3 days ago
Gen Z Is Barely Holding On to the American Dream
Elizabeth Swan is a teacher. Her dad was a teacher. Her aunt was a teacher. 'I went to school to teach during a time we were told, 'There's a teacher shortage. You will always have a job and be in high demand.' And that has simply not been true,' Swan, a 27-year-old Illinois resident, told me. She is licensed to teach middle and high school history and social studies yet has been able to find only a substitute position that pays her $32,000 a year. She's in a long-term relationship with a software engineer, and they each live with their families in the south suburbs of Chicago.
Swan's American dream, she said, is to be 'debt free, unafraid of homelessness, not fearing lack of insurance. And perhaps the dream that public education remains alive, so I can have a job.' Ideally, she would like to get married and have kids, but she feels she needs to move out on her own before that happens, which right now feels impossible. 'Even the worst place is still going to be, like, $1,300 for a one-bedroom. It feels almost insane,' she said. Swan wants to be able to provide things like summer camp for her future kids and to stay solvent even if someone has a major medical issue or some other unavoidable blip.
Over the past few weeks I have read almost 200 reader responses to my prompt to members of Gen Z about what they're thinking about their futures. I asked them about how they saw their career prospects, the future of homeownership, what they thought about family formation and what retirement could look like. I wanted to talk to young people in this moment because so much seems in flux.
I wondered: Do they embrace the earlier vision — house, steady job, kids, the white picket fence of it all — or do they want to tear it all down and go full YOLO nihilist?
While I can't claim the responses to my call-out are a gold standard, nationally representative study, they offered a good deal of situational, gender and geographic diversity. I followed up over the phone with a dozen respondents — the ones who seemed especially thoughtful, and whose stories echoed major trends that I picked up in the responses, which are backed up by economic data.
While they might be remaking the dream around the edges — for example, thinking about buying property with friends instead of with a spouse — the Gen Z respondents I spoke to still wanted most of the old dream (get married, buy a house, have kids — not necessarily in that order); they just didn't think they could achieve it. Almost none of them thought they would be better off than their parents, even if they described themselves as coming from generational poverty.
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