Millennials have faced more career stress than any generation alive - and it is not over yet

Baby Boomers were born into postwar abundance. Wartime technological advances translated into peacetime prosperity; wages rose, jobs were plentiful, and education was heavily subsidized. One didn’t need a college degree to buy a house, but if you pursued one, tuition was often free or nearly so. That generation became better educated, better paid, and longer-lived than any before them.

Millennials came of age in the shadow of the Great Recession — the sharpest downturn since the Great Depression — and carried staggering student debt thanks to neoliberal policies that shifted the cost of higher education from governments to students. They were told that a degree was essential to succeed, then forced to finance it with debt no generation before them had been asked to shoulder.

Just as they were finding their footing, COVID struck. Overnight, millions were sent home to makeshift offices, often in houses or apartments that cost more than any prior generation had ever paid. Their parents could walk into subsidized universities and affordable homes; Millennials were expected to build their own educations and their own workspaces, at the highest costs on record.

Now, as Baby Boomers retire in record numbers and Trump clamps down on immigration, Millennials face another paradox. In theory, fewer workers should mean greater demand for their labor. In practice, it could also mean slower job creation and a stagnant economy. And hanging over it all is the great unknown: artificial intelligence. Will it become their partner, making them the most wildly productive workforce in history? Or will it make their hard-won degrees obsolete — leaving them priced out of the very jobs they trained for?

The traumas keep piling up: 9/11 in childhood, the Great Recession in early adulthood, student debt, COVID, housing inflation, political instability, climate disruption, and now AI disruption. They’ve never had a decade of “normal.”

Bless the Millennials. They’ve been asked to pay more, risk more, and endure more uncertainty than the generations before them. One hope is that as we self-absorbed Boomers finally leave the stage, policymakers will give more attention to the needs, potential, and stresses of the generation that will actually inherit the 21st century. In the meantime, they’ll have to endure yet another Boomer in the White House — one who may be the most self-obsessed of all.