Financial Independence and the Lost Generation

The Lost Generation

There was a time when I was the youngest guy in the room.  I confidently walked into every meeting as the youthful doctor.  In my early thirties.  All the hospice personnel and nursing home administrators had at least a decade on me.  As I have reached the gilded age of 45, I now notice that the opposite is true.  As the twenty somethings bop into our meetings, I shake my head knowingly and remember what youth felt like.  I sometimes feel the same way in the financial independence community.  It seems like we are always talking about those crazy millennials or bashing those spendthrift boomers.  I sometimes wonder if my age group, Gen X, is the lost generation of personal finance.

We are just not that interesting.

Boomers

If the millennials are the heroes of financial independence, Boomers are the villains.  Our stereotypes are vast and most often negative.  We typically picture this generation as selfish, self indulged, and over reliant on money for happiness.

It is thus not surprising that our community points to the follies of this group as fodder for our personal finance proselytizing.   Look no further than the headlines to see that the current crop of traditional retirees are not only facing severely underfunded futures, but also may still be wracked with debt.

We love to wag our fingers at Boomers and sigh as they trip over their hedonic treadmills.  Even Gen X, the lost generation, isn’t immune to such hand wringing.

Millennials

Millennials, and Gen Z to some extent, are the heroes of the financial independence movement.  Although the other generations preach caution, we also bask in the glow of  their financial savvy. We read enviously about their jaunts over the country, their gap years, and their experiments with geoarbitrage.

In many ways, we picture this group of young adults as winning the game.  They are pursuing purposeful lives without spending even a second under the fat thumb of the man.  They have elevated passive income and side hustles to an art form, and are living frugally, travel hacking, and home schooling their way towards financial independence.

Even the lost generation, us Gen X’ers, can’t help but be envious.  As we sit in our small cubicles and type away about our plans, the young ones are out there doing it.

And we both like and don’t like it.

Gen X

My generation.  The lost generation.  We are not lost in terms of purpose.  Just boring.  We bursted into corporate America long ago, put our heads down, and grinded out a living.  Some of us loved it.  Others not so much.  But we did what we had to do in order to not be frivolous like the Boomers.

We are also much more cautious then the millennials.  We have no problem front loading the sacrifice to some extent for the eventual pay off.  Unlike the other generations, we find more identity in our work and will have a harder time leaving.  The one more year phenomenon is real, and threatens to eat away our free time.

We are no more or less successful than any of the others.

Our stories are just less fun to talk about.

Final Thoughts

I believe my generation is the lost generation.  Sandwiched between the poor planning Boomers and the free-spirited Millennials.

We are boring.

We embraced the blank countenance of corporate America, and many of us will come out victorious and financially independent in our forties.

But our stories might be somewhat humdrum.

We might be somewhat bland.