Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by MadManE 3748 days ago
I find this to be more than a little disingenuous. While it is true that millennials are poorer, the reasoning isn't so cut-and-dried.

I fully place the blame on the attitude of entitlement. There is the expectation that everything will be handed to anyone who just follows the pre-set path of college-->office job-->retirement, without the acknowledgement of all the behind-the-scenes effort that it takes.

College is more expensive, but it's not impossible. Some non-college careers are now more profitable because of this also. No matter what some people say, just showing up is not going to cut it. You need to do your job well and advocate for yourself to get raises/promotions/opportunities.

This is not to say that it's easy to get ahead. But making the "right" choices and having a little temporary discomfort or making the "wrong" choices and committing to a life of debt is pretty standard throughout history. We just have a much larger group of people with access to mass marketing tools than before, so we get to hear about it more often.

4 comments

I love that people blame "entitlement" when the group of people getting the largest numbers of actual entitlements are the baby boomers. As the article says, retired people are actually seeing their income rise faster than young people. And yet people say the young people are the entitled ones...
It's hard not to have your income rise if you take care with it. And it's hard not to have your income fall if you refuse to work for it.

Acting entitled and actually being entitled are very different things.

What evidence do you have that people are refusing to work for this income?
Sure is nice to have a pension and then vote to eliminate pensions for younger generations, so you get the nice double effect of having a pension AND a 401K... you know, what the boomers actually DID.
Yet even if you do all that you'll still have more debt, higher rent and more expensive home prices. Even those who work their ass off with lower expectations are going to end up less well off than they would have in a previous generation. That "little temporary discomfort" is significantly less temporary than it used to be.
Yeah, life sucks sometimes. But I have yet to see someone complaining about how hard millennials have it who doesn't also have the latest iPhone and MacBook, living in an expensive city.

If you're really serious about growing your net worth, then stick with the old hardware and move to somewhere between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River. Prices are low enough to live the "American Dream" there, but it's not the cool, hip living of SF Bay, Seattle, or NYC.

I'd love to move somewhere cheaper but jobs my wife and I do don't exist there. Which is quite likely exactly why those places are cheaper.
You're going to compare necessary tools that cost nothing over their lifetime to having things like retirement, cheap rent, benefits, and a strong job market?

"Life sucks sometimes" is also a thought terminating cliche, as such you should really avoid using it -- if you're actually trying to contribute to the discussion instead of sounding like a daft moron.

Their MacBook or iPhone is your Chevy or Ford when you were their age.
That's because you are reading about it on the Internet. If they didn't have the devices to access the Internet you wouldn't hear about it.

If you're really serious about hearing from people between the Rockies and the Mississippi, move there and ask them.

I grew up there. It's not pleasant, but it is ripe with opportunity to seriously grow your worth.

And 5-year-old hardware is hardly inaccessible to the internet. It is orders of magnitude cheaper, though.

College is impossible to pay for without taking on significant amounts of student loans, or having wealthy parents to pay for it. This is not conjecture, this isn't opinion. This is a fact at this point. The average cost of college has far outstripped the pace of wages, inflation, and just about every other metric we use to measure economic growth. It's simply not doable anymore in most cases. Are their exceptions? Sure. But those cases don't account for the median experience of people.

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/the-myt...

And to whom would you lay the blame of creating the atmosphere of entitlement? Is it a construct that Millenials decided to work up through their Elementary, Junior, and High School educations? It doesn't seem rational to point out 'entitlement' without context as to where such a trend came from. Would you agree the Baby Boomer "Me Generation" set up the stage for what we're seeing today?
The OP's argument was ridiculous enough that we don't need to start pointing the finger at who is to blame for what. Inter-generational flame wars between millenials/boomers/etc are likely to just waste a lot of people's time without contributing a great deal of insight.
But who set the stage for the Baby Boomers? Do we blame the previous generation for that?

At some point, you need to take responsibility for your own actions. Even if the situation that you're in isn't your fault, it IS up to you what you do to get out of it.

So you do agree there's context that is important? To answer your question, yes, absolutely look through history for understanding how "The Greatest Generation" could breed the "Me Generation" and now here we are.

To put it another way, the US political and economic system is a giant game of Jenga, and by the time Millenials have showed up, the tower is rife with holes, wobbly, and on the brink of failure - these weren't the actions of the Millenials, but yet claims like yours seem to pass the buck in a blase fashion.

My argument is that the context is irrelevant. You have to do what you can with the hand you're dealt, but ultimately, if you're not willing to work for things, you will be poorer than someone who is.

I also find it ironic that you use the term "pass the buck".

“Homes and education cost more than they used to” ‘You’re not working hard enough’

“There are no jobs” ‘You’re not looking hard enough’

“Okay I moved to shitsville to look for a working-class job, industry dried up and the unions are gone” ‘…’

JFC

Exactly, this is how you tell the difference between adults and man-children.