"I really worry for the young generation. How can they afford anything in this day and age?"
Many times, I've heard such questions as part of conversations about young people not being able to afford their first houses anymore, not only in money-juiced places like Vancouver or Toronto, but even here in Estevan or Saskatchewan in general. Inflation, the pandemic and economic recession are all to blame for our new reality.
My Boomer friends told me many times that they worry about the new generations since everything is so expensive now. Oftentimes people point out that the cost of living is so high that especially Generation Z or Zoomers (born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s) have a really hard time managing.
But is it indeed that, or is there more to the changing way of life we see with younger generations?
The recent research on American Zoomers shows that more and more young adults chose trades over college and university degrees. Young Americans are turning away from traditional career paths, favouring jobs that offer more freedom and autonomy. Trades like plumbing and electrical work are gaining popularity as they provide opportunities without the need for extensive formal education or corporate barriers.
While the research explores the situation in the U.S., I notice similar trends in Canada – today's young adults don't want to simply be part of the system, they want to be valued by employers off the start, and they also want to have more freedom. The same applies to some millennials.
The consequences of economic crises and the pandemic have dashed the hopes of many older generations, such as millennials, for stable income and home ownership. This example, among other factors, led to disappointment in the idea of hard work paying off.
With this new generation, the traditional North American workaholism – which for decades was portrayed as the path to the American dream, and which distinguished this continent from the more laid-back old world – starts fading. To summarize, Gen Zs want to work to live rather than live to work, researchers note, which strongly differs them from many generations before them.
The first-generation immigrants were always the hardest at it. Those Polish, Ukrainians, Germans, Lithuanians and others working at the Taylorton Mine near Estevan didn't have anything easy. I believe hardly any local millennials or Zoomers would survive life the way it was 100 years ago.
Boomers grew up with hard-work ethics inherited from their older generations that knew not only how to survive (a lot of them made it through two world wars) but how to find their way to strive.
I definitely don't want to diminish the role of the latest economic changes as they certainly play a huge role in what anyone can and cannot afford today. No matter which generation we belong to, we all feel it. (My latest shock: olive oil seems to become a luxury, sitting at around $20 on sale in at least one of the stores). We felt it before the pandemic, but those two years made it much tougher, and I'm afraid we are to feel more aftereffects for a while.
But since the way many people overcome economic challenges has changed, it's also not fair to blame the results solely on the economy.
Look at young, first-generation immigrant families now. Some of them are two to three to five years into their Canadian journey, and believe it or not, they are buying their first houses. (Of course, not all of them, and unfortunately, not all of them will likely be successful in it, but some will succeed.)
As an immigrant, I can tell that those first years are more difficult for newcomers than they are for most families' kids, graduating from school and starting an adult life. Newcomers often face language barriers, have no real support system, have no clue about how the systems work here, have no credit histories or references, etc. There are a lot of challenges to overcome.
Nevertheless, I see some newcomers (not wealthy by any means, as all some of them brought was just a suitcase) buying into real estate. How? There are many factors to it, including the value of "home" for those who left everything behind for whatever reason. Those families I know work hard, work several jobs, and save all they can on the way to their dream. They live to work like previous generations did, and a lot of them end up where previous generations did as well.
So, while the economy definitely changed what people can afford these days and pushed many of us back in our plans and dreams, the changing values and approach to work also play a role in where Gen Zs are finding themselves.
