The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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What leads you to believe this and when do you perceive it as starting? I finished a postdoc a decade ago and had pretty close to zero net worth at the time, but I'm doing great now. I've seen a decent number of friends go from near zero or negative net worth at the time to quite wealthy since. All of us that have done well do have some sort of specialized skill but saying that making money is greatly helped by having a specialized skill is very different from claiming that labor can't build wealth.
In 2019 the us median numbers were around:
In 2023 the us median numbers were around:
Since 1/1/20 the S&P 500 has increased by at least 67%. If someone owned a house before March 2022 they were able to lock in a 30-year mortgage rate around 3% (vs. around 7% today). People with wealth had huge gains in the last 4 years and those gains will continue to generate more passive wealth in the future.
A new grad isn’t going to be able to save/invest much. Meanwhile, the people with extraordinary returns in the last 4 years are generating tons of passive wealth because they locked in a low mortgage expense and have more money to invest/save. They are also earning passive income faster now because they have a larger asset base.
When inflation is normal for long periods of time and mortgage rates are similar between new/existing homeowners this wealth disparity effect is much less of a problem.
For a new grad starting around $0 (or in debt) to build substantial wealth they need to be on a path to earn much more than the median salary and/or make sacrifices to greatly lower expenses (like living with their parents for a few years after college).
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The economic situation seems to be a lot more grim for GenZ. I don't know if its reflecting in the youth unemployment numbers in the US, but the future points more towards a East Asian/ European like labor market. Not the end of the world, but certainly not what it used to be.
Definitely a global issue, finding employment as a college grad seems to be an increasingly omnipresent issue.
Anecdotal but I can't ignore the noise, something is definitely off even if the numbers haven't caught up yet.
Maybe that's right, maybe it's not, but if it's a signal that's sufficiently weak that it's hard to detect in the data, the advice for any given individual should be to get their shit together rather than moping about systemic decline that makes it impossible for them to profit from labor. Get a degree in petroleum engineering or accounting or chemistry or literally anything else that has a plausible practical use and get to work. Even if there is a broader problem, being a Debbie Downer and giving up before even getting started is a poor approach to life. Being a Debbie Downer in the context of the American economy circa the present isn't just a poor approach, it's comically ridiculous if one takes even a slightly zoomed out look at history.
Yeah, even if it were indisputably true that the US economy is in decline, it's declining from the highest heights in human history. Even if Gen Z ends up being a bit worse off than Millennials, they're still better off than the vast majority of people who have ever lived.
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Gen Z is more likely to own a home than millennials at their age.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/katherinehamilton/2023/04/21/gen-z-ahead-of-millennials-and-their-parents-in-owning-their-own-homes/
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Is this actually true, though? Millennials felt the same way 15 years ago, that's what all the Occupy and "I am the 99%" stuff was about. People understandably feel poor when they're starting their careers. They often have a bunch of debt and relatively little income. But that situation generally corrects itself over the course of a person's working life. Life is a struggle but this stuff is not insurmountable.
Things are, simply, not that bad in the US. Unemployment is close to the lowest it's ever been. Real (i.e. inflation adjusted) wages are close to the highest they've ever been. Cost disease has hit certain sectors like housing and healthcare, but there are still plenty of places where housing is affordable, and young people generally don't need a ton of healthcare. I'm not claiming everything is perfect or couldn't be improved, but I can't see how economic doomerism is warranted under the circumstances.
There appears to be a consensus between Millennials and late X-ers that, say, for the average fresh college graduate looking for a job, or for a college student looking for a summer job, the job market was better in 2001 than in 2011, and was better in 2011 than it is now. Also, the overall sentiment of doomerism, anomie and stagnation was much less palpable in society even back in 2011.
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