I have a lot to say on this subject, I'll try to keep it short.
This story must come from my own heart entirely. I am writing this all with no AI (sorry to the vocal dissenters in my generation, I actually use it a lot)—my laptop is not even connected to the internet—I am flying through aggressive turbulence right now. It is too important for AI slop.
TL;DR
It is harder to be a twenty-something than ever before.
Some of this is self-inflicted. Most of it is not.
There are things we can do to manage those challenges without making it worse.
Weekend is one of those things.
The Reality
It is harder to be a twenty-something now than it was for any other living generation.
I'm frankly astounded when people fail to recognize this. Most Gen Zers just feel it intuitively in their gut, but here are some of the data points that illustrate it most obviously.
40
The median age of a first time home-buyer. Up from 33 in 2021.
There are more homebuyers over the age of 70 than under 35.
1,345
In 1979, one year of public college tuition cost about 385 hours of minimum wage work.
Today it's roughly 1,345 hours, which is 34 weeks of full-time work.
1986
A fun one and a personal favorite of mine: did you know that all interest paid on consumer debt was tax deductible until 1986?
1980
2024
Price-to-Income Ratio
Under 3.0
3.1 - 3.9
4.0 - 4.9
5.0 - 7.9
Over 8.0
If you're curious about how we got here, I implore you to check out the comments on any one of my TikToks (literally, any one of them), where you'll see a litany of reasons that may or may not have contributed to our current predicament. There is no reason to litigate those now—we're in this mess together.
I am less interested in placing blame than I am on what we can do to take back agency.
I first started to notice this in 2021, when GameStop stock took off by more than 400% in a handful of days. At the time, I was president emeritus of Wake Forest University's esteemed Dow Jones Club (shameless plug), a daily reader of r/WallStreetBets, and truly fascinated by my generation's sudden interest in investing. At first, I thought social media was the root cause of our peculiar behavior.
It took a few years of a compounding problem to become painfully obvious: the world we live in is fundamentally different for people in their 20s today. If the data above hasn't convinced you, feel free to head out. You can use the emergency exit here.
How this reality shows up in our daily lives
The headwinds are real, and the reality is different.
There are two things that we're fighting against most aggressively:
Boomerisms
"Boomerism" is a term I invented; my expression for the stereotypical "just do X and you'll own a home" that you hear from folks with thinning, white, wispy hair. You know, the "stop buying lattes and avocado toast," "never step foot in a restaurant unless you're working there," "downgrade to a flip phone," "move to rural American where you don't know anyone and the closest airport is a three hour drive" type expressions.
These are annoying (bordering on infuriating), they're out of touch, but most importantly, they're not helpful.
We can laugh about them and turn them into gospel songs, but they're really not worth the time of day.
But you know what else isn't helpful? Blaming the Boomers and doing nothing about it.
Warped Expectations
Let's look in the mirror. C'mon—we do need to take some accountability here. As unhelpful as Boomerisms are, the abdication of accountability and embrace of indulgence is even less helpful.
Our expectations or priorities have lost their grounding as a result of many things, including…
The curated highlight reels of 8 billion people across the world, accessible via social media. Just because two of the guys you went to high school with went to Bali for a week does not mean that you should expect to do the same.
Deceptive advertising, also accessible via social media. I am not just talking about literal ads from companies (Kalshi's "you owe it to your grandchildren to bet on March Madness" was particularly appalling), but how many times have you seen someone go from barista to millionaire with the help of very little talent, enabled by a platform like Twitch, TikTok, or OnlyFans. Yes, this is still advertising—and demoralizing for those consuming that rise to stardom from a cubicle.
The Boomerisms themselves! Imagine my surprise when I didn't order avocado toast for a whole year and never received my mansion. But I've already belabored this point.
Our parents. Most Gen Zers do not have Boomer parents, but these Gen Xers still lived in an economy where homeownership by 30 wasn't a pipe dream. And most people (parents included) view a core part of the American Dream as empowering their children to live a better life than themselves. So parents do want you to improve on their trajectories (and you probably want to do this anyways), and may be pressuring you, implicitly or explicitly, to advance.
Anxiety
Anxiety is projecting a negative future outcome and assigning it a higher probability than it actually warrants.
Intellectual folks have been calling this financial nihilism lately, which is essentially the idea that the traditional milestones aren't accessible by traditional pathways, so hitting on long-shots (aka massive risk taking) is requied to not just get ahead, but achieve some semblance of success. In other words, "fuck it we ball."
The "fuck it we ball" attitude is a direct result of financial anxiety, and the (probably correct) mental math that millions of Gen Zers have done to arrive at the same conclusion: we're fucked.
The remainder of this article is for people where that sense of aimlessness is what's keeping them up at night. There are lots of Gen Zers with bigger fish to fry (often in the form of debt or shopping addiction), where some kind of intervention is required. There are lots of excellent tools out there that are better equipped to help in those situations than Weekend.
How Weekend helps
I said before that I am less concerned about placing blame than I am about taking back agency. Here is the Weekend philosophy for taking back agency.
Recalibrating expectations
So you won't be able to buy a house on the same timeline as your parents. That's ok. What can we do instead? Or, when can we reasonably expect to hit those milestones, and what tradeoffs are required?
Getting introspective, only for a moment
There would be no problems in the world if we all just listened to the economists (obviously, this is a joke, but I have to say it's a joke or else the economists would think I'm serious).
So the simplest way to understand the Weekend philosophy is with a Thomas Sowell quote:
There isn't a perfect way to live. I'm confident that most people have fallen into an optimization trap about one thing or another. And I'm even more confident that that experience was neither pleasant nor long-term beneficial. So instead of optimizing every decision for perfection, it is much more sustainable to know the trade-offs you're making with each individual decision.
Have a good time!
Key to the Weekend philosophy!
Part of those trade-offs should include making the whole "plan" (aka your lifestyle) manageable. If you're solely and strictly focused on your future, then you'll almost certainly burn out and abandon the track entirely. And we're right back to square one.
So le's have a good time out there! Like I said before: trade-offs.
So how can Weekend be helpful?
We can help you understand the life you want to live, both now and in the future. That means uncovering your financial values.
Check-in on how your day-to-day aligns with those financial values and, when you're not aligned, course correct the plan or remind you about the trade-offs you're making.
Contain your anxiety. We've all felt that surge of financial anxiety. Weekend helps by giving you a single outlet to deal with it, then move on.
And most importantly, we can be there for you when the questions about the future pop up, or when you're unsure how a potential purchase maps to your financial values.
So, why does Weekend exist?
Weekend exists to help Gen Zers make financial progress, on our own terms.
So what's next? Signing up for Weekend would be a good first start. Or following any one of our socials. I mean, if you've made it this far, the least you could do would be to follow our Spotify playlist—bangers only.
