Never Retire - Maybe Today's Trends Are Not Just Phases Or Fads
Doing life differently for the duration
Social media takes things people have been doing for decades and amplifies them to the point where it feels like Generation Z or the millennials just came up with the idea.
The most recent and pertinent examples—
#illmakemymoneyback. The Wall Street Journal ran a story this week about 18-to-25 year olds feeling like the pandemic robbed them of their early 20s. Leaving the self-centered absurdity of that statement aside, some folks in this demographic are responding with travel:
Many of these students or recent graduates are now taking more elaborate and in some cases more expensive vacations than they expected to take at this age, say some young graduates. Overall, 72% of Gen Zers between the ages 18 and 25 surveyed in April were likely to take a summer vacation, more than any other age group…
Quiet Quitting. It’s a trend that recently emerged on TikTok. Doing no more or no less than your job requires. No more going above and beyond.
Basically, work to rule. Establishing a healthy work-life balance.
Side hustles. Millennials didn’t invest the side hustle. However, if you read the endless articles on the internet about side hustles, you’d think working a second job to supplement your main source of income became a thing at the turn of the century.
I wrote about this in March on Medium. And, before that, in October, 2021, using my Dad as an example:
My Dad always worked a full-time, traditional 9-to-5 gig by day. At night and on weekends, he had a variety of side hustles, primarily painting houses. But he also worked in a friend’s liquor store a couple nights a week when I was a kid.
Moonlighting, baby. Old concept and excellent 80s television show starring Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd.
Follow your passion. An offshoot to the side hustle because, quite often, you work your soulless day job 9-to-5 and follow your passion:
during the day, on your employer’s time, while you’re quiet quitting (or doing even less to keep our paycheck) and/or
at night and on the weekends.
These trends of the social media era have their roots long before smartphones existed.
Generation Z didn’t start the fire.
Rejecting the 40+ hour work week. Fighting back against demoralizing work or poor working conditions. Refusing to overextend yourself in pursuit of somebody else’s dream. Taking back the power.
Finding work you feel good about. That allows you to be creative and feel good about yourself, to work less and live more.
Discovering and embracing a new way to do life.
Aged old concepts. Like fashion trends, they reemerge. This is a good thing.
There’s a guy from San Francisco—Chris Carlsson—who, along with a few friends, was essentially writing about this in the 80s in an excellent zine called Processed World:
Processed World magazine was founded in 1981 by a small group of dissidents, mostly in their twenties, who were then working in San Francisco's financial district. The magazine's creators found themselves using their only marketable skill after years of university education: “handling information.” In spite of being employed in offices as “temps,” few really thought of themselves as “office workers.” More common was the hopeful assertion that they were photographers, writers, artists, dancers, historians or philosophers.
Beyond these creative ambitions, the choice to work “temp” was also a refusal to join the rush toward business/yuppie professionalism. Instead of 40-70 hour weeks at thankless corporate career climbing, they sought more free time to pursue their creative instincts. Nevertheless, day after day, they found themselves cramming into public transit en route to the ever-expanding Abusement Park of the financial district. Thus, from the start, the project's expressed purpose was twofold: to serve as a contact point and forum for malcontent office workers (and wage-workers in general) and to provide a creative outlet for people whose talents were blocked by what they were doing for money.
Just because all of the above existed in—and was invented by—previous generations doesn’t make it any less important or revolutionary today. Cringeworthy as it might be, we’re wise to accept and roll with the fact that social media takes the old and makes it new again.
Who cares if Gen Z thinks they were robbed of their 20s? What’s it matter if they think I can always make more money is some novel idea?
Side hustles, following your passion, moonlighting, starting your own business, freelancing, work-life balance. They have taken on lives of their own.
Taken together, we’re seeing a wholesale rejection of the American dream.
By choice. And out of necessity.
That’s really what we talk about here when we discuss money and personal finance strategies to help those of us who will Never Retire not only survive, but thrive.
Maybe you can’t afford to buy a house. Maybe your’re house rich/cash poor. Maybe you’ve discovered you’re not going to save a $1 million nest egg after all. Maybe all of the above.
Maybe one or more of the above and something else.
Whatever your situation, there’s something powerful about social media amplifying the ways people do life differently. Even if they’re not new. The permeation of these and other trends into the mainstream can help incite cultural change more quickly and effectively than the radicals of the 60s or children of the 80s ever dreamed.
Bottom line—resist the urge to shit on Generation Z. And, if you’re older, the millennials.
They’re the people who will Never Retire and be proud of it!
They’re the ones who will work less now so they can work less longer.
They’re the ones who will put work ethic in its proper place.
They’re the ones who replace the American way of life with the far more healthy and exciting semi-retired life.
In the next installment of the Never Retire newsletter, we discuss cash security, a key element of personal finance.