Throwing A Fit

In the past, the future was an exciting prospect. Not so much in a ‘flying cars and hoverboards’ way, but in that the technological revolution from the 80s to the 00s made the world seem infinitely more connected, knowledge much easier to come by, travel increasingly accessible. The big, wide world felt more at everyone’s fingertips than ever before thanks to the economic boom of the 80s and the birth of the internet in the 90s. Things were looking up, and on the whole people were genuinely, sincerely, optimistic.

I don’t know all that many people, in 2026, who are optimistic about the future. Exponentially, faster than it ever has before and at a rate of knots, the world is changing, and not for the better. Those same advancements in technology and connection are now serving to isolate people, think on behalf of people, and ensure people continue to feel inferior by comparing themselves to more of civilisation that any human was meant to see. The global climate is changing at such a pace that the world is quite literally dying underneath us. Current global politics is a sort of Orwellian caricature which is serving chiefly to deepen the divide between left and right and rich and poor. 

The assumption was that today’s Millennials and Gen Z would follow in the footsteps of their Boomer and Gen X parents. An archetype of life had been set out, and save for differences in wanting spouses and children, the major message of ‘work hard in school to get a good job’ was fairly ubiquitous. Technological changes would only serve to improve our lives and make our work more efficient. However, noone could have predicted the speed at which the world, economies, markets and society would change, and how it made the prior generation’s example almost redundant.

I would like to state that I don’t mean this to be some tedious mourning of ‘the good old days’, and if I ever use the phrase ‘in my day’ you are welcome to give me a clip round the ear.  There was, and has always been, a great deal wrong with the past, moments in our shared history which now serve as an example to be learned from.

Do we learn from them? Do we fuck.

Speaking for my generation – millennials, born between 1981-1996, we have so far seemingly lived through an absurd number of ‘Once in a Lifetime’ historical events. We either have childhood memories of the fall of the Berlin wall or the attacks on 9/11 and the War on Terror. We were in our late-teens and 20s when the 2008 financial crisis wiped the value of the stock market and crashed house prices, a level of which had not been seen in generations. We spent the following decade in a global recession just as we had entered the job market, a grim period of austerity punctuated by populist politics leading to Brexit and Trump being elected president. Around 2018/19, economically things were slowly improving. Interest rates were rising, the housing market had recovered and businesses had been expanding.

However, immediately after this, the rug was swiftly pulled out from underneath the whole world when the Covid-19 Pandemic happened.

It was the largest disruption to everyday life since WW2, an event the majority of people alive in 2020 could not remember. The human cost was staggering, not only in those who fell ill from the virus, but for those in healthcare roles, local council and government. It was another huge financial blow across business and commerce. The burden and toll on everyone’s mental health is a bill that can never be fully repaid.

The consequence of this was sky high interest rates, making home ownership and mortgages even further out of young people’s reach. With wages almost stagnant on average since the 00s, the price of natural resources and production rising caused the cost of living crisis, something we still feel to this day.

The aforementioned technological revolution, something which had vastly improved our ability to learn, produce, create and develop, continued to metamorphose into a huge, much more sinister tool, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy. The rise of AI has made the internet into a disconcertingly sentient being, and I’m increasingly unaware if it is working for me, or if I am working for it.

To put it simply, the timeline of my generation’s life has been:

School → 9/11 → university → 2008 financial crash → graduate into recession → austerity → housing crisis → Brexit/Trumpism → pandemic → cost-of-living crisis→ climate emergency → AI revolution.

The phrase “once in a lifetime” has had such heavy usage that Millennials may need a loyalty card. Every fifth unprecedented global catastrophe, the next one is free. 

It’s little wonder that we are fucking jaded. 

We were effectively mis-sold the notion of ‘Get a degree = get a better job’ when we were young, not necessarily through poor advice, but by sheer virtue of the speed of economic and political change. Working hard at a moderately good job at above average earning levels no longer guarantees home ownership or financial security. Even if you manage the former, it might compromise the latter. We know we should have savings and healthy pension pots, but it is almost impossible to achieve all of this. We have no idea when we will be able to retire, if in fact we can retire at all. We were given a roadmap. The roadmap stopped working.

What makes this even more disconcerting is that we can’t simply re-strategise our plans for retirement BECAUSE the world is moving so fast. What is true now is highly unlikely to be true in ten years. How are we meant to make a 30-year plan or get a 30-year mortgage when we have absolutely no idea what the world will look like in 30 years? The prospect of this makes me want to close my eyes and stick my fingers in my ears and pretend it isn’t happening.

Even more, my heart goes out to Gen Z. Having some of your formative years during the Covid-19 pandemic is socially and psychologically challenging, meaning the knowledge of how the world works was, for a few years, distorted. 

Additionally, It is pure fact that life costs more now than it ever did. Over the last 20-25 years, we have seen almost stagnant wages, precarious employment and a housing market increasingly detached from the incomes of young people. 

In this relatively short time frame, house prices rose twice as fast as average earnings. The average house price climbed to roughly 8.6 times average annual household income, up from about 4.4 times in 2000. Coupled with this, resources such as oil, coal and gas have risen in market cost significantly, meaning what precious little is left of wages is swept up by bills which are needed to simply exist.

Unless you are incredibly lucky, the system is keeping people, and young people especially, trapped in a cycle of renting, and with bills, groceries and transport rising, there is little opportunity to save for a house deposit, let alone the future. While house prices have indeed risen to double the rate of wage inflation, rental costs are also growing at 50% higher than income. Even at my age of 35, a great deal of people I know at similar ages are not able to buy a house or get a mortgage.

Even if Gen-Z manage to scrape by, it’s hard to imagine how Gen-Alpha stand a chance. I assume they are being prepared for adulthood by being taught how to barter with a supermarket self-checkout machine.

And perhaps this is the bit that I find hardest to articulate: We’re not necessarily miserable, we are just exhausted by uncertainty.

It feels like we’re being asked to play a game while someone keeps changing the rules.

And perhaps that is why so many people my age seem to be permanently tired. Not just physically tired, although God knows there is plenty of that, but existentially tired. Tired of optimising. Tired of side hustles and pension calculators and property ladders and LinkedIn and trying to work out whether we’re financially behind where we’re supposed to be. Tired of being told that if we just make the right choices, we’ll eventually achieve the life we were promised.

Because increasingly, it doesn’t feel like there are any right choices, there are just choices with different levels of risk.

And this is where I think something has fundamentally changed between generations. Previous generations could reasonably expect that, broadly speaking, tomorrow would look like today, only slightly better.

We can’t even guarantee that next Tuesday will look like next Tuesday.

Which brings me to the uncomfortable question that no one wants to say out loud: What exactly are we supposed to be working towards?

Do let me know if you work it out.

J x