I Want It All — and I Want It Now

Because they were in town, I had an early breakfast with my sibling. We hadn’t seen each other in a few months, and it was nice to see them. (If you wonder why I don’t say whether I have a brother or sister, it’s because I don’t want some whack job finding out who they are and harassing them because of something I said.) As I have mentioned before, my sibling and their spouse have three grown children, two boys and a girl. My niece, who is 25, just got married. My younger nephew is a bachelor and is 28 and my older nephew, who is 32, has a girlfriend. He is also a liberal, much to my sibling’s great disappointment. I honestly think he’s not serious about it but uses liberalism to tweak both his parents' noses.

My sibling related a conversation they had with their oldest child, who is a millennial. He does quite well for himself, which is awesome, but he was grumbling to my sibling with a complaint that is common among millennials and members of Gen Z. “I can’t afford to buy a house,” “I can’t afford to start a family,” “I can’t afford to <fill in the blank>.” “It was easier when you were my age. Everything was cheaper. You don’t understand how hard it is now.”

My sibling is at the tag end of the Baby Boom. So is their spouse. Both of them were well out of college and in the workforce by the time the Internet came into being. They met and married in the late '80s. My nephew was born in the early '90s. He just missed having his entire life online. He doesn’t know what life was like when his parents got married, but he learned.

“We chose a house 25 miles outside of Houston because that’s what we could afford,” my sibling said. “We spent a lot of time commuting. We painted the house ourselves. We poured all of our money into that house. We went on one trip the entire time we lived there. We chose not to travel. We made choices.”

I remember that house. I think the baby shower for Eddie was held there. Read again what my nephew was told. The key phrase is “we chose.” Travel was not as important as buying a house. My nephew travels with his girlfriend. They like to ski. They had ski passes in Colorado last winter and probably will again this winter. They certainly have the money to do so. Their choice has been to ski and travel. They cannot have a down payment for a house and travel and ski all at the same time.

Without realizing it, my nephew and his girlfriend made their choice, and they don’t like it. They think they should be able to do both. My nephew truly believes his parents were able to do far more than they could. Both my nephew and his girlfriend have no knowledge of delayed gratification. The idea of waiting for anything or saving for anything is foreign to them.

That is not how he was raised. Eddie was raised with delayed gratification firmly entrenched in the family. If he wanted something, he had to earn the money for it. He did not get whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it, not even for birthdays or Christmas. As an adult, he sees what his parents have, and he wants that. He forgets what his parents had to do to get what they have. Like in the Queen song, he wants it all, and he wants it now.

Where did this lack of delayed gratification and ignorance of choices come from? That’s partially my generation’s, Gen X’s, fault. As the last generation to grow up without the Internet, the “latchkey kid” generation, a large portion of Gen X basically raised themselves. When Gen X grew up and had children of their own, they went 180 degrees in the opposite direction in terms of child-rearing. The now-adult Gen Xers were determined to keep their children from doing what they did, because Gen X parents remember exactly what they did as kids. A lot of Gen X parents got a little too involved in the lives of their children. Some wealthier Gen Xers never said “no” to their children or made them choose.

What seemed harmless when they were children came back and bit millennials on the backside. With Mom and Dad no longer there to pay for everything, a lot of millennials learned the hard way about what money can and can’t do and what it’s like to live without a large paycheck or a paycheck at all, in some cases. Of course, not all millennials are the same or act the same. Eddie has been working since he was a teenager. His parents instilled a work ethic in him and his siblings.

He may grumble about the cost of things, but he has a good job that pays well, and he knows it. He needs to do what his parents did: sit down and make choices about what to do with his money. What is more important to him and his girlfriend? A house? A ski trip? Season-long ski passes or a down payment on a house? Making choices like that is not enjoyable but is part of being a successful adult. Your life depends on the choices you make, good or bad, and a lot of choices come down to money and its uses.

That said, a lot of parents don’t know how to talk to their children about money. Money is an uncomfortable subject. In my case, my mother did very well at budgeting and stretching paychecks as far as they could go until her mind started to be affected by Parkinson’s disease. She learned those skills from her mother, who was an Army wife during the Great Depression, through World War II, and up to the 1960s, when my grandfather died. My sibling and I learned from our mother, who was a widow and a single parent at a time when there weren’t many single mothers out there. My sibling used what they learned after getting married, which is what allowed them to buy a house in their late 20s.

The lack of financial knowledge in all of the generations is appalling. That lack hits the younger generations hardest, especially now, when you can have whatever you want whenever you want it. There is no need to wait; there is no need for delayed gratification. Get it now. If you can’t get it now, obviously it’s not your fault; it’s someone else’s.

A lot of what Gen Z and millennials grumble and complain about, they have brought on themselves. They are making choices without realizing it. Just as Eddie thinks he should be able to travel and ski and be able to make a down payment on a house, he doesn’t realize that’s not possible on what he makes.

The idea of having to choose either a house or traveling doesn’t occur to him because he never had to think about those choices. He never saw his parents make those choices because they made the needed choices long before he was born. The choices my sibling and their spouse made back when they were first married set them up for success later on. Hopefully, as they grow older and have more life experiences, the idea of delayed gratification and making good choices will catch on with millennials and Gen Z. Otherwise, they are in for a life of frustration, disappointment, and blaming others for their lack.

Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has been infected by socialism, and it's spreading FAST. Democrats are claiming there's nothing to worry about, but we know the truth.

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