It was not naïve, they grew up in a generational-scale labor shortage with low inflation and incredibly low costs of living and low energy costs.
They had a minimum wage in a technical legalistic sense, but financial success was guaranteed in practice. Risk taking is safe if you're not able to fail.
Nobody lives in that kind of paradise now. Was all squandered.
If the "Do what you love" parents crash and burn, they tell their children to "Focus on career." If the "Focus on career" parents succeed, they tell their children to "Do what you love."
Definitely seems like a couple of generations ago you could do basically anything (As long as you did something) and come out pretty decent financially.
I wonder the extent to which that's the case (or maybe better said "that depends on what 'pretty decent financially' means").
Both sets of grandparents were blue collar (steel milling/odd-jobs and coal mining/nursing). My parents were the first generation to attend college at all and both became public school teachers. Both sets of grandparents had a sizable (very large for a hobby) home garden to supplement the family food and made use of it. I remember eating "government cheese" (literal cheese from the government) at times. They were not substantially better or worse off than the other working-class families we saw around us and hung out with.
Their pensions did ensure that they were able to not be in danger of starving in retirement, but they weren't traveling anywhere by airplane (I think maybe ever for one set and exactly once for the other) and, at the end, their estate was settled for an amount of money that one person could easily carry.
Is that "pretty decent financially"? I genuinely don't know; it was surviving.
I'm Gen Z. It's the perception I have but, I don't know if it's accurate. My perception is also definitely biased towards middle class. One other thing is that I'm not american, which probably makes a difference.
To refine things a bit more, it seems like if you got a degree and had a white collar job you were probably going to do decently. Nowadays degree + white collar job is basically baseline.
My parents are Gen X with degrees (Eng + Chemistry?) and they seem to have enjoyed their 20s and early 30s, settled down in their 30s and ended up pretty well off without ever really worrying about money.
I don't think that strategy would work very well today. The world seems a lot more competitive now than it was 20 years ago, and on average it seems like there are less serendipitous opportunities.
It's not at all surprising that being in the 83rd percentile of most educated in 1980 gave a better life outcome than having the same absolute level of education but relatively then being in the 62nd percentile in 2021.
Roughly speaking, your parents' degrees are about twice as uncommon in 1993 (~midpoint of Gen X undergrad graduation) as they would be today.
Not to mention Gen X is known for being a smaller generation than the ones before and after it, which is another factor that would have reduced competition for them in their careers.
US population in millions per birth year (alive today) by generation*:
Boomer - 3.7M / yr (70.23M / 19) alive; 4.5M / yr (85.4 / 19) originally born **
Gen X - 4.4M / yr (65.8M / 15) alive
Millenial - 4.8M / yr (72.19M / 15) alive
Gen Z - 4.3M / yr (68.6M / 16) alive
> My parents are Gen X with degrees (Eng + Chemistry?) and they seem to have enjoyed their 20s and early 30s, settled down in their 30s and ended up pretty well off without ever really worrying about money.
That probably depends on where they were and what "end" of GenX they were. The early part of GenX was entering the workforce in a pretty nasty recession with high unemployment, high inflation and limited prospects (hence Grunge hehe). The boomers (although probably not those in America to be fair) went through periods like this too.
GenZ is experiencing high(ish) inflation and high(ish) interest rates now, but unemployment is still low and wages are still good. It can get much worse, and has done before. Generally though the bad times are shorter than the good times - hopefully that keeps holding true.
My dad was a high school grad from the middle of nowhere and was literally raised in a barn (the girls lived in the house—it was too small for all the kids) with no running water (manual-pump well). His dad was a small-acreage farmer and slightly-successful rodeo rider. Birth year puts him in the early part of the Boomer generation.
He puttered around with not-quite-successful-but-not-quite-failure blue collar sole-proprietor small businesses for most of his 20s, then got a low-level railroad job, worked his way up and spent his last ~15 years in middle management there before being forced into early retirement. Recall, just a high school diploma. He couldn't handle middle-school math (by more recent standards) when I was learning it, and could barely use a computer. But he could run a train yard. Go figure.
My mom quit work when they married in her late 20s, and never worked again. She had a junior college degree and just made enough to get by before that. Lived in a trailer when she was single.
They retired very well and paid my way through college in the early '00s. We never wanted for money at all when I was a kid—which is how they were able to drop four figures on a first computer (good ol' Tandy) for me, just in case that led to something. A big week-and-change road trip every year, sometimes flights instead, plenty of time off and travel around the holidays. We lived in some pretty damn nice houses (at times—there's only so much available when the railroad moves you to some podunk town and you want to buy on short notice).
On one income. In a pretty mundane, middling-pay career.
Union pensions and 20th century union health plans were magical. As were housing costs.
My point was that "seems" is probably based on performative information, like Instagram, not that 20 year olds are doing great.
People who work hard downplay how hard they work. People who got lucky play up how hard they work. Objective data points to lifestyles being mostly the same now and 50 years ago.
A couple of generations ago you could have 100sqm house, a small black n white TV, maybe a basic 4 cylinder car if you were doing quite well, and be happy about it. If I lived at the level of consumerism my grandparents did, I could still do basically anything and be comfortable financially. Instead I have every electronic gadget ever made and an expensive Italian automotive exotica fetish and a constant thirst for more dollars to keep the gravy train chugging.
My baby boomer uncle likes to brag that he bought a house at 19 after two years of delivering firewood in trunk of his car. He thinks kids today would get similar results with similar effort; it's very tedious.
I'm aware of, and agree with, the points you've so clearly articulated. But to my mind, being blissfully unaware of the context of one's material success is an example of naivety.
They had a minimum wage in a technical legalistic sense, but financial success was guaranteed in practice. Risk taking is safe if you're not able to fail.
Nobody lives in that kind of paradise now. Was all squandered.