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Lizzie: If you’ve been reading this newsletter long enough, you’ve probably heard our idea for a podcast. (Everyone reading simultaneously closes the tab.) It’s called The Amazing Race, and, in the style of the TV show The Amazing Race, it involves us racing somewhere in NYC. But, and stay with me here, the twist is: We’re forced to split up and take different modes of transportation to get there. Will two subway lines be faster than a subway and a bus, or a bike ride, or a bike ride to the subway? On the way to the finish line, we’ll record our thoughts on the travel experience in real time—Seat or no seat? Public sermon or no public sermon?—and pepper in relevant context about the history of the MTA or stats on the number of people who insist on exiting through the front door of the bus even though the voice is always reminding you to exit from the rear.

We’d never actually tested the structure of the podcast until last weekend, when we decided to go to the Aqueduct Racetrack in Ozone Park, Queens. Since the horses would be racing, we figured we should race too. Make it even. A race for a race, if you will.

Kaitlyn: I’ve never watched the TV show The Amazing Race. I don’t see what it would offer me. But The Amazing Race (podcast) will make my daily travels so much more exhilarating and rewarding. (When I win them!)

To prepare for our first experiment with the show’s format, I went straight to the archives. A New York Times article from September 1894 noted that a new racetrack would be opening in Queens the following day and informed all “intelligent racing men” that the place—named for its proximity to the Ridgewood Aqueduct—could be reached by “the Rockaway Branch of the Long Island Railroad.” Then I went to Google: Is the LIRR faster than the subway? Answer: “Long Island Rail Road is a commuter rail service, and it is faster than the subway.” Then I went to Liz and proposed our routes. I would take the Long Island Rail Road, I suggested, with an “lol” to convey that this was just me being, you know, down to clown—willfully choosing the goofier and probably losing option. She could feel free to take the more logical subway route (“haha”).

Now I should explain about my outfit. After we planned our race, Lizzie and I reviewed the “Aqueduct Racetrack Rules.” According to these rules, it would be “appreciated” if we wore “elegant attire,” and that we not come in “abbreviated wear.” So no crop tops? Or, not to be rude, no visible butt cheeks? Because I’m eager to please, I decided to wear a pair of low heels, a WASPy blue-and-white striped dress with three-quarter sleeves and some tasteful pleating, and a wide-brimmed kelly-green sun hat. I was ready for a mint julep!  

On my way out the door, Nathan took a photo of me holding up my phone displaying the time (12:00 p.m.), as well as my laptop displaying the “Today’s Paper” tab on the New York Times website so that Lizzie could be assured that I was racing fair and square.

Can you see the horses? They're actually quite big. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Lizzie: I was initially wearing big white pants and a white shirt, but I changed into big black pants and a black shirt because I was sure all the horse dust would stain my whites. I didn’t take any photos to prove I was leaving my home when I said I was, but I promise I didn’t cheat. Matt and I even stopped to get coffee after the clock had started. This added about seven minutes to our trip, so by the time we even got to the C train, we were already down 15 minutes and 19 seconds. By the time we transferred to the A, we were down 30 minutes. The thrills just keep coming! When we got to the Aqueduct, one hour and six minutes had elapsed, including the coffee break.

At this point, Kaitlyn was still pretty far away on the LIRR. This diminished the competitive aspect of our race, but gave Matt and me about 45 minutes to explore the Aqueduct before she showed up. If you’ve never been, it looks pretty similar to the Atlantic-Barclays DMV (assuming you’ve been there): Bright hospital lighting, barf-beige tile floors, and rows of plastic chairs all connected to one another facing giant TVs playing races that are also happening outside. Despite its appearance, the racetrack has its regulars. The place was packed! I’ve never seen so many men in one place.

Here’s a Yelp review from, I assume, a regular:

Where should I start? This is the greatest place of all time. I actually hope all you losers stay away from this place so it doesn’t get crowded. I usually win a couple of races but I get jinxed by my friend Paul. The kid is a born loser.

It took us a good 20 minutes to figure out how to get cash, get a voucher, and then place a bet. Matt put $5 on Warman Road (favored to win) in the second race (out of nine total that day), so we went outside to watch. An estimated 70 percent of the outdoor crowd was chain-smoking. When everyone around us started yelling, we knew the race had started, but it took us a few beats to find the horses, who were really just specks on the opposite side of the track. Then, as quickly as it had started, the race was over. Men behind us groaned. Warman Road came in last place by a significant margin. I mean, he was actually trailing behind the pack. With our first loss under our belts, it was time to go find Kaitlyn in the casino.

Kaitlyn: Man, oh man. I made a mess of it this time. To back up a bit: The Long Island Rail Road—in addition to being “faster” (sure) than the subway—is a lot more expensive. My fare from Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn to Jamaica, Queens, was $7.75. When I got off the train, Lizzie and Matt were, as noted, already at the Aqueduct. Meanwhile I still needed to spend an additional $2.75 to take a 20-minute bus ride to someplace that would be a 15-minute walk to the Aqueduct. The bus picked me up underneath the LIRR tracks after a tense waiting period. I do like the bus but it’s a fact that you never really know whether to expect it. There’s no accounting for the bus. It could be anywhere. (It once ended up inside a house in my old neighborhood, so I do mean “anywhere.”)

The woman seated next to me was editing a TikTok—it was a short video of herself riding the bus, viewed from slightly different camera angles, with a pink gradient overlaid on top, set to Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hot Girl Summer.” Because of her attention to detail, I heard the same 20-second clip of the song about 85 times in a row as she worked.

Finally, I hopped out at 109th Avenue and 108th Street and booked it to the racetrack in a misting rain. I was carrying my huge green sun hat, feeling ridiculous. Usually I would also feel horrible guilt about being so late to meet a friend, but since I was adding minutes on to Lizzie’s victory I reasoned I was actually doing something nice. (She loves to win so much.)

By the time she and Matt found me wandering the roulette area, I had given up. I had yet to see one piece of signage indicating that I was, in fact, anywhere near a racetrack. “Do they have a sports book here?” I asked Matt and Liz. “Let’s just put some money on the Mets and go home.”

Lizzie: I guess Kaitlyn missed the giant mural outside with the horses on it. As you can imagine, the Mets were nowhere in sight, so we had to settle for betting on whatever the betting machines would allow. I’ll be honest: I had no real plan going in, and I don’t understand all the abbreviations, so I just clicked around until the machine accepted my voucher. Apparently, I placed two bets for $10 each: One “Pick 3,” where you attempt to guess the winners of three consecutive races, and one bet for a horse named Hang Tight to “place” in Race 4. Kaitlyn and Matt also placed some bets.

From there we headed to the Aqueduct bar called Silks, and clocked almost immediately that they probably didn’t have mint juleps on the menu. It felt like a convention-hall situation: some canned beers, a few handles of your classic spirits, and some cans of soda. I got a Corona, Kait got a rum and Diet Coke, and Matt got a whiskey and Diet Coke. The bartender took a “say when” approach to the mixers.

She also asked if I wanted a lime in my Corona, and I said yes, but almost instantly regretted it. I don’t want to be dramatic about the bartender’s lime handling, but it did make me feel like Monk. I know everyone is always touching the limes at bars—the human-flesh-to-pulp contact is just the required cost of getting some citrus in your beer. But this bartender really palmed my lime, sort of rolled it around in her bare hand, attempted to hook it onto the edge of the cup, and then just kind of gave up and chucked it directly into the beer. It felt as if she had dunked her fist in my cup and then handed it over to me. I used a coffee stirrer to fish the lime out, but if I know anything about germs—and I don’t—the damage was already done.

Technically I don’t think we were allowed to bring the drinks outside, but there were also No Smoking signs everywhere and no one was paying attention to those, so we did it anyway.

This is an expensive restaurant. (Courtesy of Kaitlyn Tiffany)

Kaitlyn: The only signs anyone seemed to respect were the ones that said Don’t Feed the Pigeons.

My one note about Silks bar is that a bunch of men were standing around drinking and chatting in T-shirts advertising the Aqueduct Race Track. You know how you might buy a T-shirt advertising the New York Mets, or your hometown, or a favorite restaurant you went to on a vacation? They did that with the Aqueduct Race Track. I found this fascinating. As I’ve said before, I’m always keen to learn about a new type of guy. And who could blame these guys for being Aqueduct guys? Despite the issue with the lime-handling, the view was decent and the drinks were very reasonably priced.

Lizzie kept saying she had “voted” for whichever horse she had put money on. In Race 3, I voted for Anaconda to win, and we all thought he did. We saw him cross the finish line and we heard an announcer yell something about him. At the bet-cashing station, however, the administrator looked at me with a concerned expression, handed my slip back, and said, “This one isn’t a winner.”

Lizzie: I’m looking at the results now and it seems like Big Everest won; Anaconda came in second. I lost my Pick 3 (seems kind of impossible to win that one), but Hang Tight did come in second in Race 4, just like I predicted! Impressive, if you ask me, to pick exactly which horse ends up finishing in which place. Surely there would be a big prize pot. I began to dream of the money I would win. Everyone would cheer me on as the guy behind the IRS winnings counter filled up a duffel bag with bricks of cash. Maybe I could go on a trip, or even quit my job?

Cut to: Me, ready to cash in. After she scanned my betting slip, the woman behind the counter asked me if I had a dollar. I did, and I gave it to her assuming they were going to frame it next to my photo or something. Biggest Aqueduct Winners of All Time. She handed me a $20 bill. Realizing this was all I was gonna get, I slowly backed away. I won $19 dollars on a $10 bet. I won $9. But I also lost $10 on my Pick 3. So, all things considered, I’m in the negative. Ohhh, it stings!

Kaitlyn: I made back $2.50 on a $5 bet for Life and Light to show in Race 4. But sadly, I also lost $20 more on a horse named Bingo John. It just doesn’t make sense when a horse with a good name does so poorly!

Once we started losing, we could really enjoy ourselves. I encouraged Lizzie to start ripping her betting slips up and throwing them on the floor like the men do. Lizzie asked Matt why some of the races were being run on the grass track and others were being run on the dirt track. He explained to her that there are different horse hooves. There are grass hooves and there are dirt hooves. And at the start of every race day, a man with a monocle looks over each thoroughbred and makes a list of which is which. If he forgets his monocle, the whole day is canceled.

He also explained about the ambulance that was following the horses as they raced, which was dusty orange and looked 40 years old. “Yeah, we got everything you need in here to repair a horse,” he said, imitating the grizzled driver, who was frighteningly casual about his job and the state of his tools, but also, in some ways, obviously wise and trustworthy, as he’d likely seen it all.  

After my one rum drink, I was feeling emboldened. I wanted to see the fancy parts of the Aqueduct, which were what I had dressed for: The “Turf and Field Club,” the special lounges, the Equestris Restaurant, which supposedly offers a $95 prix fixe and “breathtaking sightlines.” The escalator to the third level was blocked off, but we soon found an unmonitored stairwell.  

What we saw when we got up there sent me jogging off on my own without a backward glance. I left Lizzie and Matt in one large, abandoned area, looking out a huge window at the racetrack, and went up several more flights of stairs. The wonders never ceased. Room after wood-paneled room was empty except for some old CRT TVs, tables set with white tablecloths, and lots of dust. In the “Ladies Lounge,” there was still a long vanity with a row of padded chairs, but the walls were smudged and the ceiling tiles were falling off. It was like the beginning of Titanic. There were glimmers of grandeur past, but in the present it looked disgusting.  

For your information, the Aqueduct closed for renovations in 1956. Thirty-three million dollars and three years later, it came back with a whole lot of flair! According to The New Yorker, “many of the 42,437 spectators on opening day came merely to see what the place looked like.” To contextualize the figure, it’s a little smaller than the audience at a Taylor Swift concert and a little bigger than the max capacity of a Mets home game. And now? It was all for us.

This is a club requiring elegant attire. (Courtesy of Lizzie Plaugic)

Lizzie: If you’re wondering, I am clocking that Kaitlyn has now mentioned the Mets three times in a newsletter about horses. Has anyone checked if she’s on their payroll?

Anyway, she really wanted me to go look at the old abandoned bathroom, so I followed the sound of her voice upstairs. We walked past a room labeled “Investigations” with posters on the walls warning readers about the dangers of counterfeit money. I stuck my head in the old Ladies Lounge. Suddenly, a man in a blue blazer, dressed more formally than anyone we had seen all day, popped up behind us and asked what we were doing. Obviously, the answer was that we were doing something we were not supposed to, but it’s not like we’d had to jump a fence or anything.

“We’re just exploring the different areas,” Kaitlyn said.

“Yeah but this area is closed,” the man said.  

Fair enough. We walked back down the stairs to find Matt, and the man kept walking, never even looking back to see if we were following him. We never saw him again.

Kaitlyn: We hustled back to the regular bleachers to watch the fifth race, which ended up being another disappointment. Then we decided to meander around the casino, back where we started. Nobody works in this casino, as far as we could tell. The blackjack dealers were big screens with sexy, animated women on them. The roulette table was a new, computerized version as well, which is too bad because I only just read thousands of words about how to cheat at regular roulette.

Stepping out of the gnarly old racetrack and into this hypermodern gambling palace was jarring. We had to get back to familiar territory and, ideally, eat something like a hamburger.

Lizzie: As we walked out into the daylight, I deeply inhaled the fresh air of the parking lot. I may have been in the red, but the skies were gray (my favorite) and we didn’t need to race home to record a podcast we don’t actually host.

Kaitlyn: There’s just one more thing we need to tell you about this podcast …

The day after our trip to the racetrack, we Amazing Race-d again—this time to the Bronx to see Amelia. I lost because I took the 4 train while Lizzie accepted a ride in Ashley’s Honda Fit. But that’s not important.

The important part is that we had a pre-dinner glass of wine on the sidewalk outside of some random café, where the proprietor winked at us and refilled our glasses before they were empty. I said he was doing that thing that men sometimes do when they don’t understand why you’re around. They give you the old “Girls, what are you doing here?” And in this case it was nice. And at the racetrack, they were asking the same question, but maybe they were not asking as nicely. Amelia said, “You should change the name of the podcast to Girls, What Are You Doing Here?” So we did! That’s what it’s called now.

On Nobody Famous: Guesting, Gossiping, and Gallivanting, a collection of Famous People letters from the past five years, is available now from Zando Projects and The Atlantic.

“Millennials are many things, but above all, they are murderers,” Mashable noted in 2017, introducing a list of 70 items and institutions that Millennials were purported to have “killed,” including napkins, breakfast cereal, department stores, the 9-to-5 workday, and marriage. The list was tongue-in-cheek—the cereal aisle persists—but it captured something essential about a generation that has reshaped old habits of American life.

Even amid this slaughter of tradition, Millennials are best known for another characteristic: how broke they are. Millennials, it’s often said, are the first American generation that will do worse than its parents financially.

Pick up a book on Millennials, or wander into a discussion about them online, and this theme pops up again and again: The once-optimistic children of the 1980s and early ’90s are now wheezing under the burden of college debt, too poor to buy houses or start families, sucker punched by a hostile economy that bears no resemblance to the one their parents enjoyed as young adults.

“We’re only now starting to grasp the degree to which we have gotten screwed,” Jill Filipovic wrote in her 2020 book, OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind, “and we’re responding with desperation and sometimes anger.” The famous rebuke that Filipovic takes as the book’s title isn’t mere snark, she writes; it’s “a final, frustrated dismissal from people suffering years of political and economic neglect.” In a Morning Consult poll last year, 45 percent of Millennials, compared with 35 percent of all adults, agreed with the statement “Because of my money situation, I will never have the things I want in life.” Fifty-two percent of Millennials said they were concerned that “the money I have or will save won’t last.”

The mythology of the generation begins with the participation trophies and limitless expectations granted to its members in childhood by parents and teachers newly eager to build self-esteem. (I wrote about the implications of that approach in my 2006 book, Generation Me.) But the story is centered on the wreckage of the Great Recession, when those youthful expectations violently collided with the worst financial crisis in nearly a century. The sense of betrayal in OK Boomer and other writings is both palpable and understandable. If anything, it only seems to have hardened over time.

Impressions of generations tend to form early, and they often get cast in amber. As a scholar of generations, I’m well aware of that. But even I was surprised when I returned to my study of Millennials to look at the generation as it enters middle age.

The surprise was this: Millennials, as a group, are not broke—they are, in fact, thriving economically. That wasn’t true a decade ago, and prosperity within the generation today is not evenly shared. But since the mid-2010s, Millennials on the whole have made a breathtaking financial comeback.

This is terrific news. And yet it’s not all good news, because the belief that Millennials have been excluded from the implicit promises that America makes to its people—a house for most, middle-class security, a better life than your parents had—remains predominant in society and, to go by surveys and the tenor of social media, among Millennials themselves.

That prompts a question with implications for the cultural and political future of the United States, a country premised, to a large extent, on the idea of material progress: What if the American dream is still alive, but no one believes it to be?

The Highest Incomes Ever

The Great Recession of 2008 was hard on American incomes, especially those of young Millennials (born roughly between 1980 and 1994), who were just entering the job market. By 2012, the median household income of 25-to-34-year-olds had dropped 13 percent from its peak in 2000. But the mid-2010s saw the beginnings of a turnaround that has continued ever since. By 2019, households headed by Millennials were making considerably more money than those headed by the Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, and Generation X at the same age, after adjusting for inflation. That year, according to the Current Population Survey, administered by the U.S. Census Bureau, income for the median Millennial household was about $9,000 higher than that of the median Gen X household at the same age, and about $10,000 more than the median Boomer household, in 2019 dollars. The coronavirus pandemic didn’t meaningfully change this story: Household incomes of 25-to-44-year-olds were at historic highs in 2021, the most recent year for which data are available. Median incomes for these households have generally risen since 1967, albeit with some significant dips and plateaus. And like each generation that came before, Millennials have benefited from that upward trend.

Household income is only one lens, but individual income shows largely the same thing. Booms and recessions push incomes up and down, but although many media stories have tended to associate Millennials almost exclusively with the latter, they’ve now experienced both, and in a big way: Increases in income since 2014 have been steep.

In this, Millennials trace a pattern similar to the Gen Xers before them. Early Gen Xers, too, entered the job market during a recession, and the generation was subject to dire predictions about its economic future (one 1995 book, Welcome to the Jungle, by Geoffrey T. Holtz, described Gen X as the “Impoverished Generation”). But those predictions didn’t hold up after the economy rebounded later in the ’90s. The Great Recession was no doubt a more harrowing experience for young adults than the recession Gen X faced, but the income stagnation that followed it nonetheless lasted only a few years. Over the past half century, the longest period of falling or stagnant wages was from the ’70s to the mid-’90s, when Boomers were young workers. My point is not that Millennials should consider themselves fortunate—I don’t believe that—but rather that economic prospects can change greatly as a generation ages, and especially as it reaches its peak earning years.

The Millennial income rebound has been broad as well as steep. The income of young adults across racial groups has risen since 2014. By my analysis, Black and Latino Americans ages 25 to 44 in 2021 were making more money than Black and Latino Silents, Boomers, and Gen Xers at the same age. The U.S. is not without economic inequities, many of them racial. But Black and Latino Millennials are not falling behind previous generations when it comes to their income. Instead, most are getting ahead.

Two groups have not outpaced the generations that came before: men and people with less education. Millennial men, on average, have not seen the income increases that Millennial women have (more on that later)—a divergence at least partly explained by the growing gap in educational attainment between men and women. And overall, the median income of Americans with a four-year college degree has steadily risen while the income of those with only a high-school degree has fallen. This trend is not new, though it is troubling.

[From the September 2017 issue: Jean M. Twenge on smartphones and the post-Millennial generation’s mental health]

Yet there are also far fewer high-school-only graduates among Millennials than among previous generations, and many more with a college degree. Millennials are the first American generation in which more than one out of three had a four-year college degree by their late 20s, up from one out of four when Gen Xers were in that age bracket. And two out of three Millennials have attended college for at least a year.

That has enabled more people to move into higher income brackets, and is one of the main reasons Millennials are doing relatively well financially. But even the story of the generation’s have-nots is complicated, and hardly Dickensian. The least fortunate members of the Millennial generation seem better protected economically than those of prior generations: Fewer Millennials were in poverty in 2019 than were Boomers and Gen Xers at the same age (in 1987 and 2004, years in which the economy was likewise strong). For all the talk of America’s tattered social safety net, that net has in some ways been reinforced since Millennials became adults. The Affordable Care Act extended health-care coverage, and federal-government support during the pandemic actually caused poverty to fall in 2020 and 2021, once you account for that support. Whether because of federal social policy, minimum-wage increases in some states, or other factors, poverty is not any more common among Millennials today than it was among previous generations.

A Generation of Homeowners

A house is perhaps the most tangible embodiment of the American dream. Millennials’ housing woes have featured prominently in media accounts of the generation’s economic (and life) problems. “There should be a Millennial edition of Monopoly where you just walk around the board paying rent, never able to buy anything,” a Twitter comedian who goes by “Mutable Joe” joked in 2016. BuzzFeed ran a story last year on 24 “ways Millennials became homeowners,” filled with decidedly sui generis anecdotes. One described someone who’d been hit by a truck and won a lawsuit, covering their down payment. Short of getting concussed by a semi, the article suggested, Millennials had little chance of becoming homeowners.

But contrary to that narrative, Millennials’ homeownership rates in 2020 were only slightly behind Boomers’ and Gen Xers’ at the same age: 50 percent of Boomers owned their own home as 25-to-39-year-olds, compared with 48 percent of Millennials, hardly a difference deserving of headlines or social-media memes.

Both house prices and mortgage rates are higher now than in 2020. That’s bad news for Millennials who haven’t yet bought a house but want to do so soon. Nonetheless, many older Millennial homeowners got great deals on their most important purchase, having passed into their 30s during the early 2010s, one of the most fortuitous times to buy a house in recent memory. It was Gen Xers, by and large, who were in their prime home-buying years as the great housing bubble of the aughts inflated, and who went underwater when that bubble popped. People who bought a house in 2005, for instance, saw their home’s value plummet 21 percent over six years, on average, and not regain its purchase price until 2014. Older Millennials, in contrast, were buying into a depressed market that subsequently rebounded; houses bought in 2011, for instance, appreciated 40 percent over the next six years. Almost everyone who bought a house in the U.S. before 2019 saw its value shoot up during the pandemic years. And until the past year, just about all Millennial home buyers were able to lock in mortgage interest rates that were at historic lows.

[Read: The next generation of NIMBYs]

These are national figures, and the picture will vary from place to place. (Housing has not been a bargain in New York City, for instance, where a very large number of Millennial journalists live.) But on the whole, Millennials have not been economically unlucky as to homeownership—if anything, the reverse is true.

Closing the Wealth Gap

Between the toll that the Great Recession took on Millennials’ early careers and the college-loan debt that many of them carry, one might expect this generation to be living more precariously than previous ones, with little financial cushion.

And there’s at least some truth to that. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis made big headlines in 2018 when it announced that among families headed by people born in the 1980s (older Millennials), median wealth was 34 percent lower than what you’d expect based on the wealth of previous generations at the same age. The report, which analyzed data through 2016, theorized that Millennials might be a “lost generation” when it came to wealth.

But when the St. Louis Fed updated its analysis of Millennial wealth a few years later, using 2019 data, it found significant progress. By then, older Millennials lagged only 11 percent behind previous generations at the same age. That progress was uneven: The gap was larger for Millennials without a college degree (19 percent) and even more so for Black Millennials (50 percent). Younger Millennials (born in the ’90s and still in their mid-20s at the time) also faced a bigger gap. Still, since 2019, both housing and the stock market have increased in value, last year’s swoon notwithstanding. Recent analysis by the Fed, including data through the middle of 2022, has shown average Millennial wealth to be neck and neck with the wealth of Gen X at the same age.

Does debt alter this picture? Millennials are without a doubt more heavily burdened by college loans than previous generations. Black Millennials are particularly likely to carry heavy student-loan balances. But again, the Fed’s analysis already takes that into account: Its wealth figures net out college loans and other debts.

Even the wealth gap that exists today may mean less than it first appears to. Because more Millennials went to college and graduate school, they started their careers later, on average, than Boomers and Gen Xers did. On those grounds alone, one would expect a lag in wealth building. But more education typically means higher lifetime earnings—and thus stronger savings potential as the years go by. Many Millennials are just entering their peak earning years and have more earning power than the generations before them.

Meanwhile, the long trend in American life spans has generally been upward. The high-wage manufacturing jobs that Boomers could count on right out of high school also tended to take a toll on the body over time; the shift toward services and office work enables longer career tails. As the saying goes, 60 is the new 50, and this will benefit Millennials in myriad ways.

The New Economics of Family

“I see ‘Millennials Aren’t Having Babies’ is making the rounds again,” tweeted “pokey pup,” a self-identified Millennial, in November 2021. “No one is getting paid enough, there’s not adequate maternity leave, no one can afford hospital bills, most of us can’t afford a house—like what did you think would happen?” The tweet got more than 120,000 likes and more than 25,000 retweets.

Although Millennials’ economic outlook isn’t so dire as many social-media posts would suggest, something is clearly holding Millennials back from having children—and finances are, indirectly, at least a plausible culprit.

[From the July/August 2013 issue: Jean M. Twenge on how long you can wait to have a baby]

As high-school seniors, 95 percent of Millennials said they wanted at least one child. Four out of 10 said they wanted three or more. Those desires have persisted. In the 2018 General Social Survey of adults, Millennials’ average ideal number of children was 2.6. Yet total fertility—the estimated number of children a woman will have in her lifetime based on the year’s births—was just 1.66 in 2021.

Family income itself doesn’t seem to be to blame—after all, Millennials’ incomes are higher than those of previous generations. But the pattern of income—particularly the split between men and women—may play a role.

Millennial women’s incomes are much higher than the incomes of women of previous generations, a result of both higher wages and more hours worked. In 2021, Millennial women ages 35 to 44 made roughly twice as much as Boomer women in 1980, and over 20 percent more than Gen X women in 2005. Women 25 to 34 made similar gains.

Men’s incomes, however, have fallen since 1970 (though not nearly as much as women’s have risen). The statistics aren’t uniform: Men on the higher rungs of the economic ladder have for the most part bucked this trend, and Millennial men’s incomes have rebounded from their Great Recession lows. But that may be cold comfort to men making less than their fathers did, especially those who don’t live (and share expenses) with women—even though men still make more than women on average.

These rapidly changing income dynamics also affect Millennial families. For heterosexual couples, if the woman quits her job when children arrive, the family will lose considerably more income than two-earner families did in past generations. If the man quits, the typical family will lose more than half its income. And if both parents keep their job, the couple must find child care—the price of which has far outpaced inflation as more and more parents have sought it. In most states, child care costs more than a year of college at a state university, and sometimes more than housing.

The balancing act between salaries and child care might be one reason Millennials are having fewer children, and also why some Millennials feel they are not doing as well as their parents. In a 2018 poll by The New York Times, 64 percent of young adults who said they expected to have fewer children than their ideal named “child care is too expensive” as the reason.

Still, this argument shouldn’t be taken too far. If Millennials need to spend more income on child care than previous generations did, they also need to spend less on many other things. After accounting for inflation, the prices of cars, clothing, furniture, toys, and electronics have all fallen in recent decades. These are not, for the most part, minor line items in a family budget—or at least they weren’t in, say, the 1980s.

The link between family finances and having kids is also weaker than you might think. On average, families with more income actually have fewer kids; those with less income have more kids. A recent paper by the economists Melissa S. Kearney, Phillip B. Levine, and Luke Pardue showed that states with bigger increases in child-care costs have not seen steeper declines in birth rates—and found, more broadly, that economic factors were not the major driver of falling birth rates. Instead, they concluded, albeit speculatively, that “shifting priorities across cohorts of young adults”—that is, generational differences in attitudes—are the primary explanation. Hypothetically, the logic goes, Millennials might want more children, but when they trade off kids versus income, professional success, and other goals, kids get slotted lower than in previous generations.

Why Millennials Still Feel Poor

Every generation faces financial challenges, including some that its parents’ generation did not. Within every generation, there is hardship, and Millennials are no different. But all in all, this is a generation on the cusp of middle age that looks successful, not lost. So why does the idea persist that Millennials have gotten screwed economically? Why is the narrative around Millennials still so negative and sometimes angry?

Incomes and wealth are not just objective numbers—there is a large element of perception involved in whether someone thinks they are doing well.

Human beings are hardwired to care deeply about status, and we assess it in two different ways. At any given moment, we look around to see how we’re doing compared with our peers. And we reflect on our own past and future status as well: Are our lives getting better? Are we better off than our parents, and will our children be better off still? Both of these forms of status affect our well-being. A number of factors inherent in modern society may have pushed many Millennials toward a distorted view of each.

Before social media, and before the proliferation of lifestyle and reality TV, the only rich individuals most people encountered were from the particularly well-off families in their town. Now the rich (or at least those who appear to be rich) fill our feeds and our screens, providing a skewed view of how other Americans live. The Kardashians cannot, in fact, be kept up with. Online, everyone else’s life looks more glamorous than our own. The resulting sense of “relative deprivation,” as it’s known among psychologists, no doubt afflicts Americans of all ages—but Millennials have spent their entire adulthood in this milieu, and remain more online than older generations.

Meanwhile, negativity in the news—which, studies show, has become much more pronounced in recent years—has colored perceptions of generational progress. A seemingly endless array of articles and news segments have repeated the idea that Millennials have gotten the shaft economically, an idea that social media amplifies further. (When government economists worry that Millennials might be a “lost generation” as to wealth, it generates news; when they later say that Millennials have greatly narrowed the wealth gap, the coverage is quieter.)

This constant drizzle of grievance and disappointment falls daily on a generation that carried extraordinarily high expectations into adulthood—more than half of Millennials, for example, expected to earn a graduate degree. In a 2011 survey, Millennial teens believed they would make, on average, $150,000 once they settled into their career—more than four times as much as the median income that year. “There is a profound gap between the expectations we were raised to hold and the reality we now experience,” Filipovic writes in OK Boomer. Given those expectations, some Millennials’ disappointment with their status and material success might be baked into the cake.

But expectations do change over time, and perceptions adjust. The Fed’s 2021 Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking showed that a small majority of Millennials, 53 percent, believed they were doing better than their parents at the same age. That hasn’t seemed to translate into a more buoyant public discourse, nor to positive views of American capitalism among young adults—in 2021, a Gallup poll showed that nearly half of all 18-to-34-year-olds had a positive view of socialism, compared with only about a third of those older than 55. But it’s encouraging nonetheless.

Whatever one’s views of socialism, it matters whether Millennials are doing better or worse than the generations before them—and, more important, whether they believe they are. The erosion of faith in material progress has already reshaped political values and changed the tenor of American culture, and the longer it persists, the more it will continue to do so. Rising prosperity and the optimism that follows carry benefits that extend well beyond material comfort. They make social comparisons less obsessive and, as the economic historian Benjamin M. Friedman observed in his 2006 book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, create an environment in which hatreds cool, cooperation becomes easier, and human rights advance more readily.

If Millennials keep doing well economically, the optimism that characterized their childhood and adolescence may eventually return. The scars of a searing start can take time to fade, but they eventually might. And if Millennials’ expectations are now lower, they may be pleasantly surprised by their financial success, leading to more contentment in middle age.

Perhaps not long from now, financial pessimism will be talked about as the latest item on the list of things Millennials have killed. That particular murder might be welcome.

This article is adapted from Jean M. Twenge’s book Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—And What They Mean for America’s Future. It appears in the May 2023 print edition with the headline “The Myth of the Broke Millennial.”

When Molly Shannon auditioned for Saturday Night Live in the mid-’90s, she received some appallingly bad advice. A scout warned her against doing the character Mary Katherine Gallagher—a geeky teenager who stuck her hands in her armpits and smelled them when she got nervous—because the show’s executive producer, Lorne Michaels, wouldn’t like it. “He’ll think it’s weird, that dirty little character,” Shannon recalled being told. Despite listening to that guidance for her first round, Shannon surfaced Mary Katherine during her second, and Michaels saw the potential. Which is why last night, more than 20 years after her last appearance on SNL, we got to see Shannon as host teaching the Jonas Brothers how to smell their armpits. And though Mary Katherine didn’t make a full appearance, Shannon’s episode was a striking reminder that character work was once essential to SNL’s success.

When Shannon joined the cast in 1995, the show was attempting to correct the previous year’s slump. Characters were a way forward, and Shannon became a major player. In many ways, she was the character queen. There was Mary Katherine, of course, but she also introduced viewers to a wealth of other weirdos who paved the way for the likes of Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon to chase their ideas down more outrageous paths. Along with her fellow cast members Cheri Oteri and Anna Gasteyer, and the writers Paula Pell and Tina Fey, Shannon began to shift the notion of SNL as a boys’ club and reveal new possibilities. Her often extremely physical comedy reveled in excess, challenging cultural expectations of what women in the industry should and shouldn’t do. She created characters who were, more often than not, too much: too strange, too brash, too subdued.

On a variety show that changes every week, characters establish familiarity and consistency, helping determine viewers’ favorite eras and cast members. After Shannon’s departure in 2001, new cast members developed a fresh array of peculiar personalities. Yet, outside of Ego Nwodim’s Lisa from Temecula sketch, this season of SNL feels noticeably light on the sorts of characters who have helped it become a comedic institution.

Thank goodness, then, for Shannon, who reprised two characters from her collection last night: the aging performer Sally O’Malley and the dreadfully bad stand-up comic Jeannie Darcy. As Shannon recently shared with Jimmy Fallon, “I actually did [Jeannie] toward the end of my SNL run ’cause I was like, Uh, it’s so hard to be thinking about making stuff funny all the time that I thought, I want to do something that’s really dull.” Pursuing dullness seems antithetical to SNL’s purpose, but part of what worked when Darcy first appeared was the live audience’s strained response. The jokes, and Darcy’s painful delivery of them, were meant to be so bad that they forced an awkward laugh. Unfortunately, last night’s Jeannie segment (a satire of Chris Rock’s live Netflix special) was pretaped, which felt more regimented and robbed the bit of the real-time non-reactions that fuel Shannon’s zany energy.

At the end of the show, Shannon let loose as the 50-year-old O’Malley, who had been tasked with helping the Jonas Brothers’ choreography team (Chloe Fineman, Bowen Yang) reimagine their upcoming Las Vegas residency. O’Malley’s aging perspective (“I got half a century of sizzle in my lady schnizzle”) and high-riding pants, which she took her time pulling up higher and higher up to create a noticeable camel toe, caused both Fineman and Yang to break. “Okay, you know, I’ve engineered my entire life so I would never have to see what I just saw,” Yang’s choreographer cracked. The sketch felt designed to create a viral moment when the Jonas Brothers finally joined O’Malley. Dressed in her signature red pantsuit, they mimed her kick-lunge-kick routine while she coached them. “Let’s put some bone-as in your Jonas,” she said.  

Throughout SNL’s history, the biggest breakout performers have tended to be those with the largest—or loudest—arsenal of characters. In recent episodes, both Nwodim and Yang have generated viral or near-viral moments thanks to some characters that have seemed to have the potential to reappear: Barry the midwife, the no-nonsense upstairs neighbor Mrs. Shaw, and even the recently deceased Glenda. Whether they’ll return remains to be seen. But revisiting some of Shannon’s more eccentric personas last night felt like a throwback to the show’s glory days, when characters weren’t an anomaly but an expectation.