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Young People are F*cked — Here’s What They Can Do About It
Scott Galloway recently published an essay titled “War on the Young.” In it, he looks at how America treats its young people as a proxy for measuring success. In his concluding thoughts, he asks a fairly salient question:
“Children make us better. We care for our kids, but do we love children? Somewhere along the way, we lost the script as a society. If we have the resources to address these issues — and we do: Nvidia added a quarter of a trillion to the economy in 5 minutes post-earnings — but continue to look the other way, then we have to ask: Is America worth investing in? And do we really love our children?”
As a millennial, I resonate deeply with this. America has the means to invest in its young people — our politicians constantly talk about how raising the next generation is important — but somewhere along the way we’ve missed the memo. We’re not doing it and that’s a problem.
Instead of building up our young people, we’re exploiting them. Each new generation that comes up seems to no longer represent an investment in the future, but a cohort to extract rents from in the present.
How sad is that?
It’s painfully obvious the extent to which young people are economically disadvantaged. As the meme goes, if only millennials had been wise enough to make smarter financial decisions during high school, we’d all be better off today. As teenagers, maybe we should’ve pounced on the opportunity to purchase foreclosed homes instead of, you know, doing teenager things.
If only…
Jokes aside, the problem, of course, is much graver than many of us want to acknowledge. Young people aren’t just “disadvantaged” — we’re financially insolvent. There isn’t enough work for us to be able to repay our debts let alone save up to invest in our future.
We simply don’t have the means to earn an income that’s high enough to make up for the losses on our balance sheets. And that’s not because we’re not trying. It’s because the jobs we need don’t exist. They never did.
In the coming years things are going to go from bad to worse. Wages are probably going to fall further as jobs disappear. Yes, there is optimism that new technologies — artificial…
