They used to call the Baby Boomers the “me generation” because they lived a life of leisure and prosperity compared to their parents, but at least some in Gen Z seem to believe no one before has ever struggled.
Earlier this week, a TikTok video of a young woman in a Walmart uniform expressing her frustration at entering the workforce and not earning enough money to live the way she wants went viral. “I work five days out of the week, 40 hours a week,” she insisted. “I do not make enough to live on my own. I do not make enough to pay rent, water, electric, and eat. All by myself I would not be capable of doing that.” In one of those classic microcosms defining our increasingly bizarre era, that she’s surprised by this development is shocking on its own. Where does one get the idea that working at Walmart for likely $15 an hour was enough to head a household? I began my career in a similar job, working at Costco, then Price Club, as a cashier and then in the photo lab for around $7 per hour. I was part time during school and closer to full time in the summer, but many of my colleagues were full time. None of them, however, expected it to pay enough to support their family. Except for management, most cashiers and similar roles worked for supplemental income, extra money while their spouse or significant other was the primary earner. Somehow, it was understood that not every job supported the lifestyle they wanted and most entry-level jobs in particular were only stepping stones for something better. The same was true even after me and most of my friends graduated college, armed with shiny, often expensive degrees (they talk about the cost of college today, but NYU was over $40,000 per year thirty years ago). With precious few exceptions, no one made enough right out of school to live entirely on their own. Personally, I started my career in graphic design earning a whopping $25,000 per year with the privilege of a 55 mile commute, back when you actually had to go into the office everyday. This was less than I could’ve made in the car business, where I worked throughout my college years, but there was a fundamental difference aside from the pure numbers: My first job after college was the beginning of a career, one where I understood that if I worked hard and moved up the ranks, my $25,000 income would increase, sometimes rapidly, sometimes not as fast as I would like. Either way, I would not be ready to live on my own for some time for obvious reasons, but this was not a flaw in the system. It was the system. Shocking as it sounds, few if any of my friends believed their first job was supposed to provide for everything they require in life.
Sure enough, $25,000 became $28,000 became $32,000, and after a few years I was earning what at the time was a median income that would grant me independence. To be sure, my lifestyle before and after was far from lavish. There were hand-me-down cars from my father, grandmother, and brother. My first new car, purchased in 1993 was a Dodge Neon. It wasn’t luxurious and leaked oil for the 135,000 miles I put on it, but it was an achievement for me at the time. It wasn’t until 2002 that I was able to afford a car I really wanted, my first roadster, a Mazda Miata, and even then it was only because they had a zero percent interest rate special. I vividly remember getting on the Garden State Parkway on my way to work all these years later, realizing the air conditioner no longer worked and dreading what I’d have to pay to fix it, but as frequently happens in life, there was an ad on the radio for the zero percent interest literally at the moment, filling me with relief and excitement. Still, it would be almost a decade before I could afford anything resembling a luxury vehicle, and even more time before I could have my beloved Porsche. In college itself, I worked full time in the car business whenever I possibly could, frequently putting in 50 hours a week plus a full course schedule, but because I had to pay for school, there were times when I was so broke, I’d be on my way home from Manhattan with a single dollar and an old paper train ticket in my pocket. If I lost either, I would have been begging at the station for help, hoping someone took pity on me. The early days of my career were not markedly different, juggling student loans, car payments, and other expenses while trying to build something resembling a real life. At the same time, it was clear to me – and most of my fellow members of Generation X – that this was not a permanent state of affairs. It was a part of growing up and building your professional career. In that regard, me and most of my friends grew up in a decidedly middle class neighborhood in New Jersey. Our parents were far from rich, but they owned their own homes, had two cars, took decent vacations, and the other trappings of a reasonably comfortable existence. We might have aspired to more, and many of my friends ultimately achieved more, but we were under no illusions that we’d be able to afford any of this at 20 years old, far from it. Our parents didn’t wake up one morning right after they were married to find themselves living in a reasonably nice house, driving an imported car. They started with less than we did and built themselves up. We expected to do the same because that’s the way the world works.
Perhaps I had a more personal familiarity with this phenomena based on my own family’s unique history. I was born the son of a lawyer, not rich in the country club way, but certainly better off than most and headed for private school until my parent’s separated between fifth and sixth grade, and my father ultimately crashed and burned – he went into the car business, which is what led me and my brothers there. In the aftermath, my mom worked multiple jobs supplemented by food stamps and aid to dependent children, fleeing Staten Island for a small, rented condo in South Jersey. Even then, no one believed this was permanent. My mom returned to her career as a teacher, traded in working at Macy’s and as a waitress for a job with some upward mobility and, thanks to some crucial help from my grandmother, we were able to climb back out of relative poverty within a few years. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have the distinct honor of living in every economic quintile, both as a child and as an adult. I started that first job out of college driving a Dodge Neon and left it with a Porsche, all at the same company. Today, however, there is the sense that these quintiles are static, that you will end up where you are born, or where you start your career, that the American dream is dead and upward mobility is a myth. This is a falsehood – there has been a slight decline in the overall movement through economic quintiles, but my experience is not unique. Many of my friends and relatives have experienced much the same in their own lives, starting low and ending high, or at least medium high. Crucially, most of this happens when you are young and just beginning your career. According to even the progressive Brookings Institute, “About 61 percent of young adults in the bottom quintile in their late twenties have climbed to a higher quintile ten years later. But for those starting from the bottom rung in their late forties, just 40 percent have moved up.” They phrase this in a negative way, but the numbers reveal that almost two thirds will rise from a young age, and close to half even older. Sadly, the bottom quintile currently has the least mobility, suggesting that the viral video on TikTok will be the lived experience for some – especially if these young people accept their Walmart jobs and fall prey to the notion that there will somehow be a “living wage” if only democratic socialism will prevail. To be sure, many of the blue collar jobs that supported a middle class lifestyle when I was younger no longer do so, but by and large those jobs have been replaced by moderately skilled white collar service workers, creating a similar dynamic if you acquire the skills. Regardless, the idea that you can work 40, or in some cases even 35 hours a week and support a family, is something that has never been true and never will be true unless you would like the inflation we experienced these past few years to seem like a pittance.
The result is a false expectation that young people will pick up their lives where their parents left off, enjoying all the things they spent decades to acquire. The combination of the two requires at least some in Gen Z to blame someone, anyone for their (likely temporary) lot in life, and so it is not a surprise that this young woman lashes out. “Twenty years ago when you were getting started, you could live on your own,” she insisted, seemingly unaware that this most certainly wasn’t the case for most people. “Twenty years ago when you first started, you were able to do everything that I am now struggling to do,” she continued as if no generation before her struggled. Oddly, she went on to accuse the older generations of having twenty years of working experience “behind [their] belt”, as if the same won’t be true of her and peers as she gets older. She continues to insist that this experience, which again she seems to think she cannot acquire, allows the older generation “to profit…in an economy you created. You can sit here and call Gen Z lazy all you want, but I’ve been working my tail off just to barely get by and respectfully, I don’t want do that for the rest of my life.” The irony here borders on the absurd, the accusation even worse. She seems to accept that people older than her have accumulated income and wealth over time based on decades of work, but simultaneously believes she cannot do the same, perhaps hinting with the phrase “for the rest of my life” that she doesn’t want to do the same. Instead, she wants to accuse everyone else of “creating” this for her, “and that is what you created. Not Gen Z, we’re just here getting started. You’ve been doing that for the last twenty years, you tell me how it got ruined. We can sit here and you can call Gen Z lazy all you want, but you let the economy get how it did. You let it all run to hell, and now it’s Gen Z’s fault because we don’t want to work to fix your mistakes.” While it might be easy to dismiss this as the rant of a disaffected young person, in my opinion at least, there is something deeper at play. First, there is a fundamental lack of understanding about how the economy works. You do not start at the top, or at least precious few do. Second, there is an equally fundamental lack of knowledge about how your career progresses as you age, and through hard work, smart choices, and yes, a little luck, you accumulate wealth. Third, there is an entitlement and an expectation that is startling to behold. They used to call the Baby Boomers the “me generation” because they lived a life of leisure and prosperity compared to their parents, but this representative of Gen Z seems to believe no one before has ever struggled. In their minds, Millennials and Generation X were simply handed good jobs, had no trouble paying their bills, and basically kicked back on someone else’s dime, stealing what she feels belongs to her.
The even sadder and more absurd irony underlying all of this: She only feels this way because she grew up in the most prosperous period in the entire history of the world, enjoying more wealth, access to more goods, shiny new toys and devices, products of every kind imaginable, and every type of restaurant within spitting distance. Consider that she is recording this rant on a likely $1,000 phone crammed with more technology that I could dream of at her age, broadcasting it directly to millions of people using a completely network whose complexity boggles the mind. There are challenges in the economy, yes, but compared to the challenges in the past, from the financial panics that plagued the country in the late 19th century, to two World Wars with a Great Depression in between, there isn’t a person alive then who would not trade places with what we believe is catastrophic today. Disruption has always been and will always be the norm, for once there was an entire industry devoted to horses and carriages. There’s simply no comparison to what our ancestors faced, the hardships they endured, even the hours they worked (children for the record used to put in 60, adults 80), and yet many of us today, especially the young, are simply too blind, misguided, misinformed, and mis-educated to appreciate any of it. Instead, they feel that they are uniquely persecuted and uniquely forced to suffer. Nothing could be further from the truth, however, and I actually feel bad for them in a sense. They’ve been spoon fed nonsense about the horrors of the United States and the free market economy practically since birth. This steady diet has been supplemented by an over inflated sense of self worth and importance, leading them to believe they deserve what they have not earned and if they do not get it, someone else is at fault. Lastly, they have no real concept of what it is to struggle. She works 40 hours a week at Walmart, and acts as if she was mining coal in the Gilded Age. I can’t imagine what it was like working a hundred years ago myself, but I’d like to see her spend a single day in the car business circa 1995, where you were lucky your manager didn’t curse you out right to your face for being a lazy piece of shit while your coworker tried to steal your commission. Laziness is not the problem. A fundamental disagreement with reality itself is, and that’s far more dangerous.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 