Dear Millennials, It’s Time to Grow Up
Millennials are trapped in a state of arrested development. But who's really to blame?
In 2009, I began my freshman year at Syracuse University. The first in my family to go to a four-year university, I thought a college degree was the key to limitless career opportunities that would solidify my transition into adulthood.
I was wrong.
After college I moved to Washington, DC to begin my career. I found myself playing an unwinable game. College had prepared me to write essays and perform well on tests; it didn’t teach me anything about navigating the world of work.
Turns out, a college degree itself is a worthless piece of paper. What makes it valuable is the network and connections that come with it. I didn’t know that when I was in school so I focused on grades. In hindsight, I probably should’ve partied more and studied less.
Capital – whether it’s economic, political, or social – is the actual key to career opportunities, and thus, social mobility. The more capital you have the longer you get to play the game. The longer you can stay in the game, the more chances you’ll have at finding success.
This is the way the world actually works. It’s a game of selection bias that favors those who enter the game with a little bit of capital – the Haves – at the expense of those who start the game with nothing – the Have Nots.
But the game itself isn’t what it seems. It’s an unwinable game that’s shrouded in a myth of social mobility. The goal isn’t for you to win, it’s to convince you that you have a shot at winning so you actually consent to playing the game in the first place.
This is reality. The sooner you realize it, the more opportunities you have to change course and avoid regret later on in life.
Millennials are now at an age where we’re coming to terms with the game. College was a scam to saddle us with debt so we would obediently work meaningless jobs in order to pay it off. We’re supposed to be starting families but thanks to a combination of debt and stagnant wages we can’t afford to. Now, many Millennials are entering into middle age, watching time pass by as we fail to achieve the essential milestones that should have otherwise conferred us into adulthood.
The problem isn’t what’s happened to Millennials so much as how Millennials have responded to it. We’ve been duped but we don’t want to admit it. It’s much easier to blame “the system” than it is to take personal responsibility for the choices we’ve made.
At the end of 2024, The Wall Street Journal published an essay titled What Happens When a Whole Generation Never Grows Up?. It explores how a myriad of economic and social factors hasn’t just stymied the careers of high achieving Millennials, it’s resulted in the arrested development of an entire generation.
The essay argues that without stable careers and sufficient financial resources, Millennials – and now Gen Z – are foregoing essential life milestones like getting married and starting a family. Without these milestones, young people are finding it increasingly difficult to grow up. As the article notes of a 38-year-old in Brooklyn:
After watching his parents raise three kids and buy a house on his parents’ salaries in retail and manufacturing, Cody Harding assumed that being the first in his family to earn a Bachelor’s degree would grant him an even better quality of life. Although he now makes around double what his parents did at the height of their careers combined, he’s disappointed by what it affords him in New York City…Instead of being able to support a family or at least live on his own as a full-time lawyer, he’s paying $1,700 in monthly rent to live with roommates in Brooklyn.
Commentary like this pins blame on the high cost of living. That’s not entirely wrong. Wages have stagnated and inflation continues to eat away at the average American’s purchasing power. But while there are certainly economic circumstances affecting how young people progress through life, that isn’t the whole story.
Millennials were sold on the myth of social mobility and convinced that college was the best course of action. We made choices based on the information we had at the time. We were wrong. That’s part of life. Sometimes you make choices and they don’t lead to good outcomes.
But you can’t go back and change time. The only thing you can do is move forward.
By failing to acknowledge the choices Millennials made – both good and bad – Millennials are unable to make new decisions that would otherwise enable them to move on. They cling onto the regret of the past, expecting things to get better without taking the necessary action to ensure they actually do.
While the economy isn’t helping, the real reason Millennials are stuck in arrested development is because they have failed to take ownership of their choices. Millennials continue living in expensive cities trying to climb a corporate ladder they were never supposed to succeed at climbing in the first place.
If Millennials accepted the world as it is – not as they think it should be – they could discern myth from reality. In doing so, they might come to the conclusion that I and so many other Millennials have come to: life isn’t worth wasting playing an unwinnable game.
This essay will argue that it’s not actually the economy that’s holding young people back – it’s themselves. By looking at patterns from history, it will demonstrate that what young people are experiencing today is the norm rather than the exception. It will make the case that if young people truly aspire to grow up – to buy homes, start families, and become full-fledged adults – they first have to make the adult choice to do so.
That choice comes down to where you live. Cities are designed to concentrate capital and extract profit from laborers. They aren’t designed to help young people grow up. That leaves Millennials with a choice. Do you continue trying to assert your adulthood from a place like Brooklyn? Or, do you leave? Do you make the choice to stop playing an unwinable game and design a new game for yourself to play somewhere else?
Historically, peasants relocated to cities to find work. Today’s young people are no different.
There is no question today that the cost of living is problematic. But what’s happening in the United States right now isn’t an exception. It’s happened plenty of times in the past.
As economies grow people migrate to cities looking for new opportunities. Over time, cities become too big. The cost of living rises, cannibalizing the workforce. Eventually it becomes an unsustainable place for workers to live.
Let’s look at Ancient Greece and industrial Europe to illustrate how that plays out over time.
Ancient Greece is considered the birthplace of Western civilization. At its zenith, Athens was the hub of art, culture, philosophy, democracy, and trade.
Greece began its decline in the 4th century BCE after the death of Alexander the Great. Incessant wars across the Mediterranean took a toll on the Greek city-states and their ability to trade with one another. Eventually Greece was absorbed into the Roman Empire.
Trade was vitally important to the growth of ancient economies but it also led to their downfall. As trade grew, new socioeconomic classes emerged within society. Like the wealthy today, the elites of ancient Greece hoarded their gains. This came at the expense of the poor, driving up the cost of living as a result:
One of the unintended consequences of the rise in trade is the growth of powerful classes within society. Merchants and bureaucrats wielded tremendous power over local populations because they controlled the means to access trade. This enabled select classes of people to monopolize the means of production and methods of trade, allowing them to accrue vast sums of wealth at the expense of the larger population…
Over time inequality squeezed the poor and middle class. They took on increasing amounts of debt or moved to larger cities looking for better work opportunities. In time the cost of living reached a point where it was no longer sustainable and the economy ceased to function. Trade slowed and the administrative state grew ineffective. (Tomorrow Today)
What happened in Ancient Greece – and across the ancient world – wasn’t an isolated incident. A millennia later, history would repeat itself in medieval Europe.
After the fall of Rome, Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages. Trade that had enabled Rome’s high-standard of living to reach the far edges of the empire ceased.
Individual European communities were left to fend for themselves. Feudalism emerged where local peasants worked the lands of noble lords in exchange for security and protection. Pockets of common land existed within medieval towns that peasants could farm to provide for their own sustenance.
Over time trade resumed. Like the ultra rich today, feudal nobility started developing a penchant for luxury consumer goods to confer their elite status within society. In an effort to improve the output of their land – and generate more revenue to spend on consumer goods – the nobility privatized it.
What is referred to as the enclosure movement today led to the mass displacement of European peasantry. Without land to work, the only thing a peasant could sell was their time. Many moved from towns to cities where new hubs of manufacturing had started to emerge, culminating in what eventually became the Industrial Revolution.
Young people today think of living in a big city like New York as a rite of passage. It’s been glamorized in the media as a desirable place to live. In reality, urbanization is a reflection of deteriorating economic conditions for the lower and middle classes of society. It represents the loss of employment opportunities outside of cities, the loss of property ownership, and a decline in one’s overall quality of life.
Just as disruptions in trade changed the economies of the ancient world and medieval Europe, deindustrialization in the American heartland during the 1980s and 1990s fundamentally changed the value proposition of living in small town America. Whether they were aware of it or not, economic conditions that emerged during childhood eventually pushed Millennials to migrate to cities in search of work later on in life.
With this historical context it’s easy to see why Millennials – and now Gen Z – fled the suburbs of their youth for cities like New York and San Francisco. What they think is an essential prerequisite for employment is merely history repeating itself.
While changes in the economy incentivize people to move to cities, it’s not to blame for keeping them there. That’s a matter of personal choice.
Young Americans believe the economy has failed them. And to some extent it certainly has. But two things can be true at once. The economy can suck and young people can also make poor choices. Expensive apartments in Brooklyn can make it difficult to start a family, but that’s not a sufficient reason in and of itself to explain an entire generation’s arrested development.