LordMortis wrote: ↑Thu Dec 01, 2022 1:55 pm
Smoove_B wrote: ↑Thu Dec 01, 2022 1:41 pm
LawBeefaroni wrote: ↑Thu Dec 01, 2022 1:39 pm
Even if the odds of making a career of it are good, say 1:10,000, what happens to the 9,999 living at home producing useless content?
I will continue to maintain there's a shadow economy where boomer / older Gen X parents are working F/T jobs instead of retiring and funneling money to their kids. Again, I have nothing but anecdotes to support this, but what I've seen with extended family members is...surprising.
Trust fund babies. And there were a good collection of X who were already in that class. There were a greater number of Millennials, so it only stands to reason that there is an even larger quantity of Z. Wealth begets wealth.
Not trust fund babies, as there is no trust fund involved. Failure to launch. It's kids who finish school and simply... continue. They continue as they always have, living at home while the parents pay their way. Their parents aren't rich, they're simply working longer and harder to pay the bills.
Part of it is the failure of the school system to actually prepare kids for the real world, combined with making public school such a horrible, exhausting experience that there is no desire to continue their education.
Part of it is the brick wall society has built around college, in which we redefined a college degree into what a high school diploma used to mean, then told the kids with little experience at managing their lives to accept decades of heavy debt or to have no hope. All of that mostly succeeds in the kids earning their mandatory high school diplomas, then looking and seeing nothing but hopelessness and misery.
Part of it is the impact that technology has had on young people who have learned to interact remotely rather than face-to-face. Before, after high school, all of your friends would disappear into their lives, and you'd have to go out into the world to meet your social needs. Now staying at home feels both adequate and preferable, while that lost face-to-face communication over the years leading up the that point makes the prospect of being forced to do it every day at a job seriously intimidating.
Part of it is the economic realities. We've been over that one a thousand times. We finished school looking forward to a future with earnings, home ownership, and independence. Now, though, home ownership is a long shot. The only path they see to money is countered with crippling debt from day one.
Not only that, but for those of us who didn't go to (or finish) there were still paths forward. You would go out, get a full-time job to pay for that first apartment and give you insurance. That would give you confidence and a sense of independence, and the motivation to work your way into a stable life. But guess what - these days, the key phrase in most businesses is
efficiency. Get the most while giving the least, and that employment model was inefficient. The best someone fresh out of school is likely to get now is a part time job that requires almost full-time hours - usually just short of the hours required for benefits. There are a hundred 35-hours-per-week jobs out there for every job that gives 40 and benefits. That means that even if a young person today charges out on day one and gets a job, they're not going to have insurance. They're also not going to be making enough to pay for even a studio apartment plus food plus utilities. The only way for them to survive is to continue to live at home, denying them that feeling of independence and adulthood.
Society, all in one generation, is having to regress centuries to the idea that homes (and apartments!) and permanently multi-generational. And we don't have the know-how to make that work smoothly. Our society has established 'moving out' as a rite of passage for both adulthood for the kids, and of moving into a new phase of independence for the parents. Without that rite of passage, both are sometimes getting... stuck. The kids aren't feeling like they're adults because nobody knows how to make that shift in perception happen anymore without the kids moving out, and adults aren't moving beyond the 'take care of the kids' mentality because the trigger for that change is now gone.*
And we look at all of that and wonder why young people aren't moving forward the way we did, not recognizing that we moved forward a long time ago, in a world that no longer exists.