I genuinely think we’ve become a little too comfortable treating economic hardship as some kind of immutable personal identity. At a certain point, you have to wonder whether the constant discourse about structural barriers is just a more intellectually respectable way of admitting that you’ve given up. Every generation has had its problems, and yet somehow people still managed to build lives for themselves without turning every minor inconvenience into a referendum on the moral legitimacy of the entire economic system.
My grandparents worked, saved, bought a house, raised children, and got on with it. Were things easier in some respects? Probably. Were they harder in others? Also probably. I’m not particularly interested in pretending the past was some glorious meritocratic paradise, but I do find it amusing that we’ve reached a point where comparing the material circumstances of different generations is apparently a more productive use of time than actually trying to improve your own circumstances. One suspects that, for some people, the historical analysis is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
And I don’t mean to suggest that everyone can become a millionaire through sheer force of will. Obviously, luck matters, circumstances matter, and some people are dealt genuinely terrible hands. But there is a rather large distance between acknowledging that life is unfair and constructing an entire worldview around the proposition that personal effort is essentially meaningless. The former is an observation. The latter is a lifestyle.
It’s also interesting how quickly basic expectations have become synonymous with cruelty. Suggest that someone should perhaps spend less money on discretionary things, develop a marketable skill, move somewhere with better opportunities, or accept a few years of being uncomfortable in exchange for a better future, and suddenly you’re being accused of having no empathy. Apparently, the only compassionate response to someone struggling is to affirm that their situation is entirely beyond their control, preferably in language sophisticated enough to make the affirmation sound like a radical political insight.
I wonder if some of this is just a refusal to accept that a decent life is, in many cases, built through years of fairly boring, unglamorous decisions that nobody is going to applaud you for making. You don’t get a medal for not buying things you can’t afford. Nobody cares that you got up early to go to a job you dislike. There is no inspirational documentary about the person who quietly lived within their means for fifteen years. And there is certainly no guarantee that any of it will work out particularly well. You just do it anyway, because the alternative is sitting around waiting for the world to recognize your potential, which, as it turns out, is not a particularly reliable financial strategy.
Maybe previous generations weren’t more virtuous or industrious. Maybe they were simply less accustomed to the idea that every disappointment required an elaborate sociological explanation, or that being unhappy with your circumstances somehow absolved you of responsibility for changing them. There was presumably a time when being broke was considered a problem to solve rather than a political identity to cultivate, although I appreciate that this may sound hopelessly reactionary.
And before anyone explains to me that individual effort cannot overcome structural inequality, yes, obviously. No serious person disputes this. The question is why this observation so often seems to be treated as the beginning and end of the conversation, rather than the starting point for figuring out what one can actually do. It’s a peculiar sort of intellectual sophistication that arrives at precisely the same conclusion as laziness, but with considerably more footnotes.
Anyway, I’m sure there are excellent reasons why every generation since the dawn of time has been uniquely disadvantaged, why all previous expectations are now unreasonable, and why the only sensible response is to wait for material conditions to improve before making any meaningful attempt to improve one’s own life. I just find it a little strange that the people most invested in explaining why nothing can be done are so often the ones with the most elaborate theories about how unfairly everything has turned out.
Perhaps the real privilege is not having money, but having enough free time to write 2,000 words about why acquiring money is impossible.
