Do You Hate Living With Your Parents?

During the pandemic, for the first time since the Great Depression, a majority of adults under the age of 30 lived with their parents. Over the past two years, a record-breaking 52% of young adults reported either still living at home, moving back home, or having a parent move in with them, which is the highest percentage that’s ever been measured in American history.

So, how is it possible that the single most educated, most productive, and hardest working (with multiple jobs) generation is unable or unwilling to live independently at rates equivalent to the Great Depression. In the 1960s, just 29% of young adults still lived at home.

How did we go from less than a third to more than half? In 2020, the percentage of young Americans living at home jumped from 46% to 52%, but by late 2021 had fallen back to 49% as lockdowns lifted, and the economy recovered. And when this story broke, pundits were quick to say that the majority figure being cited was just the result of college students temporarily moving back home, and therefore a statistical anomaly created by the pandemic - while completely ignoring the fact that 49% is just as big of a crisis as 52%.

The reality is, it’s a crisis that’s only gotten worse over the past decade! According to Pew Research, in 2014, for the first time in 130 years, young adults living at home surpassed those living with a spouse or a partner. And while there’s nothing wrong with living at home by choice, in a majority of cases, it’s not by choice. It reflects the most serious generational crisis we’ve ever seen.

Younger millennials and older zoomers are saddled with the largest amount of debt in US history, they see the lowest average wages combined with mathematically impossible to afford housing, and the highest cost of living ratio ever.

For most of this generational group, even those that don’t live at home, it is literally impossible to live independently, much less buy property or start a family by their mid 30s - which is what their parents and grandparents and even great grandparents were able to do by their mid to early 20s.

Baby boomers have popularized the idea that living at home is a sort of failure or a mark of irresponsibility - and in a way, they’re right. It IS a failure of an economic system that incentivizes irresponsibility by the power brokers who funnel every available dollar upwards to multi-millionaires and billionaires.

And somewhat ironically, the percentage of young adults who live with their parents, includes parents who have moved back home with their children - reflecting the fact that the systemic failures of wealth inequality and wealth hoarding coupled with a totally bankrupt social safety net, means that many Baby Boomers are also being exploitated by the very same economic system that they put their faith in, because their economic future was stolen from them too.

About half of all Baby Boomers have no retirement savings whatsoever, despite half of them having saved money the majority of their lives. And that’s almost entirely because before retirement, they were forced to withdraw from their 401ks in order to afford medical expenses, college costs, funerals, and other disasters - while in the rest of the high income economic world, all of those things are either totally free or heavily subsidized - including retirement!

The most perfect example of how deeply unwilling our plutocratic government is to help anyone who actually needs it, is that instead of providing enough support for people to economically survive the pandemic, the CARES Act graciously allowed Americans to withdraw from their retirement accounts without penalty, leaving many without retirement accounts - while simultaneously generating trillions of dollars for literally ten white men, under the fallacy of saving the economy that it turns out, none of us are actually part of. 

So if you’re living at home, and watching housing prices skyrocket, real wages falling, your grocery bill doubling, and wondering how the hell you’re going to start repaying your student loans when they’re due again in May - you can give a hearty thank you to a hyper-capitalist plutocracy supported by a corrupt political system that thinks Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Walton family deserve to double their fortunes more than you and everyone you know deserve to live a life of dignity.