To think current young adults are heading for a tough mid life crisis?

[clairemcnam]

Most generations since we have moved in the west beyond bare survival, have had a significant group of young people questioning the point of focusing on a career, buying more stuff and living an ordinary consumerist life. But this generation seems incredibly conformist. Amongst young adults the emphasis seems to be on agitating around being able to buy a house, rather than questioning capitalism.

I suspect when a lot of current young adults hit mid life, they are going to be hit very hard as they begin to question their life and why they strived so hard to be consumers.
AIBU?

I saw stats concerning UK home ownership in the 1920s. Roughly 80 percent rented privately. Half the remainder rented off councils and the other half (ie 10 percent) were owner occupiers. Slum clearance and rebuilding after the wars replaced private rentals. In the UK at least, the idea that one should own one's home only really dates from the rise of Thatcherism. Before then, working people found it harder to afford to buy and harder to get finance.

We're now heading back to 100 years ago. The last piece in the jigsaw remaining is restrictions on finance.

Home ownership was more of a thing in colonial societies (Aus, NZ, USA etc) but that is because there was plenty of land available for those willing to farm it. They are now going the same way as the UK.

Walkaround No I am not sheltered at all. Either in where I live, my extended family or my social circle. I do know many people struggle, I am aware of the rise of street homeless, impact of universal credit, etc. But those are not the type of young adults I was talking about.
So yes AIBU in generalising. I think this applies to middle class over protected kids. And yes I think more kids are over protected.

Sorry. "Slum clearance and rebuilding after the wars replaced private rentals" - should have been clearer that council housing replaced the private rentals.

Well, it's not my experience OP, the young people i know are, in no particular order: professional cyclist living abroad, various apprenticeships, healthcare workers looking after our elderly, at uni studying to be nurses, therapists, on placement, learning about the raft of complex adult care needs, backpacking in Asia/Auss/Europe.

All this despite that they'll be paying for their uni education into retirement, won't be able to buy property without parental support and perhaps more importantly, people like YOU constantly criticising them.

The generations since WW2 never had it so good.... until recently.

Lol, no. Just, no.

It is an incredibly conformist generation. A friend works in a university and has for years and he has commented how this generation of students turn up when they are supposed to, and do what they are told to do. There have always been some students like that, but also many students who did question things and were challenging.

I also in my workplace work with a lot of colleagues who are young adults. It is myself and an older colleague who question anything. The younger ones just go along with things.

I remember a fairly recent thread where posters were ruminating on how tame their children were in comparison to their own misspent youth.

I agree in many ways but also think this is probably looking at it from a middle class perspective in many cases. I retrained a few years back in a trade (was in corporate sales before) and work with a lot of working class lads, many of whom have poor if any qualifications. They are a far cry from the university types I encounter.

This thread 🤦🏽‍♀️

The generations since WW2 never had it so good.... until recently.

I have said this before on this thread, but you are talking about the better off in society, the winners in life. Not the people in awful mental hospitals, black people and the level of racism, SN kids locked away in institutions, lesbians having their kids taken away and gay men being put into prison, families living for decades in 1 room with a shared outside toilet, etc. Things went on in the recent past that I would think shock some young adults these days. Too much shocking still goes on, but it certainly was not the good old days for many vulnerable people.

Anyone who thinks all baby boomers had it good should read A Working Life by Polly Toynbee.

My DP was a cleaner in a mental hospital 40 years ago. He left because what he witnessed was just so awful.

And a friend who left school at 16 and started work in an institution for disabled kids, some as young as 6, said the other staff totally ignored the kids. They made sure the kids were fed and bathed, and ignored them the rest of the time, just telling them off or smacking them if they interrupted the staff chatting. She was 16 and I remember her coming round to my house in tears because of the way these kids were treated. This simply would not happen now. But those kids have grown into the adults that some think now never had it so good.
And yes it pisses me off because it erases the lives of all those people who had a very difficult life.

@Linning this has to be one of the most eloquent and effective posts I've ever seen on Mumsnet i really don't know why a lot if the baby boomer generation and the one immediately after can't accept the numerous challenges our generation face currently. It's
Like any time it's mentioned it's always ' we had it worse' it's not a competition guys!

We know its not a competition. But on social media so many young adults talk about baby boomers as having had a charmed life. They are wring. That is why you get those responses.
And no isitfridayyet Linnings low key racism is not eloquent.

Free education inc college, cheap housing, a high availability of well paid work.... i'm almost a boomer and the last 15 or so years have been the toughest so far.
I see what my DD generation has to look forward too and i weep, fortunately for DD she has Aussie citizenship.

Sure, you can look at the scandal that is Social/Mental healthcare now or the institutions that vulnerable people ended up in years past but you started a thread about how a whole generation are hurtling toward crisis in their middle age... not how a minority were treated in the 50s onward.

Oh and Racism is alive and kicking, it never went away.

I disagree with a lot of things you’ve said OP but many people have already expressed things I think in more detail (examples of activists from the younger generation etc).

What I find funny though is that you’re berating younger people for not fighting against consumerism/capitalism, and several people are agreeing - but when younger people join in conversations on here about housing and express support for a socialist system, limits on buy to let, house price caps, 100% inheritance tax (all of which I am actually in favour of, although I’m a bit older than the demographic you speak of) they’re shot down, called names, accused of being stupid Stalinists etc. On that topic it was actually a collective of young people who pushed to get tenant fees banned, and many people of the older generation are complaining about it! I would love to see a huge socialist uprising and the entire housing market cease to be a for-profit exercise (Poloshot I think even people who work in coffee shops should have access to secure housing!), and perhaps you would like to see that kind of radical change too, I don’t know, but I suspect many people on here agreeing with you really wouldn’t like that at all.

I applaud those changes. And privileged people always complain about changes that negatively affect them, and there seem to be a lot of privileged people on MN.

jasjas Thanks for telling a black person that racism never went away.
And no disabled kids and adults and those who suffer from mental health problems have never been a tiny minority.

Fair enough. I wasn’t insinuating you wouldn’t want that, it’s just my suspicion a lot of millennial-bashers would be the first to complain if something drastic like that happened. However I can sort of see what you’re saying about middle class people being less resilient but in my experience it’s more about entitlement - privileged people have a much higher base of what they consider an acceptable standard of living which as a WC person I do find ridiculous. Case in point: I have a friend constantly complaining she’ll never be able to afford a house (has always lived with parents in nice big house in south London apart from when she went to uni, never had to pay board). I sent her a link to a nice flat within budget. Her response: Eww! It’s in XXX area! Who’d want to live there?

clairemcnam - your posts are a bit confusing. You started out bashing an entire generation. Then you said you didn't come from a middle class background, so didn't know what it was like to be middle class when you were younger, whereas you presumed thatcorythatwas did know. Then you said that you think the middle classes are having a harder time of it now than they did in the past, unlike others who have it easier. And now you are saying that it's middle class children you are talking about who have it too easy and lack resilience compared to how they were in the past and you aren't talking about the rising numbers of street homeless and universal credit, etc?! So, are the middle classes better or worse off, softer or more resilient, or what, in your opinion, because I've lost your train of thought. Or are you now going to say you don't mean the middle classes after all, only a handful of late-teenage employees where you work?

And btw, given the latest scandal about the way people with learning disabilities and developmental disorders were being treated in a residential care home, and the uncovering of cases of vulnerable people being kept as slaves, for sex or manual work, do you really think things are that vastly improved on the past and that what used to happen couldn't happen now?

@clairmcnam

You missed the mark of my post.

Again. I really am NOT talking about YOUR experience, in YOUR neck of the world. I am talking globally.

Because again your generation and mine AREN'T limited to the UK/Europe. They really aren't. And while it is awesome that some people in my generation have it easier in some aspects where you live than yours did when you were our age, it does NOT mean that it is the case for most people from my generation across the world.

It is GREAT that as a black woman you feel less scared walking down the streets now than you did 20 years ago, but you are (again) being unreasonable to assume that your experience is representative of everybody else's because plenty of black (and non-black) people of my generations are still as scared walking down the streets as you were 20 years ago.

A black man got killed by no less than 6 cops 15 minutes from where I live a few months ago, while sleeping in his car. A shooting occured less than a week ago in my city and another one less than 2 months before that.

As a black woman living in the US I can assure you that I am STILL very much scared to walk down the streets. Scared to be pulled over by a cop and then shot dead for no real reason other than being black, scared to see myself being refused care in a life-threatening situation because I am gay and it is legal here to refuse to provide care for me if my sexuality goes against the doctors and nurses' core beliefs, scared that as a gay woman if I have a baby with another woman and she carries it I will have zero legal rights regarding the baby, scared that if I get raped and pregnant I risk the DEATH penalty or spending the rest of my life behind bars for trying to abort a baby I never chose to have. So while it is great you get to feel safer in the streets of your town please please remember that plenty of women (and men) like me, still walk and live in as much fear as you were back in the day when things were bad for you because things are STILL very much bad for us.
So do take a minute to acknowledge that it's a pretty BIG privilege to be able to stop fighting and feel safe, the same way I acknowledge that I am bloody privileged to be able to run back to Europe the second I start feeling too unsafe here because people here don't get to. I am not fighting for myself because yes where I am from I have it better than the previous generation, I am fighting for the rest of my generation who majoritarily live in Asia/Africa/South America and the US and don't have the luxury to have access to the same level of safety/education/protection/rights as me.

I have never said your generation did nothing. I asked YOU what you did that you feel is better than us, and at what point YOU had the luxury to feel that what you did was "enough" for the world and that those battles weren't worth fighting anymore to the point that you now look down at people for fighting them.

You have talked about how useless my generation is but conveniently dodged all the question about yours. You also haven't addressed which lifestyle you now live and why you feel your generation gets to look back at their youth and feel prouder than mine will at your age.

Look around, do you genuinely feel proud where the world is at and what you and folks your age have achieved? You are in the middle of the shit show that is Brexit, extremism is on the rise absolutely everywhere, the planet is on the verge of death more than ever, the NHS is on its knees, houses are unaffordable to most, women are yet again losing their rights and body autonomy but hey oh, it's my generation who will wobble their head and wonder what the fuck we have achieved and been doing for most our life. (Trying to counter all of this is what we will have been doing btw!)

If when I am mid 40's the world has managed to be worse than it currently is then yes I will definitely look back and reconsider my life choices until then, I will keep on trying to fix the mess you and people before you have put us in while you apparently sit back and do nothing and I will continue to call myself queer because while I know some people hate it, love it or not I still have the right to self-refer as I want (which is drastically different to calling someone else queer!).

I appreciate the few things your generation did for mine but maybe you also want to appreciate that we have issues to put up with you never had to.

Why do you think the OP would be talking about any situation other than the country she’s living in, which is the UK, Linning? Why are you writing massive long essays about irrelevant situations?

She is not talking about the UK though she is talking about "young people"? She never said where she lives or is from and it's a global Forum so it would be silly to assume which specific people she is talking about. The UK also involved different countries with vast histories and their own issues so unless she specificy that she is only talking about people between the age of 18-25yo born and raised in England, I am going to assume that she is talking about young people in general like the initial post implies.

Cassian - I think you will find the OP was talking about "the West" which in most people's eyes very much includes the US. Try reading the opening post, why don't you? Also, if you are living in the UK but rather than focusing on career and monetarism, are thinking about the state of the World and how you can change things, in what way does that not fit with the themes raised by the OP?

They wont have the opportunities that we had with our free education, cheap housing, jobs for life and decent pensions.

That’s so true. The younger generation are mainly fucked due to the entitlement of the older generation. No wonder suicide rates are on the rise.

Obviously, the OP may have meant the West Country and be bemoaning the attitudes of young people Bristol or Cornwall or something, but I somehow doubt it .