A few days ago I wrote about generational stories. In that post, I talk about how millennials and younger generations grew up seeing successful but unhappy parents and draw conclusions about life from that.
The generation before that grew up after the second world war in poor families where their physical and emotional/mental needs were not met. From that experience, they worked hard, built good careers, and earned comfortable middle-class lives. They identified poverty as a major issue with their upbringing and solved for it, but most still weren’t happy.
The current generation of young people grew up in households where their physical needs were met, but their emotional/mental needs were not. They were still ruled by controlling authoritarian parents and they still observed their parents weren’t happy, even though they had money.
The lesson that a lot of young people seem to take from this is that money is a problem. That the focus on career caused their parents to be authoritarian, bitter, or depressed. What most of them don’t consider is what life would have been like without the financial success.
They assume that if their parents hadn’t worked hard and found success, they would have been happier. As if there is a tradeoff between career and contentment.
They overlook the much more likely scenario, that if their parents had not had success in their careers that life would have been much worse. They would have had neither their physical or mental/emotional needs met, and their parents would likely be more depressed, bitter, and controlling.
Just because it is possible to have money and not be happy, does not mean that having less money would make you any happier.
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