What do you call a group of people who witnessed the dotcom collapse as children, 9/11 as teens, and graduated from college in time for a global recession? Millennials. Now that Covid-19 is upon us, coping with the fourth crisis in 30 years is muscle memory. But should it be business as usual – or a chance to confront the serious setbacks our generation has faced since we entered the workforce?
After the 2008 financial crisis, millennials demanded change, but not for long (RIP #occupywallstreet). Brunch and Netflix became our “bread and circuses” – the ancient Roman practice of appeasing the peasantry with distraction. Curating a glossy lifestyle fantasy on social media became our escape, a coping mechanism for dealing with the impact of generational theft (thanks, Boomers!). It’s easy to forget you’re 50K in debt when you have your 50K followers to tend to.
For young people in the late 2000s, the emotional consequence of entering a recession was profound. One’s sense of self-worth became tied to the ability to generate capital. A 2017 survey revealed that millennials make up 40% of “work martyrs” in comparison to 29% of all respondents. Statements related to work martyrdom include: “No one else at my company can do the work while I’m away”, “I want to show complete dedication to my company and job”, “I don’t want others to think I am replaceable”, and “I feel guilty for using my paid time off.” In other words, if you aren’t killing yourself working, you may as well be dead.
Coming out of a recession, trading the domestic for the corporate seemed right. Rather than learning to cultivate a home life, we threw money at takeaway meals and “domestic vaporware” (Alexa! Order Sweetgreen!). It’s no coincidence that as millennials got their first jobs, the 2010s saw the rise of “mommy apps”. While the media joked that young adults were too lazy or dumb to cook (Blue Apron, Seamless, Soylent), shop (Postmates, Winc, Instacart), clean (Tidy, Handy), or walk their dogs (Wags, Rover), the reality was that these services enabled a generation of workaholics to spend more time at work and less at home.
Maybe this was because we never believed that home was for us to begin with. Young adults are about half as likely to own a home today as they were in 1975. Silicon Valley thought leaders told us that we were too “Yolo” to be burdened by ownership of goods, and were better suited to “the experience economy”. As a group of people with a collective $1tn in student loan debt, this was all too convenient to believe. The experience economy was a lovely lie while it lasted, but now we are left with empty apartments, empty bank accounts and CANCEL RENT signs taped to windows. As millions have been laid off or are lucky to work from home, we have been forced to stop dreaming about our next Airbnb, and look at our surroundings.
What other cultures have known since the dawn of civilization is just now becoming apparent to young adults: home is not just a place to store your body between working hours. It is your center of gravity.
This moment of economic pause and forced domesticity can transform our relationship with home and work. Our instinct coming out of a recession is to work harder, to place more merit on our ability to earn, all while drowning ourselves in Seamless takeout. But what if we’re wrong?
Perhaps the real lesson of quarantine is that home life matters. If we believe this, we must commit to it as a society: in 2017, France enacted a law giving employees the “right to disconnect” after work hours. As millennials age into managerial roles and determine how we and others will spend working hours, we can decide that the future of work should not be one of martyrdom and 80-hour workweeks. And rather than outsource our domestic lives by buying into the experience economy and “mommy apps”, we may find ways to “insource” home life: creating products and services that deepen our involvement with home.
Let’s use this economic pause to roll up our sleeves and cross the domestic divide as a society. If we decide that home matters as much as work does (or, is more important) let us agree and make a better domestic life accessible for all.
