Gen Z will say our childhood has been ruined by social media and smartphones. Millennials will say we can't buy a house. Uh baby boomers will say our retirement is very uncertain.
Really the true losers in the generational war are generation X. Tell me what it is that makes us generation X really so unusual. There's this theory called the Ubend of life theory which actually has quite a lot of academic support.
You're pretty happy when you're young and you're pretty happy when you're old, but you're pretty miserable uh when you're in middle age. So, there was a recent poll by Ipsos which found that roughly a third of Gen X's are either not very happy or not happy at all. Some chronic health issues begin to emerge in middle age.
Uh people kind of come to realize that they're not going to achieve or they want to achieve in their career and also where they're at this tricky stage where often they have to look after both children and parents. But haven't generation X done pretty well in terms of wealth accumulation and tending to own their own homes. If you look at when people's earnings start to really take off, it's in their kind of 30s and and early 40s.
Now, for Generation X, this coincided with the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 where wage growth across the world was very, very weak. So, they were hit at just the moment when they were really going to see a takeoff in their earnings. If you look at the older um millennials, they're actually more likely to own a home than u generation X were of the same age.
And again, the the the the long shadow of the financial crisis is is to blame here because what you had in in 2008 to 2011 was a large number of foreclosures and so on, particularly in the US. And the people who got hit hardest by that were generation X. So, as a result, they've not been able to get on the housing ladder to anywhere near the same degree as the baby boots.
