When my parents were my age they had three kids and a house. Meanwhile I’m here with three houses and one kid.
My parents have passed, but I’d like to have more close family. We had a hard time making that first kid, and we’re not getting any younger.
(Scandinavia)
Worse (USA)
At the age I am now(34) my parents had 3 kids and and a house. My mother was able to support us all on her salary alone. Dad worked as well and we were able to do whatever we wanted until they got divorced.
I’m upto my nose in school debt, unemployed, and living at home with mother. So are my brothers though they work. One had a baby. The other is a recovering drug addict with severe mental problems. We’ve traumatized each other in brutal violent ways. That’s a life I never want to bring other people into. Kids are out of the question until I move out. I just hope I’m not 40 and too late for that. Or worse dead.
Better, but in a way that’s largely on them. They had more money, security, and opportunity, but they were a terrible match with a lot of mental issues and grew to hate each other. I have less, but I’ve been working on my mental health since I was younger and actively prioritized only marrying someone I was a good match for.
My life has been hard and painful, but I’ve played a difficult hand fairly well and my problems are rarely persistently internal
We’re Americans.
China. Much, much better, but it’s a bit unfair to compare someone who grew up in a typical modern society to someone who grew up in time of extreme poverty, subsistence farming, and famine…
Although, my parents did go to better universities & got better careers right off the bat due to a lack of educated ppl back in their days
Yeah, I think pretty much everyone in China is gonna have it better nowadays. No 红卫兵 to harass you, 开放改革 allows more movement. Freedom to emigrate.
People used to have to do farming, then it opened up to the world and cities have jobs.
My mom would not ever stop mentioning it. “Stop being so picky with food, when I was your age I had to help your grandma with the farming, we barely had anything to eat” 🫠 (Paraphrased from Cantonese)
She also said something like “你们已经很幸福了” … something something “要懂得珍惜/感谢我们”
Always trying to make me feel guilty.
I think when I see those “good old days” memes that westerners make, I’m always like 🤔
My parents didn’t get degrees and they managed to get an apartment in Guangzhou somehow…
Oh you know how people say 90% home ownership in China? I think those accounted for rural houses… which is kinda worthless since you can’t find jobs, so they go to cities then its the same thing, you need to rent an apartment. Most people do.
After we emigrated, my parents managed to save up money for a house in Philadelphia, PA. NYC was way too expensive so its impossible, rent was going up, so we had to move…
But the ramifications is that I get bullied a lot more often in Philly schools due to less Asians so more racism… lots of emotional damage…
“你已经很幸福了，很多人偷渡来的没身份，你能得到公民身份” is used to shut me up if I ever try to voice dissent at home
I mean I do appreciate how much better I have it, but my mental health is still horrible. Emotions just boxed up and suppressed all these years.
('Murica) At my age (40s) my parents owned a home in the suburbs. I still live in that house with those same parents so that should tell you the bulk of it.
I feel very resentful that I never got to spread my wings and just be an independent adult away from my parents in the same way my brother and sister have. I think I get along well with my folks and there are financial benefits to living in someone else’s house, but I can’t escape the fact I am their son, and a certain amount of paternalism seeps into our interactions sometimes, despite the fact that I’m the same age my father was when I was 10. I mean things like demanding rather than asking that I attend some family gathering, or insisting I wear more formal clothes to said gathering, etc. It doesn’t come up often, and I think they’re aware of how it makes me feel and try not to do it, but it still hurts when it does.
When I bring this up to them (or many others for that matter) the reaction is usually “Oh but that’s an American thing, wanting to cut loose at 18. It’s common in many cultures for adult children to live with their parents.” But I’m an American with American parents, who grew up watching American media, and I’m surrounded by Americans, so I measure my success vs other Americans, and especially when I was a kid, an adult living with their parents was an object of ridicule.
Of the three of us, my brother is doing the best materially speaking. He owns a house. My sister I don’t think is living paycheck to paycheck, but she isn’t rolling in money either.
Relatable, just wanna share:
Me (about 24) and my older brother (about 29) still live with our parents… 🙃
But we’re Asian so apparantly, according to google, it’s normal…
I am still financially dependent cuz I’m dealing with depression… health insurance literally still on my parents plan… so yea my self esteem is at an all time low
Feels so awkward when I criticize my parents when talking to a therapist, while I need their money to pay for said therapy…
I really wanna grow wings and fly away, but I cant, I have an unhealthy emotional attachment to my mom, I feel anxious without here presence, but SIMULTANEOUSLY I feel scared of mom. I think I fear abandonment.
You have no idea how anxious I feel when like… I traveled with parents, especially with mom, and I had use separate bathrooms cuz I’m old enough, so I sometimes stand outside waiting for mom and like idk why, but somehow women always take longer in the bathroom (no offense btw, just an observation I made) and like sometimes if I wait too long I’m like omg did mom abandon me and I just begin shouting her full name. Like especially when I’m around like 8 to 12, I get extremely anxious.
I feel like I have have developmental delays or some shit, I sleep with parents as a teen, which I know, the whole internet is gonna judge me for.
…
Anyways,
I can’t escape the fact I am their son
Yea I feel this too.
I don’t have my own transport (no drivers license) so I need my parents to drive me to places, and we went to the park the other day, and I still acted like a kid since I’m in the presence of my parents, reminicing on past, spending tome together, before all went to shit and I feel like they started resenting me. Perhaps its me, I’m the problem. Everyone just hates me, any kindness is merely pity.
Expectations grew, but my heart never grew, still feel like a child, still just want, desperate for their affection like a child.
I don’t feel ready for this world.
I’m expected to just “stop being depressed” in a snap of a finger and “start acting normal”, and they threatened to disinherit me.
I mean, I constantly get told how much “I have life better than them”, but idk how the fuck they go through the stuff in China and somehow now have permanent trauma, they make me feel like I’m weak for not being able to just shove away depression like its nothing just because “I had a better childhood than they ever did”
And I have to obey everything my parents say, because I cannot deal with doing this alone… the emotional abandonment and the withdrawl for money support would combined devastate me. My abusive older brother would’ve won, I get nothing, he triumph being an abuser, he’d get the last laugh…
Like my mother is pressuring my older brother to get married and I think he’s just doing it out of appeasement, I don’t think he even cares about getting married, I can’t imagine him being a good father, can’t even be a decent brother, imagine you were born to him, have him as a father? Jesus christ, his kids are so cooked.
Anyways idk whats the point of this comment, just like to talk about stuff I guess…
I can’t offer much other than to say I hope things get better for you. My childhood wasn’t that bad in spite of my blindness. Sure I couldn’t drive, but my friends couldn’t either. I didn’t have a job but neither did my peers. It was as I got older and my peers started becoming independent that the resentment started to brew.
I’m also dependent on others including my parents for transportation, which more than anything is why I feel the way I do. I can’t go anywhere without asking them. While they try to be accommodating they have their own schedules and I have to plan around them, so I don’t feel like I have my own life. Asking for help also feels too much like asking for permission.
No judgment, but you need to do some exposure therapy on separation. I know it’s hard and scary but it’s what works. I cried my first night living away from home, and fuck knows I wasn’t healthy when I lived in dorms, but it helped build independence. And I’m not saying “move out now”, I’m saying make a plan to spend a small amount of time away from your mom, do something, and you keep doing that until it’s no longer scary and then you do something more.
Also look up some anxiety management techniques, and start practicing some that seem relevant. I’m personally prone to catastrophizing and so for me figuring out the worst realistic scenario and planning for that helps calm me down by forcing me to actually reject unrealistic worries and reframe the situation as something where I can probably handle it if things go wrong. Breathing techniques and grounding techniques have done wonders for dealing with the physical experience of anxiety. I’ve also found exercise to be helpful, taking a walk and just chatting to myself about my feelings in my head is amazing, but if you can do something more strenuous like running, biking, push ups, or lifting that’s also awesome.
One step at a time, small, but consistent. The most important step a person can take is the next one. It’s ok to fail, but you get back up and try again. Getting out of this is a marathon not a sprint. You seem to really hate being in this position, and that’s fair, but you today can start the process that eventually will get you out of it.
I personally have found a “no zero days” philosophy to be extremely helpful for my goals. The way it works is every day you do something to advance a goal you have, even if it’s very little. When I was getting into shape that meant even on days I wasn’t running a calorie deficit I still did some bodyweight exercises, and if I forgot to exercise at all until bedtime I’d accept staying up a bit late to do a few push ups, just to ensure the habits stuck. For you that could mean even if you don’t have the energy to do anything you spend a few minutes meditating or doing a breathing exercise. But the low days should be accompanied by days with more effort, where you push yourself into the growth zone.
You can do this.
Switzerland, meh.
I have a better job with low hours for more money but still have to be cautious about costs. They have several houses with a garden that I can only dream about.
They have a retirement plan that I can only dream about and an happy life while I’m ok-ish but depressive.
But I have 10Gbs fiber optic internet and a NAS+Seedbox so there’s that.
Worse. My parents own a huge house and have “last earned” pensions. I’m paying through the nose for rent and my pension will be miniscule. I currently earn enough to pay the rent, but I can’t afford to buy. So I’m guessing I’ll be living under a bridge when I retire.
Kinda depends.
My parents divorced when I was a baby.
My mom is probably doing fine. She was fake and selfish and none of the rest of us talk to her, my immediate family that is. All her fam, parents and siblings, were across country and kept in touch rather surperficially. But she always has local connections and worked two jobs and got her finances in order at 40 and bought a house and is now retired. And probably doing fine.
My dad never did well. He was the opposite, wasn’t greedy, worked as a chef at Denny’s for 14 years, always had a lot of deep connections and loving friends he helped out and us kids treated like family. But he basically only ever made ends meet, so that he could afford space for us kids in his apartments and be reasonably comfortable.
But after us kids became adults, my sis and him would loan each other money back and forth to cover bills in a pinch. They did that a lot.
He only really got on his feet after his mum passed and left him and his bros some cash. But he moved into the desert, away from everyone, and his health has never been great, and he’s going blind, and working as an in-house aide to others worse off then him, and he can barely keep his lights on, let alone afford to get the treatments he needs, or ever retire.
My sis is married and seems to be stable. She, like my dad, moved around a bit, with her husband, after her kids left the nest. She was too much like my mum so I don’t keep in touch, but I haven’t heard anything about her struggling in many years.
Like my sis, I am married, and I think that helps a lot. Having a two income home. I’m a home owner, we, me and my spouse, are both on track to retire, barely, and we are managing alright otherwise.
It’s not great. And we all about break even. But I think if my parents had stayed married or just shared a house with each other and us kids they woulda both been retired comfortably years ago. Instead they struggled with one income about equally to how we now struggle with two.
So, it kinda depends.
Worse for sure.
At my age, they were already married with kids and had enough to build a dream house in a decent town. Both had stable jobs that were considered good despite neither having a college degree.
I’m in a decent job that pays me (on paper) more money than my parents used to make, but I had to get my master’s degree to get here, and I’m still trying to pay off 8 years of student debt (though I’m getting closer each paycheck).
Between that, rent, and the sheer cost of everything these days, my partner and I are nowhere close to the point where we could afford a house, and we definitely could not afford to have even one kid, let alone three.
We’re at least not living paycheck to paycheck, but there have been industry layoffs left and right that have me feeling like any day could be my turn. I’d love to have more of a safety net in that situation, but there’s not all that much left over for us to put towards savings or retirement. Meanwhile, my parents are retired now, while I’m fully expecting to work until I die.
Edit: Forgot to clarify that this is the US, if the existence of student debt wasn’t already a giveaway.
Worse in that I don’t have a house and probably never will.
Better in that I know more about how to treat my physical and mental health than they ever knew about theirs.
Worse in that I don’t have as much money as they had at my age.
Better in that I don’t need to worry about leaving money to anyone.
i guess we can say we also don’t have to inhale cigarette smoke at every restaurant and on every plane trip, as well as leaded gasoline fumes, like they did
but still, yea. most people i know are basically fucked money-wise compared to our parents
Well my mum was a chain smoker, so she would disagree.
And I had to go throught all you say as long as she was near. No chance she would admit that was an issue.
A lot better. Brazilian millennial.
My parents quit school to do manual work at ~10yo and barely got to learn how to read. I did work on my early teens too but very light stuff. By my mid 20s I already reached a very comfortable life.
Better.
Canada.
Better because my dad died before he was my age, and that threw my mom into a depression and harmed her for a long time. U.S.
[Brazil] More or less the same, but with better prospects.
My childhood was better and way more comfortable than both my parents, who clawed their way out of rural poverty and into a decently paying, high school level jobs as bank clerks (they met working at the bank), in which they stayed until retirement. The married and had children later than their peers (they hadn’t meet at my age), so they had good savings in store.
I went into a great public university and decided to follow an academic career (just finished my master’s). This means I already have way more educational opportunities than they ever did. On the other side, my finances are way less stable, going from stipend to stipend in temporary scholarships and research grants. This is aggravated by the fact I got a partner who relied on my income for years while she tried to overcome depression, finish her graduate course and get a job. Now she got all three, and for her, who came from real poverty, this already means she is way better than her parents (her father never finished elementary school and her mother got pregnant of her at 17 and abandoned high school).
Now I’m looking for a more stable job outside of academia, and I hope the as soon as I get it, with both our incomes, our financial lives will start getting better. It might take a while for us to have the means to have a child, but we expect to have less children than our parents (I’m the middle child of three, she is the oldest of four siblings), so this might be easier.
We also have 4 cats, which is a plus in any life.
In Canada. Worse financially, but socially/mentally we’re better off. My parents have none of the tools I have to deal with shit on an emotional level, they instead just shove it in a box and try to forget about it. This is how they raised me, but thank fuck for the internet and people I met that know better.
Well, all of this ignores the destruction and probably death of the Earths environment which has such an overarching presence it had to be ignored to provide a meaningful answer.
*I suppose ones financial situation isn’t tied to which generation they are, but to how much emotional damage their parents inflicted (which is correlated to socio-economic status IIRC). IMO, if my parents weren’t so permanently fucked up I would’ve had the mental wherewithal to attend University at an earlier age so I likely would be graduated already. Would probably still be just as fucked tho.
