Financial Independence and the Lost Generation
The Lost Generation
There was a time when I was the youngest guy in the room. I confidently walked into every meeting as the youthful doctor. In my early thirties. All the hospice personnel and nursing home administrators had at least a decade on me. As I have reached the gilded age of 45, I now notice that the opposite is true. As the twenty somethings bop into our meetings, I shake my head knowingly and remember what youth felt like. I sometimes feel the same way in the financial independence community. It seems like we are always talking about those crazy millennials or bashing those spendthrift boomers. I sometimes wonder if my age group, Gen X, is the lost generation of personal finance.
We are just not that interesting.
Boomers
If the millennials are the heroes of financial independence, Boomers are the villains. Our stereotypes are vast and most often negative. We typically picture this generation as selfish, self indulged, and over reliant on money for happiness.
It is thus not surprising that our community points to the follies of this group as fodder for our personal finance proselytizing. Look no further than the headlines to see that the current crop of traditional retirees are not only facing severely underfunded futures, but also may still be wracked with debt.
We love to wag our fingers at Boomers and sigh as they trip over their hedonic treadmills. Even Gen X, the lost generation, isn’t immune to such hand wringing.
Millennials
Millennials, and Gen Z to some extent, are the heroes of the financial independence movement. Although the other generations preach caution, we also bask in the glow of their financial savvy. We read enviously about their jaunts over the country, their gap years, and their experiments with geoarbitrage.
In many ways, we picture this group of young adults as winning the game. They are pursuing purposeful lives without spending even a second under the fat thumb of the man. They have elevated passive income and side hustles to an art form, and are living frugally, travel hacking, and home schooling their way towards financial independence.
Even the lost generation, us Gen X’ers, can’t help but be envious. As we sit in our small cubicles and type away about our plans, the young ones are out there doing it.
And we both like and don’t like it.
Gen X
My generation. The lost generation. We are not lost in terms of purpose. Just boring. We bursted into corporate America long ago, put our heads down, and grinded out a living. Some of us loved it. Others not so much. But we did what we had to do in order to not be frivolous like the Boomers.
We are also much more cautious then the millennials. We have no problem front loading the sacrifice to some extent for the eventual pay off. Unlike the other generations, we find more identity in our work and will have a harder time leaving. The one more year phenomenon is real, and threatens to eat away our free time.
We are no more or less successful than any of the others.
Our stories are just less fun to talk about.
Final Thoughts
I believe my generation is the lost generation. Sandwiched between the poor planning Boomers and the free-spirited Millennials.
We are boring.
We embraced the blank countenance of corporate America, and many of us will come out victorious and financially independent in our forties.
But our stories might be somewhat humdrum.
We might be somewhat bland.
Boring is OK. Everything is cyclical anyway. In 20 years these millennials will be babysitting their grandkids in their yurt while their children are out basking in the warm glow of consumerism. No matter what generation we’re in, we’re influenced by the generations that came before us and the economy we’re born into.
Very true. What’s old will be new again.
As a gen x member I find this sort of resonates. Where I work there are hundreds of boomers and thousands of millennial. But in the middle it’s probably tens. It’s a weird feeling though partially related to my employer and the business cycle it experienced.
In terms of identification I believe a lot of it has to do with current age of gen x. People in their 30s and 40s have a wider range of outcomes and lives. People seem to converge early and later in life statistically. I suspect it’s because we mostly come up with health, wealth and retirement as an older person. When young most of us are poor and inexperienced. What happens in the middle though is extremely individualized. Exceptions even large exceptions to every rule exist of course.
I never thought of it that way. The 30’s and 40’s are very unique times. We all kind of spread our wings.
I’m proud to be a member of Gen X. I think most of the younger people have only experienced a bull market and of course the sky is blue if it never rains. We Gen X’ers (the worker ants in the parable) have been storing away for winter for a long time. Don’t know how many of the younger crowd (the grasshoppers) have set enough aside to weather a bad storm which WILL one day come not if. Of course some may have set aside a large enough NUT to cover it all but I think too many are leaving early forecasting the past decade of market returns to the future (which I feel is very unwise) to justify the need to stop working since they have “made it”.
Interesting. A reckoning this way comes.
I really don’t identify with various groups that I fall in, like being a woman or a baby boomer. What has brought me to FI is being a contrarian in many categories and learning from that experience to try not to feel swayed by the pull of marketing, the media, or peer pressure. It is hard to do and it’s a challenge all the time. Yeah, a lot of people fit various stereotypes, but I think we need to look at ourselves as unique individuals. For instance, I don’t see you as a typical GenX’er.
I like the idea of being contrarian. I always assumed I was typical Gen X.
Here is Millennial or Gen Y philosophy: I made $100, I made $100 hawking T-shirts let’s take a trip to San Lucia and eat dumplings. Boomer: Damn my kids college cost me $400K and I had to sign a second mortgage, and the little prick is still living in my basement, health care is a bitch and I’m 63 I’ll never get to retire. Gen X: why the hell do I have to work for the man? It’s such a drag. I make 250K per year have a full slate of benefits, don’t really do much work and my life is virtually risk free but but it’s so stressssfulll working for the man! I want to go drink and live on the beach!!
Holy Shit! That’s me. Gen X!
Naa you’re a physician. Your genetically engineered to bust your ass
I take exception to being called boring sir, and I think my story is fun!
Signed, GenX employee, Government ID#: 45344832
😉
You know your my role model…right?