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October 16, 2002
Generation Wrecked
Just read Generation Wrecked in Fortune online. Its about how my generation got kinda screwed financially speaking. Most of my generation will not experience ever increasing salaries as our parents did. Even worse, many have passed their prime earning years and will never make what they did during the boom. The article describes us as a generatioin more set up for failure than the generation that lived through the great depression.My favorite quotes were, " When you can't find a job or pay your student loans, though, college can seem like the Big Rip-Off."... "Whereas their parents experienced rising wages over their lifetime, Generation X may not. So college may have been a bad investment". and "I can't even tell you how much I have in my 401(k), and I have two of them floating out there with companies. I'm just going to hope it works out at this point. I just wanna die young so I don't have to deal with it."
I hate articles like this. Not because their innacurate or because they promote the wrong thing. Just the opposite. A few years ago I realized that working for the allmighty dollar didn't get you anywhere. My last blog entry says as much. So I've shifted my life around to be more balanced. I'm lucky that between my wife and I we have a decent, livable, household income. But, just like the ex-dot-commers in the article, I left the revolution with a ton of debt which will take many years to repay. How long? Maybe 10 or 15. This will put my in my 30s with no savings. Certainly, thats no uncommon, but its also not great. The problem is the dicotomy between my current beliefs on blanace, and the world view that you need to work hard now to have savings for later. They don't match so well. I could go for a much higher paying job in the field of programming and move to a big city, but I'd be miserable. I'm much happier here, underutilizing my skills by working in retail, in exchange for a low stress life that lets me go out and do the things I love, quite frequently. Its had a positive affect on my life and my relationship with my wife.
There are no easy answers. The only melding of the two ideologies that I see is the idea of living simply and cheaply. Only in this way can you make less, but still save. In my case, it means aggressively paying off debt (which I'm doing). Not as quickly as if I lived in LA and was a programmer, but at least we're not increasing it. I don't know what my current beliefs on how one should live their lives will affect my long-term future, but at the moment, I can't suspend my idealism enough to make a wholesale change back to believing that you work hard now so that you can play someday. To quote CCR, "Someday never comes."
Posted by wonko at October 16, 2002 08:49 PM
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