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If it wasn't for gay couples, the wedding industry might be in the toilet. Write that down, cake bakers.
Quote:
"Fewer Americans are getting married. In 2015, the median first time American bride was 28 years old and the median groom was almost 30. In addition to that, American millennials lag previous generations on many metrics of adulthood from living on their own to buying a home to having kids."
If it wasn't for gay couples, the wedding industry might be in the toilet. Write that down, cake bakers.
Don't forget the delay paying for their own insurance.
No wonder old people are delaying retirement. They are still stuck with their kids.
Delayed weddings don't have a direct relationship with living at home. They are related to a third factor, the general economy. But it's not as though Millennials are living at home because they can't get married, or that they can't get married because they're living at home.
A lot of old people are delaying retirement because the same economy put them behind the eight ball in their late middle age.
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Many of these kids simply have no ambition either, and it's due to our generation pandering to their every whim. We have failed this generation like no other IMHO by giving them trophies for simply showing up and treating them like royalty. The payback is delayed retirement and ungrateful spoiled brats living under our roofs.
These "young people" marriage reports and percentages of young adults living at home usually reflect ages 18-34. That's a huge age range with people in vastly different stages of life.
An 18 year old may still be in high school. A 34 year old may have an 18 year old child and be a grandparent themselves. I'm 31 now. I didn't live outside my hometown for any significant length of time until I was 25. Since then, I've lived in six different states. The bottom line is that I've had more life experience in the six years since I was 25 (which included two years of full time work after college) than I did in my entire life to that point.
Right or wrong, people are taking longer to get through college. The normal graduation age might be 23 or 24 now vs. the expected 22. I graduated in 2010 into a terrible economy and did not get my first "professional track" full time job until I was just a few weeks from turning 28. At 31, I'm about where I would be had someone asked me "where will you be in five years?" when I was 21. The economy stunted my "life development" for almost five years.
One thing that is overlooked is that almost all of the dating prospects for younger people who want some success in life are in mid-sized or major metros. I live in a town of 50,000 - median age about 45. The dating prospects for a young professional wanting to date another young professional are almost nonexistent. Almost all of the single women I know around my age have no decent job, multiple kids, or have a lot of baggage. The dating pool is basically 18-22 and 40+ divorcees.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Robert20170
Many of these kids simply have no ambition either, and it's due to our generation pandering to their every whim. We have failed this generation like no other IMHO by giving them trophies for simply showing up and treating them like royalty. The payback is delayed retirement and ungrateful spoiled brats living under our roofs.
I say this all the time, Robert. We got nobody to blame but us. We have met the enemy, and it is us.
Many of these kids simply have no ambition either, and it's due to our generation pandering to their every whim. We have failed this generation like no other IMHO by giving them trophies for simply showing up and treating them like royalty. The payback is delayed retirement and ungrateful spoiled brats living under our roofs.
No ambition??
I'm 33yo and every millennial I know over the age of 25 busts their asses on a near daily basis. They're holding down full time jobs, part time jobs, and "side hustles". If they're living at home it's because rental costs in the majority of cities have outpaced wages, or because the added load of student loans have messed with people's credit scores so they can't get their own place, or because they are being financially smart and trying to save up money. There are a variety of reasons people don't move out of their parents' home and "laziness", in my experience, is more often at the bottom of that list.
Enough of this tired trope that millennials are lazy because they got trophies. I didn't get trophies or awards for just showing up. This is a BS idea that maybe applies to wealthy suburban kids whose parents filled up their schedules with soccer games, music camps, karate, and ballet classes, but it doesn't apply to a whole swath of people born within a specific range of years. Let's just end that incorrect rhetoric right there and try to come up with a less used cliche.
As for marriages, why would anyone my age married? We've seen the rising divorce rates, many have been personally affected by it. Women as just as likely, if not more likely, to be college educated and earn as much or more than their partners so they don't need to rely on the income of a breadwinner husband. Despite what you may see on reality TV shows and gossip rags, many millennials are over the big, overly expensive weddings in much the same way we're over McMasions and massive SUVs. Lots of women and girls have the increase confidence to be "independent women" and have learned that they don't need to be tied down in a relationship (especially a bad relationship) to be happy. Many of us are just trying to build up our brand or career and aren't ready to settle into the cliche of a married, suburban lifestyle.
Personally, outside of tax and legal reasons (especially if children are involved), I don't see much of benefit to marriage. Marriage doesn't equal commitment; lots of people who get married divorce within weeks/months/years and many couple who don't get officially married stay together for decades. Stop placing marriage on this hallowed pedestal, stop making it this requirement to advance to the next level of adulthood that must be passed in order to find true happiness, success, and enlightenment.
Don't forget the delay paying for their own insurance.
That's likely to be largely a function of the very popular provision of the ACA. It costs less as an add-on to an existing policy than as the sole beneficiary of a stand-alone policy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by whocares811
IMO, it is because more and more young people don't see the advantage in being married. (NOT the case 50 years ago!)
Personally, I think that's sad.
I don't.
There are advantages and disadvantages to being married. There are advantages and disadvantages to being single. Just because I'm contentedly married, I don't think that it's 'sad' that some other people have different subjective preferences on how to live their lives.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Robert20170
Many of these kids simply have no ambition either, and it's due to our generation pandering to their every whim. We have failed this generation like no other IMHO by giving them trophies for simply showing up and treating them like royalty. The payback is delayed retirement and ungrateful spoiled brats living under our roofs.
Well, it didn't take long for someone to waltz in and start claiming that Millennials really suck compared to those of us who came before them. If there's one constant in human history, it's generations sneering at the up-and-comers, oblivious to the fact that the generation that spawned them similarly looked down its nose at its progeny (as did the generation before that one, and so on and so on, all the way back through recorded history - yes, there are writings from ancient Greece in which contemporaries prattled on about how crappy the youth of the day supposedly were).
Last edited by Unsettomati; 07-28-2017 at 08:47 AM..
These "young people" marriage reports and percentages of young adults living at home usually reflect ages 18-34. That's a huge age range with people in vastly different stages of life.
An 18 year old may still be in high school. A 34 year old may have an 18 year old child and be a grandparent themselves. I'm 31 now. I didn't live outside my hometown for any significant length of time until I was 25. Since then, I've lived in six different states. The bottom line is that I've had more life experience in the six years since I was 25 (which included two years of full time work after college) than I did in my entire life to that point.
Right or wrong, people are taking longer to get through college. The normal graduation age might be 23 or 24 now vs. the expected 22. I graduated in 2010 into a terrible economy and did not get my first "professional track" full time job until I was just a few weeks from turning 28. At 31, I'm about where I would be had someone asked me "where will you be in five years?" when I was 21. The economy stunted my "life development" for almost five years.
One thing that is overlooked is that almost all of the dating prospects for younger people who want some success in life are in mid-sized or major metros. I live in a town of 50,000 - median age about 45. The dating prospects for a young professional wanting to date another young professional are almost nonexistent. Almost all of the single women I know around my age have no decent job, multiple kids, or have a lot of baggage. The dating pool is basically 18-22 and 40+ divorcees.
I live in Brooklyn now and have lived in several other cities and states and, for me at least, the major issue is that the hook-up culture is so prevalent and I'm personally not into it. The hook-up culture can explain part of the reason people aren't getting married (because let's be real, there are still young people getting married because of the stigma of having out-of-wedlock sex). There are tons of young professionals, but, the flip side of that is there are a lot of young professional who put career success over relationship success, including marriage. Most of the young people I'm surrounded by have a long list of things they want to do before settling down (OT: ever noticed the negative connotation of the word "settle"? Like settling down is what you do when there are no other options left? I think it's telling that that phrase is synonymous with marriage). They want to start businesses, become successful artists, travel, live in different cities/states/countries, try different careers, continue having fun (nothing wrong with fun) etc.
And yeah, it kills me when baby boomers and their ilk continue to berate millennials without acknowledging the horrific economy many of us grew into and are still dealing with. No matter how often you tell them that times are different and you can't work your way through college and pay for it out of pocket, that you can't buy a house with the wages from your first post-college job, that you can't afford to rent an apartment, pay expenses, and save for retirement on stagnant wages, that you can't afford to start a family in this day and age right out of college in most cities/large towns, they just continue to call us lazy and entitled. They need to stop reminiscing back to the days where people had long-lasting careers, got married, bought houses, and had babies all before turning 25yo.
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