I wonder if one of the causes of animosity towards “entitled millennials” is that many millennials are poor people who look rich. There’s this growing class of people who wear nice clothes, have fancy new electronic gadgets, go out to eat nice food… and will never own a home or have a retirement fund or put a child through college.
It’s so easy to say “if you cut down on the avocado toast maybe you could save up”, and so hard to accept that a house these days is fifty thousand avocado toasts, and that’s why so many of us have just given up. We don’t treat ourselves because we think the world will take care of us when we get older; we treat ourselves because we know it won’t. Might as well feel and look good on the way down.
I think you’re absolutely right. And what compounds this image is the fact that fancy new gadgets and nice looking clothes and elevated toast ARE all relatively cheap compared to how they look. The cost of things has gone way down while the price of property has skyrocketed. I can buy a full outfit, a phone case with an external charger embedded, and lunch at a local business for under $50 total, but then I’ll walk home to my apartment because I can’t afford a car payment or a mortgage.
It’s unintentional smoke and mirrors.
Older, better off people also have difficulty understanding the cell phone thing because they remember cell phones being a luxury for thousands of dollars practically yesterday in their personal timeline of the world. They often have sincerely no idea you can get at least a flip phone for $10 and pay as you go.
And foods that used to be “exotic dining” in America like sushi and pho and curry have normalized enough, especially in cities, to be as inexpensive as a typical quick lunch.
Yep. There’s an aspect of frugality to turning your buying choices to what gets you the most bang for your buck, and now that you can have sushi for the price of McDonald’s, buy a suit from the thrift store and have it tailored to you for less than the price of a new pair of jeans, and find smartphones for under a hundred dollars or even free with data plan, that is the sort of thing that people buy.
also like, half of the stuff is not only nolonger a luxery but its an actual necessity, if you dont have a computer it just became so much harder to apply for jobs, if you dont have a phone how are they going to contact you for the interview?
A low-end laptop is currently cheaper than unsplit rent anywhere other than long-held rent control apartments or public housing, period. Cheaper than split rent a lot of the time, too. And that laptop is better than what you could buy at any price just 15 years ago, by any spec you can look at.
We pay $250 or less per year for my cell phone, including all data, pay-as-you-go. Data is non-optional because of the transit app. The transit app is how we don’t lose perishables in the heat on summer grocery runs or risk health leaving before necessary when it’s freezing out, among other things. When I didn’t need the transit app, I got by on $80 in coverage purchases one year, and that only to buy service time while the minutes kept accumulating.
This is all true, and I can’t help thinking that we really get it from three sides. First, there’s the obvious one, with people looking down on anyone with less money or status. Then, there’s the (understandable but not helpful) resentment towards anyone who appears to have it better than you do. And then there’s the very specific image of tastes above your status. For centuries, this has spoken in the public mind of a “suspicious character”, whether actually criminal or merely bohemian. And we fall right into it, just by doing what makes sense….
“We don’t treat ourselves because we think the world will take care of us
when we get older; we treat ourselves because we know it won’t.”
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