One of my good friends and I were discussing marriage one day, and how some of our former classmates were getting married this year. She pointed out that her mother was 30 when she got married, and she’s anxious that she’s almost 30 and virtually single. In an effort to make her feel better, I mentioned that my mom was 23 when she got married, and had my brother and me when she was 25. Meanwhile, I’m 28 and nowhere near that stage in my life. I told her I eventually understood that my mom was from a different time and generation. It was the norm then for women to get married and have children at an earlier age. But now, we usually expect our women to graduate from university first and become gainfully employed before settling down into a long-term relationship, and then maybe having children.
Really, there’s nothing wrong with where we are in our lives. We’re actually following the new tradition.
How we’re different
This got me thinking about some of the more crucial disparities between the millennials and the baby boomers/Generation Xers. Here’s some from off the top of my head:
1. Qualifications
In the past, it was easier to move up the career ladder with just a high school diploma or a Bachelor’s at best. Now, it’s more or less expected that you need to have at least one Masters to get a job, and a permanent one if you’re lucky. Almost all of my friends have their Masters degrees but are yet in contract positions. Some of these contract positions are too short-term to adequately plan one’s future, to qualify for loans and mortgages, and in the case of women, to even qualify for maternity leave if children are on the menu.
2. Job satisfaction
Then there’s job satisfaction. Our parents were more likely to work for the same company until they reached retirement age. They worked hard in that job, whether they liked it or not, to be able to afford their loans and mortgages and provide for their families. In this day and age, it’s not uncommon to see resumes chock-full of various positions from different companies. And still, the young adults today question if they’re doing what they love.
3. “Get a real job”
There’s still a challenge to get our adults to support our decisions to veer into less traditional jobs. Our parents would prefer us to stay in school all the way up to graduate level, and become doctors, lawyers, accountants, doctors and lawyers. Just like them. It’s very hard to get them to champion our desire to become full-time musicians, artistes, artists and writers. Even if they sort of do, they prefer that we still study a more traditional degree as a ‘back up plan’. Then they encourage us to do what we love ‘on the side’.
4. Financial stability
Then there’s the issue of money. Our parents were able to move out of our grandparents’ homes early on. Even if they rented for a while, they eventually owned their own homes, and were able to make enough to support a family of four or seven. Now, partly due to inflation and rising real estate costs, I don’t even have enough money to support myself, much less plan for children, and I certainly can’t afford a house right now, much less get a mortgage if I wanted to. So if I wanted to move out, I’d have to rent.
To some, renting is wasting money that could otherwise be put into a mortgage downpayment. But I’d still like to see if those saying that actually save that money towards a downpayment on a house, hmph. For now, most of us have no choice but to live in our parents’ house like the overgrown teenagers that we’ve seemed to become.
The bottomline is this: we can’t compare ourselves to our parents. The game is way different now. Therefore, it’s not a fair comparison. We need to stop putting so much pressure on ourselves to achieve certain milestones at the same ages that they did. We need to realise that it’s not our faults if we don’t. It’s actually theirs.
We’ve been screwed, thanks to them
When you think about it, it’s these same generations who have screwed things up royally for us today. They’re the reasons we don’t have permanent jobs, and why the bar for qualifying for any job has become so high. They’re the reason we have difficulty in strolling down the paths less travelled, because they want us to continue in the same unfulfilling jobs they went through, causing a saturated workforce in virtually every industry. They’re the reason why the minimum value we need to pay for a good house in this country is TT$1.5 million, when back in the day it was somewhere around TT$500,000.
They are in the upper management positions. They are the decision makers influencing the stability of our career futures. And now, it’s these same baby boomers and Generation Xers who are retiring from their jobs and coming back to work as consultants, robbing us from gaining any leadership experience! Honestly, you suck, baby boomers and Generation Xers!
Where does this leave us?
I think we need to own the fact that our generation is vastly different from previous ones, thanks to the boom in technology. Therefore, we need to recognise that we have other avenues of making money that our parents didn’t have before. We don’t need to rely on traditional sources of income anymore. We are internet- and smartphone-savvy. We are social media pros. We can start online businesses from our passions. We can work from home in that regard. We can study online, and even study courses for free. We can become qualified in anything we want, right from our laptop or smartphone, from the comfort of our toilet bowls. And then we can even teach people online how to do the things we learned for money, also from said toilet bowls.
But back to the idea of settling down. Now I can understand the rush for women to still settle down early if they want to have children before it would be harder to do so. To those women, I do feel your pain. But overall, I do believe that we’re fortunate to live in a time today where there’s more tolerance and acceptance of different lifestyles. Couples are either putting off marriage or forgoing marriage altogether. Women in general are also putting their education and career first before feeling ready to settle down. And in some countries, couples of same-sex orientation can even get married if they want to, which was not a possibility years ago! We live in an age of improved social acceptance, where we can define our relationships, even ourselves, however we want, and that’s a good thing.
Basically, it’s time to embrace the benefits of our new world, and stop trying to live the way our parents did. It’s time to own what we got and carve a new path for ourselves, bravely and boldly.
