The uncertainty facing my generation was not new to me. I have read articles just like the one I am now trying to write. I have seen the reports. I have watched the TikToks.
But the life I am living was by far the biggest clue that my generation is facing a growing economic crisis.
I just was not ready to admit it.
Like many millennial men who have just entered their 30s, I am happy to self-identify as a stunted youth. As traditional markers of adulthood have been pushed back, so too has my sense of myself as an actual grown-up. Although I manage the challenges and responsibilities of adulthood, I still feel as though I am making my way in the world. I still feel like a kid.
And idealism about my future, instilled in me by my parents, still rang louder in my head than the reality of my every day. It was like my brain was bifurcated; still believing in the dream but at the same time understanding the reality. Despite watching the housing crisis make home ownership more unattainable by the day, despite the seemingly inescapable burden of student debt, I still felt the road to economic safety and stability was in reach. I was going to reap what I sowed. If I just worked hard enough, hustled harder, created a more successful, economically stable and more commercially viable version of myself, I too could have my own little patch of earth, just as the former Australian prime minister Robert Menzies promised to generations before.
But late last year I began an investigation into the economic conditions facing my generation for the podcast Who Screwed Millennials. And over the course of those several months I, in a sense, grew up.
Through hours of reporting and recording, I realised that the life my parents had would never – no matter how hard I grafted – be mine.
“We grow up and go out in the world and we’re like, ‘Oh, shit, we’re screwed.’ The world is not really our oyster,” one of the interview subjects, Dr Intifar Chowdhury, told me. “I think there’s a huge discrepancy between how we’ve been raised versus how the world actually is.”
Since the end of Covid lockdown orders in New South Wales, I have experienced the rental crisis first-hand. Rent increases and the cost of living have forced moves to three different properties over the same number of years. Each time, moving further away from the city, from my work, and from the connections to people and place that I developed when I signed each lease. Any thought my partner and I had of removing ourselves from the perils of the rental market were dashed each time we checked our shared student loan debt and our dwindling savings.
The latest Scanlon Report which maps social cohesion in Australia over time says that almost half of 18- to 44-year-olds – that is millennials and gen Z – said they were “just getting along financially”, and the same amount believed the things they do in life are worthwhile only a little or only some of the time.
“When you start to see those kinds of shifts, that’s really dangerous for any society,” Jill Filipovic, author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind, told me.
Filipovic says generational inequality is not simply a concocted culture war but a tangible economic and political divide which has the potential to worsen divisions.
I have seen this online and in real life. As my elders blame younger generations for not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, I watch as friends and family fall down rabbit holes looking for answers to why they can not create the life they feel they have been promised.
“I think when people feel as though they’ve been sold a bill of goods and they start to lose faith in the society, faith in their government, in their institutions,” Filipovic told me. “I don’t think anything good comes of it.”
***
I am very much a child of the global financial crisis, the first time I saw my generation lose faith in the economic status quo and spill out into the streets. I remember feeling this was the fork in the road when it came to economic inequality – the system had to change for my generation to be optimistic about our futures. But more than a decade later, here we are.
In our efforts to know how we got here, the podcast team and I called a man who knows a thing or two about a financial crisis.
Yanis Varoufakis, capitalism doomsayer and the former finance minister of Greece, who was at the helm during the middle of that country’s debt crisis, said in the last 10 years he had noticed a complete change in the mood of young people.
For Varoufakis, the problem, and the solutions – at least when it comes to the housing crisis in Australia – are easily identifiable. But he says we are locked in the same political stasis we were seven years ago when he told Guardian Australia negative gearing was “scandalous”.
The more we talked, the more intractable Varoufakis made generational inequality seem. But, as I began projecting my own worries on to our conversation, the more questions moved from “who or what caused the housing crisis?” to “whose fault is it that I will never own a home?”, the more optimism Varoufakis offered.
“Every generation feels that the end times are nigh and every generation is proven wrong,” he told us. “But at the same time, it is important to identify the structural causes of apathy and a diminution in cultural capital.”
He found optimism in the crisis – as did Filipovic (sort of).
“OK, the bad news for millennials is that I don’t think we do get out of this situation. Not entirely,” she said. “The good news for younger folks is that this doesn’t have to go on in perpetuity. Millennials are a much more liberal generation.”
In Australia this more liberal generation has become the largest voting bloc. Millennials and gen Z make up 43% of the electorate, and the way they do politics is really different. Chowdhury says they care about the issues that impact them directly, not necessarily what the major parties are offering up at election campaigns.
“Assuming that millennials do kind of continue to ascend in politics … I think that those younger generations are going to see a future in which they are better cared for and more invested in,” says Filipovic. “I don’t think it’s happening as quickly as it needs to. But I do feel optimistic about the trajectory that we’re on.”
I share this optimism. I can identify the logic in it.
But I also understand how it is easy to let anger and apathy consume you.
So before I left Varoufakis, before he disappeared from my computer screen and I returned to my white-walled, mould-infested apartment, I asked him for advice. I asked him how young people can be hopeful and imagine a better future for ourselves and the generations coming up from behind.
“Well, look, young people do not want advice, especially from old people like me.”
Paraphrasing George Bernard Shaw, “he said this ironically, of course”, Varoufakis said anger, or what he called “madness”, isn’t always such a bad thing.
“There are two kinds of young people. There are the sensible ones who try to adapt themselves to the world around them, and then there are the mad ones who try to adapt the world to their own ideas of how it should be.”
“Be mad,” he told me.
Listen to Who Screwed Millennials, presented by Matilda Boseley and Jane Lee, in the Full Story feed – wherever you get your podcasts
