Millennials The Middle Children Of Modern History Are Bearing The Brunt

The middle children of history,” to borrow Chuck Palahniuk’s phrase, have neither the confidence and comforts of their elders nor the attention-seeking social-media-facing self-absorption of those who came after. As they enter middle age, bearing the burdens of taxes, children and parents, it is becoming increasingly clear that those born between the early 1980s and mid-1990s are not just the middle children of modern history, but perhaps its step-children as well. Research by the British think tank Resolution Foundation shows that millennials are the first generation to have less disposable income than their predecessors. And Gen Z, for all their performative gloom and doom, have a real weekly pay that outpaces millennials’ at the same stage of their career by 12 per cent.

Most millennials were early in their careers around 2008 and its aftermath, when the global economy collapsed and, in India, the heyday of the post-liberalisation boom began to subside. Social safety nets and public goods began to shrink, and their private-sector replacements add to the burgeoning set of expenses on stagnant pay cheques. Born into an analogue world, this cohort spent much of their adult lives becoming “digital natives” only to be told, now, that they are to be rendered obsolete by artificial intelligence(s) that their work has helped train.

There is, though, a quiet dignity to the millennial tragedy. They bear the burden of being the tax base, the mid-level workers who keep companies running, while listening to the lectures of those who came before and the algorithmic righteousness of those who came after. In the end, in an increasingly virtual world, there’s something commendable about being made of stern stuff.