This is just the classic happiness u-curve. People in their forties always report the lowest happiness and highest anxiety. Holds true across time and across countries and seems to be an almost universal feature of modern humans. I know everyone loves an article about how [my generation] has it uniquely bad, but millennials are financially better off than Xers were at their age, who were better off than the Boomers, and Zoomers will be better off than we a when they get to our age.
Two questions to always ask about demographic claims: is this an age or a cohort effect? And is this a global or American effect?
The finding is a little interesting in that much published research on happiness is seeing a loss of the u-curve in the Anglosphere. (Last week’s World Happiness Report covered this, for example; I work for a happiness research nonprofit that found this in our own US self-reported happiness data.) So something must be different about their data collection methodology maybe?
Zoomer anxiety went super high during the pandemic and has steadily receded since. It may be that the "loss" of the u-curve was a really just a pandemic phenomenon, and the literature hasn't caught up. But even if zoomers remained unhappier than millennials, I would still bet they get even less happy in early middle age and happier again in late middle age. You can only show loss of the curve longitudinally.
As someone who turned 40 during the pandemic, I’d definitely seemed that I was in the best life stage for that! The disease itself affected older people more, and the prevention measures hurt young people more, but those of us in our 40s were mostly ok working from home.
You beat me to this comment! Though I’d love to see a comparison of the Millennial happiness u-curve to u-curves of other age cohorts. I don’t have a strong intuition about whether the Millennial u-curve would dip lower, higher, or be about average but that’s why I’d love to see that comparison!
I do think that the cost of living stuff is a lot more impactful on millennials vs Gen X right now. I’m a millennial and happen to be friends with a fair number of Gen Xers and they’re just at a different stage of life even if they have kids etc. At least in my liberal, well-off bubble, 50+ year olds are sitting on substantial nest eggs, nearly paid off houses etc. Millenials are still in what Corinne Law calls “the squeeze” - that period of time when both demands from family life (young kids who need a lot of time from you) and work (aggressive work demands on time) pile on top of each other. Add things like childcare, commute and housing costs rising and it does feel like a recipe for stress. The squeeze is supposed to ease at ages 40+ so many younger millennials are probably in the thick of it, plus exact timing depends on when you had kids so likely some 40+ year olds too.
I think the stagnant labor market is related too, at least in the professional managerial class. The cliche millennial hustle culture is real and came from being raised to believe that if we worked hard we’d make it to the top. For a while it seemed to work- companies were competing for talent, perks and promotions were flowing. Now that’s all stopped, and just at the point when we’re supposed to be making it into positions of power, we’re just supposed to feel lucky to have a job at all. It seems like office culture has dried up too, which was a social touchstone we took for granted. This is all anecdotal, but it’s pretty palpable/universal in my network and would explain the liberal correlation too.
Put another way: millennials bought into the system and are now feeling it let us down; genz never bought into the system to begin with.
There's a real geographic divide on this one, but for me it's housing. My household income is about ten times the median in my neighborhood and yet I can barely afford my house. We're selling and moving to the DC area because I got a new job. There, we can rent a house that is much nicer than the one we live in now for significantly less than we're currently paying, which is nice! However, if we were to buy the same exact house at the price similar ones nearby sold for, it would cost double the rent even if we somehow scraped together a $250k for a 20% down payment. I look at numbers all day for a living but you don't have to be a financial wizard to see that's a bad deal.
You might say, that doesn't sound so bad, and it isn't. It's fine. I have a nice life. But it's hard not to feel resentful at getting locked out when I worked so hard to get here. I went to a good college, graduated with no debt and a good job, got married to my now-wife who did the same. Worked our way up to the top part of the income distribution. What did it get us? Rent a nice place in a nice neighborhood and accept that ownership will be a bad deal there forever versus investing the down payment, or go be the highest-income person in a crappy exurb but own a house for the same amount of money because income is not wealth. This is what success looks like? If this is all I get, how much worse must it be for someone whose career went closer to average, or worse?
For reasons I, a GenXer, have never entirely understood, Millennials have ALWAYS been uniquely disappointed in, and/or whiny about, their financial situation. And no, it’s not because they’ve been uniquely hard done by macroeconomic developments. They were not the first generation to graduate into a recession (Gen X did too, in the early 90s), or to experience an early-career stock market crash (we did that with the tech bubble in the late 90s). And it’s not like Millennials were the only generation in the economy in 2008; Gen X were still in their 30s, lots of them just getting into the housing market themselves when all that went down.
I truly think it’s all about childhood expectations. Gen X, especially those of us who have a lot of memories of the gloomy 70s, were never led to expect that life would be easy, or fair. Who knew that would prove to be such an emotional boon decades later?
Not just their financial situation! They are a distinctly gloomy lot, I find.
As a GenX, my diagnosis is that the Millennials unfortunately developed "hopes and dreams", which as we know is the gateway to disappointment. Instead of just being delighted that the world hasn't been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust (yet! I shouldn't jinx it!) they seem disappointed that life is just work and errands, with no greater meaning or purpose.
Eh, I’m going to gently push back on the idea that we Millennials haven’t faced uniquely hard macroeconomic developments compared to Gen X. You are certainly right to point out that Gen X faced its own hardships, but what makes our situation material worse than yours is the degree of those hardships. The Great Recession was much worse than the recession of the early 90s, and the recovery was much slower. The composition of the workforce changed as older people stayed in jobs for longer or took jobs that would have normally gone to younger folks, keeping more of us un- or underemployed for longer. Likewise, I’m pretty sure the COVID Crash was worse than the Dot Com Bubble (albeit shorter). Now we have the Trump Tariffs.
Both of our generations have also faced major technological disruption after many in our respective groups had developed skills and career paths for the old paradigm. On the one hand, y’all grew up without internet, and the initial forays into the workforce for many of y’all happened before it really became a “thing.” By comparison, I can kind of remember a time before the internet, but I’m pretty sure we had dialup before I turned 8. Most of my childhood memories (and those of my peers) occurred post-internet, and therefore we had more time to adapt while our brains were still very neuroplastic.
Our technological disruption—AI—has yet to play itself out, on the other hand, so it’s unclear what kind of longterm consequences it will have for us. I’m neither a Doomer nor a Hypeman when it comes to AI, but I do think there’s a reasonable possibility that the economic disruption of AI will be bigger than the internet. Feel free to push back if you disagree, of course.
Where I am sympathetic is that it really made a big difference if you had been able to acquire assets before the 2008-09 GFC. Because when the government pushed stimulus, everything went up - stocks, housing, etc. And if you weren't on that escalator already, it didn't lift you up.
But to things like tech disruption etc, I am unimpressed. Plus there's the classic "you young folks don't understand how good you have it" reaction from those of us who lived before this age of wonders and can appreciate the smartphone as a modern innovation of tremendous value.
And that issue of perspective continues to many things. There are complaints about rising teen suicide rates - but those rates are still FAR LOWER than the late 80s and 90s. There is distress about fentanyl overdoses - but we had the crack epidemic and near-uninhabitable cities. Global warming makes you worry that the world could end someday in the future - but the Cold War nuclear standoff felt like the world could end literally any day. You feel like the older generations are holding jobs and spots you want - but we grew up in the shadow of the biggest generation the country had known.
So while I get that Millennials have trouble being happy with things they never had a chance to miss, from a GenX perspective it is hard to see how things have been more difficult for you. Don't be jealous that we can appreciate the present more because we lived through a sh*ttier past.
Two things. First, implicit in what you're saying (and in a lot of the writing on this topic) is the idea that recessions are much, much harder on people in their 20s than on people in their 30s or older. And while there is some economic research showing economic "scarring" from graduating into a recession, I think that effect gets wildly overstated into the idea that the recessions since 2000 have somehow affected only Millennials, which is patently untrue. Gen X wasn't even all that old, or far along in our careers, when 2008 happened; most of us were still in our 30s, and plenty of us lost jobs and careers as part of that contraction (I kept mine, but my pay took a big hit, and I'm not sure it's ever recovered compared to what it might have been absent the recession).
Second, even if you accept the "scarring" hypothesis, Millennials (especially elder Millennials) are just too old to continue to complain about being uniquely exposed to some of these later shocks. Covid and Tariffs are hitting Millennials at roughly the same age that 2008 hit Gen X. And Gen X, most of whom are still at least a decade away from retirement and, over the course of their careers, have probably been MORE affected then Millennials by the Boomers' refusal to retire, are still exposed to all of this just like Millennials are. How could one possibly say that these are all challenges faced uniquely by Millennials?
I think you bring up some good points. I’m curious if we could compromise, though, on both generations being EQUALLY affected by Boomers’ refusal to retire. After all, it has knock-on effects; Gen X would be taking Boomers’ positions, and Millennials would be taking Gen X’s positions. We’d both be doing so, of course, later than Boomers did, which affects both of our abilities to accumulate wealth.
Speaking of wealth accumulation, there’s also the issue of housing (insert Matthew Yglesias here). I don’t want to deny that. However, would you agree that Gen X has had more opportunities to purchase a home than Millennials have? Certainly Gen X was massively impacted by 2008. Y’all might have been more impacted by that than any other generation. However, my understanding is that Millennials’ home-ownership rates are down compared to previous generations. Many of us can’t even begin to think about buying—even those of us in $100k+/year households like mine—because the market has gotten so damn expensive. I bring housing up specifically since the question is wealth accumulation, and housing is where most people have their wealth housed (pun very much intended).
I'm always happy to close ranks against the Boomers--Gen Xers have been resenting the Boomers since before many Millennials were born--so sure, I'll agree with you on that! Though I do feel like Boomer resistance to retiring at a decent age might hurt Gen X more in the long run, since companies might rationally choose the 49 year-old Millennial to replace a Boomer who finally stepped aside at 80 rather than the Gen X candidate who's already in their 60s.
As for housing, I truly don't know. I find that issue really tough to disentangle from generation-independent factors. For example: I graduated high school in 1987 and college in 1991. When I returned home for a year after college (because I couldn't find a job), I ran into a few of my high school buddies who went straight to work in the trades (auto repair and construction) rather than go to college. They were both married, with a kid, and they had both already bought a house in our nice, but decidedly unglamorous, midwestern city. I had only my school debt. I then spent the next 15 years or so getting a law degree and then working in San Francisco and London, two cities with housing costs so outlandishly expensive even at the time (late 90s-early oughts) that my wife and I literally never even discussed the possibility of buying a home, even though we had a couple of kids. It wasn't until 2006, when we moved to a different nice, but decidedly unglamorous, midwestern city that we finally became homeowners, at age 36. Of course, that meant that we bought very close to the height of the pre-2008 market; the interest on our 30-year fixed mortgage was 6.5%, and our house lost about 40% of its value in our first decade of ownership. Fun!
My high schools friends' stories definitely fit the "people used to find it easier to buy a home" narrative. My personal narrative sounds an awful lot like what Millennials complain about. I don't know which is more representative of Gen X.
As a 37-year-old who hovers between the left edge of liberal and the right edge of very liberal, this tracks to my experience. On the one hand, we face some very real, unique economic challenges in our generation—graduating into the Great Recession and facing COVID in our prime earning years. On the other hand, we’re also very liberal, and have been growing less so at a slower rate than previous generations, which certainly colors our perception of the economy in such a hyper-partisan era.
As others have pointed out, there’s probably also an aspect of people in midlife being unhappier than others. Classic Wednesday problem in the school and work week—caught between last weekend (the lack of responsibilities in childhood) and next weekend (the lack of responsibilities of retirement), and far enough from both that you’re not feeling the lasting/anticipatory glow of either.
I’m curious, though, if there’s an aspect of economic jealousy at play; the understandable kind of jealousy, based on real material differences, not the imagined-differences kind. Moreover, I think Millennials’ wealth share comparison point isn’t Gen X, it’s Boomers. Boomers were who raised the vast majority of us, after all, and we grew up in the households that wealth share allowed them to give us. As such, I’m going to compare the shares of wealth between Q3 1990 and Q3 2025. I’m picking those dates because a fair share of each generation will be represented in each respective age group—lots of Boomers were both Under 40 and 40-54 in 1990, and lots of Millennials were both in 2025. I’m picking Q3…well, arbitrarily. It’s where my birthday falls, and I needed to pick.
In Q3 1990, Under 40s held 11.6% of wealth and 40-54s held 32.0%. By Q3 2025, those numbers had dropped to 6.6% for Under 40s and 19.7% for 40-54s. Meanwhile, the 55-69 and 70+ shares of wealth has risen from 37.1% and 19.3% to 41.0% and 32.2%, respectively.
Now, it should be acknowledged that Under 40s in 1990 made up a greater share of the population than they do now, so that might explain at least some of the difference—though, at the same time, 40-59s make up a greater share now than they did then, so that can’t explain that age group’s decrease.
What I believe all this suggests is that we Millennials have been primed for dissatisfaction with the economy because our wealth share lags behind what our parents’ was at our age. Now, standards of living have definitely increased over that time, but I believe a lot of our dissatisfaction comes from the fact that we remember the standards in which we grew up RELATIVE TO THE GENERAL STANDARDS OF THE TIME (caps for emphasis). And, based on the increasing wealth shared of the 55-69s and the Over 70s over the same time frame—especially significant for the Over 70s—I suspect at least some of that wealth share decrease came from Boomers holding onto more of their wealth than previous generations did.
So why, then, is Gen X more satisfied than Millennials? After all, they’re in the thick of the greatest wealth share decrease. That part, I suspect, has to do with our respective political leanings. Millennials are a very liberal generation, while Gen X is the least so.
And I think this myth is important because it illustrates how much of this is about false expectations rather than real conditions. NOT that Millennials haven't experienced any hardships, but just that EVERYONE has and you are not that special. Sorry not sorry! :)
"We found that the median wealth of older millennials (those born between 1980 and 1989) was 37% above expectations. The wealth of younger millennials and older Gen Zers (those born between 1990 and 1999) was a similar 39% above expectations."
From what I’ve been able to see in a quick bit of research—this 9-hour flight really is interminable—the evidence is quite mixed. Some studies, like the St. Louis Fed one in 2024, have indeed found that the median Millennial is better off than previous generations, as you say. Others, like this 2023 study in the American Journal of Sociology, found the opposite.
In that study, the top 10% of Millennials were still better off than previous generations—by a whopping 20%, no less—but the median Millennial was 30% WORSE off (compared to Boomers).
As with any scientific question, we shouldn’t take one study as gospel; we should look at the consensus. And that evidence appears to say that…we need more evidence, because different studies are producing different answers. 🤣
My problem with socialists (as they exist in the USA, think DSA) is that they assume stuff just exists, and their only concern is how to distribute it. So price controls seem like a good idea because the amount of stuff (housing, food, etc) doesn't change. It is what it is (or so they believe).
So what happens to your sense of purpose and meaning if your worldview doesn't value creation? If you think that the clothes that you wear, the food you eat, the car you drive, and the phone that you use just exist? You aren't going to work hard to innovate and create goods and services more efficiently. You aren't going to feel like you are valuable if you don't grok that the work that you do is contributing to the creation of the world that you live in, and every detail of it was created by people doing the same sort of work that you clock in to do every day.
IDK, I'm a big proponent of reminding people that when I get on a video call at my job, the thing that is happening is that my voice is being converted into 1s and 0s, sent through the air, and then recreated (sometimes thousands of) miles away and it's recognizable as my voice, and it feels barely different from talking to someone three feet in front of me. That's amazing, and not being in awe of that just feels like not paying attention.
This idea is way too cute to be a major reason for why liberals and/or millenials are less happy, but maybe it's one aspect of it.
I’ve been thinking about a factor of unease that is often hard to measure: choice. It often feels like the choices our generation has had were not as difficult for the two before us. More than previous generations we are forced to choose between opportunity or stability, leaving metros because we couldn’t find housing that fit our careers or choosing to limit our family size because the economic timing never worked. These choices stick with you and when you add intractable political structures with minimal electoral representation by our generation, it doesn’t feel great. I’m aware that every generation probably feels this to some extent, but I think it would be worth studying the extent to which these types of decisions impact generational malaise.
This is where my thinking went too. I'm 42 and have felt my choices get more and more limited in the last 8-10 years. Maybe that's a typical curve to feel when you're in the caregiving for both kids and parents phase, but this job market is demoralizing, my neighborhood is feeling the effects of disinvestment (losing our school, increase in violence), and I feel very limited in my options other than staying the course and playing my part in building the community I want. (Maybe that can be okay?)
While both millenials and Gen X are in “housing a family” life stage, aren’t many more Gen Xers already homeowners with largely locked in mortgages (often at low pre-2023 rates) compared to millenials, and thus Gen Xers much less exposed to rising housing costs?
This is just the classic happiness u-curve. People in their forties always report the lowest happiness and highest anxiety. Holds true across time and across countries and seems to be an almost universal feature of modern humans. I know everyone loves an article about how [my generation] has it uniquely bad, but millennials are financially better off than Xers were at their age, who were better off than the Boomers, and Zoomers will be better off than we a when they get to our age.
Two questions to always ask about demographic claims: is this an age or a cohort effect? And is this a global or American effect?
The finding is a little interesting in that much published research on happiness is seeing a loss of the u-curve in the Anglosphere. (Last week’s World Happiness Report covered this, for example; I work for a happiness research nonprofit that found this in our own US self-reported happiness data.) So something must be different about their data collection methodology maybe?
Zoomer anxiety went super high during the pandemic and has steadily receded since. It may be that the "loss" of the u-curve was a really just a pandemic phenomenon, and the literature hasn't caught up. But even if zoomers remained unhappier than millennials, I would still bet they get even less happy in early middle age and happier again in late middle age. You can only show loss of the curve longitudinally.
As someone who turned 40 during the pandemic, I’d definitely seemed that I was in the best life stage for that! The disease itself affected older people more, and the prevention measures hurt young people more, but those of us in our 40s were mostly ok working from home.
You beat me to this comment! Though I’d love to see a comparison of the Millennial happiness u-curve to u-curves of other age cohorts. I don’t have a strong intuition about whether the Millennial u-curve would dip lower, higher, or be about average but that’s why I’d love to see that comparison!
I do think that the cost of living stuff is a lot more impactful on millennials vs Gen X right now. I’m a millennial and happen to be friends with a fair number of Gen Xers and they’re just at a different stage of life even if they have kids etc. At least in my liberal, well-off bubble, 50+ year olds are sitting on substantial nest eggs, nearly paid off houses etc. Millenials are still in what Corinne Law calls “the squeeze” - that period of time when both demands from family life (young kids who need a lot of time from you) and work (aggressive work demands on time) pile on top of each other. Add things like childcare, commute and housing costs rising and it does feel like a recipe for stress. The squeeze is supposed to ease at ages 40+ so many younger millennials are probably in the thick of it, plus exact timing depends on when you had kids so likely some 40+ year olds too.
I think the stagnant labor market is related too, at least in the professional managerial class. The cliche millennial hustle culture is real and came from being raised to believe that if we worked hard we’d make it to the top. For a while it seemed to work- companies were competing for talent, perks and promotions were flowing. Now that’s all stopped, and just at the point when we’re supposed to be making it into positions of power, we’re just supposed to feel lucky to have a job at all. It seems like office culture has dried up too, which was a social touchstone we took for granted. This is all anecdotal, but it’s pretty palpable/universal in my network and would explain the liberal correlation too.
Put another way: millennials bought into the system and are now feeling it let us down; genz never bought into the system to begin with.
There's a real geographic divide on this one, but for me it's housing. My household income is about ten times the median in my neighborhood and yet I can barely afford my house. We're selling and moving to the DC area because I got a new job. There, we can rent a house that is much nicer than the one we live in now for significantly less than we're currently paying, which is nice! However, if we were to buy the same exact house at the price similar ones nearby sold for, it would cost double the rent even if we somehow scraped together a $250k for a 20% down payment. I look at numbers all day for a living but you don't have to be a financial wizard to see that's a bad deal.
You might say, that doesn't sound so bad, and it isn't. It's fine. I have a nice life. But it's hard not to feel resentful at getting locked out when I worked so hard to get here. I went to a good college, graduated with no debt and a good job, got married to my now-wife who did the same. Worked our way up to the top part of the income distribution. What did it get us? Rent a nice place in a nice neighborhood and accept that ownership will be a bad deal there forever versus investing the down payment, or go be the highest-income person in a crappy exurb but own a house for the same amount of money because income is not wealth. This is what success looks like? If this is all I get, how much worse must it be for someone whose career went closer to average, or worse?
For reasons I, a GenXer, have never entirely understood, Millennials have ALWAYS been uniquely disappointed in, and/or whiny about, their financial situation. And no, it’s not because they’ve been uniquely hard done by macroeconomic developments. They were not the first generation to graduate into a recession (Gen X did too, in the early 90s), or to experience an early-career stock market crash (we did that with the tech bubble in the late 90s). And it’s not like Millennials were the only generation in the economy in 2008; Gen X were still in their 30s, lots of them just getting into the housing market themselves when all that went down.
I truly think it’s all about childhood expectations. Gen X, especially those of us who have a lot of memories of the gloomy 70s, were never led to expect that life would be easy, or fair. Who knew that would prove to be such an emotional boon decades later?
Not just their financial situation! They are a distinctly gloomy lot, I find.
As a GenX, my diagnosis is that the Millennials unfortunately developed "hopes and dreams", which as we know is the gateway to disappointment. Instead of just being delighted that the world hasn't been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust (yet! I shouldn't jinx it!) they seem disappointed that life is just work and errands, with no greater meaning or purpose.
Eh, I’m going to gently push back on the idea that we Millennials haven’t faced uniquely hard macroeconomic developments compared to Gen X. You are certainly right to point out that Gen X faced its own hardships, but what makes our situation material worse than yours is the degree of those hardships. The Great Recession was much worse than the recession of the early 90s, and the recovery was much slower. The composition of the workforce changed as older people stayed in jobs for longer or took jobs that would have normally gone to younger folks, keeping more of us un- or underemployed for longer. Likewise, I’m pretty sure the COVID Crash was worse than the Dot Com Bubble (albeit shorter). Now we have the Trump Tariffs.
Both of our generations have also faced major technological disruption after many in our respective groups had developed skills and career paths for the old paradigm. On the one hand, y’all grew up without internet, and the initial forays into the workforce for many of y’all happened before it really became a “thing.” By comparison, I can kind of remember a time before the internet, but I’m pretty sure we had dialup before I turned 8. Most of my childhood memories (and those of my peers) occurred post-internet, and therefore we had more time to adapt while our brains were still very neuroplastic.
Our technological disruption—AI—has yet to play itself out, on the other hand, so it’s unclear what kind of longterm consequences it will have for us. I’m neither a Doomer nor a Hypeman when it comes to AI, but I do think there’s a reasonable possibility that the economic disruption of AI will be bigger than the internet. Feel free to push back if you disagree, of course.
Where I am sympathetic is that it really made a big difference if you had been able to acquire assets before the 2008-09 GFC. Because when the government pushed stimulus, everything went up - stocks, housing, etc. And if you weren't on that escalator already, it didn't lift you up.
But to things like tech disruption etc, I am unimpressed. Plus there's the classic "you young folks don't understand how good you have it" reaction from those of us who lived before this age of wonders and can appreciate the smartphone as a modern innovation of tremendous value.
And that issue of perspective continues to many things. There are complaints about rising teen suicide rates - but those rates are still FAR LOWER than the late 80s and 90s. There is distress about fentanyl overdoses - but we had the crack epidemic and near-uninhabitable cities. Global warming makes you worry that the world could end someday in the future - but the Cold War nuclear standoff felt like the world could end literally any day. You feel like the older generations are holding jobs and spots you want - but we grew up in the shadow of the biggest generation the country had known.
So while I get that Millennials have trouble being happy with things they never had a chance to miss, from a GenX perspective it is hard to see how things have been more difficult for you. Don't be jealous that we can appreciate the present more because we lived through a sh*ttier past.
Two things. First, implicit in what you're saying (and in a lot of the writing on this topic) is the idea that recessions are much, much harder on people in their 20s than on people in their 30s or older. And while there is some economic research showing economic "scarring" from graduating into a recession, I think that effect gets wildly overstated into the idea that the recessions since 2000 have somehow affected only Millennials, which is patently untrue. Gen X wasn't even all that old, or far along in our careers, when 2008 happened; most of us were still in our 30s, and plenty of us lost jobs and careers as part of that contraction (I kept mine, but my pay took a big hit, and I'm not sure it's ever recovered compared to what it might have been absent the recession).
Second, even if you accept the "scarring" hypothesis, Millennials (especially elder Millennials) are just too old to continue to complain about being uniquely exposed to some of these later shocks. Covid and Tariffs are hitting Millennials at roughly the same age that 2008 hit Gen X. And Gen X, most of whom are still at least a decade away from retirement and, over the course of their careers, have probably been MORE affected then Millennials by the Boomers' refusal to retire, are still exposed to all of this just like Millennials are. How could one possibly say that these are all challenges faced uniquely by Millennials?
I think you bring up some good points. I’m curious if we could compromise, though, on both generations being EQUALLY affected by Boomers’ refusal to retire. After all, it has knock-on effects; Gen X would be taking Boomers’ positions, and Millennials would be taking Gen X’s positions. We’d both be doing so, of course, later than Boomers did, which affects both of our abilities to accumulate wealth.
Speaking of wealth accumulation, there’s also the issue of housing (insert Matthew Yglesias here). I don’t want to deny that. However, would you agree that Gen X has had more opportunities to purchase a home than Millennials have? Certainly Gen X was massively impacted by 2008. Y’all might have been more impacted by that than any other generation. However, my understanding is that Millennials’ home-ownership rates are down compared to previous generations. Many of us can’t even begin to think about buying—even those of us in $100k+/year households like mine—because the market has gotten so damn expensive. I bring housing up specifically since the question is wealth accumulation, and housing is where most people have their wealth housed (pun very much intended).
I'm always happy to close ranks against the Boomers--Gen Xers have been resenting the Boomers since before many Millennials were born--so sure, I'll agree with you on that! Though I do feel like Boomer resistance to retiring at a decent age might hurt Gen X more in the long run, since companies might rationally choose the 49 year-old Millennial to replace a Boomer who finally stepped aside at 80 rather than the Gen X candidate who's already in their 60s.
As for housing, I truly don't know. I find that issue really tough to disentangle from generation-independent factors. For example: I graduated high school in 1987 and college in 1991. When I returned home for a year after college (because I couldn't find a job), I ran into a few of my high school buddies who went straight to work in the trades (auto repair and construction) rather than go to college. They were both married, with a kid, and they had both already bought a house in our nice, but decidedly unglamorous, midwestern city. I had only my school debt. I then spent the next 15 years or so getting a law degree and then working in San Francisco and London, two cities with housing costs so outlandishly expensive even at the time (late 90s-early oughts) that my wife and I literally never even discussed the possibility of buying a home, even though we had a couple of kids. It wasn't until 2006, when we moved to a different nice, but decidedly unglamorous, midwestern city that we finally became homeowners, at age 36. Of course, that meant that we bought very close to the height of the pre-2008 market; the interest on our 30-year fixed mortgage was 6.5%, and our house lost about 40% of its value in our first decade of ownership. Fun!
My high schools friends' stories definitely fit the "people used to find it easier to buy a home" narrative. My personal narrative sounds an awful lot like what Millennials complain about. I don't know which is more representative of Gen X.
Finally, something Millennials and Gen X can agree on: JUST RETIRE ALREADY, BOOMERS!
There’s also a well-established pattern of unhappiness peaking around midlife with increasing happiness later in life - although more recent research apparently suggests those patterns may be shifting. For further context: https://www.interdependence.org/the-global-loss-of-the-u-shaped-curve-of-happiness/
As a 37-year-old who hovers between the left edge of liberal and the right edge of very liberal, this tracks to my experience. On the one hand, we face some very real, unique economic challenges in our generation—graduating into the Great Recession and facing COVID in our prime earning years. On the other hand, we’re also very liberal, and have been growing less so at a slower rate than previous generations, which certainly colors our perception of the economy in such a hyper-partisan era.
As others have pointed out, there’s probably also an aspect of people in midlife being unhappier than others. Classic Wednesday problem in the school and work week—caught between last weekend (the lack of responsibilities in childhood) and next weekend (the lack of responsibilities of retirement), and far enough from both that you’re not feeling the lasting/anticipatory glow of either.
I’m curious, though, if there’s an aspect of economic jealousy at play; the understandable kind of jealousy, based on real material differences, not the imagined-differences kind. Moreover, I think Millennials’ wealth share comparison point isn’t Gen X, it’s Boomers. Boomers were who raised the vast majority of us, after all, and we grew up in the households that wealth share allowed them to give us. As such, I’m going to compare the shares of wealth between Q3 1990 and Q3 2025. I’m picking those dates because a fair share of each generation will be represented in each respective age group—lots of Boomers were both Under 40 and 40-54 in 1990, and lots of Millennials were both in 2025. I’m picking Q3…well, arbitrarily. It’s where my birthday falls, and I needed to pick.
In Q3 1990, Under 40s held 11.6% of wealth and 40-54s held 32.0%. By Q3 2025, those numbers had dropped to 6.6% for Under 40s and 19.7% for 40-54s. Meanwhile, the 55-69 and 70+ shares of wealth has risen from 37.1% and 19.3% to 41.0% and 32.2%, respectively.
Now, it should be acknowledged that Under 40s in 1990 made up a greater share of the population than they do now, so that might explain at least some of the difference—though, at the same time, 40-59s make up a greater share now than they did then, so that can’t explain that age group’s decrease.
What I believe all this suggests is that we Millennials have been primed for dissatisfaction with the economy because our wealth share lags behind what our parents’ was at our age. Now, standards of living have definitely increased over that time, but I believe a lot of our dissatisfaction comes from the fact that we remember the standards in which we grew up RELATIVE TO THE GENERAL STANDARDS OF THE TIME (caps for emphasis). And, based on the increasing wealth shared of the 55-69s and the Over 70s over the same time frame—especially significant for the Over 70s—I suspect at least some of that wealth share decrease came from Boomers holding onto more of their wealth than previous generations did.
So why, then, is Gen X more satisfied than Millennials? After all, they’re in the thick of the greatest wealth share decrease. That part, I suspect, has to do with our respective political leanings. Millennials are a very liberal generation, while Gen X is the least so.
Hold on a second. This is a pervasive myth, but the truth is Millennial wealth share does NOT lag behind previous generations at that same age: https://www.reddit.com/r/MiddleClassFinance/comments/1c85cb4/us_median_income_trends_by_generation/
And I think this myth is important because it illustrates how much of this is about false expectations rather than real conditions. NOT that Millennials haven't experienced any hardships, but just that EVERYONE has and you are not that special. Sorry not sorry! :)
wait shoot, sorry that link was income, but here is the Fed talking about wealth:
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2024/feb/millennials-older-gen-zers-significant-wealth-gain-2022
"We found that the median wealth of older millennials (those born between 1980 and 1989) was 37% above expectations. The wealth of younger millennials and older Gen Zers (those born between 1990 and 1999) was a similar 39% above expectations."
From what I’ve been able to see in a quick bit of research—this 9-hour flight really is interminable—the evidence is quite mixed. Some studies, like the St. Louis Fed one in 2024, have indeed found that the median Millennial is better off than previous generations, as you say. Others, like this 2023 study in the American Journal of Sociology, found the opposite.
https://thehill.com/homenews/4319352-are-millennials-worse-off-than-boomers-heres-how-they-stack-up-financially/
In that study, the top 10% of Millennials were still better off than previous generations—by a whopping 20%, no less—but the median Millennial was 30% WORSE off (compared to Boomers).
As with any scientific question, we shouldn’t take one study as gospel; we should look at the consensus. And that evidence appears to say that…we need more evidence, because different studies are producing different answers. 🤣
Still, in the face of such debatable evidence, the "Millennials have had it uniquely bad" myth is one that deserves to stop IMHO.
Semi-related thing I was thinking about recently:
My problem with socialists (as they exist in the USA, think DSA) is that they assume stuff just exists, and their only concern is how to distribute it. So price controls seem like a good idea because the amount of stuff (housing, food, etc) doesn't change. It is what it is (or so they believe).
So what happens to your sense of purpose and meaning if your worldview doesn't value creation? If you think that the clothes that you wear, the food you eat, the car you drive, and the phone that you use just exist? You aren't going to work hard to innovate and create goods and services more efficiently. You aren't going to feel like you are valuable if you don't grok that the work that you do is contributing to the creation of the world that you live in, and every detail of it was created by people doing the same sort of work that you clock in to do every day.
IDK, I'm a big proponent of reminding people that when I get on a video call at my job, the thing that is happening is that my voice is being converted into 1s and 0s, sent through the air, and then recreated (sometimes thousands of) miles away and it's recognizable as my voice, and it feels barely different from talking to someone three feet in front of me. That's amazing, and not being in awe of that just feels like not paying attention.
This idea is way too cute to be a major reason for why liberals and/or millenials are less happy, but maybe it's one aspect of it.
I’ve been thinking about a factor of unease that is often hard to measure: choice. It often feels like the choices our generation has had were not as difficult for the two before us. More than previous generations we are forced to choose between opportunity or stability, leaving metros because we couldn’t find housing that fit our careers or choosing to limit our family size because the economic timing never worked. These choices stick with you and when you add intractable political structures with minimal electoral representation by our generation, it doesn’t feel great. I’m aware that every generation probably feels this to some extent, but I think it would be worth studying the extent to which these types of decisions impact generational malaise.
This is where my thinking went too. I'm 42 and have felt my choices get more and more limited in the last 8-10 years. Maybe that's a typical curve to feel when you're in the caregiving for both kids and parents phase, but this job market is demoralizing, my neighborhood is feeling the effects of disinvestment (losing our school, increase in violence), and I feel very limited in my options other than staying the course and playing my part in building the community I want. (Maybe that can be okay?)
While both millenials and Gen X are in “housing a family” life stage, aren’t many more Gen Xers already homeowners with largely locked in mortgages (often at low pre-2023 rates) compared to millenials, and thus Gen Xers much less exposed to rising housing costs?
Would utilizing the actual generational age splits have generated slightly different results?