Dude, I was part of the precariat before it was cool.
I have been putting little income streams together for decades now while most of my peers got regular jobs. I’m well suited to it, I like the variety, and most importantly, I chose it.
Not so the Millennials.
I grew up as a Gen X’er but that label didn’t mean much to me. For a long time I filtered out the trash talk about the Millennials because I figured it was just the western culture’s love/hate relationship with youth. Admittedly, they are our literal replacements — our beautiful, fresh, tech savvy replacements — and that freaks out people who are insecure, I suppose.
Then I had the opportunity to work with a bunch of them at a not-for-profit I founded. They came in as program participants, became exceptional volunteers and eventually I was able to hire them to run some of the programs.
And they are awesome. They are super-talented, motivated, believe in the mission of the not-for-profit, and have made it their own. I stepped away at the end of last year and I’m excited to see what new places they decide to take it.
But there was a few differences from my generation that I noticed. Most of them worked several side-hustles (the freelance gig I offered them being one of them) and a lot of them lived at home, paying down sizable student loan debts. A lot of them struggled with mental health issues that I became aware of through their social media.
I found these public struggles hard to reconcile with the sides of them I knew, but appreciated the value of sharing their vulnerabilities with the world. It made me think about my comparatively care-free 20s, the majority of which were spent eeking out a living as a novelist.
I lived incredibly cheaply back in those days — early on I’d ran the numbers and assessed I needed $10K a year to get by. I didn’t drink, drive, or even own a computer back then. I got a job straight out of university for my favourite magazine, mostly by luck, but after a year I was done with it. I had a lot I wanted to do. I was able to save enough money (even at $9/hr) to carve out 6 months (or $5K) to write my first novel, and then was lucky enough to find a publisher for it.
I had a lot of good luck in those days, but you know what I didn’t have? A student loan debt to pay back. Student loan payments would have made putting money aside to write a novel pretty unlikely. Why didn’t I need a student loan? Did my parents pay for it? Nope, I just was lucky enough to be going to university in the early nineties, when university tuition was regulated. Tuition was about $2K a year, and I was able to pay for it with minimum wage summer jobs and by commuting to school rather than staying in residence.
Before I looked at the numbers of what Millennials face, I was rather proud of this little narrative. I had worked hard, sacrificed my rez experience to be fiscally responsible, and had ended up debt-free at the end of it. But then I did a little research.
Since I was working minimum wage jobs, that wage has doubled.
Since I went to school, tuition has quadrupled.
See that 2X discrepancy there? That is not a discrepancy people mention much. It’s twice as hard for Millennials. And maybe it’s true of the Boomers too, that they had it twice as good as we did. But we are so wedded to our personal narratives of overcoming the odds and “making it” as an adult that we don’t really want to look at that too closely.
Most of us are proud of our little origin stories: how we saved, and worked hard, and made the right decisions, and have thus earned what we have now. But if we buy into that, then what happens when we don’t succeed? The flipside to pride is shame.
I had a little taste of that recently. Due to bad planning, I ran out of money. I’ve had a good run: for the past twenty years I’ve managed my meagre resources well. Ever since I left my last full time job in 1995 I had said to myself, if I run out of money I’ll just get a job.
It turned out to be a naive assumption. I have a varied skillset, but none of those individual skills are in high demand. I was too senior for the positions I did interview for. I have lots of contacts, but they know me as an independent lone wolf & were worried I wouldn’t mesh with the company culture.
So, with mortgage payments coming due, I asked my mom for a loan. I didn’t have a line of credit of my own but she was able to tap into that and help me out. The shame I felt about this was both societal and specific to my own story. When I left home I remember thinking I wouldn’t go back. I have a great relationship with my mom, she was glad to help me out, but she has always worked a regular job. I thought it was unfair for me to make the decision to live a precarious artist life and expect her to underwrite that.
But when I needed the safety net, it was there. Probably, it was knowing that that allowed me to make the choices I made in the first place and not be crippled by anxiety.
But it felt like failure to me, until I came across the statistic that 75% of children borrow money from their parents. Then I got angry that it has social stigma around it at all, if it’s something most of us do. It’s this myth that we’re independent, when in fact we’re hugely interdependent — and this is a good thing.
Our whole economy is a false one, entirely dependent on the supply of cheap goods and services from other countries. Looked at that way, everything we have achieved is only within the context of our geographical & chronological fortune: being born in the 20th century, in the first world.
My favourite analogy for privilege (racial/gender/whatever) is that two people are cycling towards each other. One is speeding along, and notices the person he’s passing is having a much harder time. He chalks it up to that person being out of shape, or new at cycling, not noticing that the wind is at his back… and that the other person is riding against it.
There are invisible biases at work all throughout society, and generational ones are just another one of them. But what impact is it going to have, when even our most talented 20-somethings feel like they’re failing at life? When they’re finally able to move out of their parent’s place in their 30s, and need to race against the biological clock if they want to have kids?
We have to admit that they’re playing an unfair game, and we will have to make concessions to rebalance that game. It will come at a cost, both in letting go of our pride and economically. Maybe it’s student loan forgiveness. Maybe it’s free tuition. Maybe it’s real estate laws disincentivizing homes as investments.
It starts with looking at the real challenges this generation is facing, looking more at the data than the instagrams, and letting go of our pride. We’re all in this together.
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Illustration: Alenn Predko
This is a part of the Fallow Essays, reflective pieces on art and cultural production I’m writing now that I’m 20 years deep into my practice. Last time I wrote about my relationship with productivity.
If you’d like to see me continue to make stuff for another twenty years, you can encourage me by signing up for my mailing list: