unable to launch
Three older millennials describe how their dreams have been thwarted by the bad luck of being in the only cohort to face two economic downturns
Elena Sosa Lerín did everything by the book after graduating from university in 2006. She got a job right away. She paid off her student debt. She quickly climbed the ladder in her chosen field. Two years after getting her degree in political science and journalism, she was managing a bilingual magazine in Seoul, South Korea. “I was feeling great,” she said. And then she decided to go back to school.
It made sense at the time. Sosa Lerín had experience, but it was local, in Korea, and she wanted to cover global news. So she did a master’s degree in international migration and ethnic relations. Two weeks after she started, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the global economy cratered. She hasn’t had full-time work since. “It’s demoralizing,” she said.
Sosa Lerín has never had a pension plan. She’s never owned a home. She’s put off getting married and having kids. Recently, she moved back in with her parents. “I tried applying to a supermarket,” she said, and even though she’s worked on contracts with some of the top international organizations in the world, but “they wouldn’t even consider my application because I did not have enough customer service experience.”
Entering the labour market in the middle of a recession can have career and life impacts that last years, even decades. Studies have shown that graduating into a severe economic downturn like the Great Recession of 20082009, can mean slower career growth, later and fewer marriages, and a significant loss of lifetime earnings. By middle age, U.S. recession graduates are more likely to be dead from such issues as heart disease, liver failure and drug overdose than are peers who started their careers in better times. Canadians who came of age during the Great Recession are less likely to be in management, to own homes or be doing skilled work for which they are qualified.
Those effects are quite consistent across recessions, with a lot of demographic variance and some wiggle room up and down depending on the size of the crater, according to researchers. But the cohort that graduated into the Great Recession is now facing another hurdle. Just as their careers should be stabilizing, as the losses they absorbed in their first decade of work should be easing, they’ve been hit by a second economic calamity. “I’m sure there will be some out there that will be hit (a second time),” said Philip Oreopoulos, a professor of economics at the University of Toronto who has studied the early-career impacts of graduating into a recession. “How would that average out? I can’t tell you for sure. But I think the situation is pretty grave and serious.”
The global shutdown caused by COVID-19 is unlike anything the world has seen in more than a century. No one knows for sure how long the economic fallout will last, who will come out of it or what the world will look like on the other side. But for many older millennials, battered by a decade of unstable work, the prospect of another hit now is heartbreaking. “laugh, just because if I don’t laugh, I will probably have a nervous breakdown,” Sosa Lerín said. It’s like 2008 all over again. “I feel that I’m in a kind of purgatory. And I don’t know if I’m going to land in hell or some higher level of purgatory, as in Dante.”
It isn’t all bad news for older millennials — the cohort is generally defined as being born between 1981 and 1996 — at least relatively speaking. Those who have managed to settle into permanent jobs in solid industries have a decent chance of weathering this storm, according to Oreopoulos. The losses they suffered in their first decade of work are baked in now. They’re a sunk cost. “What matters is making the most out of your situation right now,” Oreopoulous said.
But for those in their mid- to late 30s still struggling with gig work or facing layoffs without significant savings or property, there are real reasons to be afraid. A second hit now could cause them career and life delays that “they might never recover from,” said Andrew Agopsowicz, a senior economist at the Royal Bank of Canada, who has written about millennials and the Great Recession. ”It will be interesting to see whether that cohort has been able to recover enough to be able the ride this one out.”
The point is, right now, no one really knows. This is not a normal, cyclical slowdown. It could be a blip. It could become a depression. There is no good research out there to show what this will mean. It’s that uncertainty, as much as anything, that’s weighing on older millennials. They’ve lived through this once. Some have lived through it their entire working lives.
Over the past week, the National Post spoke to more than a dozen Canadians who started their careers in and around the Great Recession to get a sense of how the past decade has shaped their lives and careers and what they face now. These are three of their stories. Their comments have been edited for clarity, grammar and space.