The avocado toast was never the problem. The disconnect between what work pays and what life costs was
I want to start with a small story, because the small stories are usually clearer than the big arguments.
My father bought his first house in 1979. He was twenty-four years old. He had been working, full-time, for about three years. His starting salary, in the kind of job he was doing, was modest by the standards of his generation. He was not wealthy. His parents were not wealthy. He saved up a deposit on his own, with no help from anyone, and he bought a small terraced house in a part of London that, at the time, was considered slightly down-at-heel.
That same house, today, is worth somewhere between forty and fifty times what he paid for it. The neighborhood has not, by any meaningful metric, become forty to fifty times better. The house has not, by any meaningful metric, gotten forty to fifty times bigger. What has happened is that the cost of housing, in the city he was raised in, has uncoupled itself from the wages of the people who were raised there, and has floated, for forty years, into a stratosphere that bears almost no relationship to what a person on a normal salary can afford.
My father, when he tells this story, tells it with a kind of bemused pride. He worked hard. He saved. He bought the house. The story is meant to illustrate that the path to adulthood was, in his time, available to anyone willing to put the work in. The implication, never quite stated but always hovering, is that the path is still available to anyone willing to put the work in, and that the people who haven't taken it must, presumably, not be putting the work in.
I want to use this article to dismantle that implication, gently, because I think it's the central misunderstanding between my generation and his, and because I think the misunderstanding is producing real damage in real families.
The math, briefly
I'm not going to fill this article with statistics, because statistics rarely change anyone's mind, and the people who would benefit most from understanding the situation are usually the ones who find statistics least convincing. But I want to put one or two numbers down, just to anchor the conversation.
In the United Kingdom, in the late 1970s, the average house price was about four times the average annual salary. By the time I was buying my first place, in my late twenties, the average house price had risen to about nine times the average annual salary in most major cities, and considerably higher than that in London. In some neighborhoods my father grew up in, it was over twenty times. The same trajectory has played out in the United States, in Canada, in Australia, and across most of Western Europe.
What this means, in practical terms, is that the deposit alone now requires the kind of saving that would have, in my father's day, bought the entire house outright. To save that deposit, you have to forgo, for years, the things that previous generations took for granted: the holidays, the dinners out, the small acts of consumption that made adult life feel like adult life rather than perpetual deferral. The "delaying adulthood" that older generations describe with a kind of pitying head-shake is not, in most cases, a choice. It's the structural consequence of trying to save, on current wages, for a milestone that has been priced into a different category entirely.
And housing is just the most visible example. The same trajectory has played out in education, in healthcare, in childcare, in every domain that previous generations could access on a normal salary. Standard milestones of adulthood—home ownership, marriage, children, retirement savings—are being reached later, in lower numbers, and with significantly more financial strain than the generations that came before. This isn't laziness. This is arithmetic.
The work nobody sees
I want to talk about the work, because this is the part that I think is most invisible to the older generations watching us.
The cultural narrative about millennials, deployed by older generations and by the media that caters to them, is that we are entitled, distracted, allergic to commitment, and prone to spending our money on avocado toast and craft coffee instead of saving for our futures. The narrative is wrong, but I want to be specific about how it's wrong.
It's not that we don't work. It's that the work we do is paid less, in real terms, than the equivalent work was paid in 1979. It's that the work we do is structurally less stable—more contract, less benefit, fewer pensions, less protection. It's that the work we do, when adjusted for the cost of the things we're working to afford, produces a lower standard of living than the work our parents did, despite, in many cases, longer hours and higher levels of education.
Most of my friends in their late thirties are working harder than their parents did at the same age. I mean this literally. They are putting in more hours. They are dealing with more email. They are doing more cognitive labor over a longer working day. Many of them have second jobs, or side projects, or freelance work that supplements the main income. They are, in any objective sense, hustling. The hustling is not, by and large, producing the kind of life their parents had at the same age.
The reason it isn't is not that they're not hustling enough. It's that the structure of what hustling produces has changed. In 1979, my father's full-time salary, on its own, supported a household, a mortgage, a car, a holiday, and a savings account. In 2026, in most cities I know about, two full-time salaries, between two parents, sometimes do not produce all of those things. The math has changed. The hustle is the same or higher; the output is lower.
This is not a complaint. It's a description. The older generation, when they look at us and shake their heads, are looking at a description of what their economy produces and concluding that we, individually, are the cause. We are not the cause. We are inside the description.
What this does to a generation
I want to write about what this does to people, because I think the structural argument can come across as cold, and the actual experience is anything but.
What it does, mostly, is produce a kind of slow, persistent low-grade anxiety that runs underneath every decision a millennial makes. Every choice has financial weight. The dinner out is a calculation. The trip is a calculation. The birthday present is a calculation. The decision to have a child—to take on, on top of the existing financial pressure, the costs of raising another person in a city where the rent of a two-bedroom is more than your monthly take-home—is a calculation that, for many of my friends, has resolved in the negative not because they don't want children but because they cannot, with any honest accounting, see how to afford them.
The previous generation did not, on the whole, have to make these calculations. The previous generation, on a single income, could afford to have children, buy a house, take an annual holiday, and retire on a pension at sixty-five. The infrastructure was there. The numbers worked. They did not have to weigh whether to have a third child against whether to keep the car. They did not have to choose between fertility treatment and a deposit. They did not have to decide whether their parents' home, in the event of inheritance, was the only realistic path to home ownership for their own children.
My generation does. And the slow accumulated weight of always making these calculations, year after year, is one of the central textures of our adult lives. Financial stress is consistently linked it to anxiety, depression, and a general degradation of well-being; and the research I've seen has been particularly stark for millennials, who report rates of financial stress significantly higher than previous generations did at the same age, despite working similar or longer hours.
The older generation, when they observe the resulting anxiety, often diagnoses it as a character flaw. We are, in their view, less resilient. We are anxious because we are weak. The previous generation, in their telling, did not have these feelings, because they were tougher. The implication is that the toughness produced the prosperity, and the lack of toughness now is producing the lack of prosperity.
The implication has the causality backward. The toughness was, in many cases, a luxury produced by a stable economic foundation. When the foundation gives way, the toughness erodes too. You can't be unflappable about money when the math, every month, is genuinely not adding up. The unflappability of the previous generation was, in part, a side effect of an economy that allowed them to be unflappable. We don't have access to the same economy. The unflappability is, accordingly, in shorter supply.
The vote that nobody admits to
I want to make one specific argument, because I think it's the one most often deflected, and I want to be honest about it even if it produces some discomfort.
The economic conditions that have priced my generation out of the standard milestones of adulthood were not handed down from the gods. They were produced by specific policy choices, made over decades, by specific governments, elected by specific voters. The voters who produced them are, in large part, the same voters who now look at my generation and wonder why we haven't reached the milestones they reached.
The policies in question include the gradual removal of supports for working families—the public housing that was sold off, the university tuition that was uncapped, the pensions that were dismantled, the labor protections that were eroded, the tax structures that increasingly favored asset holders over wage earners. None of these changes happened by accident. All of them were voted for, by majorities, in democracies that included the people now most likely to express bewilderment at the resulting economic conditions.
I'm not making a partisan point here. I'm making a structural one. The generation that benefited most from the post-war social contract has, in many cases, voted to dismantle that contract for the generations coming after them, and has then, in some cases, expressed surprise that the generations coming after them are not reaching the milestones the contract used to make affordable.
This is the vote nobody admits to. The discussion, when it happens between generations, is usually framed as a question of individual character. We are accused of laziness or entitlement. The accusation deflects from the structural fact that the conditions of our adult lives are, in important ways, the result of votes cast by the people accusing us. It is genuinely easier to believe that we are lazy than to confront the possibility that the policies one voted for, over decades, have made certain aspects of life materially harder for one's own children.
I don't want to be self-righteous about this, because I think the accusations are, in many cases, made in good faith by people who genuinely don't see the connection. The connection is hard to see from the inside. Most people don't think of themselves as having voted for the conditions that now exist; they think of themselves as having voted for various local issues, various candidates, various positions, and the conditions are an accidental aggregate of those choices. But the accidental aggregate is real, and we are, in the most literal sense, living inside it.
What I'd say if I had the floor
If I could speak directly to the older generation about all this, in a tone that would actually land, I would say something like this.
We are not delaying adulthood out of laziness or entitlement. We are working harder than you remember working at our age, for less stable wages, in an economy where the standard milestones of adulthood have been priced into a different bracket than our incomes can reach. The path you took at twenty-four is not, in most cases, available to us at thirty-eight, no matter how hard we work or how carefully we save.
This is not your fault as individuals. You did not personally rig the housing market or dismantle the pension system. But it is, in some real aggregate sense, the result of choices made by your generation, and the resulting conditions are not something we can will ourselves out of through hustle or character.
What would help, more than the head-shaking and the lectures about avocado toast, is the recognition that the economy you describe—the one where a young person could buy a house on a normal salary at twenty-four—no longer exists. We are not failing to live in it. It is no longer available to live in. Acknowledging that, even partially, would be a kind of generational honesty that almost never happens, and that would do more to repair the relationship between us than any amount of advice about saving harder.
And we, for our part, are not asking to be coddled. We are asking, mostly, to be seen accurately. To have our circumstances described in terms that match the reality of those circumstances rather than in terms borrowed from an economy that ended before we became adults.
The avocado toast is not the problem. The avocado toast was never going to be the problem. The problem is the structural disconnect between what work pays and what life costs, and the disconnect was not made by us, and it is not going to be solved by us alone.
That's the conversation I'd like to have at the family dinner table, the next time the topic comes up. I'm not optimistic that it would land. The dictionaries are too different. The story the older generation tells about itself is too important to its sense of identity to allow much updating at this point. But I think the conversation is worth having, even imperfectly, even partially, because the alternative is that we continue to be misdescribed in terms that obscure the actual texture of our lives, and that the older generation continues to wonder why we don't seem to be reaching the milestones they reached, while remaining structurally unable to ask the question that would actually answer them.
That question is the one I want to leave you with. Not "why aren't they trying harder?" The other one. The harder one. The one that would require a piece of intergenerational honesty that almost nobody is willing to offer.
The question is: what would it cost you to look at the economy you helped produce and see, clearly, what it has done to your children?
The answer, I suspect, is more than most people are willing to pay. But I'd love to be wrong about that.
