Look, I'm not here to pile on younger generations. The structural stuff is real. Housing costs are brutal, salaries haven't kept pace, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But I also don't believe that's the whole story. There are a couple of things I keep turning over that I think are worth saying out loud.
The first is how we raised you.
Parents have always tried to give their kids a better life than the one they had. That's not criticism, it's biology. But the tools available to do that, have changed in ways nobody fully accounted for. When I was growing up, if mom didn't want to cook, we figured something out ourselves or we went without. That was just reality. There was no DoorDash. There was no Amazon. Stores closed early and never opened on Sundays. Our family had one cell phone, a three-watt Motorola bag phone that lived in the car for emergencies. Not mine. The family's.
The point isn't that life was harder. The point is that friction existed. And friction, it turns out, changes things significantly.
When everything is convenient, when dinner is a tap away, when anything you want arrives on your porch by morning… those conveniences stop feeling like conveniences. They become normal. You stop noticing you're paying $18 for a meal that would've cost $4 to make, because you were never in the habit of making it. Amazon is essentially the impulse rack by the register. Except it's always open, there's no line, and you've already agreed to it before you've thought twice.
I'm not pointing fingers. Every generation would make the same choices with the same tools. And honestly, if you sat down and calculated how much any of us have spent in the last five years on things we didn't need and didn't notice, we'd all have some explaining to do. Even if only in the mirror.
The second thing is social media, and I'll keep this short because you already know it's true.
There used to be one rich kid in the neighborhood. We all wanted to hang out with him and kind of hated him for it at the same time. That was the ceiling of comparison. One kid, same zip code, same general frame of reference. Now the ceiling is infinite. You're not comparing yourself to one kid on your street. You're comparing yourself to a curated highlight reel of everyone, everywhere, all at once and no one is leading with the price tag or the credit card balance.
It's not a new instinct. It's just at a scale we were never wired for.
It amazes me how often I hear younger people talking about not making enough money. The reason I hear it, is because they are having the conversation in Starbucks, sipping their 7-dollar coffee which is sitting next to their $1,600.00 iPhone as they talk to each other across the top of their $3,000.00 gaming laptops. Every ounce of me wants to laugh and tell them how ridiculous their complaints are, but I can’t. Because in that moment, I become acutely aware of the young man having coffee with me, while he's on his iPhone that I bought him and scrolling social media as we talk.
Welllll shit.