If you listen to Scott Galloway, you know that life has gotten quantifiably harder for young people over the last few generations. Our new reality is that the cost of college has grown exponentially, median home price to income ratio has doubled or tripled, and our collective energy is sapped be social media, and the alarming sum is that young people are having babies at rates below the replacement target of 2.1 babies per mother. Is it all bad news? For every situation there are strategic ways to respond. Traditional routes may currently be blocked, but I believe there is an alternative path to a meaningful and fruitful life for each of us.
So what’s meaningful to you? Sadly, for most of us, the default is to seek approval from our family as the strongest driver of meaning and purpose. And herein lies the challenge, your parents grew up with the traditional route available, they could get decent grades and their parents in a middle class home could afford state school without loans, and coming out of college they could easily find a job that could afford them another suburban home. So your parent’s expectations are no longer possible to fulfill. Give those up and define what is important to you. Ask yourself why it is important to you. Ask yourself why 5 times to get to the bottom of it. If the last answer is your parents, well, be warned. I did this exercise and recognized that I am a human part of a species that is evolving and growing and learning and adapting over a time span much larger than my life. I recognized that I am not an individual that is here alone, that I owe my existence to the generations before me and therefore I owe a debt to those that come after me. So how can I fulfill that role and find meaning in my days? I strive to contribute to the future success of the species by spreading positivity and my findings in life that I believe can make life better for us all.
So that becomes your mission statement. Everything you do from here should fall in line with that mission statement. Currently I’m spending time trying to optimize my day and intend to share my findings over time.
But wait, back to the point, how do we navigate income, housing cost, cost of college, and the cost of raising children in today’s world. First, know that this inflated housing market will not last. Boomers will be gone in 20 years, AirBnBs have falsely inflated housing demand, there is so much unused land that could be housing in this country, something has got to give. Maybe a young (under retirement age) presidential candidate could unleash the floodgates, but I digress.
It’s clear you’ll have to embrace non-traditional paths to finding outcomes that you seek for finding meaning and ticking traditional boxes within the scope of your own mission statement.
More to come…
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