If you belong to the Church of Manifesting, there’s a strong argument to be made that this was how Sennott willed “I Love LA” into existence, whether in fulfillment of a suppressed desire or a cosmic joke. Either way, that clip belongs to her joke-posting era, when the burgeoning comic performer tried out material on Twitter and sharpened her punchlines at New York City open mics.

Then came her indie darling christening, courtesy of Emma Seligman’s “Shiva Baby” in 2020, when she moved to Los Angeles, followed by breakout roles in 2022’s “Bodies Bodies Bodies” and 2023’s “Bottoms.”

Many Instagram reels later, Sennott’s grid is bedazzled with poses on gala step-and-repeats, snapshots from a Balenciaga campaign and party pics with pop queen Charli XCX. But the surest sign that the Connecticut-born New Yorker has gone West Coast native is a February posting captioned “hard at work in the writers’ room,” showing a staffer hanging up a framed poster that screams, “New York Is Over.”

(Kenny Laubbacher/HBO) Rachel Sennott as Maia, Jordan Firstman as Charlie and True Whitaker as Alani in “I Love LA”

I assumed that slogan held a special meaning for the “I Love LA” creator and star – and it does, but not for any reasons having to do with snubbing NYC. Sennott and her fellow executive producer Emma Barrie bought it to replace an identical piece their fellow executive producer Max Silvestri lost in the wildfires that ripped across the region earlier this year.

“Sex and the City” addicts surely recognize this shoutout to the infamous “Splat!” episode, in which Kristen Johnston’s last-call party girl Lexi Featherston rants about the demise of the freewheeling New York scene.

Some know Lexi’s speech word by word. “This used to be the most exciting city in the world . . . now it’s nothing but smoking near a f**king open window,” Lexi blurts. “New York is over. O-V-E-R. Over! No one’s fun anymore. Whatever happened to fun? God, I’m so bored I could die.” On cue, her stiletto heel breaks and Lexi loses her balance, tumbling out of that open window to her death. (“It was the first time Lexi ever left a party early,” Carrie Bradshaw quips in a voiceover.)

But Sennott assured me in a recent video conversation that she doesn’t feel that way about the city. “Anytime you’re feeling stifled here, you’re like, ‘I need to go to New York and f**k a bunch of people and go out every night.’ And then if you’re in New York for too long, you’re like, ‘Ugh, I can’t do this anymore. I am so tired, I need to not have to take vitamins all the time.’”

Judging from the upbeat tartness flavoring the humor of “I Love LA,” the show’s title isn’t sarcastic. The Los Angeles that Sennott’s Maia navigates is sunny and fabulous, but can also be hard and isolating: “And it sucks and you have to drive everywhere!” Maia says.

Other subterranean tremors acknowledge Maia’s inner tug of war between New York and her new battleground. She and her boyfriend Dylan (Josh Hutcherson) are still new enough to Los Angeles to be freaked out by its earthquakes and appalled by the malignant narcissists who refer to you as family in one breath and in the same sing-songy tone undermine your self-esteem or threaten to ruin your life.

(Kenny Laubbacher/HBO) Rachel Sennott as Maia, Odessa A’zion as Tallulah and Josh Hutcherson as Dylan in “I Love LA”

Take her boss, Alyssa (Leighton Meester). She has little desire to promote her hard-charging employee to a higher position at her boutique talent management company, but speaks to Maia as if they’re best friends. Indeed, everyone in Sennott’s LA throws around “I love yous” and air-kisses like chewing gum wrappers blowing into the gutter. The cheeriness is intoxicating and frustratingly false.

When Maia’s old frenemy Tallulah (Odessa A’zion) sashays back into Maia’s sphere, she brings her social media influencer confidence with her despite lacking the bank account and endorsement deals to back it up.

But that’s the key to success in today’s version of the industry town. You fake it until you make it, especially when your appearance of having made it isn’t backed up by anything substantial. Tallulah and Maia are flanked by Maia’s stylist friend Charlie (Jordan Firstman) and Alani, who holds a vanity executive title at her father’s production company — a nepo baby played with a knowing wink by True Whitaker, Forest Whitaker’s daughter.

Sennott accepts that people will compare “I Love LA” to the many shows about young adulthood that came before it. She has described “I Love LA” as “Entourage” for internet “It girls.” But there’s also a streak of “Girls”’ aimlessness merging with the aspirational grind vibe shaping “Atlanta,” and a hint of the fantasy glam that defined “Sex and the City,” although these friends flirt with chaos and ruin with a lot more realism than Carrie and company ever did.

“We were inspired by so many different shows. Obviously, like we tried to make our own original tone,” she said, adding, “I kept talking about ‘Hannah Montana’ too, you know?”

One differentiator is in the emphasis “I Love LA” places on social media as a powerfully shaping presence in the lives of younger adults. Sennott has dropped the spiritualist concept of the Saturn return in many interviews to describe her show’s central theme. This astrological belief holds that the ringed planet’s return to the position it occupied at a person’s birth marks the dividing line between youth and true adulthood.

A less romantic way of describing this landmark is the quarter-life crisis. Regardless of the sticker we slap on this signpost, it refers to the late-20s urge to commit to your path or trash it and start fresh.

For Gen Z and Millennials, Sennott explains, this checkpoint is extra fraught, “because it carries the weight of feeling like you missed out on something. Feeling all this pressure, feeling a lot of setbacks from COVID, strikes, the government, whatever, all these things.”

Adding to the intergenerational appeal of “I Love LA” is the reality that everyone feels or has felt that fear of falling behind in the invisible footrace to secure the house, the car and all the other Illusionary success signifiers.

Barrie also points out that this era is shaping into an encore of the Gilded Age — a time defined by financial inequality, a depression, a pandemic, and fears of war.  Everything is cyclical, she said. “That’s a microcosm of what it feels like to be alive. And I think that so much about this show is relatable. The internet and LA are like the vehicles we use to tell these stories, but these characters, their friendship and the way they look at life are kind of universal.”

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And yet, the initial audiences for “Sex and the City,” “Girls,” and even “Friends” did not have to contend with social media maintenance and the constant fear of reputational death by TikTok. The internet’s integration into our lives has transformed how we define our relationships and devalued interactions with strangers, replacing connections with content farming opportunities. (“What’s the point of being nice if no one that can help me sees it?” Charlie fumes when an expensive night out doesn’t yield the social currency he’d banked on.)

“Because you can see each other or stay in touch with what people are doing, there’s an expectation to hold on to everyone forever,” Sennott says. “And there are false ideas of how people’s lives are going. I’ve run into people when I’m at the lowest point in my life, and people are like, ‘You seem like you’re doing amazing, girl!’ And I’m like, having a breakdown. Or I’ve projected onto other people and been wrong. So I think it goes both ways.”

(Kenny Laubbacher/HBO) Jordan Firstman as Charlie, True Whitaker as Alani and Odessa A’zion as Tallulah in “I Love LA”

Reaching this understanding required a combination of drive – the performer loves homework, she says – and shedding some long-held expectations about Los Angeles. Sennott’s first glimpse of the reality behind the Hollywood curtain came to her during a trip to audition for a pilot. She took a picture of the grimy hotel room where she stayed, capturing the swirling cursive on the sign for the dialysis center across the street in the background. It told a story of glamor and despair, informing the show’s spirit.

Still, neither Sennott nor Barrie is necessarily eager to abandon either of the cities informing their characters’ lives.

“For me, what’s funny about it is, when you’re in LA, you’re trying to convince yourself New York is over,” Barrie said. “And when you’re in New York, you’re trying to convince yourself . . .

“That LA isn’t beautiful and warm,” Sennott offers, finishing her thought. “That’s just forever. If you’ve lived in both, you’ll never get over the other place. ‘Should I go back?’ So that’s kind of the joy of it.” While watching “I Love LA,” you can tell she means that.

“I Love LA” premieres at 10:30 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 2 on HBO and streams on HBO Max. 

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In the short-lived “Napoleon Dynamite” animated series, Kip Dynamite composes tender mixtapes of songs by the Goof Nutz Pizza band — a trio led by a kangaroo, a gorilla and an octopus on drums, naturally—intended to woo the girls of his small Idaho town. On “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” the gang finds spiritual release at Risk E. Rat’s Pizza, where the house theme song commands patrons to “DO IT DO IT DO IT / DO WHATEVER YOU WANT.”

And they do.

It’s not all fiction, either. Almost a decade ago, “Freakonomics” devoted an entire episode to the economic mysteries of Chuck E. Cheese, including the darkly funny question of whether higher menu prices correlated with an uptick in adult brawls — a theory spurred by a spate of viral YouTube videos starring furious grownups throwing punches near the Skeeball machines.

All of which is to say: the line between childhood memory and the chaos of adulthood has always been thinner than we pretend. So perhaps it was inevitable that Chuck E. Cheese would decide to lean in.

This week, as reported by CNN, the company announced it’s launching a new adults-only concept: Chuck’s Arcade, a spin-off designed for the generation that grew up on pizza parties and prize counters. According to a company release, the project is meant as a “modern-day love letter to the games and people who made Chuck E. Cheese great.”

Much like its kiddie counterpart, Chuck’s Arcade offers a blend of retro and modern amusements — classics like Donkey Kong and Mortal Kombat sit alongside newer fare like Halo and Connect Four Hoops. The spirit of the original is intact, too: each location is “overseen” by a member of the animatronic Munch’s Make Believe Band, including, of course, Chuck himself.

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So far, ten locations have quietly opened in malls across the U.S., with sites in St. Petersburg, Florida; Tulsa, Oklahoma; El Paso, Texas; and St. Louis. The design varies by city, with each space featuring original artwork that nods to the brand’s long, weird history.

The expansion follows a turbulent few years for the company, which filed for bankruptcy in 2020 during the pandemic. Since then, Chuck E. Cheese has reportedly spent $350 million on remodeling efforts and pricing overhauls aimed at budget-conscious families.

The post Chuck E. Cheese and the millennial midlife crisis appeared first on Salon.com.

But like all sorts of tribalistic feuds, things aren’t as black and white in most Americans’ everyday experiences. As I wrote about earlier, new insights from Savings.com show boomers as largely sympathetic to younger Americans’ financial plight, rarely viewing their own millennial or Gen Z offspring as lazy or entitled, and often willing to help their adult kids — quite generously — cover financial odds and ends. 

In that piece, though, I didn’t get into the real resentment between the generations — particularly the ire that millennials and Gen Zers feel toward boomers. After all, how could there not be tension when they are locked in a more intimate financial relationship than any recent generation? Millennials and Gen Zers' present-day hardships are so directly correlated to boomers’ past gains; at the same time, they’re more dependent on their boomer parents than any other generation has been. It’s a socioeconomic and psychological cocktail that, experts explained, has calcified as a sort of baked-in resentment against older generations — but one that, when you consider things from their perspective, might be understandable.

Millennials and Gen Zers, no doubt, are on track to spend what are supposed to be a person’s prime working and earning years in a highly volatile economic and workforce environment, with flat earnings and stratospheric housing prices. Median household income has barely risen since 2000, according to the U.S. Treasury, rising 15% over that period compared to housing’s 65% hike. If you were able to afford a house around the early 2000s, you were made “relatively wealthy,” Albert Saiz, faculty director of the Urban Economics Lab at MIT, told Salon. “But people who are coming into the economy don't have that wealth, and they have to save harder and work harder to get there.”

Meanwhile, when boomers were in their 20s, 30s and 40s, they enjoyed higher relative incomes and were more likely to own their homes, amassing more long-term wealth than most younger Americans likely will. That alone would be enough for younger Americans to feel entitled to some of their parents’ earnings. But the underlying fundamentals make things a little stickier. As the writer Sean Illing put it for Vox in 2019, describing the underlying argument behind Bruce Gibney’s 2017 book "A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America," boomers “have committed ‘generational plunder,' pillaging the nation’s economy, repeatedly cutting their own taxes, financing two wars with deficits, ignoring climate change, presiding over the death of America’s manufacturing core, and leaving future generations to clean up the mess they created.”

It’s a potent economic fog to navigate, and younger Americans can point out the pollutant in a lineup. Add in conservative boomers’ framing of younger Americans as lazier than their more more traditional, hardworking predecessors — to say nothing of the scores of boomers who do, genuinely, believe that millennials and Gen Zers are indeed entitled brats — and it’s hard to deny that such a recipe would create anything other than a brewing, bitter resentment. 

Younger Americans “too often” feel their parents "overlook" their very real financial challenges, and feel their parents can’t “come to terms with the fact that their lives aren’t a bed of roses,” Dr. Michael Kane, a psychiatrist specialized in family medicine, told Salon in an email response to the Savings.com survey. 

“This shift in thought is revolutionary, and transforms the existing parent-child dynamic,” he added. It introduces “heightened emotional and financial stress that was not witnessed in the previous generations.”

Lindsay Bryan-Podvin, a financial therapist, podcaster and author of "The Financial Anxiety Solution," said younger Americans don’t necessarily resent their parents, or boomers more broadly, for having financial security. “It’s much more of a frustration of an unwillingness for their parents to say, ‘Yeah, things are different,’” she said. 

Melissa Cox, a certified financial planner at Future Focused Wealth in Dallas, said younger Americans “often look at their parents’ relative financial comfort and think, ‘Why is it so much harder for me when I followed the rules?’” 

“It creates this quiet storm of guilt, pressure and unspoken expectations,” she said. And that gulf can “cause frustration and struggle, complicating family relationships and increasing the difficulty of free and healthy communication” about money, as Kane put it.

To that end, Bryan-Podvin stressed the importance of having financial conversations though perhaps from a more psychotherapeutic perspective than makes the mainstream. 

“We think about the way that the brain works — if we get something that is vague or uncertain or unclear, our brain fills in the gaps for what was missing, and our brain fills in the gaps in a negative way,” she said. “So, even if it feels anxiety-provoking to have a financial conversation with somebody else, being really clear prevents somebody else from filling in the gaps with something that isn't true, or is worse than they anticipated.”  

“Having these open and honest conversations really is about honoring the dignity and respect of this relationship,” she said. “Having that clarity is so powerful, and I think that also helps to dial down the overall tension and resentment.”

The post Boomers wanted to help their kids. Instead, they’re getting resentment appeared first on Salon.com.

From the younger adults’ perspective, much of their financial lives can be defined by what they lack compared to their parents: They can’t afford to buy a home, they feel like their wages have stagnated, they don’t feel “comfortable” with how much money they’ve got saved, they’re worried about AI obliterating their job prospects, consumer products aren’t quality anymore, all the furniture is cheap and, oh, right, they’ll be living through the more acute impacts of the climate crisis, explicitly caused by capitalistic oil boomers of the roaring 1980s.

For boomers, conventional wisdom says they resent millennials, that they think they’re lazy or entitled, and that, hey, maybe they could afford a home if they stopped shelling out so much on avocado toast. We imagine the average boomer as a wealthy, conservative, out-of-touch white suburbanite largely unsympathetic to millennial and Gen Z money troubles.

But new data challenges that assumption, and paints a more compassionate picture of boomers and Gen Xer parents as largely sympathetic to their kids' financial plight, and willing, sometimes gladly, to continue helping their kids cover financial odds and ends. At the same time, they’re worried their kids’ long-term dependence might jeopardize their own retirement, or even their ability to retire. Savings.com — an online coupon company that, yes, I recognize doesn’t have a classically prestigious-sounding name like The Johns Hopkins University, and I’m asking you to to challenge those frankly misogynistic assumptions about what companies with unserious names are capable of — surveyed 1,000 U.S. parents of adult children, specifically on how their contributions to their savings compared to their financial gifts to their children.

And in several anonymized survey responses shared exclusively with Salon, parents didn’t bemoan their offspring as being anything close to lazy or entitled. Instead, across all ages and incomes, parents showed “a lot more sympathy” for their adult children, as Beth Klongpayabal, analytics manager at Savings.com, described in an interview. 

“The respondents in our survey, I mean, they weren't rich people — they weren't all sitting around on their yachts replying,” Klongpayabal said. “A lot of what we're seeing is that these are people who don't want their kids to struggle the way they did.”

If one thing was made clear, it’s that there's a good reason these generations share a singular relationship. The survey found that parents providing financial support give an average of $1,474 a month, or $17,688 per year. Additionally, it found that working parents tend to contribute twice as much to their kids’ finances as they do their own retirement, and that half of the surveyed parents feel “obligated” to help their offspring with money. More than 80% of parents help pay for their adult children’s groceries; nearly half of the parents pay for their children's vacations. 

Granted, that $1,474 figure might be a bit inflated; most parents aren’t giving their adult offspring enough cash to snag a new MacBook each month. For adult children living at home, for example, the cost of what would’ve been their rent or mortgage contribution was included. Still, the figure crystallizes something we’ve all felt for a while — that boomers are giving more money to their millennial or Gen Z offspring than past generations. 

“Parents have never extended support of this scale and frequency before,” Dr. Michael Kane, a psychiatrist specialized in family medicine, told Salon in an email response to the survey.  

Despite providing unprecedented levels of support, though, most boomers weren’t resentful of their kids. Instead, they were rejecting a “kick the baby bird out of the nest” mentality, Klongpayabal said, that they felt was largely inflicted on them by their Silent Generation parents. “A lot of the parents are saying, ‘I had to struggle … and I don't want my kids to have to live through that the way I did,’” Klongpayabal said. “‘I didn't work so hard so that my kids could struggle. I worked so hard so my kids could have a better life.’”

Not all the responses were rosy. A 61-year-old father who pays for his Gen Zers' phone bill and college tuition described the dependence as “a burden.” And a 72-year-old woman who covers some of her 45-year-old’s discretionary spending described their current financial relationship as one in which her grown kid “constantly (asks) for small loans.” 

“I looked at her spending, and it was just her daughter apparently asking for money here and there,” Klongpayabal said. It added up to around $200 a month, she added. In the respondents’ additional answers that Klongpayabal described, the 72-year-old said she was in a lower-income bracket, and while she sometimes talks to her daughter about money, she’s still “knocking her door down.”

“She's exhausted,” Klongpayabal said.

Klongpayabal, 49, designed the Savings.com survey, and lives in Dallas with her husband and four of their grown kids — one a millennial and three Gen Z stepkids — all of whom went straight into the workforce after high school. “I am one of these people which I never expected to be when we started this research,” she said.

Part of her interest in the subject comes, naturally, from her own personal engagement with the material. And if the research shows this is a widespread reality among most people with adult children, it’s useless to subscribe to outdated expectations about what success looks like, she said — while also making sure you aren’t jeopardizing your own future.

“Equal isn't always fair when it comes to the children being cared for, or if their needs are different,” she said. “For all of my kids, as long as they're making progress toward a goal — as long as we're working toward that, and it's productive, then I think I am being successful in launching them.”

It’s not exactly an ideal time for boomers to feel like perennial bank accounts, though. An estimated 58.8% of them are delaying their retirements due to financial stress. In 2024, 60% of boomers became eligible for full Social Security retirement benefits, but only 10% were fully retired. More than half have less than $250,000 in retirement savings, according to a 2024 study from the Retirement Income Institute and the Alliance for Lifetime Income, and will have to “rely primarily on Social Security as a source of income.” Those benefits are expected to be around $22,000 a year, according to AARP. 

“Boomer parents often feel torn between love, responsibility and fear,” Melissa Cox, a certified financial planner at Future Focused Wealth in Dallas, told Salon. “On one hand, they genuinely want to help. They see their kids navigating higher housing costs, student loans and stagnant wages, and they remember how hard it was even when things were 'easier.'”

“But on the other hand,” she said, “many of these same parents quietly tell me they’re afraid their death has become their kids' financial plan — and that's a terrifying position to be in.”

To that end, some survey respondents set firmer boundaries. 

“In this economy, I can barely support myself,” one wrote. “All I can do is guide and give advice.”

“Unless there's an emergency, of course — I’ll always be there for emergencies,” they added, I imagine with a sweet, frenetic energy, the way I’d picture it coming from my mother.

The post Boomers are still bankrolling their adult kids — but not all are mad about it appeared first on Salon.com.

By many measures, millennials are doing great — but they don’t seem to feel that way. This disconnect between being wealthy on paper and feeling financially free has been referred to as “phantom wealth," and it could be due to the following factors.

Wealth that’s locked away

While the data shows that millennials have experienced a pretty massive growth in net worth, much of this increase comes from two main sources: rising home values and stock market gains. These are not cash in hand. So millennials might technically be wealthier, but that doesn’t mean they have more disposable income. 

“Both of these assets aren't really liquid, which means millennials don’t have instantaneous access to either of them,” said Kevin Leibowitz, president and CEO of Grayton Mortgage. With this wealth locked away, millennials can’t spend it unless they sell, and even then they’d have to buy in the same inflated market. 

A deep-rooted sense of insecurity 

Every generation is shaped by defining events in their formative years that influence how they see the world — and how they see money. Bobby Mascia, CEO and founder of Green Ridge Wealth Planning, believes that 9/11, which occurred during millennials’ formative years, is one of the first major disruptions that instilled a sense of uncertainty. 

Then came the Great Recession in the late 2000s. “Unlike previous generations who may have experienced financial hardships more distantly, millennials were deeply affected because they had a front-row seat to the economic turmoil,” Mascia said. During this time, millennials saw their parents struggle with job losses and home foreclosures. The constant news coverage reinforced the fragility of financial security and the banking system.

“Fast forward to the post-COVID era. Millennials have endured not just one economic disruption, but multiple,” Mascia added. “They’ve faced recessions, skyrocketing housing prices, overwhelming student debt and job instability. These compounding factors have made financial security feel like an ever-moving target.”

As a result, millennials have developed a deep-rooted sense of insecurity about money and the world at large. And even once they achieve financial success, they seem to have an underlying fear that stability could disappear at any moment. The world has repeatedly pulled the rug out from under them, so many are struggling with financial insecurity regardless of their actual net worth. 

Social media comparison 

According to a Credit Karma survey, around 33% of Americans experience a distorted view of their financial situation. Younger generations, including millennials, struggle with it the most. And despite having above-average savings, 41% of millennials feel behind financially. 

The culprit for this could be social comparison. Many millennials have grown up using social media and are constantly bombarded by their peers’ curated highlight reels. This endless comparison breeds financial anxiety and a sense of inadequacy, even among those who are actually doing well financially. 

The rising cost of living 

The illiquidity of their assets, coupled with the rising cost of living — due in part to inflation and high interest rates — is another reason millennials feel less wealthy than they appear on paper. According to a Bank of America survey in May 2024, 76% of workers say the cost of living is outpacing growth in their wages, compared to 67% in June 2023.

“So, even if millennials' retirement accounts have increased, the day-to-day cost of living has also gone up, which may still make them feel like they’re just getting by,” said Jordan Mangaliman, wealth preservation specialist and CEO at Goldline Financial Services. 

How to achieve real financial security?

If you’re still constantly stressed about your finances and suffer from money dysmorphia despite a growing net worth, try these steps to develop a genuine sense of financial security. 

Build liquid savings. If most of your net worth is tied up in retirement savings and real estate, consider putting a portion of your wealth in more liquid assets like a high-yield savings account. This way, you can easily access it for short-term needs or emergencies. 

Avoid lifestyle inflation. If your spending increases just as fast as your income, you may never feel financially secure, no matter how much money you make. If you haven’t already, create a budget to keep your expenses under control and maintain a gap between what you earn and what you spend. 

Work on your money mindset. Jay Zigmont, founder and CEO of Childfree Wealth, believes that feeling financially secure comes from shifting your money mindset more than hitting an artificial goal like becoming a millionaire. “Many millennials saw their parents struggle with their finances. These tough times can create trauma around money,” he explained. “Until this trauma is addressed, they may not ever feel real financial freedom.”

Zigmont suggests working with a financial professional for at least six months to help shift this limiting mindset. “And though your finances may not change drastically in those six months, your comfort level will, and that is what matters,” he said.

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Perhaps more than any generation up to this point, young Americans’ ability to build wealth may uniquely hinge on whether they can afford to own property. Their wages, while no doubt affording them a higher standard of living than other generations, still haven’t risen as quickly as inflation and the cost of living. And surging demand for housing has sent prices soaring to the degree that a home now represents one of the most valuable assets the non-wealthy can possess.

“If you sort Americans by wealth, and forget about the top 10% or 20%, most of our wealth is indeed in housing,” Albert Saiz, faculty director of the Urban Economics Lab at MIT, told Salon. 

Since 2000, Americans’ median household income “barely rose over the whole time period,” according to a report from the U.S. Treasury. Wages for the lowest 90% of earners have risen by 15% since 2000, according to the Economic Policy Institute, while hourly wages have risen around 22% over that period. 

Meanwhile, housing prices have risen so much over the past two decades — around 65%, per the Treasury — that those who were able to buy a home around the 2000s were made “relatively wealthy,” Saiz said. “But people who are coming into the economy don't have that wealth, and they have to save harder and work harder to get there,” he said.

You can see the stark impact of new homeownership on a demographic’s financial standing in a series of studies, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, that tracked how millennials’ wealth — cash and assets, minus any debt — compares to previous generations. The first study, published in 2016, found that millennials’ median wealth was around 38% less than expected, based on past generations at their age. Things got a bit better in 2019, when millennials’ wealth was around 9% lower than the norm for adults their age. But 2022 brought a stratospheric shift, with millennials suddenly possessing a median wealth 37% above expectations — a 46-point upswing.

So, what happened between 2019 and 2022? A lot of them became homeowners. In the three years leading up to 2022, the share of millennial homeowners skyrocketed, by roughly 9%. That’s a pretty dramatic leap for that time period — typically, homeownership rates change incrementally, rising or falling one or two percentage points a year. You’d normally wait around a decade or longer to watch them hike up 10 points.

But U.S. homeownership rates are “subject to volatility during major economic events,” as Bankrate notes. As many readers will remember, the coronavirus pandemic’s stay-at-home orders created a massive surge of housing demand from homebuyers of all kinds: city dwellers wanting more for less in their hometowns, apartment dwellers itching for a yard, young families suddenly feeling cramped in their first homes. This created a white-hot housing market — and one in which the highest-earning millennials were able to afford a piece of the pie.

This appears to have created a generation of haves and have nots, based largely but not exclusively on whether one can afford to buy, rather than rent. Millennials face the steepest wealth gap of any other demographic, according to a study from the University of Chicago, with the poorest millennials having less money than the poorest baby boomers and the richest millennials possessing more wealth than the richest boomers. 

That wealth gap is partly due to unequal wage growth in recent years. The top 1% of earners have seen their wages grow by 138% since 2000, while the lowest wages haven’t grown meaningfully over that period. And top millennial earners have seen their earnings increase far more dramatically than high-earning boomers’ wages grew during their prime working years. “Housing actually exacerbates a problem that would already be bad enough if it was only driven by the way in which the income distribution has become more unequal,” Saiz told Salon. 

Still, the gains in real estate value “drove most of the overall growth” in millennials’ median wealth gains in 2022, the Federal Reserve noted. And this suggests that the value of homes acquired during that period was significant enough to sway millennials’ overall economic standing against other generations at their age — even if a minority of millennials bought homes during that period. Millennial homeownership rates still lag behind other generations, with fewer millennials owning homes compared to boomers at their age.  

“This has been an issue for decades, and it's gotten worse, I suppose, because prices have been increasing,” Alex Schwartz, a professor of urban policy at The New School, told Salon. “But it's not like there was a halcyon time where home ownership was readily available for renters.” 

That also, of course, means homes have become increasingly unaffordable for the average American. Half of U.S. adults couldn’t afford to buy a $250,000 home, a National Association of Home Builders study found in 2024 — a particularly stunning figure when you learn that the average home sale last year exceeded $500,000.

So, what does this mean for younger Americans? Frankly, that something has to give, whether in workers’ wage growth or in making it easier for Americans to become homeowners. National policy hasn’t been too focused on boosting the number of young homeowners, save for then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ proposal to offer up to $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers last fall. 

Schwartz noted that critics of the proposal feared it would just inflate housing prices, but he disagrees with that take: “I actually think that would have helped, because having the resources for a down payment is a huge barrier,” he told Salon. 

Saiz also acknowledged the unique challenges of becoming a first-time homebuyer, especially considering that the average American has around $8,000 in liquid cash savings, compared to the median down payment currently standing at more than $60,000. “Obviously, getting that first home is the hardest of the steps,” Saiz said. “Because once you have a house, you can build collateral, and that equity is going to be helpful for you to buy a second home.”

This also points to the need for relief for renters, like national rent control, which the Biden administration urged Congress to pass legislation on last year. One-bedroom apartment rents rose around 2.9% last year, according to Zumper, an apartment rent tracking website, while two-bedrooms’ rent rose 3.7% annually.

The post Homeownership is more important — and less accessible — than ever appeared first on Salon.com.

This flexibility remains a privilege out of reach for many Americans, as rising costs of living and stagnant wages leave many households focusing on immediate financial survival rather than long-term planning.

For those who are able to adopt a retirement strategy, driving factors such as the rise of the gig economy and fluctuating job security influence how different generations approach retirement planning. 

Return of the baby boomers

Many baby boomers are re-entering the workforce, primarily due to financial pressures and rising living costs, with 69% citing financial necessity as a key reason. This trend of "unretirement" provides economic stability and fulfills a need for social engagement and purpose. For example, experienced workers often take part-time or flexible roles, allowing them to balance work and leisure while addressing financial concerns.

A significant portion of boomers (about 45%) report their savings are behind schedule and they lack personalized retirement plans. While projections indicate their future retirement incomes will increase, income inequality poses a challenge, potentially impacting boomers’ ability to maintain pre-retirement living standards. Additionally, the financial strain is evident as approximately 57% of young adults live with their parents, highlighting both generations' economic pressures. According to Leon Turkin, CEO of Turkin Mortgage, "Many watched their retirement savings take a hit in economic downturns such as the Great Recession or the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused them to rethink full retirement."

Gen X takes strategic breaks

Gen X has adopted a pragmatic approach to retirement planning, focusing on self-reliance and early savings due to economic shifts and the decline of pensions. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, 54% of Gen-Xers express concerns about retirement security. Many have increasingly turned to retirement accounts like 401(k)s, with participation rates rising due to automatic enrollment features in response to employers terminating pension funds and forcing burden onto employees.  Thérèse Caruso, Global Chief Strategist of The Human Project at Zeno Group believes, "All employees will have more control of their work arrangements and decision-making processes in 2030. The desire to take time for oneself has grown tremendously since the pandemic. Even throughout prolonged financial insecurity during the inflationary years of 2022-2023 and between 2019 and 2022, the proportion of engaged employees under 40 dropped while those actively disengaged increased."

This practicality extends beyond financial planning to career sustainability. According to Gallup's 2023 State of the Global Workplace report, 44% of employees experienced significant stress during their previous workday, with burnout becoming a major factor in career planning. This crisis presents itself for Gen X as they navigate what researchers call the "sandwich squeeze," juggling peak career demands while caring for aging parents and growing children.

The American Psychological Association's 2023 Work in America Survey found that 38% of workers report feeling burned out, with higher rates among those with caregiving responsibilities. Jay Zigmont, a certified financial planner and founder of Childfree Wealth, agrees. "In nearly every couple I work with, one person is miserable in their job and needs a change. They stay for the salary, but it affects their physical and mental health. They have often needed a change for years, but it can be hard to give up stability and a high income for something you enjoy." The adaptability of Gen X is evident as they navigate these challenges, often adjusting their work and savings strategies to maintain economic stability. 

Millennials reject traditional path

Millennials are fundamentally reimagining retirement by rejecting the traditional model of working continuously for decades before taking a hard stop. Having witnessed their parents' generation struggle with burnout and work-life balance, they are crafting a different approach. Instead of viewing retirement as a distant reward after years of grinding, millennials incorporate sabbaticals throughout their careers. According to Steven Sarrel, partner at Raines & Fischer, LLP, "The FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early) movement has gained among millennials to get financial freedom through aggressive saving and investing to retire as soon as they can."

This shift is more than just a different way of working. It’s a different way of thinking about the relationship between work and life. Career breaks, sabbaticals and flexible arrangements are strategic investments in long-term sustainability, not career interruptions. This generation approaches the concept of work with a clear-eyed understanding that preventing burnout is key to maintaining stamina for a longer, more dynamic career.

The path to retirement has not been easy. Millennials face considerable economic headwinds, from student debt to rising living costs. Yet rather than abandoning retirement planning altogether, they are adapting. Many are leveraging technology and the gig economy to create multiple income streams, building flexibility into their careers while focusing on long-term financial goals. They prove that preparing for the future does not mean sacrificing the present. 

Gen Z is "micro-retiring"

Gen Z is leading the micro-retirement trend, emphasizing mental health and work-life balance. This generation prioritizes personalized retirement plans, with many focusing on early savings and investments. Social media amplifies their desire for memorable experiences, encouraging flexible work arrangements that allow for periodic breaks instead of deferring leisure until traditional retirement. 

The rise of remote work has created possibilities unimaginable a generation ago. Professionals of all ages craft hybrid lifestyles that blend work and leisure, income and passion projects, career growth and personal fulfillment. According to Ross Loehr, certified financial planner at The Sovereign Investor, "Gen Z values financial independence, with many aiming to retire earlier than previous generations by leveraging digital tools to build their diverse income streams. They are also more wary of debt, so they are more likely to go down the entrepreneurship route rather than burden themselves with university debt."

Despite their financial challenges, many Gen Zers are committed to early investments in retirement plans, showcasing their dedication to long-term savings. Many express concerns about job security and the traditional retirement model, leading them to opt for careers that align with their values and offer flexibility.

Evolving perspectives across generations

The traditional notion of retirement, i.e., a clean break from work to leisure, gives way to something far more nuanced and personal. Each generation is writing its rules: Baby boomers are discovering second acts through unretirement, while Gen X is building strategic breaks into their peak earning years. Millennials and Gen Zers are pioneering micro-retirement phases throughout their careers. These work patterns aren’t temporary glitches but rather a fundamental reimagining of life's third act.

As the boundaries between work and retirement continue to blur, we are moving toward a future where the question is not when you will retire but how you will design your path to fulfillment.

The post Navigating retirement: Generations redefine the future of work and leisure appeared first on Salon.com.

“I had intended to ask someone if I could borrow the $25, but with the holidays and chaos of the month, I forgot to ask in time and it went on my credit report as a missed payment,” said Brown. “I still remember that gut wrenching feeling. This missed payment has haunted me so much.”

The one missed payment tanked Brown’s already-low credit score, and she needed several years to recover.

“I felt so much shame and embarrassment that I wasn't able to make a $25 payment on time.”

Many people have felt the shame Brown described — and they believe they’re alone. In reality, eight in 10 Americans hold some kind of debt, with 39% holding unpaid credit card balances, according a 2015 study from Pew Trusts. The vast majority of them say credit cards are essential to help them pay for necessities, but they’d still prefer not to have that debt, reflecting the cultural shame around the subject that keeps us from sharing these stories candidly.

“There's always a chance you'll make people uncomfortable if you talk about your finances, but I'd argue that there’s no other real risks,” said Lindsey Stanberry, founding editor of Refinery29 Money Diaries and author of the “Money Diaries” book.

Learning others’ experiences with money is important for reducing stigma and helping us all better understand our financial circumstances. Credit scoring is a famously opaque practice, and fear and confusion put consumers at a disadvantage. Negative marks on credit reports often come as a surprise to folks who believe they’re making responsible money moves.

When "responsible" moves hurt credit scores

Kelly Schulze was let go from their job in 2021. Their family was “making it OK” on Schulze’s husband’s paycheck and a shared credit card with a balance that rode near the limit for months. A high credit utilization weighs heavily in a credit score, so this dragged down both spouse’s scores.

A tragedy turned out to be the couple’s financial salvation: Schulze received an inheritance in 2022 after their father’s death. That helped the couple pay off the credit card debt and Schulze’s student loan debt all at once — but they didn’t expect the effect on their credit scores.

Paying down the student loans dropped those accounts from Schulze’s credit report, reducing the age of their debt, another little-known credit score factor. Having a lower average age for debt brought their score down.

“It was a blow to see how drastic of an impact paying off large amounts of debt had on our credit scores and made me mad at the system,” said Schulze.

This isn’t the only seemingly responsible money move that can lower your credit score. Douglas and Heather Boneparth, who write the newsletter The Joint Account about relationships and money, saw temporary dips to their scores when they refinanced graduate school loans in 2016 and 2017 and a mortgage in 2020. Refinancing requires taking out a new loan, which dings your credit score.

“The good news is that it’s usually a short-term blip,” said Douglas. “[But] it’s important to recognize the impact refinancing can have on your credit score even if it’s temporary.”

Insecurity about how credit scores work

Another little-known credit factor, applying for new credit, dinged Brown’s score recently — and she didn’t even realize she was doing it.

“[This] hurt my ego more than my credit score,” Brown noted, as her score only dropped about five points temporarily.

Brown was researching a Lasik procedure. She answered a series of questions from her doctor’s office, expecting to learn more about her payment options. “I got to the last page, and it turns out I applied for a credit card. I was so embarrassed and so agitated.”

Brown immediately canceled the card (and never scheduled the procedure), but the new application for credit still appeared on her credit report. After working her way out of tough financial straits, she still keeps a close eye on her credit score and can see it dip between two and five points if her utilization goes over 10%, which can be nerve-wracking, if not significant.

Applying for new credit — even when it’s intentional — is a common challenge for anyone keeping an eye on their credit score.

“The hardest thing for me has been opening new credit cards and having that hurt my credit, and being afraid to close old credit cards that I don’t use for fear that will decrease my credit,” said 27-year-old Maria DeVoto of New York City.

Even though DeVoto’s parents helped her build the habit of spending carefully on her credit card and paying off the balance each month, the obscurity of credit scoring still shakes her confidence. “My insecurity with credit cards and credit scores is that I feel like I still don’t fully understand how they work.”

Your credit score doesn’t define you

The best-kept secret about credit scores is that a negative mark to your credit doesn’t necessarily doom your financial future. Central-Illinois writer Michelle Teheux once tanked her credit score on principle — and talked her way into a mortgage in spite of it.

One weekend around the year 2000, Teheux wanted to turn a giant pumpkin into frozen puree for pies. Slicing into it, the knife slipped and cut her finger deeply. She had it stitched in the emergency room but couldn’t see the hospital’s hand surgeon until Monday.

“[I knew] the nail bed needed to be absolutely flat for the nail to grow back properly and that waiting two days was not ideal,” Teheux said. “I was rather pissed that the specialist blew me off like that.”

After a quick check-in with the specialist the following week, she received a bill she thought was “completely outrageous,” so she never paid it. About four years later, Teheux applied for a mortgage, and the unpaid bill surfaced during her credit check.

“I explained what had happened and said I'd be willing to pay the amount to a charity if they wished, but that there was no way in hell I was giving a penny to that doctor,” Teheux said (although donating to charity would have no impact on the debt or her credit report).

She was able to get the mortgage. Texheux, now 58, added, “I also started buying canned pumpkin.”

Hearing stories like Teheux’s might soothe some of the shame and financial anxiety younger people like DeVoto and Brown are suffering.

“Knowledge is power, and understanding where you stand compared to your peers can be enlightening,” said Stanberry, who now runs The Purse, a newsletter that includes contributor confessionals about finances and household labor. “This applies to everything from salaries to student loan debt to credit scores.

“We need to normalize talking about these things in order to take away the shame and confusion.”

The post Let’s normalize talking about our credit histories appeared first on Salon.com.

Millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, started their adult lives on a tougher path to homeownership than Gen Z. They came of age during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, facing high unemployment and sharply declining home values that severely impacted their financial prospects, as highlighted by a 2020 Pew Research study.

The housing market crash left a lasting impact on millennials, setting back their home-buying ambitions as they worked to overcome major financial setbacks and gain traction in a sluggish job market. The challenge of high student debt has been a major obstacle for millennials, hindering their ability to save up for a down payment — a problem that hasn't hit Gen Z as hard. Gen Z — born between 1997 and 2012 — has entered adulthood with slightly more stability, learning from the financial hardship lessons imposed on the previous generations. 

Ellen Flowers, editor of  The Perennial Style, said, "[Millennials] entered the market during economic instability, making it harder to save for a down payment. Now, we're dealing with the aftermath of years of rising interest rates. The road to homeownership has been tougher for both generations, but millennials had to contend with additional financial obstacles during our prime buying years."

Sergio Aguinaga, owner and founder of Michigan Houses For Cash, agrees: “Millennials have it even worse since they dealt with the 2008 financial crisis, low wage growth, and now face soaring home prices. They entered the market when there were fewer homes available and more competition which makes it tough to find affordable properties and build wealth.”

Then there are the additional downstream impacts, as Joe Muck, Realtor at J Muck Realty, described: "While conditions of high interest rates, low housing inventory and high housing prices impact other generations, millennials have the added psychological trauma of having seen their parents and others go through foreclosure and other negative experiences."

While spared the brunt of this initial economic meltdown, Gen Z now contends with the lingering aftermath — skyrocketing rents and an ever-increasing cost of living that has failed to decrease even as the market gradually recovers.

Following the 2008 financial crisis, stringent regulations to prevent future catastrophes inadvertently created new barriers for millennial homebuyers. Stricter lending rules and elevated credit requirements have made securing a mortgage considerably more difficult. Life events that typically lead to buying a home, such as getting married or starting a family, have been postponed, pushing back their entrance into the housing market. 

Millennials' monetary tightrope 

According to a recent report from Case-Schiller National Home Price Index, U.S. home prices have spiked by 47% since 2020.

The rental market also provides little relief. Consumer Price Index data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that renters across the U.S. have seen the average rent rise 18% over the last five years, outpacing inflation.

Many millennials are saddled with substantial debt and lethargic incomes, causing them to become financially disadvantaged. According to the latest U.S. census data, the number of Americans aged 25-34 living with their parents has jumped over 87% in the past two decades.

Nick Janovsky, global real estate adviser at Premier Sotheby's International Realty is unsurprised.  “[Millennials] have confronted rising prices and stagnant wages. Balancing debt with the costs of homeownership makes it increasingly difficult to acquire ideal homes. Persistent increases in insurance costs and artificially inflated mortgage rates leave millennials far behind property ownership, compared to boomers of our age.”

Tim Choate, founder and CEO of RedAwning.com, Inc., added: "Millennials have faced more prolonged economic obstacles, meeting with rapidly increasing home prices over the past decade. This generational delay in wealth accumulation has been exacerbated by the recent surge in interest rates, pushing a sizable number of millennials to pursue secondary income through property management or rental platforms as a buffer."

Gen Z's housing hurdles

Gen Z faces similar financial issues as their predecessors. According to a Zillow analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau's 2022 American Community Survey, 58% of Gen Z renters spend more than 30% of their income on housing, classifying them as "rent burdened." This heavy financial load makes it difficult to save enough for a down payment. The non-stop rise in rents and slow wage growth further worsen their challenges. As housing prices continue to climb, many in Gen Z find themselves locked in a cycle of renting, unable to break into the increasingly competitive housing market.

The urban squeeze 

The allure of city life comes at a steep price for both generations. Urban centers, home to coveted job opportunities and cultural attractions, have seen living costs soar, placing an ever-tightening squeeze on younger residents. According to a Zillow study, in cities like San Francisco, where the median home price has surpassed $1.3 million, even high earning millennials find themselves priced out of the market.  This urban affordability crisis has also contributed to a troubling rise in homelessness among younger generations, according to U.S. Housing and Urban Development Study Point-in-Time Studies from 2017 and 2022.  

The path forward

President-elect Donald Trump's pledges of lowering taxes, cutting regulation and reducing interest rates lead his supporters to believe these measures will increase the housing supply due to increased investment in housing development. They also feel these same policies could increase disposable income, raising housing demand. Trump’s critics are quick to argue that his proposed tariffs will raise consumer prices and reduce disposable income.  

It will be up to lawmakers to address the unique challenges each generation faces with the goal of reviving the dream of homeownership for younger Americans and strengthening the overall health of the U.S. economy.

The post Why homeownership is rougher for millennials than Gen Z appeared first on Salon.com.

It’s a phenomenon that may in part be explained by the unique circumstances in which Gen Z Americans were raised — with social media and endless digital comparisons to more glamorous lives those apps enable. It’s also a generation that’s come of age amid historic financial and health care crises, climate change and political instability. 

The survey, conducted by Empower, a financial services company, found that members of Gen Z define financial success as earning an annual salary of $587,797 and possessing $9.47 million in assets. That salary is nearly nine times as much as the average full-time worker’s annual earnings — currently around $60,580, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. And the $9.47 million in savings is leagues above what the average American has across their savings, checking and investment accounts — $62,410, according to the Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances. 

“What I wonder about is, what do they even mean by financially successful?” said Eric Arzubi, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and assistant clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center. “I gotta believe, if they're looking at almost $600,000 a year, they're not looking at just being able to pay the bills.”

Gen Z is the first generation to experience a childhood and adolescence fully integrated online. Facebook launched in 2006, the same year Twitter was founded, and Instagram came online in 2010. When TikTok started in the U.S. in 2018, the youngest members of Gen Z were five or six years old; the eldest were in their early 20s, ready to start dreaming of their adult lives and assessing the possibilities. 

More than 90% of Gen Zers regularly use social media. And as anybody with even one social media account knows, apps like TikTok and Instagram offer glimpses into the (often meticulously curated) lives of individuals who, frankly, seem like they’re living our fantasy. A perfectly innocent, five-minute scroll sesh can bombard you with irrefutable evidence that there are people living in nicer apartments than you rent, buying pricier skincare products than you can afford and wearing clothes you couldn’t dream of splurging on — making you, by comparison, feel a little less satisfied with your weekend road trip now that you’re comparing it to another couple’s two-week retreat in the Maldives. This can redefine what success looks like. 

“That's what people naturally do, right? You index yourself against other people. That's just kind of human nature,” Arzubi said. “We all know that the level of happiness doesn't necessarily correlate with what people are seeing online, but that doesn't matter.”

There’s a name for this phenomenon: upward comparison. It’s the flipside of downward comparison, in which individuals compare themselves to those with fewer resources. Downward comparisons can translate to feelings of gratitude, while upward comparisons can leave individuals feeling dissatisfied with their lives, though research also suggests upward comparison can motivate individuals to create positive changes.

How other generations define success

Other generational cohorts don’t define financial success in Gen Z’s terms. Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) and members of Gen X (1965-1980) said in the survey they’d define financial success as earning annual salaries of $180,865 and $212,321, respectively. Boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, defined financial success as having an annual salary of $99,874. 

But there may be a flaw in the way we’re interpreting this data. Because it’s not as if Boomers, Millennials and Gen Xers were surveyed when they, too, were in their teens and 20s, Jolie Silva, a psychologist and Clinical Director of New York Behavioral Health, told Salon. The data may simply illustrate the ways in which younger individuals conceptualize what it takes to make a living.

“You're asking people in different age brackets, which confounds the entire thing, right?” Silva said. “When you described the report to me, the first thing that came to mind was, ‘Well, you're asking teenagers versus people who are 60 years old, right, who have a practical understanding of what things cost.’”

That’s not to say that members of Gen Z don’t understand how the world works.

“Even if they had asked all of these generations when they were all 20 years old, and Gen Z still said, “I need $600,000” … well, first of all, things cost more money, right?” Silva said. “The things that Gen Z have been exposed to, compared to previous generations, even millennials, is exponentially more varied in its depth and in its range, and what people are posting on social media is very often tied to financial success.”

Why the economy may be to blame

This introduces one final dimension to consider: the economy that Gen Z grew up in. For the oldest members of Gen Z, their preteen years were spent in the 2008 Great Recession, when as many as 30 million Americans — one in 10 — lost their jobs. In 2009, the minimum wage was raised from $6.55 per hour to $7.25 per hour, and has remained there ever since — the longest the national minimum wage has gone unadjusted since 1938. 

Homeownership, once regarded as a stable, accessible pathway for middle-class families and couples to build wealth, has become an impossible dream for most Americans. And for those looking off toward the horizon, the Social Security trust fund, once a reliable system Americans could trust would take care of them after retirement, is now projected to become insolvent in 2035.  

I asked Arzubi whether he thought members of Gen Z may feel like they need to prepare for an adulthood in which public systems and institutions aren’t able to take care of them as promised. His answer was nuanced: “I think it's a great take, and I don't know that they would be able to verbalize that. I don't know that they'd be able to say, ‘Well, look, the world's on fire.’” 

Instead, growing up in a political and economic environment that feels “turbulent, unstable and fragile” might mean Gen Z foresees a world in which they need “a financial moat,” he said — even if they aren’t actively aware that they’re viewing the future in those terms.

“In general, I think we were all raised hoping and expecting that every generation does a little bit better,” Arzubi added. “But that's not necessarily the case."

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story erroneously referred to Empower as a “finance and insurance company.” Empower is a financial services company, but it doesn’t sell insurance.
 

The post Gen Z’s vision of success? Nearly $600,000 a year appeared first on Salon.com.

“It seems like the amount of money that would be needed to retire in 30 years is absurd and unreachable,” said Cody Norris, a millennial worker. “How do we do real planning when it seems like the current trends will be unsustainable?”

Millennials in the Northwestern Mutual study had saved an average of $62,600; many are well behind that. To reach their target savings by retirement age, the average millennial would need to contribute between $500 and $1,000 per month to a retirement account — on top of the unprecedented student loan debt and housing prices our generation is navigating.

Plus, that savings plan only works if someone has access to a workplace account that allows that level of tax-advantaged savings. It also assumes a reliable stock market return over the next 30 years, a variable that’s become much less dependable since Americans started relying on our investment-based system of retirement planning.

Norris asked the question that’s on the minds of many American workers staring down an uncertain financial future: “Are we still saving what we can or saying f*** it?”

You might not get to choose whether you retire

Many folks, overwhelmed by the lack of nuance or sense of reality in typical retirement planning advice, would answer Norris’ question with the latter response. The increasing number doing work that doesn’t take a physical toll think: Maybe we’ll just work forever, so why bother saving now? That could be magical thinking.

“We don't always get to choose if we retire,” said financial planner Maura Madden. “People become disabled, people have circumstances that don't allow them to work…You don't always have the option [to work], so even if you don't save enough to fully retire, if you're saving, at least you've got something to fall back on.”

Investment-based retirement savings: the best we can do?

Before Congress enacted Section 401(k) of the Internal Revenue Code in 1978, American workers were generally not responsible for the bulk of their post-retirement income. Social Security in the mid-20th century replaced a higher portion of pre-retirement income, and many more Americans could rely on pensions because of stronger unions that fought for them. A pension, a defined-benefit plan, relies on employer rather than employee contributions. And it guarantees a worker a certain income after retirement.

Section 401(k) was never intended as a retirement-planning provision, but its mechanics allowed employers to shift the responsibility for retirement planning onto employees. By the time Gen X joined the workforce, saving through a 401(k) was being touted as clearly responsible financial planning; for millennials and Gen Z, it’s treated as a must-have.

Despite our cultural reliance on the 401(k) and subsequently spawned tax-advantaged retirement plans, this system has never paid off for most workers. Boomers — the youngest of whom are already over 60 years old — have an average of just $120,300 in retirement savings this year. They expect to need nearly $1 million to retire comfortably.

But few alternatives exist. Tax-advantaged retirement accounts are the most viable way to prepare for retirement in our current environment.

“To save the cash and make investments tends to be the simplest way to go,” said Madden.

Madden acknowledges alternatives, like building and selling a business or purchasing and renting out real estate, work for some individuals. But these routes aren’t reliable for the culture at large. And we’ve seen from the inflated housing market that our decades-long obsession with turning real estate into an investment has actually rendered that option obsolete for younger generations.

“That's great if you happen to buy a house cheaply 30 years ago,” said Madden, “but that ship’s sailed.”

Thinking broadly, a slate of policy changes could get American workers back on track for secure, comfortable retirements. Adjusting the income cap for Social Security taxes would better fund that program and help increase the payouts from public funds. Reinstating union protections could bolster workers’ ability to negotiate for employer-funded pensions. Enacting universal health care (and related supports like in-home care) would reduce the cost of living in old age. Policies that rein in the cost of housing would make saving more feasible during our working years.

Millennials and younger generations, in particular, can work toward the political and social change necessary to realize these policies and transform how Americans retire.

In the meantime, though, Madden guides her (mostly Gen X) clients toward retirement not with admonishments to tighten their belts and hit arbitrary savings targets, but with a new way to think about our relationship to work.

“It's about reframing that retirement isn't just before and after retirement,” she said. “It's more of a shifting process of your life and how you work.”

The advice millennials and Gen Z hear about retirement planning still imagines we’ll live like our grandparents did: 40 years of work followed by a couple of decades of not working. Most of us won’t and don’t need to follow that model. Many of Madden’s clients plan to work full-time into their 70s or transition into part-time work once they’re eligible to draw Social Security benefits.

“Instead of saying, ‘How much do you need to save right now,’ oftentimes we're playing with, ‘How long are you going to have to work?’” Madden said.

This shift in thinking isn’t fully satisfying — many people will continue to work full-time or part-time past retirement age purely out of financial desperation. But it might be just enough to relieve the millions of American workers who panic when they’re told how much they should have saved for retirement by now.

The post It’s hard to save for retirement. Here’s what Gen Z and millennials can do instead appeared first on Salon.com.

A changing world 

COVID-19 turned the world we knew upside down. The “new normal” is no longer new and everyone is dealing with the aftermath, even if our main coping mechanisms are denial and amnesia. Despite efforts to “move on,” the APA’s survey notes that every age group demonstrates signs of collective trauma. 

“The psychological damage or stress that comes from being cut off from friends, potentially family, the whole world shifted. And generally, there's this overall feeling of 'I'm not safe' or 'My safety isn't guaranteed,'” said Nathan Astle, certified financial therapist and founder of Financial Therapy Clinical Institute.  

The APA survey found that health-related stressors tied with money (both 82%) as the top sources of stress for the 18 to 34 age group. At the confluence of these stressors, data from the Nationwide Retirement Institute 2023 Health Care Costs in Retirement Survey show that 24% of Gen Z and 22% of millennials surveyed are postponing or delaying medical care because of high inflation. 

An uncertain future 

While financial stress is rampant across all generations, Gen Z and millennials face an economic reality far different from their parents or grandparents. 

The narrative of “Just work harder!” or “Pull yourself up by the bootstraps” simply doesn’t apply to everyone. 

“School is four times as expensive as it was for our parents. Houses are twice as expensive, adjusted for inflation. The dream we were fed doesn't match with our actual economic realities,” said Astle.

It’s no longer a matter of simply being cash-strapped in college or graduating into the next phase of life. “As a generation … it’s not just that, ‘oh you know, like the poor college days’, it's like ‘I genuinely don't think that there's a future for me.’ And I think that's a different type of financial stress that's more lingering,” said Astle.

High cost of living 

Based on the APA survey data, 58% of 18 to 34-year-old respondents who reported money as a significant stressor say paying for essentials is causing them stress. Shelter, food, and transportation already take up a large part of anyone’s budget. But for younger generations, especially those just entering the workforce and earning money, making ends meet is harder to do. 

A 2024 report by Bank of America on The State of Gen Z’s Financial Health reports that 52% of Gen Z says they’re not making enough money to live the life they want and the cost of living is one of the major challenges they face. To make it work, 54% of respondents report receiving financial assistance from family, friends and the government. 

Housing costs and inflation have had a pernicious effect on Americans’ financial well-being. The sticker shock on costs of goods is far from imagined and there’s a stark difference between pre-COVID and now. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation calculator shows this very clearly. 

To have the same purchasing power as $100 in January 2019 you’d need $124.96 in July 2024. That’s nearly a 25% increase in five and a half years.  

For context, $100 in January 2014 had equal buying power as $109.69 in July 2019, an increase just shy of 10%.

As of the second quarter of 2024, the average sale price of houses sold in the United States stood at $501,700, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. That’s a significant spike from five years prior when the average price was $376,700 in the second quarter of 2019. 

The oldest of Gen Z was born in 1997 when average house sales were just $175,400 at the end of the year.  

Dealing with this financial house of cards means navigating a world where traditional financial advice doesn’t apply. What worked for their parents and grandparents won’t necessarily work for them at all, despite their best efforts. 

“I think there's a certain level of very understandable cynicism there, which also leads to this financial stress. Not just like ‘What's going on with my money?’ but just the general feeling of ‘Will things get better?’” said Astle.

With such a tenuous foundation, it’s no wonder Gen Z and younger millennials lead the pack when it comes to financial stress. No one is a fortune teller and can predict the future. But we know that building a fortune in the future will be much harder. 

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In the days before my dad died, the hospital was already asking me to make major financial decisions. What funeral home or crematorium do you want to use? Do you really want the basic package? Was your beloved father basic? Funeral homes aren't even required to list prices on their websites — though that may be changing thanks to the Federal Trade Commission. While Dad was on his deathbed, I was Googling customer reviews and checking my credit card limit.

Since then, my life has been consumed by settling my parents' estate. Executor and Successor Trustee is my new part-time job — one I never asked for, and one I'm technically not being paid to do, though I suppose the inheritance counts. Over the past few months, I've learned about death certificates (you will need an absurd number of copies), the difference between having something notarized and getting a Medallion Signature Guarantee (the latter is essentially a fancier version of the former), and how you should respond when your dead parent receives a jury summons (depends on the state, but you usually have to contact the County Clerk to have the aforementioned dead parent removed from their lists). I've had to sell a condo, a boat and a car. Real estate: every Millennial's expertise!

On top of the complicated stuff that might get me in trouble with the law if I mess up, there's also the weird, sad stuff. In their Florida condo, my mom had 34 decorative fish. What am I supposed to do with those? What's the best way to transfer my dad's ashes from the basic urn to the nicer, Frank Lloyd Wright-esque urn I purchased for his eternal rest? The answer, as it turns out, is a Solo cup.

And then there's the memorial, which is like planning a depressing wedding, both in logistics and in cost. According to the National Funeral Directors Association, the average cost of a funeral in 2021 was $7,848 — a little less if the guest of honor is cremated. But that's what the life insurance money is for, right? Assuming your parents had a life insurance policy.

Fortunately, ours did — a few, in fact. We held my mom's memorial at a local bar-restaurant and catered it with her favorite pizza. We held my dad's at the golf course near our childhood home — he designed the clubhouse. It was easier the second time around: we already had easels to display the pictures, and we were able to import the invites from Mom's big day over to Dad's.

No one is truly prepared for their parents to die. When I asked my aunts and uncles and friends' parents for advice, they didn't have much to spare—all they could remember was the horrible grief of it. And many of them had hired lawyers and accountants to deal with the bureaucracy for them; unlike my generation, their generation had already built the financial security to afford such luxuries.

In Boomers' defense, those luxuries can sometimes become necessities. Though my dad had a living trust — which should have saved my sister and me from probate court — he failed to update one life insurance policy, so it does have to go through probate, and we've hired a lawyer in Florida accordingly. We'll be more than able to cover her fees with the money we're paying her to get for us.

But I'd argue that Millennials are particularly ill-equipped to navigate the obstacle course of estate law. I'm extraordinarily privileged in that I have no student loans to pay off and my parents weren't carrying loads of debt. The vast majority of my friends — and the vast majority of my generation — are not in my position. Many Millennials are barely scraping by as it is. And while for some of them, an inheritance may help, for others there will be no inheritance — only more creditors to deal with.

Even as a privileged Millennial, this process is by no means easy. Every day, whether I'm trying to untangle my parents' TD Ameritrade account (how does the stock market work?) or correct my dad's death certificate (did you know a death certificate can be wrong?), I'm confronted with the reality that I have no idea what I'm doing. It's terrifying.

Death wasn't a taboo in our household, but it wasn't a common dinner table conversation, either. I knew both my parents wanted to be cremated. My mom sometimes joked that we should "just shoot her" if she became very ill, and though my dad had plenty of guns (which I also had to figure out how to sell), none of us wanted to call her bluff during her last days. After I broke the news that he wasn't going to get out of the hospital this time, my dad told me the name of his lawyer. "He won't screw you," were his exact words.

I wish death had been a common dinner table conversation. Money, too. Don't spend more than you have is about the extent of my financial literacy. I wish my parents had talked to me about their assets instead of leaving me a cardboard box full of paperwork to comb through next to the Christmas decorations. At least I'm old enough to know how a checkbook works.

People keep telling me how sad it is that I lost both parents at such a young age. Here's what I want to tell them: I'm at the bottom of a bell curve. The Boomers are starting to die — my parents just went early. Over the next decade or two, more and more of my peers are going to join the dead parents club. The time to get cozy with the Grim Reaper is now, before he comes uninvited.

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Now that we have the full series to analyze, we can take a step back and see what the series has to say about millennial anxiety and the way the three main Roy siblings (sorry Conheads) grapple with it in a crumbling world.  

Executive producer and director of the final episode Mark Mylod has made it no secret that he views the show as a tragedy. So, it should be no surprise that we get a tragic finale. In the end, no Roy sibling really wins. In Shiv’s own words, “the empty f**king suit” ends up on top, i.e., her husband, Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen). Despite a hopeful reunion in their mother’s kitchen where the siblings anoint Kendall as the “king,” their shared happiness is fleeting. It’s the moment the siblings return to the corporate space of Waystar Royco and enter the “real world” again that the stitches come off – figuratively and literally. 

“It was perfectly painful,” Mylod said in the behind-the-scenes “Inside the Episode.” 

Indeed, it was, and the tragedy of the siblings is showcased in the rousing and emotionally stressful finale which sees each Roy’s arc collide and diverge with agonizing tension. That brings us back to the show’s central thesis, which seems particularly relevant to the millennial generation: What are we to do? What can we do to avoid tragedy in our own lives? 

There is tremendous irony in the Roy siblings being surrounded by a news conglomerate like Waystar, given they have the power not only to disseminate the news, but make it. Millennials have lived through countless global tragedies – from 9/11 and everyday school shootings to the financial crisis and COVID – and unlike prior generations, have had an unprecedented sense of immediacy to the world around them. From access to the top breaking news story to the latest natural disaster or the most recent update on climate change, viruses, act of violence and bigotry, it’s always been at our fingertips. We may not have GoJo or Vaulter, but we do have Twitter and Meta, which like “Succession’s” fictitious counterparts, have been embroiled in their own controversy over leadership and misinformation. 

As the generation most attuned to the 24-hour news cycle, millennials have constantly been overwhelmed with headlines, often feeling a loss of control due to the inordinate influence of past generations like the boomer generation. Which, in “Succession,” is the four-season long battle between the Roy siblings and their boomer father, Logan. 

Jeremy Strong in “Succession” (HBO)The paths for dealing with these stressors are laid bare, and the results of such paths are also summed up in the finale. In each sibling’s case, we see how they attempt to surpass previous generations, and what the outcomes of their decisions are.

In Kendall’s case, he chooses to follow the path already made by past generations and become the person he most detests in order to succeed. In the second season episode “This Is Not for Tears,” Logan makes it clear to Kendall, “You have to be a killer,” not believing that his son has the rough, Machiavellian streak necessary to lead Waystar. Ironic given that viewers have witnessed Kendall commit vehicular manslaughter and lie about it. But Kendall hears the advice and throughout the third season decides to embrace the killer within, targeting his father and Waystar with explosive testimony and calling out the past generations’ bullying leadership style and apathy towards sexual misconduct allegations. There’s semblances to exploiting the #MeToo movement in what Kendall does, but he attempts to utilize the controversies sparked by his father’s generation to bolster his own standing, only to then do exactly as his father had done but with less conviction, which results in Kendall alienating everyone in his life.

For Roman, we see a man who collapses into political and ideological extremism. We’ve had recent examples of young, white men embracing radicalized beliefs often as a means to either boost their own sense of self (no surprise that Roman gloats about having the presumptive, ideologically far-right president calling him) or to find a group of people to look down on and target in order to feel better about themselves. Roman grew up in an abusive household and instead of turning to help others through their own trauma, uses his own past as a weapon against others, drawn into doing this by ideologues and his own self-interest. 

Sarah Snook in “Succession” (HBO)And then we have Shiv, who betrays her political and ideological morals for a modicum of success by proxy. Shiv has had a long history of playing both sides. At the start of “Succession” she is won over to work for a liberal presidential candidate who wants to target the Roy family business. That is, until she gets a better deal to come into Waystar. In the final season, Shiv discovers she’s pregnant and within days of finding this out, she utilizes her pregnancy not only as a means to elevate the “clumsy interloper” Tom to the top, but also commits to being an absentee mother, nullifying the perceived risks of motherhood and dooming her child to a potentially “emotionally stunted” upbringing like the one she experienced. Prior to her own pregnancy, Shiv expressed little interest in having children, a growing sentiment among millennials, but the allure of using this to her advantage and to become a Lady Macbeth-type figure – “Macbeth” being directly referenced in the finale – is too much to resist.

This brings us back to the primary question: What can we millennials do? If we are to avoid the tragedies experienced by the Roys — ensconced in the world of news, breaking notifications and a crumbling world perpetuated by the scions of the past — we cannot sink. Each of the siblings in their own ways sank in order to rise. It did not work for any of them. Sure, Shiv may have some “power” through Tom as the American CEO, but at what cost? Her lifelong unhappiness with a man who has betrayed her countless times and whom she had never truly loved? Meanwhile Kendall has become, in every sense of the word, purposeless now that the competition has finished and he has lost. 

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“I don’t think he (Logan) wanted to give it to any of us,” Roman says in the finale. Which is probably true as the entire impetus of the show is Logan deciding he will stay on as CEO for five, maybe 10 more years. All to stop the rise of a new generation. But then, what is that new generation meant to do instead? The seemingly diabolical path is the most appealing, but it will assuredly result in tragedy. 

Kieran Culkin in “Succession” (HBO)There have been plenty of connections between “Succession” and other tragedies like “King Lear” and “Oedipus Rex,” but few have compared the show with another tragedy of sorts: Faust. Originally a German legend, the story became more popularized thanks to Christopher Marlow’s “Doctor Faustus” in which the titular doctor signs a contract with the demon Mephistopheles, a servant of Lucifer’s, to extend his life so he can learn more about magic. As evidenced by not only the finale, but also Logan’s death in “Connor’s Wedding,” we have seen that no matter the price one pays for extending their time on earth, no matter the sacrifices one makes on their quest for knowledge or power, our time will eventually come. It’s just a matter of whether we’re willing to sign a contract with the devil for just a bit more time. Therein lies the anxiety so many of us face and what the Roy siblings had to decide: to sign the contract or not. 

So if “Succession” teaches us one thing as a generation of amplified anxiety, it’s this: don’t sign the f**king contract.

The post The millennial anxieties of “Succession” and how each of the Roys tried and failed to cope appeared first on Salon.com.

On Thursday, Pew Research published a new study on parental attitudes that had some eyebrow-raising revelations about how different the two connected generations are. In it, they surveyed over 3,700 parents of children under the age of 18; while the ages of all of the survey’s participants weren’t disclosed, many of them were in their late 20s, 30s and 40s—many children of Boomers.

In the survey, nearly as many American parents, 43 percent, said they are raising their children similarly to how they were raised. Yet 44 percent said they were trying to take a different approach than their parents.

How exactly are the two generations going about it differently? When asked in an open-ended question to describe the specific ways in which those who are raising their kids differently than their own did, a common theme emerged: being an “involved parent.”

“Among those who say they’re taking a different approach to parenting, some said they want to be more present in their kids’ day-to-day lives than their parents were,” Pew Research explained. “Both groups of parents talked about the importance of having family dinners, supporting their children in their extracurricular activities, and generally spending time with them on a regular basis.”

Parents who want to raise their children differently from their parents also said they wanted to have better communication with their children, not yell at them, and listen more.

“I am trying to be more attentive to my children than my father was,” one 35-year-old dad said in the survey. “Raising with more direct interaction and more forward-thinking and understanding nature.” A 33-year-old mother said: “I want my children to know that a parent is supposed to be there for them 100% of the time, not just when it’s convenient.” A 39-year-old mother said it was important for her child to have an emotional connection with her, and that their child has “more room to express feelings.”

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Nearly one in 10 parents surveyed said they would not use corporal punishment when disciplining their children.

As Dr. Harvey Karp (a Baby Boomer himself), pediatrician and Founder & CEO of Happiest Baby, told Salon last year, the focus on emotions among millennial parents is one big difference he’s noticed between how the two generations parent.

“Forty years ago, more parents were still being verbally tough with their kids, saying ‘Don’t be a baby,’ ‘You shouldn’t be scared,’ and denying their feelings,” Karp said. “And that’s something we’ve learned not to do.”

In highlighting the generational divide, parental shaming came up in the survey four-in-ten or more parents said they feel judged by their own parents and their spouse or partner’s parents at least sometimes.”Parents are more likely to say they feel judged by family members than by their friends, other parents in their community or people they interact with online,” Pew Research stated.

Notably, only one-fifth of the parents surveyed in the study said it was important to them that their children get married and have a family of their own one day. Perhaps it’s because about four-in-ten parents surveyed said being a parent is tiring; 29 percent of parents said they are stressed and tired most of the time.

Aside from the emphasis on generational differences, when asked what parents’ greatest fears are for their children today, four in ten parents surveyed said that their children might struggle with anxiety or depression one day, followed by 35 percent who were concerned about their children being bullied.

Mothers surveyed were more likely to be preoccupied by these fears than fathers. Nearly half of mothers said they were extremely or very worried their children could struggle with anxiety or depression at some point, compared with 32 percent of fathers. Mothers are also more likely than fathers to say they are worried about their children being bullied, being kidnapped or abducted, or getting shot, piling on the evidence on how it’s one of the toughest times to be a mom in America.

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Specifically, conservative and far-right pundits are worried that young men specifically aren’t having enough of it. That’s their take on an analysis of the General Social Survey, a bi-annual survey conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago, which shows that since 2010 the rate at which both men and women (18-34) are having sex has declined dramatically since 2008. In 2021, the survey found over 20 percent of males under 35 reported not having had sex in the past year, and 19 percent of females of the same age group; in 2008, those groups’ numbers were 8 and 7 percent, respectively.

Graph used with permission from The Institute for Family StudiesThe survey seems to have struck a chord with conservatives, particularly, who have curiously focused on the males, and ignored the females, in these numbers. Indeed, conservative media pundits —  including pseudo-intellectuals like Jordan Peterson and mainstream media figures like Tucker Carlson — have seized upon this data point to argue that there is a conspiracy against men.

Even before this survey was released, fringe far-right figures such as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones — who was recently fined for his public denial of school shootings and massacres that lead to targeted harassment of families of school shootings — have painted this phenomenon as a crisis of masculinity (even though under-35 women seem to be having less sex, too).

This narrative – the notion that there is some kind of crisis of masculinity, that there is a war against men, even – has become dogma among a certain subset of the right. Holding up this explanation are half-truths, pseudo-science, and misogynistic beliefs that have allowed figures like the recently de-platformed Andrew Tate to attract young men seeking advice on their love life, financial well-being, and other societal issues. Yet Tate and other “manosphere” figures seek only to tap into the fears, anxiety, rage, and frustration that these men feel and encourage them to direct it towards women—going as far to say women should not own property, have access to or be financially independent, or even encourage violence towards women.

This angry group of frustrated men often gather in online forums, places like 4chan and the like, to find community and people who share their exasperation. Young men who believe they are incapable of having sex refer to themselves as “incels,” short for involuntary celibates — and researchers such as Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Professor of Sociology in the School of Public Affairs and the School of Education at American University, notes that they pose a serious problem for Western societies. As Professor Miller-Idriss points out, the danger is that these young men’s feelings can quickly spiral into desperation — and that can lead to attempted or real acts of violence, such as the recent thwarted shooting by an Ohio “incel” and a self-identified incel shooter in the United Kingdom who killed five.

Nearly 60 years ago, C. Wright Mills encouraged that we understand this kind of aggregated social data not as the result of personal failings, but as public issues that can be explained by looking to larger historical and structural relationships. When we look at other data points like the graph below, we find that it is not merely sexual relationships that are on the decline, but also friendships. This, from a sociological standpoint, reveals that there is something larger going on here. Untangling it means we must look at the at the larger economic, cultural, and political changes.

Graph used with permission from The Institute for Family Studies

But the connection between relationships and politics goes beyond the rise of incel culture online. As further analysis by the Institute of Family Studies shows, those who have less sex tend to have more conservative beliefs about pornography, tend to attend church more, and have negative feelings towards pre-marital sex. Thus, it would seem that those not having sex may be caught in a peculiar position in society, brought on by their inability to let go of conservative cultural and religious beliefs which might prevent them from finding relationships.

Graphs used with permission from The Institute for Family StudieSecondly, we must also consider larger cultural and societal changes brought on by social media. Numerous studies have found that platforms like Instagram and Facebook have had a negative impact on young women’s self image in particular. Some scholars, including myself, argue that social media has replaced the public square and traditional spaces where others meet. Unfortunately, the unregulated social media environment that we have today is a poor replacement. This is not to say social media could not evolve to meet those needs, but in its present form it leaves something to be desired.

While quite a bit of attention is being raised about this issue, relatively few media outlets have examined the economic situation of those under 35. Indeed, for some time the economic situation of younger Americans has been dire. As early as 2011, think tanks like Pew were pointing out that there is growing inequity between generations, as indicated in this chart. Deeper analysis shows that stagnant wages which create the need to work more, coupled with ongoing concerns for the pandemic, and a work force which has lost faith in the current system has produced a much less economically secure youth. All this is to say that the resulting stress that can accompany economic instability may be as much to blame as anything else.

When social systems become unstable this can produce a societal condition called anomie, a French word meaning without norms. Sociologists use this term to refer to the feelings of disconnect and alienation that individuals can feel under these circumstances. Anomie, if left unchecked, can produce higher rates of crime, mental illness, and even suicide. Those using the concept point to it as a reason for why human beings seek out and join groups (including church groups, amateur sports, or music subcultures). Such groups can shield us from feelings of isolation and loneliness that stem from societal feelings of desperation and loneliness (i.e. anomie).

In the case of young people having less sex, it would seem there are other more plausible explanations that can help us answer this question—a bleak outlook brought on by economic conditions, changing social norms as a result of new communications technologies, and just simply feeling as though one doesn’t have enough time to invest in their personal relationships. Thus, if we really do see this as a serious issue, then we need to make changes at a variety of levels. This would include making having sex more socially acceptable, improving the economic conditions for those 35 and younger, and passing regulations around social media that will help harness its power towards fostering healthy long-term relationships.

The post Why are so many young people having less sex and fewer friendships? appeared first on Salon.com.

As one of the seven subjects of the PBS documentary “Generation 9/11,” he confesses he’s “tired of living through historical events.” Gorki’s generation has waded through defining presidential elections, national tragedies ranging from school shootings to the Jan. 6th insurrection, and now a global pandemic — all without a moment to breathe. Despite this, Gorki has remained determined to resist bitterness and hate.

“I want people to know that 9/11 hasn’t made me spiteful,” he told Salon. “I’ve been told that it would be justified if I was Islamophobic or even hateful toward these groups that were turned against after 9/11. Although I’m not fond of al-Qaeda and the groups involved, I find that life is so complicated that hating someone because they share a simple, broad similarity to those connected with the attacks . . . creates so much unnecessary hate in the world that we don’t need any more of.”

Gorki’s compassionate politics might come as a surprise to anyone who’s been on the receiving end of a chilling “OK boomer” or some variation of the mocking Twitter meme du jour to excoriate political conservatives, transphobes or racists. Yet, Gorki’s desire to not reproduce the harms that have befallen him, or, simply put, to try and make things better and not worse for others, isn’t actually all that different from other young people his age.

Today’s post-9/11 youth are understandably outraged by the devastating consequences of 9/11 and the post-9/11 wars they’re forced to experience each day. Gen Z, the first generation to grow up after the events of Sept. 11, is more likely than any other generation to believe other countries — like those with socialized health care and education, and more humane criminal justice systems — are better than the U.S. 

According to a 2020 report by the Carnegie Endowment for International peace, 70% of zoomers believe that the wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan were “a waste of time, lives, and taxpayer money and they did nothing to make us safer at home.” Less than half of Gen Z believes “America is stronger because of its global leadership,” and about half of this generation believes American foreign policy should focus instead on combatting climate change.

This skeptical outlook on the country doesn’t necessarily comprise an unpatriotic view. Rather, it’s a fresh, increasingly popular application of patriotism, not as an obsessive fetishization of stars and stripes, but a determination to improve the material lives and circumstances of our fellow Americans. It’s a determination to enact positive change in the world based on compassion for others, a determination uniquely forged by the harsh realities stemming from 9/11, which have indelibly shaped this generation’s lives and values. For all their skepticism, just last year, a national poll of young people (ages 18 to 24) found 83% said they believed they have the power to change the country through voting.

Youth patriotism in 2001

In August, a viral video compilation of post-9/11 Disney Channel interstitials began to recirculate, in the weeks leading up to the 20th anniversary of the national tragedy. The supercut is a stunning historical relic that memorializes former child stars who have since faded into relative obscurity or at least ended up in Hallmark movies. The commercials also enshrine a nationalistic and dated patriotism, as 2000s teen heartthrobs wax poetic about the beauty of the American flag to young, impressionable audiences.

It also reflects the true sentiment at the time, when a majority of Americans came together in their shared grief and terror over experiencing the attacks either in person or through their TVs. However, it’s the sort of patriotism many of today’s young people, who have lived and come of age in the harsh aftermath of our post-9/11 country, would gaze upon with revulsion, or mockingly subject to the meme treatment. 

In one of the clips, “7th Heaven” star Beverly Mitchell describes her feelings for the American flag. “It means everything to me,” she says. “It means life, it means freedom, it also means unity and it means love.”

Hilary Duff, who may have inadvertently originated the “and then everyone clapped” meme, says, “I saw a fire truck pass by the other day, and it had an American flag on it, flowing in the wind. It was so amazing and everyone started clapping, cheering.”

Another of the commercials features former First Lady Laura Bush. “All across the country, everywhere I look, I see an American flag,” Bush says. She continues, “It stands for the rights of many people, religions and beliefs. That’s what freedom’s all about.”

Ask almost any vaguely online Gen-Zer who’s ever shared an Instagram infographic on some form of injustice for their thoughts on Bush’s commercial. You’ll probably hear the same thing: Who are the “many people” and “religions” for whom the flag affords protection? Certainly not the nearly 500,000 people killed in the United States’ post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan since 2001. 

New media, new patriotism

Today, the media we consume isn’t at all awash with those Disney Channel odes to the flag. Many modern shows and movies, and especially those that are more targeted toward young people, are just plain more aware and demonstrate a social consciousness. This content is infinitely more willing to confront and unpack issues of violent nationalism, the military industrial complex, or the more inhumane features of post-9/11 America, in general. 

With the advent of streaming, older zoomers can now watch past shows from the last 20 years. It’s common to hear from college students that their favorite shows to binge are ’90s or 2000s hits like “Friends,” “The Office” or “Parks and Recreation.” Similarly, that means catching up with more adult fare on HBO. That includes “Veep,” a foul-mouthed but beloved adult comedy with an honest if not depressingly bleak outlook on the corruption and insincerity of American politics. By the end of the series, in what’s perhaps the show’s most real-world development, ex-POTUS Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) is briefly held under house arrest in Norway for committing war crimes — specifically, a drone strike in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, two very different Disney+ series, but with political messaging, demonstrate what the younger zoomers may be consuming. Comedy “Diary of a Future President,” now in its second season, follows the political aspirations of Latina tween Elena Cañero-Reed (Tess Romero) as she seeks to run for student-body president of her middle school, decades before she’ll eventually become the first woman POTUS (portrayed by Gina Rodriguez). The series at times alternates between Elena’s junior high political career and the early parts of her presidency, as she swerves from pushing her school to change its sexist mascot, and supporting a friend in coming out as gay, to prioritizing diversity in her presidential cabinet as an adult. 

“Diary of a Future President” is a patriotic if not mildly critical undertaking, one that perceives the United States and its political systems as redeemable in the right hands (by a woman of color), and asserts that leadership and change start young. The show is fundamentally optimistic, as all content for its age group should be. 

With another Disney+ series,  Marvel’s “Falcon and the Winter Soldier,”  young people will grow up with a Black Captain America in Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie). Sam very publicly reckons with what it means to represent a country with deep origins in white supremacy, and succeed a beloved predecessor with blond hair and blue eyes. The show calls into question the racist history of the iconic shield and its roots in racist experimentation on Black people in order to create the MCU’s renowned supersoldiers. 

This hidden history carries deep parallels with real life, drawing on America’s dark legacy of racist human experimentation projects. “Falcon and the Winter Soldier” unflinchingly highlights the horrors of institutionalized white supremacy. But it also goes the typical MCU route of portraying radical revolutionaries who support anti-capitalist or anti-imperialist policies as needlessly violent extremists. In other words, there are, indeed, some conversations about the dark side of American nationalism that we’re ready to have in society. But in terms of discussing solutions to these inequalities that involve actual redistribution of power and resources, we may not quite be there.

Overall, this isn’t your grandparents’ Disney Channel — nor is it the Disney even millennials consumed as children, rife with American flags and Laura Bush testimonies. It’s neither fully in awe of American exceptionalism, nor fully confident that America is irredeemable. Like today’s post-9/11 young people, it’s still finding its political footing, determining where it stands. 

This makes sense considering that this is the era of majority-millennial parenting, that is focused more on the wholeness of their Gen Z children. Whether it’s mental health, gender identity or political activism, these are deemed what’s important for the messaging in today’s youth programming.

A mixed political bag

Nick Gorki recounts that participating in “Generation 9/11,” in which he recounts his coming out as gay, was both “therapeutic” and enlightening for him. Prior to the documentary, Gorki says, “9/11 was something I didn’t like to talk about a lot, because it was a sore subject with so many people, not just in my life but adults in general.” 

He continued, “Being one of the first generations to not have any memories of 9/11, it felt intimidating to ask about something that was so fresh in people’s minds, especially something so traumatic for many people.”

The young subjects of “Generation 9/11” present a unique microcosm of the political diversity, not to mention diversity of lived experience and cultures, of the greater post-9/11 generation. Notably, other subjects, cohorts who also lost their fathers in the attacks, seemed to feel somewhat differently from him on the issues, including post-9/11 Islamophobia. One of the subjects, a young man from a military family in Texas, at one point defends the racial profiling that notoriously happens at airports because there are “a lot of bad people in the Middle East.” 

Another subject, Claudia Szurkowski, whose godfather is a police officer, criticizes the harshness of the criminal justice system and says she intends to enter the legal profession to help fix this. But her family also waves a Blue Lives Matter flag on their porch. She slams calls to defund and abolish the police — which have stemmed from concerns about outsized police budgets and endemic police violence — as wrongheaded and dangerous. 

Like Gorki, Szurkowski told Salon she’d made a conscious effort to not let 9/11 shape her political views. “Recently getting into politics, I made sure to do my research and check all sides and hear all opinions and make the choice for myself without thinking about the attacks,” she said. Still, Szurkowski emphasized the importance of remembering 9/11 and the thousands of families it devastated, adding, “History is bound to repeat itself if we forget.”

“Overall I am angry and very confused on a constant basis,” Szurkowski said. “I am angry at the fact that this had to happen to my family, and that I lost the opportunity to even have a so-called normal family.” But despite this anger, Szurkowski continues to move forward each day. “The documentary has shown me how independent and mature I am, and how to embrace my story and not shy from it,” she said.

The post-9/11 generation faces some of the greatest political and economic catastrophes in our country’s history that directly or indirectly extend from the events of 9/11. This has naturally made many members of this generation more open-minded about solutions involving wealth redistribution and other sweeping reforms, or seeking inspiration from other countries. Despite this, “Generation 9/11” highlights how young people ultimately remain a politically mixed bag. 

With an endless war, endless turmoil

Twenty years ago, 9/11 marked a turning point, an inception of two Americas, one of which was engulfed in flags, the national anthem and the warmth of an almost unprecedented sort of unity. The other America, for brown people and those perceived to be Muslim or “other,” was engulfed in violent bigotry, surveillance, and a devastating rash of Islamophobic hate crimes that continues to this day. Directly after, ICE was formed under the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to combat terrorism and perceived foreign threats. Fundamental privacy rights of all Americans eroded, and racial profiling of nonwhite people in the U.S. escalated.

In a similar vein, many members of the pre and post-9/11 generations live in two entirely different post-9/11 Americas, too. Many older Americans still associate 9/11 with intense fear and loss, which caused the country to come together and even briefly view Rudy Giuliani as an American hero, not a disbarred national disgrace. In contrast, today’s young people, including many millennials and Gen Zers alike, view 9/11 as the beginning of one of the most devastatingly consequential events of our lives: an endless war.

It’s a well-known statistic that for $63 billion per year, the U.S. could make public college tuition-free. America has spent $2 trillion on the war in Iraq alone on the taxpayer dime, as of 2020. A 2019 report found the U.S. had spent $6.5 trillion on all wars in the Middle East. 

Suffice it to say, many millennials and zoomers, who share in a $1.7 trillion ocean of student loan debt, aren’t exactly enthused by how the post-9/11 wars have shaped America’s spending priorities over the last two decades. In contrast, more than half of young Americans support tuition-free public college, per a 2019 survey.

And as today’s young people watch the world burn around them, it’s not lost on this more environmentally conscious generation that the U.S. military has become one of the world’s biggest polluters. Climate change stands at the top of the list of young people’s (ages 18 to 25) concerns about global issues, and the U.S. military creates 750,000 tons of toxic waste each year, in the form of depleted uranium, oil, jet fuels, pesticides, defoliants, lead and other chemicals. Our armed forces comprise a bigger polluter than 140 countries combined, yet, it’s individual consumers who are chastised and told to not drink from plastic straws, somehow use neither plastic bags nor tote bags, and acquire costly electric cars.

In the 2020 presidential election, young people between 18 and 39 rejected Donald Trump by a wider margin than any other age group. The Trump era itself is a notable consequence of the events of 9/11, and the racist fears this national tragedy awakened in many older white people of anyone and anything foreign or “other.” 

For a period of time during Trump’s presidency, migrant families were deliberately separated to cruelly discourage border crossings, leading to the advent of the political rallying cry, “Abolish ICE.”. For many young Americans, this is more than a slogan: One YouGov survey found 51% of adult voters ages 20 to 37 say they distrust ICE, compared with about 40% of voters from older generations.

All of this — from the student loan debt crisis, to impending climate catastrophe, to the horrors of the Trump era — are emblematic of the dramatic shift in national priorities post-9/11. The misguided patriotism the tragedy stoked among older generations yielded broad support for costly, endless wars, and has amounted to disastrous outcomes that young people more than any other generation must now reckon with.

If today’s young people seem cynical, even put off by the traditionally patriotic displays of the 20th anniversary of this national tragedy, consider the unique, generational circumstances in which they’ve come of age. Their patriotism may be self-critical, sometimes a hybrid of nasty snark and unwavering compassion — but it’s patriotism, all the same.

Still, despite watching the world burn around them, the post-9/11 generation doesn’t lead a joyless existence. They’ve more than retained their sense of humor, inventing new ways to organize their communities, and finding comfort and laughter in surprising places. This is the sort of optimism Nick Gorki certainly embraces, especially since wrapping “Generation 9/11.”

“I’ve picked up journaling since the documentary,” he recounts to Salon. “I found that having something to just recall the day, and think in the bigger picture of the day, has helped me tremendously in finding gratitude for little things.”

More from Salon on the 20th anniversary of September 11: 

• Broadway’s 9/11 musical “Come From Away” lands on TV, offering kindness & laughter in dark times
• Muslim-American comics after 9/11: “I thought comedy was over, but it was more important than ever”
• “Where is Trump?” Former president notably absent from 9/11 events
• Years after 9/11, first responders are still dying from exposure. This is their story
• George W. Bush compares domestic “extremists” to 9/11 attackers: “Children of the same foul spirit”
• 9/11 and the birth of the Big Lie
• Too soon, or too late? Who got canceled after 9/11, and why
• 9/11 changed surveillance — and capitalism reaped the benefits
• From 9/11 to 1/6: What does “terrorism” look like?
• Your memory of 9/11 is probably wrong
• A 9/11 viewer’s guide, from the new Michael Keaton drama to surprising documentaries

The post How 9/11 helped define this generation’s new brand of patriotism appeared first on Salon.com.

In an interview with Nation’s Restaurant News, Pizza Hut’s chief brand officer Marianne Radley said the retro look tested well with diners, and reminds people that the chain is the “OG of the pizza category.” 

Which is fair; Pizza Hut was founded two years before Domino’s and 25 years before Papa Johns.

But where those brands were built on takeout and delivery, Pizza Hut was developed as a standalone dining destination. The shape of a Pizza Hut building is iconic, down to the distinctive red roof shape that identifies a Hut even after it’s ceased to shelter Pizza. (There’s a whole category of online photos tagged #UTBAPH, “used to be a Pizza Hut.”) When I drive by one, I can immediately envision the interior, too: exposed brick walls, fake hanging plants, green and white checkered tables and burnt-red pleather booths. 

So many kids born in the ’80s and ’90s, including myself, once sat in those booths, eating cheese-heavy personal pan pizzas earned through BOOK IT! reading challenge points. I sat there, too, for family pizza night and elementary school birthday parties where we’d listen to Britney Spears on the jukebox — a fixture in most Pizza Hut locations — and split a two-topping pan pizza. The pies were still brought to the table in skillets then, and the crust would exit the pan simultaneously grease-soaked and crisp, which to this day is a distinctly crave-worthy flavor sensation. 

But in the last decade, with more and more competition for delivery dollars, Pizza Hut began to stray from its pan-fried and blistered-cheese origins. In 2014 the company attempted a huge makeover in an effort to appeal specifically to millennials — pizzas began to include more upscale or trendy ingredients like asiago crusts, Sriracha honey drizzle, Peruvian cherry tomatoes. Unsurprisingly, the play didn’t work. There are so many other places to go for artisan pizza, the kind you serve to a roomful of acquaintances you want to impress. 

After the artisan menu makeover didn’t take off, executives went back to the drawing board and determined they needed to focus more on the “general customer” — the basic pizza stalwarts who still appreciate a plain sauce, cheese and topping option — rather than those interested in “flavor exploration.” Goodbye Sriracha; hello melted cheese-stuffed crusts. 

Sales have flagged in the subsequent years, but now the brand has the opportunity to tap into a sales hook  potentially more powerful than aspirational ingredients: nostalgia. 

Audiences are definitely primed for it. As Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams pointed out earlier this month, the pop charts are dominated this summer by former teen stars like Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez and The Jonas Brothers who haven’t tried to outrun their pop pasts. “The Brothers have wisely integrated their past into their present, appealing to the original fans who taped their posters to walls while earning some overdue respect from their former naysayers,” writes Williams. “What’s interesting about it all is that while the brothers have changed, the music itself is remarkably consistent.” 

And we’re experiencing a flash of particularly good nostalgia-fueled television aimed at older millennials and younger Gen Xers: “PEN15,” “Everything Sucks!” (a Netflix coming-of-age series that drips with early ’90s music references), “Derry Girls,” and, of course, “Stranger Things,” which just teamed up with Coca-Cola to release a collector’s pack of New Coke, a product that originally launched (and majorly flopped) in 1985. 

New Coke’s reception is certainly warmer than it was 30 years ago. After doctoring their original formula to compete with Pepsi, consumers said that New Coke tasted too sweet. Coke’s customer hotline was flooded thousands of complaints and, within three months, the company returned to their original recipe. In a nostalgia play of their own, the company then called the re-release “Coca-Cola Classic,” and incorporated the brand’s old cursive font and glass bottles. 

In customer reviews on the New Coke store website, designed to look like a throwback to an early Internet webpage, people have left comments like, “This is so great! I loved New Coke when it came out I was in middle school…it would be perfect to relive those days for me and so many others!” and “Loved New Coke in 1985 and still love it. PLEASE BRING IT BACK!!!” 

It’s unclear whether our collective palate has changed so much over 30 years that New Coke actually tastes good now, or whether there’s always been a contingent of soda lovers eagerly awaiting its return, but one thing is certain: While nostalgia may motivate someone to buy a collector’s pack of soda — the kind of purchase where you can drink one just to say you have, then stick the rest on a shelf with your Ghostbusters action figures — convenience pizza is ultimately for eating. Nobody wants to save and display their dinner.

Furthermore, I’m not convinced you can brand food products to sell in the same way Target sold out of limited-run Lisa Frank pajamas. One barrier is that the way we eat has changed dramatically. While recent market research shows that millennials especially prioritize convenience when it comes to making dining decisions, pizza is no longer the easiest delivery option, as apps like Postmates, Uber Eats and DoorDash enable users to order takeout from most restaurants. 

But on a more basic level, for nostalgia to sell the food we eat, the  product needs to prove itself worth returning to. The basic soft serve ice cream cone of childhood is always going to be good, no matter when you eat it. It was never bad, even if gelato and artisanal popsicles made it seem less cool by comparison for a while.  

In Pizza Hut’s case, the return to the vintage branding may prompt some curious delivery calls from those who want to taste their childhoods again. But is a return to pizza innocence even possible? Regardless of how the logo on the box is designed, the pizza inside probably won’t taste the same to me now as it did when I was nine, sitting in the red pleather booth with Britney Spears singing in the background, rewarding myself for meeting my elementary school reading goals.

Right now, scattered all across the country are buildings that used to be Pizza Huts but are now something new — sub shops, Chinese buffets. Maybe it’s enough to know what they once were, without expecting them to serve up the same memories forever. (Hello, Liquor Hut.) You can recognize what that building shape used to mean — and take comfort in knowing the roof is still red somewhere beneath its new paint job — without ever having to go inside. 

The post Pizza Hut wants to remind you of childhood: Can nostalgia actually sell more pizza? appeared first on Salon.com.

Miller rattles off the list of phrases she wouldn’t say: “‘Stop crying,’ ‘Quit your whining,’ ‘Don’t be so sensitive,’ ‘It’s not that big of a deal.’

“I feel like I wasn’t allowed to express my emotions and we didn’t talk about them which I think took me a long time to know how to process emotions — especially the tough ones,” she says. Now, Miller says she takes a lot of time to talk about feelings and emotions with her daughter, and gives her the space to feel “even the unpleasant ones.”

“I try to understand what the root of her emotions is,” Miller says. “It’s something nobody ever did for me.”

Miller is part of the millennial generation, the majority of whom were raised by parents from the Baby Boomer generation. While it is normal for parents of one generation to strive to parent differently than their own parents, common themes are emerging around millennial parenting — and it has to do with encouraging their kids to feel their feelings, something many millennial parents felt their parents missed when they were kids.

RELATED: How to divvy up childcare equally

Miller said that when she “lets her kid’s emotions rule” — say, by standing back in silence while her child throws a tantrum before bedtime — she sees it as an important moment in her “parenting journey,” whereas Boomers would see this as an inconvenience that would result in a screaming match. 

“She’s still going to bed — her tantrum doesn’t change that — but I give her the space to feel that frustration, and I let her know I see her and understand that right now she’s upset because she’s having fun playing and doesn’t want to go to bed,” Miller says. 

Dr. Harvey Karp (a Baby Boomer himself), pediatrician and Founder & CEO of Happiest Baby, tells Salon the focus on emotions among millennial parents is one difference he’s noticed between how the two generations parent.

“Forty years ago, more parents were still being verbally tough with their kids, saying ‘Don’t be a baby,’ ‘You shouldn’t be scared,’ and denying their feelings,” Karp said. “And that’s something we’ve learned not to do.”

Crystal King, a 40-year-old parent of two toddlers and founder of Amazing Baby, tells Salon she also focuses on acknowledging “big feelings” with her kids.

“Many millennial parents have heard the phrase, ‘little people, big feelings,’ feelings that children have haven’t changed across generations, but the way that parents acknowledge them, has,” King said. “Millennial parents will take the time to understand why a child feels angry, sad, disappointed, happy, scared, etcetera, even if the child isn’t equipped with the vocabulary to provide a thorough explanation.”

Why the change? Indeed, compared to previous generations, millennials have faced more anxiety and depression diagnoses. According to 2018 statistics, an estimated 35 percent of millennials have received help from mental health professionals, compared to an estimated 22 percent of Baby Boomers. It’s not hard to make the connection to this generation’s focus on mental health and how that might translate to teaching their own children about emotions.

Karp says this difference in how the generations parent also speaks more broadly to the environment in which parents today have to parent today, which creates a need that parents have to be “everything” to their children. This “myth,” Karp says, is new to parenting.

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“Of course, it is their responsibility in a small family when you don’t have other children or other caregivers, and it’s been especially hard during the pandemic where people are cut off from caregivers,” Karp said. “But the reality is that throughout the history of humanity, parents were not always the main caregivers.”

​Karp added that ​parents today face parenting with not only less help, but with less sleep.

“There are a lot more demands on people’s time now, in terms of entertainment, Instagram, computers, 5,000 channels on your television, et cetera, and I think that’s all kind of calling out for parents,” Karp said. “And so people feel exhausted trying to juggle all the balls that they think are necessary, and that’s led to less sleep for parents.”

​Karp said the shift, with millennials parents focusing on acknowledging feelings, can be a productive way to manage tantrums. In his book, “The Happiest Toddler on the Block: How to Eliminate Tantrums and Raise a Patient, Respectful, and Cooperative One- to Four-Year-Old,” he recommends speaking “Toddler-ese” to toddlers, which includes ​​short phrases, repetition and mirroring a bit of a child’s feelings. However, Karp warns that too much of a focus on discussing feelings can be inadvertently ineffective.

“The concept that parents have today about acknowledging feelings is to get down on their child’s level and calmly and lovingly acknowledge what their child is upset about, such as, ‘Sweetheart, I know you want more cookies, but we can’t have more cookies — we talked about this yesterday, you have to wait until after dinner then you can have more cookies.'” As Karp explained, this tactic won’t necessarily resonate with toddlers because they aren’t good with their “left brains” yet. “They’re very good with their right brain however, which is the fight or flight reflex, emotionality, recognizing a place and a face, musicality, bouncing to the music, and nonverbal communication.”

Karp recommends instead of saying ‘I know you feel mad about it,” to be more direct in validating a child’s feelings, and simply saying “you’re mad,” to validate their feelings.

Of course, a focus on feelings isn’t the only difference between how the generations are parenting differently. Leif Kristjansen is a millennial father of two kids. He tells Salon the biggest difference between how he parents his children, and how his parents raised him, is that he focuses on “experiences” rather than “things.”

“That means that I’d rather give a gift of a trip to the science center, or something we can build and create together, than yet another toy,” Kristjansen said. “I don’t care if my kids’ clothes match or if their ‘new’ bike is actually second-hand, but I will gladly spend my money on making memories and learning lessons.”

So, are these differences causing conflicts in families? Not necessarily.

“While we don’t clash on parenting styles, I do feel like my parents are still focused on my kids having ‘the right things’ which is fine by me as long as I balance it with why things are not important,” Kristjansen said.

Karp added it’s important for both Boomer parents and millennial parents to respect each other as the world of parenting continuously changes.

“You want children to feel respected and you want your parents to feel respected, too, and you want to feel respected by them,” Karp said. “So it’s a two way street, we don’t want to make grandparents personas non grata — we want to understand that they’re trying to just be helpful, too.”

Read more on parenting:

• The quest for “perfect parenting” is screwing us all
• “Good enough” parenting starts with avoiding these 13 abusive behaviors
• Giving kids no autonomy at all has become a parenting norm — and the pandemic is worsening the trend

The post How millennials are parenting differently than their Baby Boomer parents appeared first on Salon.com.

In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan symbolically consolidated the alliance by bringing religious freedom and morality into public conversations that questioned the separation of church and state. In 2003, President George W. Bush signed the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act into law. In October 2020, President Donald Trump appointed a conservative Christian, Amy Coney Barrett, to the Supreme Court, and went on to win 80% of the white evangelical vote in the following month’s election.

Trump went so far as to appoint a faith consultant board composed of influential evangelical leaders. They included Paula White, a well-known pastor and televangelist; and James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, a leading organization in evangelical efforts to embed “family values” into politics. These panel members heralded gestures by Trump, such as signing the “Presidential Executive Order Promoting Free Speech and Religious Liberty,” which targeted enforcement of the Johnson Amendment, a 1954 tax law requiring houses of worship to stay out of politics in order to remain tax-exempt.

Although it’s debated what specifically constitutes an evangelical, many agree that they are conservatives who are highly motivated by culture war issues like abortion, same-sex marriage and sexuality.

But even though evangelicals are often presented as monolithic in the media, current research signals a more complex picture.

Over the past six years, I have been working with an interdisciplinary team of scholars at the American Academy of Religion to analyze generational shifts in evangelicalism and religion more broadly in the United States. We are finding that some of the younger evangelicals are openly questioning their religious and political traditions. In short, the majority of white evangelicals are aging and a portion of younger evangelicals are engaging in both religion and politics differently.

Leaving the faith versus reforming from within

My research consists of hours of participant observation within younger evangelical faith communities, along with 50 in-depth, qualitative interviews with individuals who were raised in the politically charged evangelicalism in the southeastern United States, a region dominated by evangelicals.

Taken together, this research indicates increasing disaffection among white millennial and Gen X evangelicals with the cultural and political preoccupations that have strongly motivated their parents and grandparents. There is a growing number of “Exvangelicals” who disavow their previous stances on same-sex marriage, race and sexuality.

Evangelicals, often citing the biblical text, typically maintain that marriage is between one man and one woman. Over 75% tend to worship in racially segregated congregations and favor gun rights and ownership more than other faith groups.

But my interviewees tend toward intense critiques of their previous religious tradition, as well as rejecting the evangelical faith completely.

This data parallels other scholarship unearthing racialized structures within white, American evangelicalism like the work of sociologist Robert P. Jones and religious studies scholar Anthea Butler. Likewise, historian Kristen Kobes Du Mez examines how hypermasculinity is embedded in American evangelicalism.

Expanding religion and politics

My research reveals communities of younger evangelicals who are expanding their religious boundaries and rethinking their stances on culture war issues, as well as questioning the merits of the culture war.

These younger evangelicals are trying to reform their communities from within the tradition as loyal but highly critical members. Sometimes these groups are called “emerging evangelicals” or “progressive Christians,” with some debating whether “evangelical” as a label is redeemable.

I observed several younger evangelicals working within their religious communities to encourage acceptance of those outside of the Christian tradition as co-religionists on similar faith paths. They herald interfaith interactions as positive. One interviewee proudly detailed to me how her church partnered with the local imam and Muslim community to educate each other on their religious practices and volunteered together at a local food bank. This kind of attitude typically is resisted by their older evangelical counterparts, as I learned in previous research. Many traditional evangelicals believe that their faith is the sole path to religious redemption, and interfaith cooperation might harm their followers.

Additionally, some younger evangelicals tend toward adopting spiritual resources outside of the Christian tradition. Whether incorporating meditation techniques or yoga, my interviewees highlighted the ways in which they are exploring their religious and spiritual beliefs.

This contrasts with older evangelicals who perceive their tradition as providing all necessary resources for spiritual growth and reject any outside or Eastern influences. One interviewee noted that she had to change evangelical churches after her evangelical church prohibited her from being both a church member and a local yoga instructor.

Losing interest in the culture war

Many of the younger evangelicals in my study stated that their stances on culture war issues were significantly different from the evangelical majority of the past 50 years, which aligns with the findings of a 2017 Pew Research Center poll. This survey found that younger generations of millennials are more liberal than older evangelicals on numerous political issues.

My interviewees cited an acceptance and welcoming of those who identify as LGBTQ into their communities as both members and leaders. They support and ally with the objectives of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. In sum, they are actively dismantling many of the insider/outsider distinctions established by older white evangelicals and transforming what it means to be a politically engaged evangelical in America.

Furthermore, many of the people that I spoke with cited a culture war fatigue. Some believe that evangelicalism’s multi-decade investment in campaigning for these conservative stances and alliance with the Republican Party actually harmed the evangelical tradition instead of empowering it, while others are simply trying to opt out of the culture war and focus on their faith instead.

Interviewees also told me that often their views are creating familial conflict, since their parents and grandparents cannot understand why any evangelical would not be committed to the older generations’ conservative political causes.

Political conversion

Research to date, including my own, has yet to measure how widespread these shifts of attitude and belief among young white evangelicals may be. But there is other evidence of internal unraveling.

Take a recent announcement by Beth Moore, an influential evangelical speaker and author, that she has decided to leave the Southern Baptist Convention – the largest evangelical group in the U.S. – and end her relationship with a prominent evangelical publisher.

Or consider the recent departure of pastor Russell Moore, the former president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, who resigned from his position over the denomination’s handling of racial issues. These developments indicate a growing internal struggle over who can legitimately claim authority for the evangelical tradition.

The last several decades of American politics have been dominated by culture war issues, with white evangelicals in positions of national power. But as my research is documenting, a political transformation seems to be underway. With younger, white evangelicals rethinking their alliances and continued participation in the culture wars, it is possible that conservative politicians may not be able to count on white evangelical support for much longer.

This could have broader implications for the American political landscape. Without evangelical support and influence, the issues that are often at center stage could drastically change.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s faith as a conservative Christian and pastor Russell Moore’s title.

Terry Shoemaker, Lecturer, School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies, Arizona State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

The post White Gen X and millennial evangelicals are losing faith in the conservative culture wars appeared first on Salon.com.

This is the plot of “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture,” the first novel by Canadian writer and artist Douglas Coupland. Published 30 years ago, Generation X went on to become a cult text and helped to popularise the term “X” for those born between the mid-1960s and the early-1980s.

Coupland struck a chord, as his characters’ disaffection, “knee-jerk irony“, and withdrawal from society chimed with depictions of the young in the early 1990s in popular culture. But rather than referring to a cohort of people born between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, for Coupland “X” identifies the refusal of “the merry-go-round of status, money, and social climbing that so often frames modern existence”. As he puts it, “X is a term that defines not a chronological age but a way of looking at the world”.

Neither is the novel just a snapshot of young people’s concerns and lives in the early 1990s. Mixing narrative text with pop-art-inspired illustrations, slogans and definitions, the novel depicts what it refers to as our “accelerated culture”. Three decades later, it is a literary classic that still speaks to issues central to today’s world.

Information overload

Coupland was originally commissioned to author a non-fiction handbook about Generation X on the back of articles and a comic strip he wrote in the late 1980s about “the young and restless workforce following the baby boom”. Yet to the dismay of his publishers, who nearly didn’t publish Generation X, he soon realised that the book needed to be a novel.

Coupland’s decision speaks to a prevailing fear in the book that with information overload and technological acceleration, we may have lost the plot of our individual lives and wider society. As Dag puts it:

I’m just upset that the world has gotten too big – way beyond our capacity to tell stories about it, and so all we’re stuck with are these blips and chunks and snippets.

When Generation X was published, Coupland observed: “information overload meant 50 TV stations instead of ten.” In the current era where internet connections give access to a previously unimaginable wealth of content, this seems rather quaint. Nonetheless, Generation X’s intuitions help us understand the destabilising effects that the online world has on our sense of self today.

The novel insists on the human need for narrative and on the power of storytelling to make sense of the world around us. Andy, Dag and Claire try to regain direction and meaning in their lives by telling each other stories. Today, we might take to social media. Yet the “stories” we post on these digital environments resemble the “blips and chunks and snippets” Dag was lamenting in Generation X.

Indeed, as Coupland, the British writer Shumon Basar, and the Swiss art critic Hans Ulrich Obrist discuss in The Age of Earthquakes, the internet reinforces “denarration“. This is “the process whereby one’s life stops feeling like a story”. Instead, they write, our lives now feel like a “lineup of tasks”. There is no story in a life that is made up of short burst of mundane activity; it is not flowing and engaging but stilted and of little consequence.

Apocalyptic anxieties

Many of the stories Andy, Dag and Claire share with each other have a distinctly apocalyptic flavour. Fittingly for a novel published at the tail end of the cold war, the fear of “the flash”, namely nuclear apocalypse, is prevalent.

Anxieties over pollution also emerge, which speaks to the 21st-century climate crisis. One of Generation X’s chapters is titled “Plastics never disintegrate”, while the novel’s definitions include “Paper Rabies: Hypersensitivity to littering” and “Dumpster Clocking: The tendency when looking at objects to guesstimate the amount of time they will take to eventually decompose”. The climate crisis would remain an important thread running through Coupland’s ensuing works, from Generation A to Vortex.

Andy’s, Dag’s and Claire’s apocalyptic stories express their “futurelessness”. Saddled with McJobs, angry at previous generations handing over the world to them “like so much skid-marked underwear”, envious of boomers’ wealth and security – something that resonates with Millennials and Gen Z today – Coupland’s protagonists have a hard time imagining the future beyond a nuclear blast.

Our perception of the future might not have changed much since 1991. As Coupland puts it in a recent Instagram post, “The future feels like clickbait“. The post follows the style of his Slogans for the 21st Century, which Coupland began in 2011 wanting to capture phenomena that “would make no sense to someone from 1991”. Andy, Dag and Claire might struggle with the idea of “clickbait”, but I’m sure they’d get the sentiment of an empty future made up of an unending list of meaningless things forever vying for our attention.

Join us to celebrate Generation X’s 30th birthday at the free online conference “Douglas Coupland and the Art of the ‘Extreme Present’“, April 23-24 2021.

Diletta De Cristofaro, Research Fellow, Department of Humanities, Northumbria University, Newcastle

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.

The post “Generation X”: Its tales about McJobs and information overload feel as poignant now as in 1990s appeared first on Salon.com.

The easy answer is that we live in a celebrity culture where ordinary people overly relate to famous people, a phenomenon so common psychologists created a term for it: “parasocial relationships.” 

I think it runs much deeper than that, however. People relate to Spears, not because they are also under conservatorships run by controlling and greedy fathers, but because her story is such a profound symbol of what was done, in general, to her generation — especially the women and queer people who make up the #FreeBritney movement. The voyeuristic, sexist, controlling, judgemental abuse that was heaped onto Spears by the press for the first decade-plus of the 21st century was clearly the first shot in what was an all-out sexist assault on millennials. It started with “abstinence-only” and played out all the way through the election of a creepy old boomer who bragged about how he grabbed the women of Spears age “by the pussy.”  

I was 21 when Spears’s first record, “….Baby One More Time” came out, and my memory of the whole Britney phenomenon was primarily that it was weird. The 90s had hardly been perfect, but it was a time of great progress for women in music. Tori Amos, TLC, P.J. Harvey, Bjork, Missy Elliott, Hole, Salt-N-Pepa, Liz Phair and Lauryn Hill all made a huge impact, often with songs that told women’s stories from their own, sex-positive perspective. 

Then, at the end of the decade, there’s a sudden interest in the virginity of this sexy young starlet. The Britney Virginity Watch — which was soon accompanied by the Jessica Simpson Virginity Watch and the Olsen Twins 18th Birthday Countdown — became a national obsession. This wasn’t just some weird pop culture thing. The hymen statuses of the up-and-coming millennial generation soon became a political fixation. 

After the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the newly empowered religious right went to war on young people. Abstinence-only education, which preached against the use of contraception and told kids to “wait” until marriage, was foisted on public schools. Purity rings and virginity pledges became trends, especially in red America. Sex-shaming myths — that sexually active women can’t fall in love, that women are “naturally” modest, that female-controlled contraception is “abortion” — spread wildly. Hysterical and often false stories about youth sexuality caused a national panic about “hook-up culture.” The Bush administration kept blocking the legalization of emergency contraception.

It may have started with the religious right, but the sex panic swept the country in the early 21st century. 

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In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense, because it was all happening as the millennials were coming of age. Unlike the relatively small generation X, millennials had the numbers — there’s more of them than there are of boomers! — and therefore were expected to have real social power. Moreover, the girls had been raised in an era of “girl power” and there was real reason to believe that this generation could grow up to be more egalitarian and feminist than any before. Recall, the average age of marriage and first childbirth was rising rapidly in the 21st century. Women were outnumbering men on college campuses. 

Unfortunately, such social progress often leads to an ugly backlash — and the abuse of Spears in the public eye foreshadowed what was coming for millennial women writ large.

The virginity fixation and shaming of premarital sex was a huge part of this. It was quite clearly about trapping millennial women with unplanned pregnancies and early marriage, as well as discouraging the use of birth control, a major tool young women need to finish college and get a good start in their careers. The perfect encapsulation of this, at least until Trump ran on his woman-hating platform, was the way that Rush Limbaugh — the embodiment of the worst kind of right-wing boomer — waged war on Sandra Fluke, a millennial law student who spoke out for insurance coverage of birth control. Even by his usual standards, Limbaugh’s leering sexism was off-the-charts, unleashing 46 separate personal attacks on the young activist, calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute” and demanding that she make sex tapes for his personal enjoyment. All because she spoke out for birth control, a service 99% of women who have sex with men will use at some point. 

But while sex was a centerpiece in this war on millennials, it was hardly the only front it was being fought on.

The first couple of decades witnessed the rise of an entire anti-feminist industrial complex that was geared largely around preventing millennial women from accessing the gains that were promised in their “girl power” youths. Anti-feminists — who were often older women exploiting sexist fears — like Christina Hoff Somners and Caitlin Flanagan penned well-publicized tomes declaring that it was boys who were the “real” victims of sexist oppression, how “girl power” was ruining young women, and how women are secretly happier being housewives. This era also saw the rise of the “men’s rights” movement, which has rapidly expanded into all manners of sexist hate communities, from the incels to the Jordan Peterson fans to the Proud Boys. 

To a large extent, this backlash worked, at least on a lot of millennial men. Polling shows millennials, especially white men, are more likely than gen-Xers to agree that husbands should be the primary authority in the family. Millennial men tend to reflexively view women as less intelligent than men and they still expect their wives to do most of the housework. And while millennial men and women both less conservative than the older generations, there is a persistent gender gap, with 44% of millennial men voting Republican compared to only 31% of millennial women. No wonder, when the coronavirus hit, it was working mothers and not fathers who took most of the economic blow from scrambling for childcare. 

Unsurprisingly, then, the press treatment of Spears set a template that is used to abuse women who are far less famous than she, especially in the age of social media. Gamergate, in which an angry and mostly male group of social media users unleashed relentless abuse on anyone perceived as “feminist” in gaming circles, is the most prominent example, but the problem goes well beyond that. Women, for instance, are twice as likely to have experienced harassment on a dating app than men. 

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The good news is, just as Spears is resisting her father’s conservatorship over her, millennial women didn’t cave to two decades of pressure to abandon feminism. A strong majority of millennial women say they are feminists, and it was millennial women who spearheaded the anti-rape movement and now the #MeToo movement that defined much of feminism in the first two decades of the 21st century. And it was millennial women who were instrumental in pushing the pussy-grabber out of office, with 65% of them supporting Joe Biden in 2020 pre-election polls versus only 45% of millennial men. 

So ultimately, it makes a lot of sense that Britney’s story resonates. Hers is an extreme situation, but one that reflects a lot of pressures on millennial women. Like her, they grew up to be hard-working and ambitious, only to find that society was far more interested in policing their sexualities and putting them down than celebrating their talents. Yes, the #FreeBritney movement is about helping this one woman whose music clearly means a lot to people. But it’s also a symbol for those in her generation who are fed up and ready to start claiming the equality and independence that was promised to them as their birthright. 

The post How the abuse of Britney Spears led to the GOP’s war on women appeared first on Salon.com.

The trolls, naturally, howled over her unapologetic daring. What they didn’t seem to notice was a human being who was never flippant or cynical, who could also speak eloquently on the illness and eventual devastating loss of a parent. One who has kept her trademark sense of wonder through her new adventures of love, marriage and motherhood. 

Now, in her debut memoir “Want Me,” Clark-Flory widens her scope to look back on the person she was and has become, how she defined her sex life and her sex life defined her. It’s rare for an author to approach her younger self with both unflinching candor and genuine self-compassion, but Clark-Flory does just that, as she grapples with the nuanced complexities of feminist ideals and the messiness of real, boots on the ground intimacy. I spoke to Tracy recently via phone about love, grief and faking orgasms.

The best place to start would probably be with the commenters, right? You’ve lived such a public life, and that has opened you up to a great deal of BS from trolls over the years. 

It’s actually improved dramatically. Back when I was first at Salon, that was really my initiation into writing about myself online and having anonymous strangers on the internet react to it in very violent and sometimes aggressive and hateful ways. Especially while writing for Broadsheet [Salon’s female-centric former vertical], we had our resident anti-feminist trolls. At the time, I was in my early twenties and just having my writing published, period, was quite an experience. But then having my writing published and to have such vitriol in response was remarkable.

The way that I coped with it at the time was I tried to laugh about it. I would print out the very worst of the troll comments calling me the worst imaginable names, and I would post them on my fridge like, “Well, this is hilarious. There are these hateful people out there in the world who are so riled up about me making very simple, straightforward arguments about women being equal to men.”

But there was also an undercurrent. As the years went on, I came to appreciate how not funny it was, and how much that harassment can have very real world implications. The conversation around online commenting and moderation has really changed since then, and so my experience right now is that I’ve learned to not read the comments. I have fully internalized that lesson and very rarely poke into any comment threads nowadays. I’ve also found that there’s better moderation. But now of course there’s Twitter, which is not so fun.

Do you still get lunatics coming at you?

Much less often. There have been times when I’ve written about figures in the manosphere, and them trying to engage with me on Twitter, that sort of thing. I ignore them and then it goes away. It’s actually surprising how it seems to have really quieted down more recently. The thing that’s surprising is, with Twitter, you can go viral and create backlash when you least expect it. I got so used to bracing for reaction writing about very controversial things, and then somehow it seems that when you least expect it, when you’re not anticipating something to be controversial at all, that’s when it blows up in your face.

When you talk in the book about putting the troll stuff on your refrigerator, it feels very consciously part of that larger story of you trying to figure out how to gird yourself from getting hurt. It’s “Nothing can hurt me. Go ahead, bring it on.”

It wasn’t just the troll comments on the fridge, it was a general disposition or way carrying myself. Especially with my interactions with men. It wasn’t just these anonymous men online that I was interacting with in this way. It was also the men that I interacted with in my personal life too. It was this protective outlook, a way of wearing my armor.

You talk about the dynamics of male porn stars expressing, “Wait, this isn’t what I want; this is just what people expect of me.” They don’t feel a lot of agency. Similarly, your way of giving yourself agency was by really pushing back, by saying, “Nothing bothers me, nothing gets to me.” And getting into some situations that in hindsight you can see were potentially dangerous. Do you think that’s uncommon?

I don’t think that’s uncommon at all. I had in my early twenties this very defensive posture of, ‘I’m down for whatever,” which I realize now in retrospect is very protective. In my casual encounters with men, the possibility of assault, for example, did not feel front of mind. Yet because of the realities of being a woman in this world, it was present for me. I think that unconsciously I developed this defensive posture of basically, “I’m down for everything, so nothing can be done against my will.” That was my way of protecting myself.

In writing this book and reading a lot of more contemporary feminist research, I’ve realized how much my experiences are really reflective of this neoliberal feminist mentality that emerged in the nineties that puts the emphasis on personal responsibility. It gives women permission to be sexual and avoid some of the usual judgments, as long as they do it with the impression of being in control and going after what they want. That is a terrible setup. It’s a setup that, given the current state of things, given the fact of an incomplete sexual revolution, essentially asked women to perform, to act, to play the part of the sexually liberated.

It’s a trope, but it’s very real. The “cool girl” speech from “Gone Girl” touched a nerve because it’s about women going along with something that’s kind of crappy,  that’s supposedly “empowering.”

It comes down to the fact that women often seek power through men, through being wanted by men, through being desired by them, through being married to them. The same thing happens with sexual desire. Very early on, girls learn that their sexuality is a liability. The developmental psychologist Deborah Tolman has this theory of the dilemma of desire, where young girls come up against their bodily feeling, their sexual feeling, and the real-world material dangers that are associated with their sexuality.

As a result, a lot of girls and women become disconnected from their own bodily experience, their own desires, their own wants. It’s a very socially acceptable thing to reroute those desires through men, to be wanted by men. That happens in the realm of sex, but also in terms of navigating the world at large, that we hand over our desires to men, that we find satisfaction, that we find power, through being pleasing to men.

The thread that weaves through this whole book is you and the faked orgasm. That is not something that women admit, because it’s considered such a failure. There are two aspects of that: There’s you as a woman being settling for that, and there’s that a lot of men don’t seem to care.

I do often wonder about that. Looking back, there was no time when any man was like, “Was that real? Was that authentic?” Or, “Did that feel good?” There was literally never a time, except for maybe later on, in a longer term relationship where there was commitment and real emotional engagement. Aside from that, there was never a time where a man seemed to want to ask any questions about it at all. This does raise the question for me of how much awareness any of these men might have had about authenticity that was present, and whether it was easier, more pleasant, to buy it, to believe it.

There’s a statistic you cite in the book about the percent of women who fake it and percent of men who think that a woman’s had an orgasm.

Half of women report having faked it, and some research actually puts that number higher. There was a study that found that 95% of straight men reported usually or always having an orgasm when sexually intimate, compared to 65% of hetero women. That’s a pretty substantial gap. When you look at straight women versus lesbian women, you see that there isn’t the same phenomenon happening. There is something particular to the heterosexual dynamic here.

There was a study of thousands of young women in college who are having casual sexual encounters. The researchers concluded that if it was possible — and I love that they said “if it was possible” — to get young men to care more about women’s pleasure, and for young women to feel more entitled to sexual pleasure, then that orgasm gap might be closed. I love it was, “if it was possible,” as though it some great feat.

A lot of that does come from porn and the ubiquity of porn. Many of us as feminists struggle with, “What are we supposed to feel about porn?” I notice over the past several years, porn has gotten so much more brutal. Tracy, what’s up with that?

It’s really tricky. I do relate to that sense of, if you were to log into Pornhub, for example, and just go browsing around, what you would generally see would be very different from what you would see if you had logged in the early 2000s to vivid.com. At the same time, there have been studies that have analyzed these things and have said, “Oh no, porn is not getting rougher.” I think often in these conversations, there is research, which is pretty scant, and then there’s individual experiences like, “This seems so much more extreme.”

When I started watching Tube sites in my twenties, my assumption was, “This is a very clear reflection of what straight men most want.” That was my engagement with it. Over the years, writing about it, I’ve come to view it much more as an industry. You can take the example of Netflix. Netflix wants you to keep watching, Netflix wants to keep you engaged. It’s not necessarily a pure reflection of what people want. I think that has an impact on the content that you see in porn.

I also think the advent of Tube sites, which totally decimated the industry, which totally decimated performers pay, has had a huge impact as well. I’ve talked to a lot of people in industry who reported how things have shifted, where performance have to move into more, quote unquote, extreme acts, much sooner in their careers that you have to do more for less. There’s a lot that’s happened to the industry through piracy that has changed the content.

It reminds me the performer you talk to in the book who says something like, “Anal is like a first date now.” It feels like both men and women have to do more before they’re ready, or if they’re ever ready. Whether or not it feels good is almost irrelevant. It makes it harder for people to figure out what they really are into and what feels good.

There’s this great example that the performer of Vex Ashley actually made in a scholarly article in the porn studies journal. She was saying, with Hollywood actions films, we might watch a crazy car chase, but then we have the real-world experience of driving around and seeing other human beings driving down the street and not jumping off the freeway. With sex, we might have our own personal individual experiences that fail to meet up to the fantasy realm. But because sex is so rarely talked about, because it’s so shrouded in secrecy and taboo, we don’t have the firsthand example of other people’s experience to compared to our own.

The fantastical realm of porn is uniquely unchecked in the real world. The only thing that we can check it against is our own private experience.

I’ve always said that trying to learn about sex from watching porn is like trying to learn to drive from watching “The Fast and the Furious.”

Our culture is totally ignorant around the realm of sexual fantasy. There’s this real lack of appreciation and understanding of what sexual fantasies mean, what they don’t mean, how they serve us. I think that they’re often interpreted fairly literally. There’s a real failure to appreciate the world of sexual fantasy is a magical place of pretend and illusion that can address some of our deepest fears and dreams.

You are now in a different stage in life. What do you want now for your life going forward into the next phase? What do you think is possible for women right now?

It’s all been about this journey from that sense of “Want me,” to more of a sense of, “What do I want?” And so moving towards a more embodied place of being in touch with my own desires, not just sexually, but broadly. There’s a lot that happening with this book that speaks to what I want, which is being able to be a mom, being able to be in a married monogamous relationship, and also publish a book like this and to stand by this as this is part of who I am. To be that fully incorporated person who doesn’t have to pick one category or the other, and doesn’t have to live in with the fractured self, but can have a a more incorporated experience itself.

There’s this rising generation of girls and boys coming up behind you, who are part of a different world. Do you think they have an easier time, the same time, a worse time navigating their sexuality in this world right now?

I think that in a lot of ways, things are better. The acceptance and around sexuality, the nuances around identity, the conversations that are happening right now are, without a doubt, major progress. The evolution around attitudes towards sex work, although slow, younger generations are so much further ahead in terms of figuring that stuff out than even my generation. And that’s  incredibly positive.

One thing that is concerning to me is the fact that this neoliberal feminist narrative that I mentioned has really pushed feminism away from this collective struggle into one of individualistic gain, a “lean in” style feminism tha in the realm of sexual empowerment is really discouraging.

I think about young women coming up and continuing to be encouraged to pursue sexual empowerment as though it were an individual job, as though, if you do not feel totally sexually empowered, it is your own fault as opposed to the cultural backdrop. One of the main struggles for me was coming up with that narrative of sexual empowerment. I believed that I could get it right on my own, as opposed to looking at the broader backdrop.

One of the greatest lessons from all of the time that I spent writing about sex at Salon, because I so often was interviewing individual people about their sex lives, was how much people keep hidden and how hungry people are for more of a sense of a collective engagement around these topics.

It’s so easy to feel like, “It’s just me.” Any time I’m interviewing people about their sex lives, everyone’s concerned that they’re not normal. Everyone is so exceedingly normal in that sense. We’re all so concerned that we’re little weirdos, and we’re all little weirdos. And how wonderful is that?

The post Tracy Clark-Flory: “Our culture is totally ignorant around the realm of sexual fantasy” appeared first on Salon.com.

Petersen’s feature was the culmination of years of being overworked, underpaid, depressed, anxious, and facing an endlessly challenging future — while being bound by impossible career expectations and the performance, on social media, of a “perfect” life. Months later, the World Health Organization went on to recognize burnout as an “occupational phenomenon.”

In an interview with Salon, Petersen said she had no idea the article would resonate like it did, and eventually lead to her much-anticipated book, on sale Sept. 22, “Can’t Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation.” “The original essay was a way for me to work through my own burnout,” Petersen said, sharing that the book had given her yet more insight into the root of the problem. “I can see it clearly.”

Salon chatted with Peterson in a wide-ranging conversation that touches on Baby Boomer parenting techniques and the collapse of the American middle class. As always, this article has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

Let’s start with the genesis of the book. Clearly your BuzzFeed article about burnout resonated with a lot of people — especially Millennials, but not only Millennials. And I’m wondering if you can share more about the process of turning that article into the book? 

I want to say, though, that I had no idea it was going to be a book when I wrote the article. The original essay was a way for me to work through my own burnout. And when it got published, I was like, “okay, hopefully some people read this and it resonates with them,” and that would be lovely. But I did not expect it to do what it did.

About a week afterwards, a colleague of mine said something on Twitter about it becoming a book. And I was like, “that would be interesting,” because I had been working on a different book proposal while I was burnt out, and it was just so forced and not very good. And I was like, “why don’t I do this?”

So from that I realized I could go deeper and wider in terms of context and experience, and turn an academic lens on it. I’m trained as an academic historian in media studies. So when I think about a phenomenon, a concept, there’s what I can do for an article and then there’s a completely different set of research that I do when it’s going to be a book. I started by making a giant reading list, seriously like a hundred books. And then started thinking about economic history, parenting history, and history of the discourse of passion around work. There’s so many things that I could go deep on, and it was really gratifying to be able to poke around in all of those different corners.

Do you feel like you have more answers now after your investigation?

I think I can see it clearly. I think that, before with my article, I was like, “I’m burnt out.” And this is something that is very common to our generation.

But then, as I started doing so much more research, and especially just learning a ton about the economic history of the United States that I was somewhat familiar with, but not as familiar with, I just got so much more insight.

For example, there was a period of stability for a lot of Americans, middle-class stability, where  a lot of people who were not middle class were added to the middle class, and that has gradually deteriorated over the course of Millennials’ lifetimes. I wondered, how can we think about reinstating some of that security? And preventing the precariousness that I think is really at the root of burnout?

And then just other things too, like the history of parenting surveillance and ideas about parenting, and what good parenting looks like. All of that was so revelatory for me in terms of thinking about my own parents, how I grew up and how, in some ways, I had some of the components of what in the book is called conservative cultivation. But I also had the total freedom and lack of supervision that accompanies more childhoods in rural areas. I grew up in a small town in Idaho, there just wasn’t as much conservative cultivation available as someone who is growing up in, say, New York City or Seattle or something like that.

What do you think of how Baby Boomers parented their Millennial kids?

It’s hard because I really think Baby Boomer parents were absolutely trying to provide security for their kids. And they were trying to do that by rearing them to succeed in the world as they saw it. And that meant, how can you get into a really good college? And then from college, how can you get a really good job?

I think that that kind of laser focus on the path to success made it easier to ignore how some of the other choices that parents were making — say, in their voting decisions and then the legislators that they elected. How would that have ramifications on things like, if you vote for legislators who defund public education and who institute right to work laws? How is that going to have effects on your kids when they enter college, in terms of how much debt they’re going to have to accumulate? But also, what are the labor conditions going to be for them when they get out of college? I think it’s hard to draw that line.

And then there’s just stuff that can seem like really good parenting because it’s preparing kids for college but that really was fashioning kids into mini-adults very early, and sucking the joy out of a lot of stuff. The thing that always sticks out to me from my research is standardization of play. How you used to go “play” at someone’s house, and now you have a “playdate,” something that is formalized and now has cultural capital, that has start times and end times, and oftentimes is supervised. It’s such a great metaphor for just how play has changed over the course of our lives.

That really stuck out to me in your book, how Millennials kids were managed as mini-adults — how we were encouraged to stay busy and have all these activities after school. In our adult life, the consequence is that many Millennials don’t know what to do with their free time, which causes anxiety and stress. But it seems like there is a disconnect between what we were told being an adult was versus what adult life is actually like.

Especially, I think, in young adulthood. And you see it most vividly in the way that there’s still this Boomer mentality that Millennials don’t work or are lazy, which is so fascinating to me. I say this in the book, but every Millennial I know is just hustling as hard as they can with what they’re doing. But I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that some of the forms of work are not recognizable as work to older generations.

So, something like — depending on your job — some component of it might be managing the Instagram account. And that just [doesn’t look like a job] to someone else, like, you’re just on social media. Whereas it’s actually a very difficult job that requires very particular skills and a lot of time. And it doesn’t look or feel like work. And so, if you say, “I’m so exhausted,” they’re like, “what have you been doing? You haven’t been in the coal mines,” or something like that.

The thing that [Boomers] often bring up is, “you’re not doing physical labor and so it’s not hard work.” That’s one of the disconnects.

I’m curious what your thoughts are on this cultural obsession and fascination with Millennials in general.

I think that every generation, as they come into form, they’ve become an object of fascination. There was a similar obsession with Gen X when they were our age, and Boomers.

How do you think we can distance ourselves from this obsession of being productive, and having to do everything perfectly, like even our hobbies?

I think that comes from childhood. Do you feel that? Do you feel like you learned that in childhood?

I don’t even know. Your book definitely made me see things more clearly, but I feel like I need to go back to therapy to really think about it.

I think that when we come to instrumentalize hobbies as a thing that you have to put on your resume, you make it into something that you have to be the best at. You can’t just play volleyball or the piano, it was like you have to be in all of these competitions, and that sort of thing. It has to have distinction in some capacity, and that, I think, transforms a hobby into something quite different.

The beauty of a hobby, and I’ve thought about this so much and there’s a chapter in the book about it, is that you don’t have to be good at it because it’s not for anyone but yourself. I just wrote a newsletter about how I’m just really struggling to make my garden work here in Montana. I was like, “I’m so embarrassed, I can’t Instagram my garden.”

But, who cares? What matters is that I have spent an inordinate amount of time just watching my vegetables grow every morning, and that gives me pleasure. Being able to go out there and just look at them. And that’s a hobby. It’s a feeling that is hard to recognize because you have become so alienated from it. But I think it’s going to take a lot of unlearning to feel at peace with, on the weekend, not doing anything. Not packing your schedule. How to do nothing is really hard for us to learn.

And for some of us, it depends on whether or not you’re a parent or you’re an essential worker who has to go out and be at work all day, every day. But some of us are finding time. Some of us have been forced to hang out with ourselves, and it feels uncomfortable because it’s so unfamiliar.

How do you unlearn that rhythm of always having to be productive and busy?

I do think that I am fortunate in my positioning in the Millennial spectrum, because I’m an “Elder Millennial.” And so, I had some time to cultivate some hobbies before they got cannibalized by my work. Like gardening is something that I did a lot of in the immediate years after college. And I think of those times as times that I was working as a nanny, I didn’t think of how to be productive in my off time, I just had time. It was just actual off time. And there was no social media yet, I had a flip phone, I couldn’t take pictures of anything.

I learned to do things to just do them. So I can return to something like gardening.

I think a lot about the fine line in exercise, the line between, “am I doing this to optimize my body” or “am I doing this because I love it?” So, trying to keep myself attuned to that, and thinking, “what’s a way that I can make an activity to lean into the part of actually experiencing it and liking it,” instead of the, “I must do this so that I look like this” part?

What is the antidote to burnout? Having a hobby?

That’s on a personal level. But the real antidote is to regulate capitalism. The thing I tell people is, there are all sorts of small things that you could do in your life. But that’s a Band-aid. Burnout is not going to be solved until it can be solved for everyone. And that means societal shifts that relieve that safety net beneath us in substantial ways, and not just for certain slots of the middle class.

The post Anne Helen Petersen: The antidote to burnout is regulating capitalism appeared first on Salon.com.

The reaction was swift and whiny, thereby providing overwhelming evidence for the thesis embodied in the two-word meme, which is that Boomers take themselves way too seriously. But it wasn’t just the narcissism that frustrated younger people, but the blindness to economic and social realities that have left Boomers holding most political power and wealth in this country, while their children and grandchildren face increasingly uncertain futures. 

Journalist Jill Filipovic has decided to step into the fray with her new book “Ok Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind,” a sober-minded and gracious effort to explain, in painstaking detail, the way political forces converged to create a world where Boomers benefitted from American prosperity but left little in the way of wealth and opportunities for those who came after them. Filipovic isn’t here to dismiss, condescend to, or annoy Boomers, but instead have a real conversation about the world they’re leaving behind, and what it might take to fix things so the later generations aren’t left behind. 

Watch my conversation with Filipovic on “Salon Talks” to hear more about her book and how to heal this generational warfare.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Let’s start with the genesis of this book, which was the expression “ok Boomer,” which hit the internet like a nuclear bomb, except instead of radiation, the fallout was all whining from Boomers. What did you think about that entire controversy?

I mean, it was very silly. The book is playing on the meme to kind of go into what is now a cultural touch point. The book is not about the meme, but I do think you’re right, that Boomer response to “ok Boomer,” which I think one Boomer called the n-word of ageism, in which they all sat around and whined about, is pretty reflective of I think some of the many complaints that Millennials have about Boomer entitlement and sort of general lack of ability to take responsibility for the world they’ve left us with.

I think legitimately for a lot of Boomers it had never occurred to them that they had any kind of responsibility for, or that even that there were disparities between their generation and other generations. You write about how Boomers have hoarded a lot of wealth and opportunities for themselves, and nothing has trickled down to especially Millennials and now Generation Z. How big are the gaps really between Boomers and Millennials when it comes to education, housing, economics, that sort of thing?

The gaps are huge. Going into this book, obviously we’ve all heard that Millennials are behind. But in the process of researching and writing it, I was surprised how bad things are. Millennials are not only going to do worse than our parents, but will probably do worse than our grandparents. We’re the first generation in U.S. history that has not done better than the previous generation.

One of the more shocking statistics that I found from that Stanford Center on Wealth and Inequality is that we’re not for social welfare programs, so things like food stamps, cash welfare. Millennials would be the most impoverished generation since the Great Depression, so we’re in trouble. Something like 1 in 5 Millennials lives in poverty. Our rates of home ownership are actually going down, even though more of us are now in our 30s, and the oldest Millennials are turning 40 this year. We are tremendously in debt. We’re the most educated generation in history, but we’re also carrying with us huge student loan debt. The average Millennial has about $33,000 in student loan debt, whereas Boomers, when they were the same age, had more like $2,300 in debt. You could pay for a college education by working over the summers.

It’s just a totally different world for Millennials. I think some more progressive Boomers understand that and are sort of horrified what their generation has left us. But the more conservative Boomers who have been the ones who have had a monopoly on political power really managed in their generation to climb the ladder. They had affordable education, they had affordable housing programs and then they pulled it up behind them. Millennials have really been left struggling at the bottom. Part of what’s so frustrating is that this was totally preventable.

I’ve had this conversation and it’s been really antagonistic with some people about how Millennials are falling behind and there’s a tendency to agree that that’s true, but an unwillingness to believe that Boomers did anything that caused this problem. I guess I want to drill down into that. How is this their fault?

I mean, it’s most of the fault of Boomer politicians and Boomer-elected politicians. Boomers have been dominant in American politics and American culture for decades now. They’re still the largest age group that makes up the U.S. Congress. There’s not a single Millennial in the Senate. There’s a small handful of Millennial Congress people. It’s been true that Boomers have been dominant since Boomers came of age.

When Ronald Reagan was elected, he was the first president, kind of came in on the fumes of Boomer energy. 1980 is really where you see a huge turning point on a lot of these issues. It’s where you start to see radical underinvestment in public education and where you then start to also see rapidly rising higher education costs. You see the government investing less in grants for college, and instead offering more in loans that students then have to pay back. You also see rapidly rising healthcare costs, which have just absolutely animated Millennial life. 1980 is this turning point where we start to see American healthcare costs skyrocket, and we started to see American health outcomes decline.

The opposite trajectory happens in most of our economic peer nations in Western Europe. They start controlling costs and they start getting better health outcomes. We get the worst of both worlds. Again, really kicking off in 1980 in this year where you have a Boomer leader coming into office and things unfortunately don’t get much better even under a Democratic president. First Boomer President Bill Clinton, who is the person who basically unfettered Sallie Mae and allows them to become not just a totally out of control student lender, but also their own collection agency. I think many Millennials who have student loan debt have a particular opinion of Sallie Mae now.

For that, you can blame, I mean, not just Clinton, congressional Republicans as well, but all of these seeds were planted when Millennials, when the earliest Millennials were just being born and when many of us didn’t even exist yet. There’s this impulse now I think the point to, for example, Millennial consumer choices, the sort of stereotypical of which is avocado toast. And to say, “This is why you guys can’t afford to buy a house,” without recognizing that the cost of a new home is almost twice what it was when Boomers were young adults. The cost of rent is much higher than what it was.

Young Millennial parents pay significantly more to have babies, to insure their families, in out-of-pocket health care costs than Boomers did when they were young adults. We’re more in debt. Our day-to-day costs for every aspect of adult life are more expensive. At the same time, the way working class wages have just seen the bottom fall out. Now you have to have a college degree to make something close to what a Boomer with a high school education would make in their early ’80s. We’re also making less.

Then on top of that, we are also a much more racially diverse generation. Millennials were about 56% white. Boomers, when they were our age, were more like 80% white. America’s longstanding even before America existed, history of racial discrimination really planted the seeds for now a Millennial generation that is immensely suffering because of systematic racism and things like housing that has not allowedBblack families to build the kind of wealth that white families did. That’s naturally going down to their Millennial kids and being magnified and perpetuated forward. Racism in education and where you can live and what kinds of jobs you have access to.

Then in wage discrimination, so really across the board. I know this is a very long answer. But our history of racism and then these really explicit, specific political decisions that were made in the 1980s and ’90s have set Millennials up for generational failure.

That leads us to today, Millennials, like you said, have the oldest are turning 40 and the youngest into their 20s. They’re sort of in their prime earning years, and we just got hit with the worst economic crisis, one that’s even worse than the 2008 one, one that’s as bad, it looks, as the Great Depression. How do you anticipate that exacerbating these problems, or do you?

Amanda, we are so screwed. I know you are Gen X, but Millennials are particularly screwed. We obviously got hit by the Great Recession of 2008 when older Millennials were in our initial earning years. Many of us didn’t get jobs, were fired from our first jobs, took lower rates of pay. Researchers suggest that that will probably, just that recession, will impact our lifelong earnings.

We were already starting at a deficit, and now this spectacular financial collapse hits us. The industries that it’s hit are really overrepresented, are dominantly Millennials, so things like food service. We hear a lot about Millennials working in the gig economy and that’s true. A lot of us do have gig jobs or cobbled together a series of gigs in order to make ends meet, and those jobs have been absolutely decimated.

Again, Millennials are also racially diverse and we know that people of color have been hit, not just health-wise by coronavirus, but financially have really shouldered many more of the burdens that white people have. We know that people under 40, the majority of which as adults anyway, are Millennials, have experienced much significant economic disruption then folks over 40 have. This is really, really hurting us. I think it’s hurting Millennial women in particular. Women’s prime earning years start a little bit earlier than men’s because women have children and then some drop out of the workforce and many then experience intense discrimination for being mothers. It really is in your late 30s that for women, your earnings start to peak. For men, it comes a little bit later, which is right where Millennial women are now, right when an economic downturn is hitting. And when a pandemic is hitting, that means that you can no longer outsource things like childcare. You have to now divide your time if you have a kid between working and taking care of a child.

Many Millennial dads are doing their part, but many, many, many aren’t. I think we’re going to see a huge hit both to Millennials as a category, and then to particular sub categories, female Millennials, and Millennials of color.

Well, and to talk about the gender issue, kind of to switch gears a little, since the Millennials were teenagers, you’ve been the subject of a bunch of hand-wringing articles and cable news segments about sex, family, marriage, all these things. You’ve been accused of being too sexual, too averse to getting married and unwilling to have families. What did you find in your research was the true story about Millennials? Are they a bunch of spoiled ne’er-do-wells that  . . .

Well, true story is we are the generation that older folks think are doing it wrong no matter what we do. Millennials were in high school when we were younger and in college, there was this whole state of hand-wringing about hookup culture, which I know you’ve written about quite a bit, and this total fear of teen sex and these crazy stories about rainbow parties and girls getting their hearts broken because they’re giving it away without being committed. There’s this whole moral panic about Millennial hookup culture.

Then the study comes out by a researcher named Jean Twenge, and it finds that Millennials are actually having less sex than previous generations, which then fuels a totally separate moral panic about Millennials not having enough sex. We’re all in our bedrooms watching porn and posting on Instagram, instead of going out and meeting people and having the sex we apparently should be having. No matter what the research finds or doesn’t find, it gives folks license to freak out about what Millennials are or are not doing in the bedroom.

I also remember when I was growing up, there was a teen pregnancy panic in the ’90s, this tremendous moral panic about babies having babies and it’s high teen pregnancy rates, and that was true. Teen pregnancy rates were high. They weren’t as high in the ’90s as they were in the ’50s, the sort of height of the nuclear family, but they were high. That is now radically decreased. The average age of a first birth for an American woman is as high as it’s ever been. Now that’s its own source of hand-wringing, that Millennials aren’t having enough babies, that we’re getting married too late, that we’re not having enough children.

I mean, my conclusion essentially is that every generation has done something different than the one before it. Every generation is a subject to this “the kids are doing it wrong” narrative. Boomers certainly were, and Millennials have just followed the path that Boomers tread. So Boomers also got married later than their parents. Boomers also had fewer children than their parents. Boomers also went to college in record numbers. Boomer women entered the workplace in record numbers.

Millennials are just magnifying those existing trends, and overwhelmingly I think those sort of lack of a safety net for Millennials, the lack of a ladder is obviously a bad thing. But I think when you look at the decisions that Millennials are making in response to some pretty terrible circumstances, I’d say we’re a generation of pretty thoughtful, responsible people.

I think that’s fair. I’m a Gen Xer, I’m on the younger side of Generation X. We definitely think the Millennials are like the goody two-shoes, good kids. I do want to ask about that because Gen X is forgotten in all of this. We’re the generation between the Millennials and Boomers and mostly we’re okay with not being part of this fight, but where do you see Xers in this whole story of these generational tensions?

It’s funny. Every time I read about the book, there’s always some Gen Xer being like, “You always forget us.”

I’m fine with that. Leave us out.

I sort of think Gen Xers are the Jan Bradys of the generation wars. Millennials, Millennials, Millennials. Obviously Gen Xers got hit by the recession as well, the 2008 recession. Gen Xers actually initially got hit a lot harder than Millennials did because they were older. They were more established.

The difference though now is that, A, Gen Xers were better off by, I would have to go back and look at the numbers, but I think they were sort of average in they’re kind of early 30s, right when the 2008 recession hit. Those Gen Xers were a lot better than early 30s Millennials are now. They did have further to fall, but then they also recovered. When you look at where Gen Xers ended up compared to where Millennials ended up, Gen Xers really did make up most of their losses from the recession. Millennials didn’t. Millennials took a hit that is still hitting even 12 years later. That’s a huge difference.

One thing I talk about in the book that I think is actually kind of under-explored in these generation debates is the impact of mass incarceration and the rise of mass incarceration. That’s one place where Gen Xers really got socked. Gen Xers who are young adults in the 1980s and 1990s, and as incarceration rates rose and hit their peak in 2009. Gen Xers that were kind of that prime age for policing and incarceration, which is 20s and 30s.

At the point where we hit our incarceration peak, the generation that had the largest number of people behind bars were Gen Xers. That obviously has huge impacts on your future ability to make a living, on where you can live, on whether we can vote.

I think how Millennials got hit is that we were kids when the incarceration boom began. We really had this kind of cradle-to-adulthood relationship with incarceration. A ton of Millennials kids’ parents had a parent who went to prison, so Millennial kids experienced that trauma. Millennial adolescents were sent to juvenile facilities in larger numbers than any other generation. A lot of us were put in jail when we were kids. Then we hit adulthood as mass incarceration was peaking. Then it started to go down, but it went up like this and it’s going down like this. The decline is a lot more modest than the scale up. I think it’s going to be Millennials and Gen Xers that are really caught up in that long tail of mass incarceration. We don’t know yet in terms of generational numbers, which generation kind of got hurt the worst by this system. But I think both Millennials and Gen Xers have a pretty strong claim to that.

I mean, the Gen Xers also were kind of the canaries in the coal mine for a lot of these questions. They didn’t pay as much for their college educations as Millennials did, but they certainly paid quite a bit. They were the first generation that did start taking out pretty substantial amounts in student loans. They also obviously got hit by the housing crisis. Gen Xers were much more likely to own their homes as young adults, but many of them lost those homes or were caught up in foreclosures. I certainly don’t want to send a message that any generation including Boomers has been universally successful or privileged, and Gen Xers, I think you’re right, we do often forget them. They experience I think in a slightly smaller scale, what a lot of Millennials are now living through.

I hate to cut it short on this, but I have to ask the question of what can be done. I mean, how do we fix this?

We fix it through politics. I think there’s often a temptation to individualize solutions in the U.S. That’s not going to cut it here. These are huge systemic generational issues. The number one thing that we need to do, and that Boomers frankly needs to do, is kind of get out of the way and start to share their reins of power. Boomers have a lot to teach us. They have a lot of knowledge and a lot of learned wisdom, especially progressive Boomers who have been more or less, have been shut out of politics much more than their conservative counterparts, but we need Millennials in office. We need Millennials running organizations and companies. We need Millennials on the pages of all of our newspapers and heading up our newsrooms. We need Millennials who are now the largest American generation and are not children anymore, are well into adulthood and starting to press toward middle age, actually being given a fair share of the power and influence in our country.

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Notably, the average duration of unemployment has dramatically increased since the onset of the pandemic. This means a lot more now than it did prior to the pandemic, because the unemployment rate itself has surged: after staying at or below 5 percent from December 2015 through March 2020, it skyrocketed to 14.7 percent in April and has stayed in the double digits ever since. (As of July, the unemployment rate was 10.2 percent.) With more people unemployed than ever, the consequences of needing to spend longer unemployed are even starker.

This consequence has been born the most by Americans from their mid-20s to their mid-30s, although older Americans have also been quite hard hit. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average duration of unemployment in May 2020 was 10.7 weeks for Americans who are at or above 65 years of age, 11.8 weeks for Americans between the ages of 45 and 64, 9.7 weeks for Americans between the ages of 35 and 44, 12.2 weeks for Americans from 25 to 34, 9.9 weeks for Americans from 20 to 24 and 8.6 weeks for Americans between the ages of 16 and 19. This means that the longest stretches have been endured by Millennials (who were born from 1981 to 1996), followed by Americans who are middle aged and senior citizens.

Young people have also suffered the horrors of unemployment much more than their older counterparts. By contrast, the latest data indicates that younger people are experiencing higher rates of unemployment than older ones in the pandemic era. But this time around, Millennials and Generation Z have much higher unemployment rates than their Boomer and Gen X counterparts — twice as high, in many cases. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that, as of July, 19.3 percent of Americans between the ages of 16 and 19 were unemployed — almost one in five. That number was comparable for Americans between the ages of 20 and 24, to 18.3 percent; and 11.4 percent for Americans between the ages of 25 and 34. 

But there’s a dramatic drop-off as you look at older workers. Only 8.1 percent of 35 to 44 year olds were unemployed, 7.8 percent of 45-55 year olds, and 8.8 percent of the 55 and older workforce. In other words, the youngest generations are experiencing unemployment rates twice as high as those 35 and older. That’s a huge generational gap. 

There are other statistics which suggest that young people have borne a disproportionate share of the economic burden during this recession. An online pay service provider for U.S. small businesses, Gusto, found that workers under the age of 25 were laid off at a rate 93 percent higher than those who were over 35.

That’s inflicted a psychological toll on Generation Z, who have become more risk-averse as a result of the economic setback. A senior researcher at Pew Research Center has commented that his data finds older Americans are more concerned about the health consequences of the pandemic while younger adults are more upset about the economic impact.

Many Millennials, who are slightly older than Gen Z, are suffering their second recession. Indeed, many Millennials were just entering the workforce when the 2008 recession hit, causing some to dub them “the unluckiest generation.” As a result, Millennials have struggled more than their antecedents to achieve such milestones as getting married, starting a career, buying a home, having children and in general achieving financial independence.

If the 2020 economic setback had been the first major downfall since the Great Depression, Millennials would most likely be in a better position to endure it. Instead it has become the economic equivalent of a one-two punch, forcing millennials who were already struggling or had just begun to recover from the last crash to be knocked back by another one.

The post The recession is creating another generation gap appeared first on Salon.com.

Last week, we heard from a commentator one might call “Old Politics Mitch.” That would be historian Mitchell Abidor, who wrote in a New York Times op-ed that “young socialists” were failing to listen to their elders in the “Old New Left” of the 1960s, many of whose luminaries recently published an open letter in The Nation urging the “New New Left” to support Joe Biden in this year’s presidential election, now that Bernie Sanders’ campaign has ended. 

Abidor argues that today’s youth are repeating the irresponsible errors of the New Left of the 1960s by refusing to endorse Biden on the basis of “doctrinal purity.” He thinks these privileged young socialists will be responsible if Donald Trump is re-elected — a rather high estimation of their powers — and that therefore they will be morally culpable for the consequences suffered by the less privileged. “Taking a principled stand is courageous only when those taking it put themselves at risk,” Abidor writes. “Placing others at risk requires no courage at all.”

A moment’s reflection shows that the open letter, along with Abidor’s article endorsing it, is an admission of defeat by those who realize they have no way to mobilize the approximately 100 million eligible American voters who decide it is not worth their time to cast a ballot. Instead, these defeated veterans of a bygone struggle blame a few thousand young people who refuse to legitimate a system that rules out the life-saving policy changes they have been patiently and painstakingly advocating.

Abidor is a historian of the extraordinary student uprising and general strike of France in May 1968, author of the oral history “May Made Me” and editor and translator of “Down With the Law,” an important volume of 20th-century French anarchist thought. In this context, he appears to be a classic example of someone who has “grown up” and now believes that it is noble to abandon the imagination and intransigence of youth, which he dismisses as purely “quixotic.” “It is a quirk of history,” Abidor writes, “that the young radicals of that time are the pragmatic elders of today.”

Of course, not all the elders of that generation take this condescending and unprincipled posture. The French philosopher Alain Badiou, who still views the task of the philosopher in the Socratic terms of “corrupting the youth,” reflects on his own participation in the French revolt of May ’68 as an experience to which he must still remain faithful, including to one of its famous slogans: “Elections, a trap for fools!”

The alternative, to which so many of Badiou’s generation fell prey, is a position of ethical betrayal. These “grown-ups” now claim not only that the aspirations of the past are no longer relevant, but that they were always false, always an illusion. They’re like those bitter people who spurt out at former partners after a breakup, “I never loved you anyway!”

Indeed, Abidor has described May ’68 itself as “the end of a revolutionary illusion.” It’s what NYU professor Kristin Ross, drawing on another ’68-er, Jacques Rancière, calls “the police conception of history”: Move along, folks, there’s nothing to see here! As Ross argues in her book “May ’68 and Its Afterlives,” this episode actually constituted an “event” in history — meaning that it broke from the repetition of everyday routine and brought about new possibilities. It was an event, Ross writes, “in the sense that thousands — even millions — of people were led infinitely farther than their education, their social situation, their initial vocation would have allowed them to foresee; an event in the sense that real participation — much more than a vague, formal solidarity, much more even than shared ideas — altered the course of lives.”

Today, the stakes are too high to abandon the greater vision aimed at by young radicals. The economic historian Adam Tooze recently wrote in the Guardian: “We have to face the possibility that we have been living in a charmed interval.” In the aftermath of the 1918 flu pandemic, massive economic growth and technological development brought rapidly rising living standards and increased life expectancy. But now the costs of growth have revealed themselves: Climate crisis and zoonotic diseases, as Tooze puts it, “are not merely accidents of nature. They have anthropogenic drivers.” While there is much we don’t know about the current pandemic, we can be sure that without a thorough restructuring of our society, there are more like it to come.

But the terrifying problem is that we have also been living through another kind of interval, as Badiou has argued — the interval that came after 1968, after the gradual defeat of revolutionary movements around the world and the domination of the neoliberal principle that “there is no alternative” to global capitalism. 

This kind of interval is the one that comes after a period of widespread revolutionary action, which has built up to the point where it can present an alternative to the existing world, the world of domination and inequality. In these revolutionary periods there is an emancipatory idea which develops real, organizational support on a mass scale. 

In the interval, Badiou writes in “The Rebirth of History,” the revolutionary idea is “dormant.” Great rebellions, discontent and agitation still take place throughout the interval. But the revolutionary idea hasn’t been developed into a sustained and concrete political sequence. The idea of emancipation hasn’t taken a material form, and those of us who still retain some hazy notion of the validity of this idea — that is, those of us who have not totally capitulated to the existing reality and decided that domination and inequality are permanent aspects of human existence — are uncertain about how to proceed.

There are signs of hope and inspiration in our present moment: A new generation is mobilizing around an emancipatory idea and attempting to find a way out of the interval. They are uncertain, experimenting, still finding a new way in a forbidding world. But they have that spark, that intuition, that something more is possible, that we have a responsibility to push beyond the boundaries of the weak and stultifying politics of the status quo. This is what real politics is. As the Congolese philosopher Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba has eloquently put it, “Politics is a creative invention.”

“The political attitude is not accommodating; the state of affairs in the world does not have to remain so because it is so,” he writes. “People may live differently than they live.” The “political attitude” is summed up in the simple yet impatient statement: “Let us do something about the situation!”

The scale of social change required to manage the impending age of catastrophe lies beyond the myopia of those who, since the election of George W. Bush (if not before that, in historical terms), have endlessly repeated that we have no option but to reduce our politics to the embrace of the “lesser evil.” To reprimand young people for failing to muster enthusiasm for voting for the lesser evil ultimately amounts to a refusal to recognize the necessity for a greater idea, for a mobilization for structural transformation. In our age of catastrophe, “lesser-evil-ism” is the most unethical position. The slogan of May ’68, “Be realistic; demand the impossible!” remains a rational and ethical principle for the present. We should be inspired by the youth who are reviving it.

To commit yourself to struggling for a better world, even when the odds are against you and the defeated leadership of the left is telling you, in the words of a May ’68 poster, to “be young and shut up” — that’s real courage.

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Time correspondent Charlotte Alter takes a more optimistic view. While criticizing the grip that elderly people have on government, she also believes time itself will make it so that younger generations, especially the millennials, will get their chance in the sun. Her new book, “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America” profiles a wide range of millennial leaders from across the political spectrum, from Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Lauren Underwood, to former South Bend Mayor and presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, to Republican Rep. Dan Crenshaw. Alter demonstrates how this necessary generational shift will change the shape of what we consider politically possible in the U.S. 

Alter spoke to Salon about her book and about the challenges that come with another election full of people that were born before the advent of color television. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

Your book focuses on how the millennial generation — the only one so far to outnumber the boomers — are finally reaching for political power. What does this generational shift say about our political landscape?

Let me be clear that this is a book that’s not about 2020. This is a book that’s really more about 2030. What we’re looking at is a shift that is inevitable. Until people can solve mortality, young people will get older and older people will retire. 

Right now, we are ruled by people who formed their political attitudes in the 20th century, in reaction to the historical events of that time. And, as we move further into the 21st century, we’re going to shift from 20th century attitudes to 21st century attitudes. This book is about how millennials formed their political identity in response to the events of the first two decades of the 21st century.

Right now we’re looking at a presidential race, where everybody is very old. The Democratic race has boiled down to two men that are so old that they aren’t even boomers. Trump, of course, is in his seventies. Also, congressional leadership is old. Mitch McConnell is 78. Nancy Pelosi is 79. How is this altering their political views or framing their understanding of current politics?

Socialism is a good example of this. In some ways, Bernie Sanders is an exception to that, because he’s somebody who identifies as a democratic socialist, despite the fact that he grew up during the Cold War when socialism had such a negative connotation in the United States. Sanders is a generational outlier when it comes to his attitudes about socialism.

But when you see, for example, this vote breakdown that we have been seeing in these primaries, of older voters gravitating towards Joe Biden and younger voters gravitating towards Bernie Sanders, a lot of that has to do with connotations around socialism. Older people who grew up during the Cold War, when they think of socialism, they think of gulags and bad shoes and waiting in line for a loaf of bread and going to a reeducation camp. They think of the Soviet Union and China and Cuba.

When millennials think of democratic socialism, they think of places in Northern Europe where there’s free childcare and universal health care and easy access to higher education. Socialism for this group, has lost its sting.

The oldest millennials were eight or nine when the Berlin Wall fell. They don’t  have the same context for that world.

Technology is another area where we’re seeing a generational breakdown. Even though Sanders has a very online following, he himself is not a digitally savvy person.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (a Democratic congresswoman from New York) is a digital native who really knows how to use technology.

Joe Biden, certainly, is not, like, firing up the tweets.

Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump were all born before the bikini was invented. They were not vaccinated against polio when they were babies, because it wouldn’t be invented. Some of them were almost in college when Barbie was invented. They just are from another time.

Sanders is somebody who happens to have ideas that are very much of this moment and that’s why he’s got so much traction with younger voters. But, one of the points of this book is that no matter who gets elected president in 2020, that same person is not going to be in charge 10 years from now. The older our leadership gets, the closer we are to a turnover. 

I’m Generation X. We get completely forgotten in all of this. All Generation X candidates got run out of the race early. Why do you think this seems to happen? 

I don’t necessarily think that millennials will come before Generation X. It’s very likely that, after the boomer president, we’ll be looking at a Kamala Harris or a Cory Booker or a Ted Cruz. I’m not arguing that the next president will be a millennial. There is a deep bench of highly qualified Gen X politicians who are definitely ready to take the mantle. I’m not arguing that millennials should cut in line.

I also just think from a pure numbers perspective, part of the reason that Gen X gets overlooked is because there are just fewer of them. Millennials are like a reverberated baby boom, because they’re the kids of the baby boomers. 

Gen X absolutely is almost certainly more likely to take up the mantle before millennials will.

I’m just going to go ahead and say it right now: I think there will be a millennial president before there’s a Gen X president.

Really? Interesting. Maybe, you might be right.

The youngest person that you profile in this book is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was born in 1989. And she’s called, by all sorts of people, an icon of her generation. How representative is she and in what way?

I always am wary of holding up one person as representative of an entire generation. Generations are not monolithic. That’s part of the reason why I chose 10 people for this book. But she certainly is representative in a couple of ways.

This is the most diverse generation in history, until the generation that comes right after it. She is a young Latina woman. She is more demographically representative of the Bernie Sanders movement than Bernie Sanders himself is.

Her political positions on Medicare-for-All, a Green New Deal, student loan forgiveness are very much in line with where many — but not all — of her millennial peers are.

That’s important to note here. Not all millennials are socialists. Not even most millennials identify as socialists. What I’m really talking about is an increased comfort with these ideas,  and an increased willingness to engage with them and not be turned off by the socialist brand. 

She’s representative in her use of social media. I found her personal Facebook, from before she was in Congress, where she was posting all of these videos of her trips to Standing Rock and her trip to the Women’s March. She had live-streamed these very important political moments for her, and she was not even running for Congress yet.

Watching those videos, you can really get a sense of how her political identity and her political presentation has evolved. But, it’s also interesting how much it hasn’t. 

That’s true for a lot of millennials. This is the first fully digitally native generation, which means that pretty much everybody with a social media account has grown up having a portion of their life that is for public consumption. A part of them is public facing, even if they’re not a celebrity.

It seems kind of seamless for a lot of them.

Some of these millennials don’t have to be media trained. They’re more instantly camera ready than some of their predecessors. Social media has trained an entire generation how to pose for a camera, how to speak in public, how to package your ideas for public consumption, how do you ask people to do things, whether it’s click a link or donate or come to this event.

All of those are things that are the skills that you use in political campaigns. That’s part of what this book is about, how social media has trained an entire generation in the skills that you need to be politically active.

Pete Buttigieg is somebody that you profile for this book. He positioned himself early on an icon of generational change, the opportunity to pass the baton, etc. And yet, most of his support was actually coming from older people. Meanwhile, Sanders, like you said, was pulling from younger people. What do you make of that?

Older people loved Pete Buttigieg, partly because he was an old person’s idea of what a young person should be. When I talked to voters at many different candidates events, age, as an issue, was more important to older voters than for younger voters. In terms of not wanting a president who’s that old. Right?

It became clear to me in my conversation with these voters that they understood the toll age takes on your mind and your body, and they were uncomfortable with somebody who was 10 or 15 years older than them taking on the most challenging job on the planet. It becomes more real to them, because they’re experiencing it themselves. Younger voters don’t know really what age means on a firsthand basis, and are more willing to just write it off. 

Pete Buttigieg is, in a lot of ways, an example of how far millennials have dragged the party to the left. That sounds surprising because he was the moderate candidate. The way we measure how things have moved over time is by how far the center moves to the left. If you compare a moderate like Pete Buttigieg to moderate from, say the 1990s, it really shows how far the center of gravity has moved to the left.

Pete Buttigieg was for universal healthcare, even if he wasn’t for the exact Medicare-for-All plan that Warren and Sanders were advocating. He wanted massive student loan forgiveness. He wanted massive government action on climate change. He wanted a massive government jobs program to help build infrastructure and care for seniors. Those are things that a moderate 30 years ago would never have been asking for. Even though he’s not of the left, he is an example of how far the party has moved to the left.

I want to ask about the phrase “OK boomer.” There was this pitched battle going around the internet, where people were defending this phrase on the grounds that there are now three generations of people living in the boomers’ shadow. We deserve to have our fun. Meanwhile, boomers said it was prejudiced and cruel to say such a thing. I want to hear your opinion on this.

Railing against boomers doesn’t really do anything. It’s a waste of time. That’s why I wrote a book that was about lifting up and examining millennial attitudes, rather than attacking boomers. 

But I also think that there is real criticism there of some of the decisions that boomer politicians, in particular, have made over the course of the last 40 years, that have led us to some of the places we are, particularly on education and climate change.

The sensitivity to it, with boomers getting really upset about it? It’s like, come on. I saw that somebody said that it was akin to a racial slur. That’s totally ridiculous.

Age is something that will happen to everybody. I’m sure, in 30 or 40 years, our kids will be saying, “Okay, millennial.” We’ll just have to deal with it.

People making such a huge deal out of it is ridiculous. There are legitimate criticisms about the ways that boomers have run this country. But I also think that blaming individuals for decisions that elected officials, who happen to be their age, made is not particularly productive.

The post Our political future is in millennial hands — even if it feels like boomers will never retire appeared first on Salon.com.

“Three years ago, we launched the great American comeback. . . . Tonight, I stand before you to share the incredible results,” President Trump said on Tuesday night. “The years of economic decay are over,” he bragged, adding that the economy, “is the best it has ever been.”

Yet as many outlets have explained, Trump’s policies haven’t done much for the economy. His signature economic legislation, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA), has not proven to have been of any benefit to workers, especially blue collar ones. And though the unemployment rate has fallen to 3.5 percent, Trump inherited an already-low unemployment rate of 4.7 percent when he started in office. Likewise, the poverty rate is falling slightly, yet one in eight Americans are still living below the poverty line. Hence, when Trump says the economy is “the best it has ever been,” there is a cohort generation of Americans who feel deeply disconnected from this claim: Millennials, the youngest generation to be entirely of working age. Indeed, Trump’s ongoing claim that the economy is booming is frustrating to a generation overburdened by student debt, heath care costs and debt, astronomical childcare costs, credit card debt and out-of-reach housing prices.

Amanda Dacks, a 24-year-old who works in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, told Salon in an interview that when she hears Trump brag about the economy, she’s “inclined to disagree.”

“I think the thing that holds Millennials back more than any other generation is our student loan debt,” Dacks said. “I’m completely unable to do the things that would stimulate the economy because I’m paying over $1,000 a month in student loans.”

In the U.S., student loan debt has more than doubled over the past decade to total about $1.5 trillion. The New York Fed says half that student loan debt is held by millennials. 

For Dacks, who makes $41,000 a year, she has to still work two to three freelance gigs and babysit on weekends to make ends meet. Dacks said she will be supporting the Democratic candidate in 2020 who is focused on alleviating student loan debt, someone like Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders.

Kat Dean is a 38-year-old living in Eugene, Oregon. As a bookkeeper, with two kids, she and her husband had to leave the costly San Francisco Bay Area to afford childcare.

“We were there for 2 and a half years, and after having kids we were like ‘we can’t keep this up, it’s not possible,'” Dean, who grew up in the Bay Area, said. “We couldn’t afford childcare if we had both been working full-time.”

Danee K., a 25-year-old living in central Montana, told Salon in an email she makes $32,000 a year before taxes working at a nonprofit. When asked how she feels about the claim that the economy is thriving, she said in an email: “I wouldn’t say I agree or disagree.”

“The economy is thriving purely from a statistical/numerical standpoint, but in my opinion an economy isn’t thriving until there is no more poverty,” she said. “The fact that there’s so much income inequality makes me feel angry and hopeless about ever having financial freedom.”

Indeed, there is both a generational and gender gap when it comes to poverty in the United States. In 2015, data from the Census Bureau showed that millennial women were more likely than their male counterparts, and more likely than women of any other age group, to live in poverty. A separate report in 2019 found that American millennial women are 37 percent more likely than Gen X women to live below the poverty line. 

Danee said her biggest economic anxieties — student loan debt, expensive healthcare — keep her from moving forward in life.

“I’m putting off buying a house, I’m putting off getting married, and I’m putting off starting a family because my financial security is nonexistent,” she said. “Obviously there are people that are doing fine without college, but many of us bought into the lie that a college degree was actually worth something and now we have these pieces of paper worth $100,000.”

The post Trump says the economy is great. Millennials disagree appeared first on Salon.com.

Millennials aren’t teenagers anymore. They’re working hard, starting families and trying to build wealth. But as a generation, they’re way behind.

They’re deeper in debt, only half as likely to own a home, and more likely to live in poverty than their parents.

If we want to address their problems, we need to understand those problems.

Number one: Stagnant wages. Median wages grew by an average of 0.3% per year between 2007 and 2017, including the Great Recession – just as millennials were beginning their careers. Before that, between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s, wages grew at three times that rate.

Second: As wages have stagnated, the costs of essentials like housing and education have been going through the roof. Millennials own fewer homes, the most common way Americans have built wealth in the past.  Education costs have soared. Adjusted for inflation, the average college education in 2018 cost nearly three times what it did in 1978.

Third: As a result of all of this, Debt.  That expensive college education means that the average graduate carries a whopping $28,000 in student loan debt. As a generation, millennials are more than one trillion dollars in the red.  In addition, the average young adult carries nearly $5,000 in credit card debt, and this number is growing.

Fourth: Millennials are finding it harder than previous generations to save for the future. Among Fortune 500 companies, only 81 sponsored a pension plan in 2017, that’s down from 288 twenty years ago. Employers are replacing pensions with essentially “do-it-yourself” savings plans.

All of this means that fewer millennials are entering the middle class than previous generations.  Most have less than $1,000 in savings. Many young people today won’t be able to retire until 75, if at all.

If we don’t start trying to reduce this generational wealth gap — through policies like debt relief, accessible health insurance, paid family leave, affordable housing, and a more equitable tax code for renters — millions of young Americans will struggle to find financial security for the rest of their lives.

The post Robert Reich: Four reasons why millennials don’t have any money appeared first on Salon.com.