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Let’s Mock Millennials’ Stress List
A CBD oil manufacturer ran a survey of what stresses out Millennials. It seems that Gen-Y thinks that 2019 is most stressful time in human history. I think it is important for other generations to mock them and make their own lists. I’ll aggregate responses in the OP.
The Millennial (Gen-Y) stress list:
1. Losing wallet/credit card
2. Arguing with partner
3. Commute/traffic delays
4. Losing phone
5. Arriving late to work
6. Slow WiFi
7. Phone battery dying
8. Forgetting passwords
9. Credit card fraud
10. Forgetting phone charger
11. Losing/misplacing keys
12. Paying bills
13. Job interviews
14. Phone screen breaking
15. Credit card bills
16. Check engine light coming on
17. School loan payments
18. Job security
19. Choosing what to wear
20. Washing dishes
+ Endless war
+ Debt/GDP ratio >1
+ College credential not worth the debt as promised
The Gen-X stress list:
- Nuclear war
- Tornadoes
- Power outage/blizzard
- Starving kids in China
- Cigarettes/secondhand smoke
- Desegregation
- Muggings
- Degree technical obsolescence
- Dot-com bust *and* great recession
The Boomer stress list:
- Polio
- Smallpox
- Nuclear war
- Tornadoes
- Segregation
- Race riots
- Career technical obsolescence
Greatest Generation stress list
- The Great Depression
- 60 million violent deaths between 1939 and 1945
Why is this worthy of the main feed?
There’s no link to the original study or raw data, no indication that was a scientific poll, no description of the methodology (i.e. did they prompt for stressors or ask for stress ratings from a provided list, are they asking about daily life stress or existential stress, who was in the sample, etc.), and the post content does an apples-and-oranges comparison purely for the purpose of insult. It’s clickbait.
This line worries me more than the whole list up above.
My mother in law was extremely poor due to the poor choices of her husband. They definitely ”couldn’t afford” kids but they had seven anyway and took great care of them. All of them have done pretty well for themselves.
I don’t understand the ”can’t afford” notion, especially if you have a stupid pet.
I think there’s a lot more to it than ”can’t affotd”.
How many of your friends are married or at least cohabiting with someone? Two (or more) live *much* cheaper than one.
But don’t kid yourself. Us old folks with the big houses (and big mortgages) and the nice salaries and bank accounts didn’t start that way, and most of us (at least speaking for myself) certainly weren’t that way at age 30. We also didn’t pretend that our situation was unique.
Stable roof over head would be a pretty big precursor to reproducing.
I don’t think we can take for granted this particular problem for this generation. Jobs are overwhelmingly concentrated in very expensive areas.
Only if you dual the income.
Tell me, for your generation, did one salary go further, taking into account housing, food, and basic amenities for that time? How was the saturation of college education? Job prospects without a degree, salary, and modest (stable) living?
Yeah, my generation* could learn to go without for quite a few things. I’m not certain how that translates to being able to afford the basics.
I’m an early Y – ’83. I caught the tail of the early part, witnessing the evolution as I graduated and early working years.
This is off-topic, but…
When it comes to affording families, I think our division of young women from older men (10 year age difference) has had a negative effect.
There is a latent period to being able to afford to support a family. Always has been (from time immemorial). Men in ancient Israel had to be able to build a living space for their future bride before he could marry her. If you expect both to work (or to marry within some arbitrarily limited age range), then family formation will be off-set.
Young women pairing with older, established men shouldn’t be as much of a social no-no as it is. And the stratification of age groups in our culture perpetuates this.
I fully agree. I have two kids, generally dislike dogs, don’t consider children and dogs comparable at all, and I don’t understand why my friends are willing to pay, uninsured and out the nose, thousands of dollars to extend an aging animal’s life just a little longer.
That being said, I love my friends, and their dogs are important to them. It’s just an arbitrary way to be compassionate to recognize it as a worthy crisis to their family unit, and I try to keep that in perspective.
Lol. I am a dog person, but opted for a cat instead because I like kids more. I do find young children comparable to dogs. Both require far more attention and use similar disciplinary tactics. Firmness, gentleness, consistency, clear boundaries.
The rule in our house is no dog until the last kid is potty trained. A dog is an 18 year investment in a toddler. At least my 3 year old will be able to feed itself in 5-6 years.
Wait, you’re the guy teaching us how to build a computer and you don’t even know how to back up the data on your phone?!?
Heh. I know this is facetious, but the electrical part of computers is a different ball game than operating systems and user interfaces.
I should also admit that I don’t actually order delivery pizza.
Nope.
Utilities, Rent, etc are fixed to the unit, regardless of how many people live there. (okay, there’s some marginal increase in utilities as more people move in).
I was relatively cash “rich” in college on a minimum wage ($3.25/hour or something like that in 1984) job because we had six people sharing a crappy house. Split the cable bill 6 ways, split the heat and electricity six ways, split some of the staple foods…
I graduated college in 1985, moved to Alaska and arrived right after the oil price crash, so there wasn’t much hiring happening. Move back to the lower 48 at Christmas, worked at a video store for several months until I found a programming job.
In 1992 I was 30 years old and making about $30k. I had a car payment and Credit Card debt. Bought a crappy fixer-upper house for $69k on a 7% adjustable rate mortgage.
Here’s my advice to any millenial – move away from the coasts. There’s plenty of jobs and life in the midwest, and the cost of living is substantially lower.
If I couldn’t do that, then what point to being a parent?
Interesting. I was born in 1973. Computers weren’t really introduced to me until sixth grade. By the time I graduated from high school, computer science was taking off. I ended up majoring in graphic design when I was in college. I was one of the few women in my courses. I also personally discovered the internet for myself via University of Minnesota, almost by accident. It’s interesting to look at the timelines.
This was a good exchange. Every generation had problems, and all contributed to under cut the constitution and take us toward where leaders in power extract as much as possible from the rest of us, knowledge all of them had and have, but the first bunch tried to insulate us from. We have access to even better historical data than they did but we’ll probably continue to go to the same place all other civilizations went. Gradual gathering of power centrally, extracting growing and narrowing wealth centrally until it settles into stagnation.
I dunno about any millennial. I’d advise the Ricochet ones that way.
Touché. I’m a software engineer who hasn’t the foggiest idea how the electrical hardware of computers actually works, it all seems like impossible magic to me.
I mean, pretty much this right here. Children will (hopefully) survive to adulthood and be able to have a meaningful conversation with you someday! The toddler years are what you ENDURE to reach that point! A dog seems like having a lifelong and insanely needy toddler to me, which is why it’s never appealed.
(That being said, the kind of unconditional love that dogs have for their owners is pretty remarkable to witness.)
You can hope, anyway.
What do I look like, a guy who’s not lazy?
Looks like the election of JFK got the fertility juices flowing . . .
I’m game (though that’s not the way we raised our kids).
I’ve mentioned on Ricochet before that I found out in 1983 that I was a horrible businessman. I went out of business then, owing about $35,000, probably $75-80,000 in today’s dollars. Most of it was to the IRS, so bankruptcy wasn’t an option. So I went to work for a company building restaurants out of town whose standard work week was 80 hours: six 12’s and an 8. And I already had a wife and kids. I paid the debts off in about four years. It was rough for a while, but don’t tell me it can’t be done.
I’m not saying that you weren’t a hard worker who pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, Randy, but this probably has a lot to do with why you were able to recover so fully and well. Education costs are rising eight times faster than wages, according to Forbes, and more well-paying jobs require a college degree. Comparing the 1980s, a famously prosperous decade in American history, with the recession of 2008 that was waiting to greet a lot of millennials entering the workforce, comes across as a little out of touch.
With any luck your children might even return the favor and care for you in your twilight years. Fido won’t be much help when you’re in a nursing home.
1983 was the *very* early stages of the Reagan boom. 1982 was a really, really bad year economically.
Fortunately, the baby boomers were smart enough to vote for somebody like Reagan who knew how to unleash an economy, unlike the millenials who voted for Obama, who only knew how to strangle one.
That’s true. But none of the work I did required a college degree. I did use a little trig once in a while. And plumbers make a lot of money.
I think the millennial stress list only shows that millennials don’t consciously know what has their stress resistance so low that even the phone screen breaking feels major. Many years ago, when I was going through an ugly divorce that I didn’t choose or want, all kinds of little things going wrong had me bursting into tears. (And more little things went wrong because I was having trouble paying attention to the here and now.) The little things wrong would have been nothing more than annoying if I hadn’t felt abandoned and without real friends.
The question would be why do so many millennials feel alone, disconnected and without meaning in their lives in a way that the WW2 generation more often didn’t.