millennials need to accept that we're middle aged lol

Hi everyone. Uh, welcome to this video that has been on my mind for quite some

time. Basically, ever since I started our podcast, Just Getting Good, where I

interview women over 50. It is something that I want to take seriously as a

subject. So, I have uh a very copious amount of notes here with me, facts,

stats, because I think that this is for my fellow millennials. And listen, if

there are Gen Z, Gen X boomers, whatever. If there are, I mean, even Gen

Alpha, get off this YouTube channel. We cuss here sometimes. There may be people

from other generations watching this, but I really want to have a conversation

from millennial to millennial. I'm born in 1989, which I think puts me kind of

smack in the middle of the millennial generation. And this is something that

has been really weighing on me because I think it is while I'm always here to

defend us as a generation and have been doing it on this channel and elsewhere

for most of my career when people were calling us lazy, when they were saying

that we were spending all of our money on avocado toast and that's why we

didn't own real estate, when they were saying we were entitled, etc. I was

always first to defend and still am, uh, quite frankly. And even for Gen Z, like

I'm not gonna say that I've never had an unpleasant Gen Z stare encounter in my

life. But I also know that to paint with an extremely broad brush on an entire

generation that was as gravely impacted by the pandemic socially speaking as Gen

Z was or a lot of Gen Z was, I think is deeply unfair. And so even, you know,

generations to which I do not belong, I am here to push back against the

intergenerational slander. And actually, wait, just kidding. I'm actually also

here to engage in intergenerational slander, which is to say at some point

we are going to need to have a bit of an uprising on the boomers if for no other

reasons than real estate based ones. Because at this point, uh the way that

boomers are not only hoarding the housing inventory, but also depending on

price gouging either their children or selling to private equity in order to

retire is unsustainable economically. And we don't want to hear it. Boomers,

when you guys went to college, uh, you could finance yourself doing that, by

working part-time at the local fast food joint, and you got a job in executive

leadership at a Fortune 500 company by going into that company as a teenager

and being like, "Hand me a broomstick, chief. I'm ready to work." So, okay, I

will engage occasionally in intergenerational slander, mostly to try and get boomers to redistribute their hoarded wealth. Uh, if no one else but

to your own children, Jesus Christ. But I'm not here to do that on average, and

certainly not to people younger than myself. I really think that few things

are more unbecoming than really crapping on the people who come up behind you.

Especially because as we as millennials know, they are often dealing with a

completely different set of social, economic, political circumstances than we were. for example, graduating into the Great Recession. Uh, a lot of what

Gen Z is dealing with right now in sort of the early stages of their career from

AI to a decimated job market to even worse uh, cost of living and inflation

issues are beyond what we ourselves had to deal with. So, this is not to on

Gen Z. This is really to have an intragenerational conversation with my

fellow millennials because I do think we are starting to reach a little bit of a

crisis point in terms of our relationship to getting older as a

generation. And before I get into the depth of this video, I just want to

remind everyone that uh we don't endorse a lot of financial products here on TFD.

We actually will say no to vastly more than we say yes to. But one thing we

actually do is promote the products that we ourselves use. If you have ever

thought about getting your money together, by far the most important

first step is accurately tracking and managing your money. For me, that means

a really good budgeting app. I've been using Monarch personally for quite some

time now. It is what I replaced Mint with, which I was using for a decade

plus before. Mint is no longer with us, tragically. Monarch, to me, is

absolutely the best replacement. It's actually started by some former Mint

people. Um, it's incredibly intuitive. It doesn't sell your data to third

parties. Uh, there are no ads. You can use it by yourself or with a partner or

even with roommates etc. It's very easy to share expenses and have like a 360

view on not just your finances but the finances of people uh that you are um in

any way sharing finances with. I highly recommend Monarch. You can try it for

free before you use it. We have a link uh in the description if you use our

link. It really really helps us. If another budgeting system works well for

you, stick with it. I love Monarch. Cannot recommend it enough. I hear every

day from people in the TFD community how much they love it after, you know,

downloading it on our recommendation. So, give it a free trial. It's free.

What does it cost you? So, as I said, I am here to have uh a real heartto-he

heart as we like to do sometimes on this channel. We are at Christian youth camp.

Some of us were actually at those camps. Uh shout out Young Life campaigners.

Anyone? Anyone? But we are at Christian youth camp and it is time to flip around

that chair, maybe flip back that baseball cap, pull up and have a loving

but necessary chat. My fellow my fellow millennials my fellow millennials I

think are in a really really difficult position with regards to the concept of

aging. As I mentioned, I've been thinking about this subject a lot since

starting my podcast where I speak to women over 50. There's a huge number of

reasons that I wanted to focus on that for my for the podcast that I do. One of

which being that I just don't think we listen to women over 50 enough and I

think quite frankly they're the most interesting people in our society who

have the most interesting stories to tell and I think I can learn the most

from personally. So definitely passing the mic in that respect was really

important for me. But another reason that I wanted to do it was because

especially in building my career on the internet and on social media to a large

extent, I feel acutely aware of how much agism you internalize on these platforms

without even being aware of it. You know, for example, I would say my most

frequently used platform is Tik Tok, just in terms of what I enjoy looking

at. I do go on Instagram, but I frankly find that the Instagram reals comment

section is the dark web. So, I mostly use Tik Tok for my own personal

enjoyment, and I have a personal account on there that's really unrelated to TFD.

It's just kind of whatever I want to share. One thing that's undeniable about

Tik Tok is that it's geared toward a much younger audience than myself. The

largest segment of Tik Tok users are between 18 and 24. As a 37year-old

woman, that is a drastically different uh place in life and just vantage point

through which to see the world. And I think about that all the time. It's hard

not to notice when you are just even passively scrolling the app. You know,

people will say something like, "Oh, I wasn't even born when the Twin Towers

fell or, you know, I was in middle school when COVID hit or whatever the

case may be." And that's not a bad thing, right? Like I think that if

anything, like I'm in their house when I'm on TikTok. I'm not people are

allowed to be much younger than myself. But it is always a good reminder. And I

think anecdotes like that can be fine, but then you have the very insidious

side of it where, you know, people will be talking about doing anti-aging

regimens in their mid20s. Or people will talk about, you know, sometimes

literally someone my exact age, they'll mention a 37year-old speaking about them

as if they are truly one foot in the grave in a retirement home, older than

the oldest thing you could possibly imagine, right? Like you see things like

that on a very regular basis. And again, it's very passive. You sort of absorb it

by osmosis. you're not seeking it out. But when you spend a lot of time on any

sort of very youthcentric platform, and social media is probably the most

youthcentric place we can spend our time, much more so than let's say your

average workplace or even just the town square, you're going to absorb that

narrative. And in going into making this podcast, I was starting to notice ways

in which I was my perspective on aging was starting to be really skewed by

that. I am not exaggerating when I say that hosting this podcast, sitting down

with these women, watching the episodes back to edit them, just sort of becoming

I mean becoming friends with several of them, it has been life-changing for me

in so many ways. There's very personal ways in which it's been healing for me

based on kind of my own situation in life. But it's also just such an

extraordinary reminder that so many of the narratives, especially as women,

that we receive about aging and getting older are complete We

literally just interviewed a woman uh a couple weeks ago who said she did not

even start having good sex until she was in her early 60s. Like some of the women

I'm friends with from the show who are single, like their dating lives are

sexier and more interesting and more frankly hopeful than many of the women I

know in roughly my age bracket who are dating or even, you know, compared to

stories I heard from my friends dating in their 20s. And it's not just for for

romantic stuff, right? like they're also having incredibly vibrant friendships

that are in many cases so fulfilling and so embodied that they're not even

looking for romantic love. They're also in control of their own financial

destinies. They're starting businesses. They're completely changing their lives. They're moving to different countries. On every level,

doing this podcast has been an amazing demonstration that not only are we not

old in our 20s or 30s or whatever, which I think should be obvious, but we're not

even old in our 50s, 60s, and beyond. Like we are only old when we stop being

curious, when we stop trying, when we feel no longer connected to the world

and to the people around us. Like it is a good reminder that age is truly a

question of how we think and feel about ourselves. We've also talked quite a bit

on the channel about how a positive view of aging has just as great of an impact

on longevity outcomes as things like diet and exercise. A recent study has

shown an average of about seven years of lifespan uh being driven by having a positive outlook on aging. We've also seen that

social connections are one of the most important aspects to a long life and are

one of the most common threads when you look at those so-called blue zones where

people are living very long and well into old age. I actually just wrote a

whole newsletter all about this because I'm very interested in the science here.

There's even a study that I absolutely love to talk and think about, which is

they put a bunch of 50something men into an isolated house uh for a few weeks

where there were no mirrors. There were only photos of themselves from 20 years

ago. All of the decor, the music, the TV, etc. that they were exposed to was

that of uh 20 years prior when they were in their 30s. They just let them vibe

out for a few weeks. And at the end of the study, not only did they report

feeling vastly younger, they actually had physiological outcomes that were

drastically better than when they started. So our perception of feeling

old, feeling decrepit, feeling like we don't have any more value. That has a

direct, not just psychological, but physiological impact on our bodies and

on our lifespans. So thinking about that, I think, is always a very

important reminder to me. And this podcast, more than anything else I've

ever done, really teaches me that. This is not to throw boomer mothers under the

bus as a rule because many of the women I've been interviewing are boomer

mothers. Um, and they're slay as hell. That being said, a lot of women

who were raised by boomer women were probably raised with a lot of really

toxic narratives about weight, about age, about appearance, about value,

about what women are supposed to do, supposed to wear, supposed to want at

different stages of their lives. And we were also often raised by women who

maybe weren't in the best marriages, maybe didn't go into having children

really understanding themselves, let alone understanding what they wanted out

of life, um, and pretty much entirely lived through those children. And

especially when the children grew up and left the house, didn't really have a

whole lot left. This is not true of all boomer women, but boomer women

unfortunately were raised in a context where we were just not living on your

own terms as a woman and sort of choosing your own destiny and opting out

of a lot of things was not really presented to women. It was a very

different time socially. Expectations were very different and also the economy

was a lot more permissive of having families on let's say a one bluecollar

income situation. like it was a lot easier to just sort of default into

family life and there was a huge social pressure to do it. But there was also

not even nearly and by the way our conversation today is not anywhere near

sufficient but there was not even a fraction of the conversation we're

having today around what do you actually want as a woman but so when I look at

millennial women in particular sort of the third reason that I wanted to do

this podcast beyond getting out of my own agist impulses and self-critical

impulses from being on social media and also to just really expand my mind as to

what life after 50 for women can look like I think a lot of times when I see

my fellow millennials relationship to aging. I feel a deep sense of like

almost kind of secondhand embarrassment toward my own generation that I really

want to unpack in this video because I think anytime I'm feeling a sense of

like that's not a good look. I want to take a step back and interrogate that

judgment in myself, but also look at the broader social factors that are really

bearing down on it. So, you don't have to look really far on the internet to

see people, often Gen Z, pointing out millennial cringe. Like, I've seen

countless videos on TikTok that are millennial cringe. I recently did a deep

dive into what is called the quote quirk chungus subtype which is apparently uh a

defining millennial archetype where you're you know a 30-something if not

even older person who is still very into Harry Potter stuff loves saying the word

doggo and just generally loves infantilizing themselves being super over the top sometimes that will come with things like an obsession with

Disney a use of the word adulting to describe common adult responsibilities

that listen no one has ever liked but we all have to do This even gets down into

the very niche in the Reddit thread we pulled up here. One of them talks about

quote that thing where you and the millennial are having a standard

conversation, but then you say something that reminds them of some randomass

viral video or god-awful cartoon from 16 plus years ago. So now the millennial is

frantically whipping out their phone so they can force you to watch it against

your will while maintaining eye contact with you to gauge your reaction to the

you're currently viewing. THAT FEELS KIND OF EXCESSIVE. I don't maybe

I'm trying to think if I've ever done that to a person younger than myself. I

probably have. This is also a tiny digression, but I do want to kind of

hold space for this as a YouTuber. Speaking of the channel, in terms of the

millennial quirk chungus archetype, the like doggo puffer like rub my butt and

feed me pizza or whatever the like memes are. The era of YouTubers that a lot of

uh millennials grew up with like did untold damage just in terms of like our

collective sense of humor and means of expressing ourselves. Like I forget who

said this but someone who was a YouTuber when I very first started. This is like

some lore drop so buckle up. She referred to YouTubers as 30-year-old

15year-olds and my my was that true. Like I remember cuz when we started this

channel we were a production of John and Hank Green who at the time owned VidCon

which was like the massive YouTube conference. Still exists but they don't

own it anymore. So, even though we were like a minuscule channel back in like

2015 to 2017, because we were a production of the people who owned the

conference, like we were with the band. Like, we had the ultra VIP backstage

passes. Like, we were I mean, we were truly nobody there, but we got

to, my partner Lauren and I, we got to really see up close behind the scenes,

like name a massive YouTuber from that era. We were around them all the time

during these like conferences and whatnot. And when someone referred to

YouTubers as 30-year-old 15-year-olds, like that was exactly it because we may

forget this now, but like a lot of the big YouTubers who were in their like

let's say late 20s to early 30s, like their audience was like drastically

younger than them. Like often they were literally like their average age was

like 13 to 17. So these people were really catering toward children or like

pre-teens. And you could really see that in the way that they interacted. Like

they spoke and act and behaved as if they were teenagers, but they were

obviously drastically older than that. And one thing about our channel here on

TFD is that we have always had a very old audience by YouTube standards. Like

even back in the day, our audience was like late 20s, early 30s, and now it's

roughly the same, a little bit older as I've gotten older. And you know, the

channel's gotten older, but like for the most part, like we're grown-ups watching

this channel, and you I think can see that in the discourse in the comments,

but like a lot of internet creators, a lot of the people who really defined a

lot of internet culture and by extension millennial culture, they were talking to

children and they were talking like children. Even the lives that they were

presenting were sort of this perpetual adolescence of like, I mean, look at me.

I'm sitting on the floor of a bedroom, although it is a guest room in uh a

farmhouse in the south of France. So hopefully there's like a slightly

different vibe to it, but like nonetheless, there was a real sort of

perpetual adolescence that was part of the the language of the internet that

millennials grew up on. And I think that that perpetual adolescence has in some

ways translated into an endless nostalgia and a sort of arrested

development around how we express ourselves, what we find funny, our our

sort of sometimes cringe humor. And I think that's a lot of what Jenz is

pointing to. And I just want to say this, a lot of times when Jenz's are

calling millennials cringe, what they're really talking about is us being

sincere, not afraid of looking silly, and like we're having fun. I'm sorry,

but call me cringe every day because to be cringe is to be alive. Like I'm out

here. I'm sincere. I was raised on sincerity. I will always live in

sincerity. I try hard. I show up. I try visibly. Like, you will always catch me

out here trying. I care. I want to do a good job, sincere in my emotions. And uh

I love life. And I'm out here living and don't care if that seems cringe to you.

Okay? And that's the millennial superpower because I would so much

rather every day be like overly sincere and somewhat cringe than be like like I

don't care about anything. Like all of this is wet. When Gen Z acts like trying

is cringe or being sincere is cringe, that reminds me of like I came of age in

the early 2000s in high school where people would call things gay. Like they

would be like, "Oh, it's gay to do X or Y." And often that would just mean like

lame or uh unappealing, unbecoming or whatever the case is, like trying hard

in class. Like you would be you would be fielding gay accusations if you just

like tried to get a good grade. Do you know what I mean? or like you you had a

full backpack instead of like struggling to carry your books. Like that's you

were feeling gay quote unquote gay accusations for everything. And gay

didn't even really mean like gay like homosexual. It just meant like lame. And

I feel like that's often like the things that are being called cringe or the

things that millennials in high school would have called gay. Um we need to

lose all of these concepts cuz often what we mean is just like we're trying.

And sorry, Gen Z, millennials are trying and we care and we love and we laugh and

we live and we're feeling the rain on our skin. Suffice to say, the sort of

overarching theme of what a lot of Gen Z in particular are criticizing

millennials, which to be clear, when older people are criticizing

millennials, we're usually still getting a lot of the same lazy, entitled

participation trophy, avocado toast tropes from younger people. we're getting tropes that really boil down to self-infantilization,

um, an overreiance on nostalgia and sort of an entitlement to seem and feel and

be perceived as younger than we actually are. And I want to be very distinct here

because there is a massive difference between I am not feeling burdened by my

age which I think very much defines a lot of the women I've interviewed and

I'm living my life on my own terms regardless of what society is telling me

I should be doing at my age which I think is very healthy and really trying

to reclaim an age that is younger than ourselves. One of the things that I will

see a lot, and I think I'm being fed this because I'm, you know, a 37year-old

woman, which is we're starting to get to the age where for some reason, and I

swear to God, when my fellow millennial women do this, nothing makes me feel

more of an like an I'm not with them feeling, then when they'll post videos

or photos of themselves specifically bragging about the fact that they look

so much younger than they do, a 20some will be getting roasted on TikTok for

having sun damage, which is this is one of the things that I see on TikTok and

I'm like, I've taken unfathomable able psychic damage from having to see this.

But a Jenzier who looks maybe a little more worn or leathered, I guess, in the

skin than an average 20some will be getting ripped to shreds in the

comments. Like they'll be they a woman will post a video of herself like making

muffins. They'll be like, "Why do you look so old?" But then some of my fellow

millennial women with vastly less decorum and wisdom than I would want to

see from someone in my age bracket will come into the comments, post a picture

of themselves, and be like, "I'm 37 by the way, or I'm 39, or I'm 45, by the

Okay. And it's like, first of all, rarely rarely are you posting a

photo of yourself to flex on how young you look, and you actually do look that

young. Also, you're often posting the best photo of yourself that's been

edited or filtered or whatever. But even if you were like Jessica Alba,

who will look I I guess 31 until the day she dies at this point, which

congratulations to her. Even if you are one of those women who genuinely looks

agedeed, how uncouthed dry beg for compliments about how young you look, but also to do it specifically

to dunk on a younger person who looks a little older than their chronological

age, like have some dignity. Anyone who posts a video on social media,

especially a platform that's mostly populated by like early 20somes and

straight up asks people how old they look, like you deserve to be told that

you look horrible. Like I just what are we doing? Like even in the best case

scenario, have some dignity. Why are we doing this? And again, even if it goes

well for you to ask how old you look or to try to stunt with how old you look,

you are reinforcing the exact same narratives that I sincerely hope that we

are growing out of as a generation, which is to not overindex on your

physical appearance as an arbiter of not only how young or old you are, but the

kind of life that you get to live. Like one thing that was really notable about

my podcast with these women is that often the stories I was hearing from

these women about living these really fabulous dynamic lives that yes,

surprise surprise do involve sex and romantic love and desire and all these

things. They are not women who look 20 years younger than they are. They have

wrinkles. They have gray hair. Their bodies are not in the exact same place

before 50some years and however many kids. They look their age. Because it is

not about having to imitate youth perpetually to be desirable. What we

need to focus on is our mental age and the limitations that we place on oursel

as a result of that. So anytime you are essentially again dry begging for

compliments about how young you look, you are automatically feeding into the

most toxic narratives about what it means to get older or this idea that as

a woman especially you need to sort of earn your keep in society by looking

younger than you actually are. We also as millennials in addition to

overindexing on things like nostalgia and self-infantilizing and you know

obsession with the appearance of youth if not necessarily the life of youth we

are also we have a lot of bad habits that you know for example when you look

at our average screen time compared to that of like a Gen Z like we do have a

lot of these same very anxious habits that we often associate with people

younger than ourselves. I'm part of that by the way. I took like six weeks off of

Tik Tok, for example, because I was really unhappy with my screen time. And

I'm very happy to say that I became literate once again in that period and

I've read more books this year than I've read in many years prior. And that feels

like a real victory to me. But it's not to say that only young people are, you

know, capable of being obsessed with things like technology or of quote

unquote wasting their time or diminishing their attention spans. But

often when we look at the criticisms that are made about Gen Z, about them,

you know, having the Gen Z stare, having no attention span, being unable to, you

know, concentrate on something or ever be bored, like millennials have a lot of

those problems, too. It is certainly not unique to Gen Z. So, I think it's also

an imperative for us millennials to be very honest with ourselves about like

we're the first to criticize often the sort of horrible Gen Z habits,

especially as it pertains to technology. And yet again, you look at the studies,

you look at the numbers, we're not that far behind in terms of technology really

dominating our lives. It's a joke to say that like Gen Z can't do anything

without asking chat GPT. I know plenty of millennials for whom that's true.

Plenty. Although I would say more often they use cloth. But I've done a lot of

talking about what I don't like and what has really pushed me to want to change

the way I think about aging, especially as I myself get older. But I do want to

have like hold some space and empathy here for my fellow millennials even as I

make these criticisms. So I am a unique situation for a millennial economically

right like my socioeconomic status is much higher than the average millennials

when you consider the factors that I did not grow up with money. I'm working in

an industry that is very much the first time for anyone. It's not like I was

grandfathered into any kind of industry and I don't have a college degree. So

statistically I should be living a very very different life economically than I

currently do. I consider myself like a very not nostalgic person because I feel

in many ways that my life has gotten significantly better with every passing

year that I enjoy it more that I'm doing more of what I love that I know myself

better that I just feel happier and more fulfilled with each passing year which

makes me not a very nostalgic person. That is a huge privilege, right?

Especially economically for a lot of people when you are aging and

economically you are not where you want to be or you are not where you need to

be from a purely financial sense. Like it is very difficult to feel better with

age. That is also a huge privilege on the health front to be you know

able-bodied and relatively good health to be at a good place for your age

bracket on all of these factors. That is a huge advantage when it comes to not

being overly nostalgic or not, you know, waxing poetic about how much better

things were at a different time in our lives. For me, like my early to mid,

even late 20s, like I was still very much muddling through, figuring things

out. Um, and things weren't as good for me as they are now. That is not the

average trajectory of a lot of millennials. So, I do want to just kind

of name and make space for the fact that the millennial, the quirk chungus

millennial who can't grow up and is obsessed with the appearance of youth.

For a lot of millennials, that physical appearance, that, you know, skin care

routine, that glow, all of that is kind of what you have because you don't have

a lot of the other typical markers of what we would consider to be an adult.

There's also, as we've discussed before on the channel, a strong correlation

with physical appearance and beauty and how much you stand to earn from one

Harvard study. Quote, "Workers above average beauty earn about 10 to 15% more

than workers of below average beauty, and the size of this beauty premium is

economically significant and comparable to race and gender gaps in the US labor

market." So, there's a very economically valid reason to wanting to optimize for

your beauty. And like as much as I don't like to see it when millennials are

coming online to brag about how young they look, I also understand from both

an agism perspective and a sort of looksism perspective, there's a real

economic value there. And while it may seem like an oversimplification to link

our economic immobility to our cringe/semingly childish habits, I do

think there's truth to it because for most millennials, buying a home does

feel impossible or at least currently out of reach as to things like having a

family. Like I am someone who is identified as child-free by choice in

part because I want to be clear that like this is an active choice on my

part. We're not like battling infertility or other things. But I also

have to acknowledge that for a lot of millennials even if they wanted to have

children and could have children physically like that is an economic

impossibility. Either having children at all or the number of children that you

would ideally want. So like a lot of the things that we typically associate with

getting older and being in a different phase of our lives is really really out

of reach. But I think there's also this effect of if you cannot buy into some of

the typical markers like owning a home, having a child or multiple children,

being in a certain place in your career, etc. What you're going to spend on are

the things that you're able to spend on. So for example, take travel. Millennials

spend less than average per trip than their boomer parents, but they take a

lot more trips. One McKenzie report said, quote, "Younger generations appear

to propel much of the rising interest in travel. In 2023, millennials and Gen Z

took on average nearly five trips annually versus less than four for Gen X

and baby boomers. Millennials and Gen Zers also say that they devote on

average 29% of their incomes to travel compared to 25% for baby boomers. And

for millennials, prioritizing experience spending is tied to identity. Quote,

"One 2024 Vox Media poll found that 76% of zoomers and millennials surveyed

agreed that travel says a lot about who they are. 88% said it had spurred their

personal growth. And for previous generations, travel was a status symbol.

And not to be really bleak about it, but you can't cla your way into owning a

home, but you can cla your way into travel. You can fund an entire vacation

on credit cards, buy now pay later. You could even put literally things like

groceries on buy now pay later apps. And it should be noted that food spending,

including things like takeout, and going to restaurants are also part of the

massive spending difference between millennials and Gen Z and Gen X and

Boomers. Like, young people spend way more on food, especially quote unquote

fancy food. And it's easy to understand why like an, you know, no offense, but

kind of out of touch boomer would be like, see, that's why you don't own a

home is because you're constantly ordering takeout. And it's like,

amittita, you are never going to be able to save up a down payment. And I think a

lot of millennials and Gen Z are have made that calculus and are like, well, I

might as well enjoy myself. I might as well just keep engaging in the things

that I am able to afford or at least finance. I do want to be clear and I am

going back to the budgeting app here that I mentioned at the beginning of

this video because it is so important to say. There are two categories of

millennials economically. There are the millennials who genuinely are in a

position where things like home ownership, having children, etc. may be

out of their reach financially completely and there are high earning

millennials. I I do want to hold space for that that like many millennials are

actually economically doing well. Many of them are here in this audience.

However, there is also a middle ground of people who may not be like super high

earners. They will often be earning less than their parents did. However, they

could still do things like own a home um or have children or engage in those

markers. And I think it's like really really important to be honest with

yourself about what is possible for you and not just engage in total nihilism.

But for the people who are engaged in nihilism, which to be clear, I fully

was. I was I got myself into severe credit card debt through the nihilist

thinking of like, well, nothing good will ever happen for me financially, so

I might as well just like buy whatever I want and you know, it, we ball type

vibes. Like that's how I got into credit card debt. That's why I started this

entire channel in the first place was because I had gotten myself into a

terrible place with money and I wanted to really like work my way out of it.

So, I'm never going to like cosign the idea that it's just truly not possible

for a lot of people. However, that is the way a lot of people think. I also

want to um just flag we have Cara Perez, uh a friend of ours, a friend of TFDs

who hosts videos on the channel sometimes. You've probably seen some of

them. She is someone who is very moderate income and she's actually doing

a video soon about saving up $200,000 while never earning more than $50,000 a

year. In part because like she genuinely does live a very frugal uh lower to

middle income life and is really focused on um financial health and growing

wealth and doing all of these things on that modest budget. So I I do want to

say that like it's a lot harder. there are a lot of sacrifices required, but

like she would be the first to say that she lives like a very rich life in a lot

of ways and like really enjoys her life and is fulfilled. Um, but she is on a

lower income. Like that's just the truth. So there is a huge middle ground

here and I don't want to again ever cosign total nihilism especially when

it's not warranted. But that is the mentality that a lot of people including

millennials are operating on. It's like well nothing good will ever happen so I

might as well enjoy myself. I also want to acknowledge that we are dealing with

a student loan crisis that just simply did not exist in the same way. And that

is leading to a lot of things like for example about 18% of 25 to 34 year olds

living with their parents which is a percentage that outside of the pandemic

we have not seen since 1940 aka literally the end of the Great

Depression. And even when millennials are doing things we're often doing them

quote out of order. According to the US Census Bureau, quote, "The share of

Americans who are both married and own a home by age 30 has shrunk from 52% in

1960 to just 12% according to new data." In a shocking collapse that has the

potential to impact the future net worth of these couples as well as the

long-term health of the housing market in US economy. And while the death of

the quote love nest, the traditional first abode of newlyweds might seem like

little more than a change in lifestyle choices, economists say that it signals

a fundamental breakdown in the traditional path to middle class

security. And as I mentioned, the child-free choice movement has gained

real traction in recent years, including for people who could afford children.

But millennials do still want children for the most part. It's just the

timeline in the economy. Quote, "A 2023 study found it's still far more common

for people to want children than to plan to stay child-free, and that most

prospective parents want more than just one child. What's different from the

past is that people are increasingly pushing back the ages at which they have

those kids, often into their 30s and beyond, which can be a gamble because,

as a 2018 New York Times survey reported, about 25% of respondents said

they had or expected to have fewer kids than they originally wanted because they

couldn't afford them or ran out of time to have their ideal number of children.

People of color in the US often say they want large families, but end up with

smaller ones, a sign that not everyone is able to achieve their ideal scenario.

On the Reddit thread that I posted, one of the commenters was talking about how

millennials have a tendency to boohoo the economic circumstances or political

situation that we came of age into when previous generations were having to deal

with things like multiple drafts or the Great Depression or all of these other

massive factors and that Gen Z is dealing with all kinds of economic

problems that literally didn't exist for us as millennials as I mentioned earlier

on. And that comment really stuck with me for a lot of reasons because I think

one of the things that I've really learned from not just my own life but

especially in doing this podcast is that to some extent every generation and the

specific concoction of social cultural economic factors etc that we're dealing

with kind of exist in a vacuum like everyone's situation is totally unique.

And when I look at, for example, the way that Gen X and Boomer women uh came into

the world and were raised and how they navigated marriage and families and all

of that, there are ways in which their economic circumstances were way better,

but there were also ways in which they were way more hindered than my

generation of women. And it would be kind of impossible to take like a

onetoone examination and say which is better. Like I, as a millennial woman

who, for example, is happily child-free, who owns her own business, who's been

able to really carve her own life for herself on a lot of terms that were much

less available even a generation or two ago, I would not want to switch places.

However, like if I were a woman who was, you know, really aspired to family life

and even potentially like the stay-at-home mom life, like you almost

undeniably would have been better off even like 20, 30 years ago, just because

the economic circumstances to be able to raise a family on a single income were

drastically better. You will never be able to perfectly account for like which

generation had it worse. And then even within all of those generations, there's

always going to be a ton of other factors that weigh into whether or not

it was better or worse. For example, if you are a black American, you can only

go back so far before regardless of any other circumstance, your life would have

been materially worse because you would have been dealing with a level of

discrimination that is just legally not even the same. Like the actual legal

infrastructure has completely changed. This is not to say that black Americans

do not face an enormous amount of discrimination today. That there that

doesn't bear out hugely on their economic prospects, but like we can see

a hard line in the sand between let's say the the mid to late 1960s and like

everything that came after it just in terms of functional practicality. Like I

I think there was a comedian who was like I can't get into a time machine and

go anytime before 1985. So even if the economic indicators for a certain

generation were better like let's say in the 1950s and60s where the middle class

like exploded in wealth and prosperity and we had things like much higher

marginal tax rates for the wealthy which were undeniably economically better than

what we have now. We also had things like redlinining. We also were very

clearly even things like the GI Bill were unevenly distributed and were

discriminatory. Even when we point to our greatest times of economic

prosperity, the question becomes for whom? because it certainly wasn't that

way for everyone. And there are also very real factors that have remained

continuous through generations. Like for example, the federal minimum wage has

literally not changed whatsoever since before I started this channel 10 years

ago. So like clearly there are also through lines that exist across

generations. I do think that the fact that so much of millennial sort of

cultural education, we were really the first generation to be kind of raised

alongside the internet and so many of the defining voices of the internet were

defined by their youth or their proximity to youth. And I think that

that has had an untold impact on the way millennials perceive ourselves. And when

you combine that with like the ruthless agism of a lot of the social platforms

we see today, like it totally makes sense why this perpetual nostalgia would

kind of be part of how millennials present themselves or perceive

themselves. I want to wrap this up by saying that a lot of the economic forces

are very real. I would never ever deny that. And that's why I wanted to like in

large part dedicate a lot of this video to acknowledging why a lot of

millennials would have a very difficult relationship with aging. However, that

being said, I think it is upon us as a generation who really got dealt a not

good hand economically, but who also had the advantage of not living under the

same social strictures that a lot of older generations lived under, who were

able to think more independently, choose our own paths a little bit more,

prioritize different things, question things, opt out. One of the things that

we have to question most vigorously and really lead the charge on is decoupling

our concept of aging from a how we look physically or b any really toxic notions

of what a certain age should be. One of my recent guests on just getting good

talked about how she hates language like you know 50 is the new 30 or you know

feeling like you're a younger age. She's like, "No, no, no. I am my age, but that

age gets to be what I want it to be." And that is how I want to see my fellow

millennials really leading the conversation and rethinking it. Every time I see a video of an older person who looks their age on social media

engaging in something that we think older people don't do or shouldn't do,

whether that's wearing a mini skirt or going out dancing till late or going to

a concert um or you know dating including people younger than themselves

or you know packing up their lives and moving or whatever the case may be.

Whenever I see that and the person visibly looks their age I nothing makes

me happier because I think this is what we need to see. Anti-aging, I think, has

been a really toxic thing for our culture for so many reasons, especially

for women, but most of all because it completely misses the point. We should

be against aging as we've currently defined it. But what we should be

against is this inevitable slide into irrelevance or thinking that we've made

our choices and we have to live with them forever or that we have an

increasingly limited number of things that we can do or be or think. I want us

to really think about anti-aging from the perspective of anti- the narrative

of aging, anti- the social impositions and restrictions of aging. And remember

that that has nothing to do with how many wrinkles or gray hairs you have.

Remembering that that is entirely a question of your self-perception and

what you allow of yourself and what you allow of the people around you. I will

end this on my begging, begging my fellow millennial women to stop posting

pictures of themselves and either asking people how old they think they look or

flexing on how young they look compared to someone else. Stop it. What does that

Michael Jordan mean? Stop it, please. Or whatever he says. Stop it. Like, it's so

undignified. And even if you look 25, you immediately feel like you're already

in the crypt, baby. Like, if that's your outlook on life, like you're gone. Like,

forget how young you look. like you're mentally dead. So, stop obsessing about

how old or young you look. Start obsessing about the prison of agism in

which you are unnecessarily keeping yourselves. Lose the over reliance on

infantilization and nostalgia. Keep the wonderful joy and sincerity that defines

millennials. No more intergenerational hate. More intergenerational lifting us up. Steal the homes from the boomers. Don't let them sell them to private

equity. That's it. That's my spiel for today. Watch Just Getting Good. Feel

better about aging. Love you guys. Have a great day.