By Afroditi A. Karagianni,
Recently, a new trend has taken Gen Z’s most used online applications by storm. More specifically, TikTok, Instagram and Twitter (or X, if you may) are full of short videos and posts, where the younger generations present what their life looks like, compared to that of their parents, when they were their age. For instance, while scrolling on my Instagram feed, I came across a twenty-five-year-old girl who posted two photos: the first one was of herself and her dog, followed by a picture of her parents when they were her age, with their two kids. No more than two minutes later, I stumbled upon a twenty-three-year-old college student’s tweet, where he tweeted that he cannot afford to rent on his own, whereas his parents by his age, had already purchased their first family home. Immediately afterwards, I saw an Instagram story of a nineteen-year-old girl, who posted the allowance she receives monthly while living with her parents, next to a framed photo of their wedding, where they were merely twenty-year-olds.
Why do the lives of the older generations differ so much from those of our own? To what extent does the socio-economic era in which we live in influence our reality? And most importantly, when will we be financially able to take care of ourselves, and thus be the sole ones controlling our future spendings (Seriously, I have had my eye on a couple of concert tickets for a while now…)?
To begin with, pretty obvious is the fact that the younger generations are mostly leading very different lives compared to those of their parents when they were their age. Young people nowadays (for example the age group from 18- 25 years old) are usually students in college, unemployed or receiving a minimal salary, single, unmarried, without a house or other expensive stuff under their belt. In visible contrast come their parents, who by that age, had already found their spouse, had moved into their family home, had gotten a steady job and pretty much ‘gotten their act together’. Of course, there are plenty of exceptions in both categories, but one cannot doubt that these special cases seem like a confined minority.
The reasons behind this reality are many. First and foremost, there is a visible difference between the housing market of now and then. Today, the prices of houses have skyrocketed. In truth, one is hesitant to even start renting a house on their own, since almost 40% of their income goes directly towards their rent. According to statistics, back in the 2000s, only 25% of one’s income went to their mortgage, and the numbers usually go down from there, as we move towards the years past. It is worth noting that between 1999 and 2022, the average cost of rent grew by 135%, whereas the average income found itself expanded by a mere 77%.
Moving on, younger people seem to be very career and education oriented. Many among them still want to at some point have kids, but generally, the expansion of their family happens later, as they want to acquire a stable income first by focusing on their career prospects. This comes as no surprise since multiple countries have, over the years, faced economic crises and instabilities, which have profoundly impacted the living standards, and psychological conditions of their people. These economic issues have made unemployment a recurring problem of today, hindering the people involved from forming bigger families and making purchases as they focus primarily on their day-to-day survival. As for those who still have steady jobs, they must either work more or get a raise in order to gather the amount of money required for them to live without any financial fears in today’s expensive world. The more one works, the less time they possess to focus on themselves and possibly their thoughts of having kids. As a result, younger people typically have fewer kids, and less marriages compared to the older folks.
This comes hand in hand with the feminist movement’s further development. As women get more independent, with more types of work available to them, they reevaluate the way past generations lived. As such, various women realize that having kids is no more a requirement, and thus decide to postpone it, or even exclude it from their life plans altogether. In fact, according to a study conducted in the US, in the 10 highest paying occupations there, only 13% of workers were women in 1980. Nowadays, women make up 35% of the workers in high-paying fields.
To follow up on that, the women who still want to have kids generally decide to become mothers later in life, since they mainly focus on their careers and education while young. Such a choice would probably not have been made in the past, as women’s fertility is gradually reduced and years later disappears with the cease of their menstrual cycle. Today, fertility clinics and scientific laboratories offer women the ability to freeze their eggs and utilize them later in their lives when they are ready to reproduce, ensuring the eggs’ best possible quality. Such unconventional reproductive methods have immensely aided women in their attempts to plan their lives to their liking, and further provided them with a chance to focus on their careers and achieve their financial goals. It is worth noting that, with the anxiety over having children gone, many women report to have been feeling more confident in their life choices, while simultaneously doing better in their respective fields.
Furthermore, fewer societal pressures designate the majority of today’s societies. The ‘need’ to have kids, get married and ‘settle down’ is starting to fade, and people are generally less pressured to adhere to societal standards and expectations. This allows them to start raising bigger families later in life or avoid having children completely. Marriage and parenthood are looked at less as goals, and the traditional family structure has also found itself quite shaken. In the past, a woman, a man and their children were ‘the family’. Today, the term family translates into a variety of alternative structures. For instance, a family can be two partners, with or without kids, or a parent and their younglings. The boundaries of the traditional family are getting more and more blurred, and people have been enjoying the newly established freedom they are the recipients of.
As a member of Gen Z, I often find myself wondering whether I am taking all the right steps towards a ‘successful’ life. But what exactly is the success we are all so eager to conquer? As I see it, success can mean different things to different people. Consequently, what our parents or grandparents viewed as a successful life can differ from our own ideas on the matter. Surely, houses, steady jobs and a good salary are all important in today’s materialistic and money-run world. But what is even more vital, is that we are truly feeling happy and that we surround ourselves with the right people and spend our days in ways that feel right to us.
The tide has shifted, the times have changed, so it is high time we stopped obsessing over traditional ‘success’. In other words, starting to wonder about what we ourselves view as success, and taking the necessary steps to achieve just that, seems like the only thing that will ensure us happy and authentic lives. As for those concert tickets that I mentioned earlier, I will probably (and confidently) go ask my parents.
References
- Women have gained ground in the nation’s highest-paying occupations, but still lag behind men. Pew Research Center. Available here
