Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

The Interwebs are chocablock filled with the musings and bleating of people who feel they have been denied an opportunity. Some of these expressions are thoughtful, but really, most of them are simply expressions of envy and its cousin resentment. Reading just a bit deeper and one finds evidence of the challenges one creates when one insists on being an experiential learner.

You know, if it’s never happened to you it’s inconceivable that it has ever happened in the history of mankind.

A great example of this is the silly concoction making the rounds known as “Total Boomer Communism”, a construct that essentially lays the blame for pretty much everything wrong in the world at the feet of the successes of the Baby Boomer generation. Can’t find a house to by that fits every single one of your buying criteria? Price, mortgage rate, commute, schools and the like. Gotta be because all of the Boomers in your area insist on staying in the town where they raised their family and went to work. Taxes too high and interest rates on your loans eating up your salary? Surely something never before experienced by any prior generation and gotta be caused by the Boomers getting massive tax benefits because they vote their pocketbooks. Or something like that.

To be fair, we really aren’t building enough housing to meet population growth. Certainly not like we did when the Greatest Generation, the parent generation for the Boomers, was returning from war and entering the workforce. But with the exception of housing built it turns out that pretty much every generation post WW2 has run this same gauntlet at one time or another. Mortgage interest up to ~7% this week? Whatever. My first mortgage in 1990 was 11.5%. Taxes bleeding away purchasing power? Pre-Reagan tax rates peaked at 75%. Every newspaper and media outlet runs a story every day of the week telling us that today’s younger generations are wallowing in dismay that they will surely never have what their parents and grandparents once had.

Funny thing: someone unearthed a WSJ article from the ’80’s about the Baby Boomer generation’s identical concern that they would never achieve what their parents and grandparents did.

We spent the weekend with our close friends, a couple we’ve known for more than 40 years and with whom we have shared innumerable life experiences and milestones. We met in medical school, further charting our similar life paths. Both couples left graduate school with significant school debt, and both left residency training with additional debt tacked on from the cost of living during our residencies. We watched as many of our college classmates began their careers and began earning real wages at age 22, some well into 6 figures by their mid-20’s; our “real jobs” would not start until we were 30+ years old. It was the opportunity cost inherent in our career choice.

Everyone we knew was paying some sort of opportunity cost. Wanna be an investment banker in NYC? Trust me, rent was silly back in the ’80s just like it’s silly now. Most of the folks we were young with left the city for tiny houses and public schools for the kids that were at the end of long train rides to and from work. The market crash and subsequent increase in inflation that came after the Pandemic lockdowns was a real bummer that truly knocked a lot of young folks off their economic pins. Many folks of all ages continue to feel the repercussions of that time, especially those who aren’t close to retirement and haven’t had a chance to get going on investments and savings.

But the same thing happened not once, not twice, but three times to Baby Boomers. In October of 1988 the stock market plummeted on what has become known as Black Friday. Jobs were lost. Fortunes disappeared. It took years for folks to catch back up, just in time for the dot-com crash of 2002 or so when the same thing happened. And then, of course, the Great Recession of August 2008, the one that really hurt my part of the Baby Boom, the younger cohort. The difference for my slice of Boomers was that we’d been through the prior two disruptions; rather than despair like our older generational compatriots did in that WSJ article, we just went to work.

We simply took advantage of the opportunity before us, swallowed hard on the cost of that opportunity whatever form it may have taken, and went to work. We didn’t look to either our parents generation or older members of our generation for relief or redress. We didn’t seek some sort of financial or social reparations, we simply went back to work. Those of us who have comfortably weathered these societal-level financial upheavals did so not through resentment and envy but by acknowledging that we still had the opportunity to succeed.

Why should it be any different now? You arrive at an opportunity and you always find challenge. Always. What happens next depends on you and what you bring to the opportunity: Desire, determination, and perseverance. No one reaches the fullest expression of their potential to take advantage of an opportunity without these three key ingredients. This is why it’s a fool’s errand to evaluate opportunity by looking backwards from any given endpoint. With a particular quiver of similar “tools” it is impossible to comment on opportunity from a societal standpoint because you simply cannot measure the individual expression of these three variables, desire, determination, and perseverance.

What then remains as a real barrier is a lack of imagination and a lack of belief when it comes to that opportunity. However, well meaning pundits who insist on pursuing courses of action built upon envy and resentment of prior generations do a disservice to their own generations and those that will follow. Why should we believe that this will be the time in our history that generational progress will stall, or even reverse? What is the evidence that desire, determination and perseverance will fail for every generation younger than the youngest Baby Boomers when belief in their power has led to continued success and prosperity for generations?

Why now?

There are serious structural issues in every economy that present challenges to any generation’s success, however one might define or describe success. These times may, indeed, bring an opportunity for an economic re-set at the national level. Regardless, parents, teachers, and mentors of all kinds should be telling their young ones that success lies largely in their own hands. It lies ahead if they recognize the opportunities before them and seek to take advantage of them with the belief that they will succeed through desire, determination, and perseverance. Commentators on the landscape who base their conclusions and the advice that arises therein on intergenerational resentment alone fail their audience by complete lack of that faith.

Everyone of these older Americans faced their own version of the challenges younger generations face today. Why must we lose faith in those younger generations? Why should they listen to voices who tell them that they are the first generations who won’t rise through belief, desire, determination, and perseverance? Every opportunity comes with a cost and success has come to those who were willing to meet the challenge of that investment.

Why is now different?

I’ll see you, from my tiny two bedroom cottage on the farthest reaches of the daily commute, next week…