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kleinbl00  ·  4019 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 36 Years Old and Living the Life of a Millenial

I don't know that it's entirely fair. I "lived the life of a Millenial" while I started a new career in television, paid for an apartment in Los Angeles and a mortgage and bills for my wife in Seattle (and the plane tickets to connect these two lifestyles every three weeks for two and a half years). The difference being, I soberly looked at the stunning amount of overhead I was about to add to my life, took a deep breath and slogged through.

The author tried to have two kids and two grad degrees in fields with really low remuneration. I don't blame him - the world needs college professors and public defenders. At the same time, a surface-level analysis will reveal that the burn rate is going to exceed the income for decades and if you don't have a plan for mitigating the impact, you'd best have a really strong stomach.

Compare and contrast - the millennials I know are fucked. Unemployment is easily 3 times what it was when I graduated (full disclosure - I graduated with an engineering degree in the middle of a Boeing strike, so the rates were comparable for about six months). HR didn't presume as a matter of course that you'd "friend" them on FB so they could sniff up your ass. Structural unemployment hadn't swept away a million jobs on a sea of "efficiency" and "outsourcing" was starting to happen, rather than being in the distant past.

I'll grant the author his decade in purgatory. I don't think it's fair to put himself on par with the millennials, who largely parachuted right into the 7th circle of hell.