How is Generation Y worse off than basically any generation ever? Let us count the ways
Congratulations, millennials. You may be young, pink-haired and wrinkle-free, but you’re also totally, inexorably fucked. Unless you’re a red-chino wearing management consultant who works in the City – but there’s only so many of us that can take that job, or so many of us that want it. We might be liberalising sexual attitudes, using technology to communicate better than our predecessors and democratising the worlds or art and music, but there’s one big problem – we have no money.
New research, obtained by The Guardian, has revealed what anyone who isn’t currently languishing in Alaska trying to access the Internet via a 90s-era iMac and a dial-up modem already knew – that our generation is pretty fucked. Among the grim headline findings were that in the US, under-30s are now poorer than retired people. As in, people who are working full-time have less money than people who aren’t working at all. In the UK, pensioner disposable income has increased at three times the rate of the income of young people.
Ironically, even as young people barely struggle to make ends meet, the elderly benefit from the fruits of our labour – with free bus passes and Winter Fuel Allowance going to all pensioners, even those who could afford to pay their own way. Why won’t this ever change? Because old people vote in elections way, way more than young people do – so no politician would ever strip old people of their benefits, as to do so would be election suicide. Meanwhile, millennials can expect to work until they’re 80 before retiring. Think you can't handle doing your shitty low-paid job until you're thirty, let alone 80? Time to suck it up (or find a rich boyfriend. Joking.)
And if you're still reading this and thinking, “hey, that’s no so bad, at least we have our youth”, we’re going to lay it out for you why Generation Y is being unfairly maligned by the mistakes of the past and the consequences in the future.
THERE’S A HOUSING CRISIS AND IT’S NOT GOING TO GO AWAY
Picture the scene. It’s 2030. You commute to your central London job from your flat-share in Zone 5. Zone 5 isn’t so bad, actually. You share your room with a night-shift worker and take it in turns to sleep in the bed. When you come in from your day shift, he’s getting ready to leave for work in the morning. Sound unrealistic? Not really, given that the average age of a first-time buyer in London is now 33 years old, and it’s only going to increase. Time to get used to sharing a set of bunk beds with someone you’ve never met before.
FULL-TIME JOBS ARE BECOMING A THING OF THE PAST
In the future, everyone will be freelance. One study estimates that, by 2020, more than 40% of the American workforce will be freelance. What’s wrong with that? I hear you say? What could be better then never having to commute to work and working in your pyjamas every day? Well, a lot of things, actually.
As a former freelancer, I can tell you freelance life is stressful. You know what freelancers don’t have? Weekends. You know why? Because if you’re not working, you’re not earning. Ditto bank holidays, maternity pay, holiday leave, sick leave, time off for doctor’s appointments or even just the opportunity to pull a good old-fashioned sickie once in a while. You know what freelancers struggle to get? Mortgages (like you’ll need one anyway, lol). The movement towards a freelance economy is not a positive thing – it means more power in the hands of employers, and less in the hands of the workforce.
EDUCATION IS GETTING MORE EXPENSIVE
You know all those pensioners who are currently spending their Winter Fuel Allowance on new 9-irons or putting it towards their time-shares in the Algarve? You know what they didn’t pay for? Their university educations. For today’s generation, university education is fast becoming an unaffordable dream. Tuition fee increases; scrapping maintenance loans, axing student grants. Much better to just lie on your C.V. and hope you don’t get caught.
THERE PROBABLY WON’T BE AN NHS TO LOOK AFTER US WHEN WE’RE OLD
This may sound fanciful, but at the rate the Tories are haemorrhaging student doctors to sunnier climes while secretly privatizing the NHS, changes are we’ll all die in pauper’s hospitals, coughing up the fumes we inhaled on our arduous 15-hour commutes to our freelance places of work. On the plus side, if we all die young we won’t have to worry about our non-existent pensions running out.
CLIMATE CHANGE MEANS THAT THE WORLD’S PROBABLY FUCKED ANYWAY
One day, we’ll watch Armageddon in schools not to marvel at how Bruce Willis once had hair, but as a grim prophecy of exactly what’s going to happen to the planet for our children and children’s children. To be honest, by then life will be so bleak that we’ll all just be praying for an asteroid to put us out of our misery, anyway.