MILLENNIALS’ LACK OF PREPAREDNESS HURTS ECONOMY
A Pew Research Center study confirmed what most of us already knew. More millennials (those born after 1982), around 35 percent, are living with their parents rather than alone or with a partner. You’ve heard of “empty nest syndrome.” We now suffer from full basement syndrome.
The poll, showing that 26 percent of even college grads move back home, was confirmed recently by USA Today. Upon hearing the news, parents of millennials said they were so proud of their kids for just completing the poll and planned to do something special to celebrate their achievement.
There are only two ways you can look at this: We have raised 1) a bunch of dependent wussies, incapable of self-reliance, or 2) a generation of kids too afraid to ask their parents for rent money. Neither one is good.
The Pew study went on to conclude that fewer young people are married than in the past. Even accounting for the increased popularity of cohabitation, there are just fewer 20-somethings and 30-somethings shacking up than there used to be. Millennials cannot decide who they want to stare at their iPhones with for the rest of their lives.
Delayed marriage may be also driven by the decline of religion among Facebook/ Twitter-obsessed millennials. Kids may not think as much of Christ because he had only 12 followers.
Of course there are exceptions, but essentially we have raised a group of self-important pansies who need “safe places” if they hear any comments they don’t like and “trigger warnings” to help them brace for anything that does not fit their narrative. They are taught to feel, not think.
How and when did this happen? It might have started about the time we began printing those “My Child is an Honors Student at Teach to the Mean Elementary” bumper stickers.
Capitalism, which they disdain, has created incredible technologies that make life easy and 200 cable TV stations at the ready for them. We did not have it so good when I was young. I had to get up off the couch and fight my way through 10 yards of shag carpet to change the channel on our TV to one of the two other channels. Then I had to rake the shag carpet on the way back because my mother told me to.
Having been told their whole lives about all the things they “deserve,” millennials have out-of-line expectations. There is an unmet sense of entitlement in this generation which disappoints and angers them. Health care became a right, while free speech is something that they can decide to allow — or not.
Most are still on their parents’ Netflix account, which a judge recently ruled cannot legally be shared by its owner. So heads up, millennials: If you don’t get your way, there has never been a better time than now to send your parents to prison.
So our snowflake kids come out of college with some silly liberal arts degree and $50k in student loan debt their loan shark government put on them. They have few skills employers are looking for and a hard-to-please attitude. Obamacare lets them stay on their parents’ insurance plans until age 26. Another poll that might astound you: 18-year-old members of the Greatest Generation died on the beaches of Normandy, but this group, when asked, said they thought the average age of reaching adulthood is 26.
With all this student loan debt and being often unemployable, millennials are not contributing as much to the economy in the form of spending, resulting in our sluggish economy. Most of their net worth is tied up in their tattoos. Economists predict that millennials will eventually surpass the spending power of both Elton John and Michael Jackson by 2023.
They say they don’t spend on things for themselves, but rather on experiences like concerts, where they post selfies constantly. On the bright side, many of these concerts are outdoors. Their selfie-sticks serve nicely as lightning rods, which could thin their ranks over time.