances should do nothing to help those people out. (For example, women stuck at home because there were no job opportunities for them and society frowned upon working outside the home still reported being “pretty happy” back in the pre-1970s. Doesn’t mean that they were content or satisfied though… which explains why, the minute they were allowed to, millions of them voluntarily entered colleges and the workforce.)
Millennials and Gen Z are exactly as satisfied with their lives as young people have been for decades.
Welp, it’s not like they have much of a choice. Nobody offers Millennials or Gen Z a time machine to go back and experience being 20-40 years old in 1965 vs today and then asks “so which do you prefer?” The choice on offer is “are you going to accept the lower living standards of today - as evidenced by the lower homeownership rates, higher college debt rates, lack of wages keeping up with inflation, lack of pensions in retirement and lack of lifetime employment expectations - cheerfully or grumble about it?”
Not surprising that, if “buy a house at the age of 22 and be financially secure forever” is no longer on offer, the people who weren’t alive during the time when it was on offer will find other ways to make themselves “happy.” YOLO, and humans have always strived to achieve happiness, even when life expectancy was below 50 and modern conveniences like electricity, indoor plumbing and the like weren’t available. Most of us today still would not trade places with the richest men alive in 1850, because as “happy” as they must’ve been back then, it would be shitty to live without flushable toilets, airplanes and television.
“Happiness” is always relative and humans have a strong desire to pursue it (and persuade themselves that they have it) regardless of their circumstances.
Sorry for my ranting but nothing pisses me off more than a Boomer being deliberately obtuse about the challenges young people face. Sure we all have iPhones and the internet. We also can’t buy homes or start families until we’re over 40. I recognize that in some ways it sucked that the Kevin Drums of the world missed out on the life I had as a 20 year old, which mostly was free of all the social constraints Boomers faced. (The gay Boomers I know had to hide everything about themselves to their families growing up and face AIDS which killed off many of their friends, both of which sound horrible.) But KD and other Boomers also need to appreciate how much it *financially* sucks today to be 20 years old, told to wait until your 40s and 50s for every economic independence milestone (homeownership, family formation, retirement security) your parents managed to achieve when they were still in their 20s and 30s.
Perhaps the trade off - less social constraints in favor of more financial constraints - was worth it. But this constant need of Kevin’s to “prove” that Millennials and Gen Z really don’t have it that bad is just fucking annoying. They have it different, in some ways - generally socially - much better and in some ways - generally financially - much worse than Boomers or Gen X* had it. (*my generation technically although I’m at the tail end of it)
"We also can’t buy homes or start families until we’re over 40."
Brother, please. Plenty of millennials and Gen Zers start families well below 40, though I agree plenty of them choose not to. But just because you have an unrealistic idea of how much income is required to raise a child does not mean that you literally can't raise one when you are younger. You do realize that not all young people are white and middle class, right? And you do realize that young families in the 60s and 70s struggled financially? Life is full of trade-offs.
You don't HAVE to wait till you are 40 to try to have kids. And if you actually want to have kids, I would STRONGLY recommend that you not wait that long because the human body is not a machine. I feel like you are not supposed to say this, but it is just a fact that women in their late 30s have a much harder time getting pregnant than women in their early/mid 20s.
And regarding home ownership, well I guess this is an anecdote, but my 25-year-old nephew, who is by no means rich, is about to buy a home with his fiancé. I'd love to see some stats on this and on income for workers in their 20s. I know anecdotally, when I started working in my early 20s I was earning about 1/3 of what we are paying kids out of college now and while there has been inflation, I doubt it amounts to 3x over the past 30 years.
Believe it or not, I too was in my 20s once. And at that time, early 1990s, my generation was all in a rage at the boomers for hogging all the good stuff and we thought we'd never be able to own homes or get social security or retire. Well, we were wrong. So are you.
When I got married, a friend with 5 kids gave me this advice: "If you're putting off some big trip because you're saving up to have kids, don't. Just do it. Spend your money. You'll never have enough for your kids anyway, so enjoy it now, because you're going to be broke no matter what." Maybe not the best advice, but it made me smile. He also told me each successive kid is less work, so you might as well have 5 instead of 2, because it's not that much worse. (No thanks.)
Kevin has actually pointed out multiple times that things aren’t all terrible for young people and old people didn’t live on easy street. A quick Google search on “kevin drum home ownership” produced multiple hits with many charts. Many, many charts. Several posts were very good including “Millennial wealth is suddenly looking very normal”.
The recent interest rate hikes have certainly hurt, but they will come down. I started looking for work during the 1991 recession. Brutal! I was unemployed for most of 2002. I ended up doing OK then and am doing fine now.
Here is a quick run down of the 1950s by Noah Smith (Noahpinion):
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1612181880300011522?lang=en
I’ve talked with people on here about the 80s and looked closer. High unemployment and high interest rates.
Things aren’t perfect, but there are many good things about the modern economy. I’ve disagreed with Kevin about a lot of things and agreed with others. In this case Kevin has done a good job changing my mind by showing some perspective.
Complaining is a big part of being happy for a lot of people