- If there’s a lesson to be learned from my decade and a half of treading water, it’s to resist the pull of material things. I don’t mean that we should all renounce our possessions and become ascetics—I like smartphones and cool sneakers and going to the movies. I mean that it’s worth questioning our assumptions about what it means to be grown up, and about how we measure success. In the nearly two decades since I left home, I have lived in $400 ghetto apartments and a $325K three-bedroom house in the suburbs, and I am certain that the house and the suburbs made me no happier than the apartments and the city. I have driven a fresh-off-the-assembly-line Scion and an aged truck with no radio, no power steering, and no automatic anything, and the new car made me no happier than the old (except for the power steering; parallel parking without power steering is hard work). I’ve been lucky to find work I loved during most of my adult life, and I’m lucky to have two wonderful, healthy children. Those things have consistently made me happy, and I realize now, I could have had them without a lot of the debt and stress and suburban ennui.
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.
This... makes me feel better. I have a relatively smaller loan (6,500, which, I must admit, is already so large as to not be "real" to me), and an actionable plan to reduce and then entirely pay it off. It's not hard for me to find a job in the restaurant industry here, and my biggest concern is paying rent, yet I have a wonderful safety net (I can always find a bed in the house I grew up). I don't feel as entirely fucked as lots of people my age.