"It's Simply Impossible To Do So On Your Own": Person Proves Why The Boomer Generation Had It Twice As Easy As Gen Z

On social media, intergenerational conflicts are common. You know how they go; millennials are lazy, baby boomers are bathing in their hoarded wealth and Gen Z'ers spend more time on their phones than with their own families.

However, slogans don't really paint an accurate picture. For that, we need hard data. And Reddit user MikeTheBard has compiled a set of numbers that might explain the roots of this hostility.

A few days ago, they put together a post for the popular 'Antiwork' community, analyzing how much effort one had to put in to get themselves an education and a roof over their head in 1972, 1992, and 2022, and the stark differences show just how much the world can change for your kids.

Of course, all of this doesn't mean that baby boomers (those born roughly between 1946 and 1964) were handed everything on a silver platter. When they graduated from college and were coming of age in the 1970s, an era of both innovation and downturn, their financial future was actually quite hazy.

In her book 'Can't Even: How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation,' Anne Helen Petersen explains that by the 1970s, many of those boomers (who were in their mid-twenties at the time), experienced wage stagnation, inflation, and an unemployment rate of 8.5% — American jobs had begun moving overseas so corporations could pay employees less and avoid the wrath of powerful unions that advocated for workers, and on top of all that, the U.S. was dealing with the Vietnam War, the Watergate Scandal, a general distrust of the government, and the resignation of President Richard Nixon.

And that wasn't the end of it. One of the biggest financial hits to the generation was the shift from the pension program to 401(k) programs.

A pension plan is a benefit provided by an employer who agrees to pay an employee a portion of their salary every year for the rest of their life if they remain at the company for a certain number of years (usually 10 to 20+ years). Petersen points out that combining pension funds with Social Security benefits allowed the generation before the boomers (known as the Greatest Generation) to retire quite comfortably, but with the shift to 401(k) accounts, retirement planning was left in the hands of boomers themselves, who now had to opt-in to save a portion of their income in a dedicated investment account for retirement. And while some companies offered a matching program (like companies still do today), many others didn't offer retirement accounts at all.

All this fueled anxiety about future financial security, and with jeopardized job prospects, some boomers also found it extra difficult to preserve the middle-class status of their parents.

And while the current economy faces massive uncertainty, at least the young seem to be aware of the problems they're facing. "In 2019, around 27 to 28% of Gen Z'ers had some exposure to equities through holding a stock or through retirement accounts," Lowell Ricketts, a data scientist for the Institute of Economic Equity at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, told CNBC. "That percentage is much higher than that of other generations. When millennials were the same age back in 2004, just 18.7% of them had some exposure to equities."

This seems to take the situation full circle. Just like boomers, Gen Z'ers are entering adulthood worried about their ability to earn and save money, but they also seem to be capable of planning ahead in their wealth-building journey. All they need is a little break.