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Episode 3: We Invented Adulting and Immediately Regretted It
6 Plays14 days ago
We were promised a house, a pension, and stability. We got student debt, the gig economy, and a word — "adulting" — that exists because we needed a term for performing adulthood without actually receiving it. This week: the death of the middle-class roadmap, the false liberation of the side hustle, and why doing everything right got us exactly nowhere. Plus: a confessional that will make you feel less alone in your overdraft. Bitter. Funny. Exhausted. Welcome to Xennialist.
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Transcript
The Illusion of Adulthood Promises
00:00:39
Speaker
I was promised a house, not a big house, not a fancy house, just a house. With a yard maybe, a driveway, a kitchen where I could cook dinner for my family without bumping elbows with a refrigerator.
00:00:55
Speaker
That was the deal, right? You go to school, you get a job, you work hard. You buy a house. That was the roadmap. That was the agreement.
00:01:08
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I'm 42 years old. I have two degrees. I've worked consistently since I was 16. I've never once, not once, felt like I could afford a house.
00:01:21
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And I'm not unique. I'm not an outlier. I am the median. I am the generation that did everything we were told to do and got exactly nothing we were promised.
Introduction to Episode Three
00:01:50
Speaker
I'm Jeff Pavlisco, and this Xenialist. Episode three, we invented adulting and immediately regretted it.
00:02:00
Speaker
The gig economy, the death of the middle class roadmap, and why adulting became the verb the same year everything stopped making sense.
Outdated Life Expectations
00:02:11
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I wanna be specific about what we were promised because i think we need to name it before we can mourn it. We were promised graduate high school, go to college, get a degree, get a job with benefits, work your way up, buy house by 30, have kids by 32, retire at 65 with a pension.
00:02:35
Speaker
This was not presented as a possibility. This was presented as a sequence, like the stages of a video game. You complete one,
00:02:47
Speaker
you unlock the next. And we bought it. We bought it because our parents lived it. My dad started at a company in his 30s and retired from the same company at 62.
00:02:59
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Same place, same parking spot, same health insurance. He bought his first house at 26 on one income while supporting a wife and kids.
00:03:11
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I make more money than he did, adjusted for inflation. I have no house. I have no pension. I have a 401k that I contribute to religiously and I'm 90% sure will be worth approximately a used Honda Civic by the time I need it.
Xennials and Economic Challenges
00:03:29
Speaker
And here's the Xennial twist. We were the beta testers for the new economy. We graduated college after 9-11 and the dot-com bust. We started our careers in the 2008 financial crisis.
00:03:42
Speaker
We hit our earning years during the pandemic. Every time we got our footing, the floor dropped out. And every time we were told, just work harder, be more flexible, just learn to code.
00:03:58
Speaker
So we did. We learned to code. We learned to freelance. We learned to hustle. We invented the side gig. We invented the personal brand.
00:04:11
Speaker
We invented adulting, a word that exists because we needed a term for performing and functioning of adulthood without actually receiving any of its stability.
00:04:22
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Think about that. We invented a word for pretending to be adults because that's what it felt like. It felt like a performance. Like we were playing a role in a movie where the script kept changing and the props kept disappearing.
00:04:37
Speaker
I want to read you something. This is from a journal I kept in 2008. Two years out of college. Working three part-time jobs. January 15th.
00:04:48
Speaker
Got a call from Sally Mae. Student loans are due. $4.87 a month. I made $1,200 last month in total. Before taxes. Rent is $6.50.
00:04:59
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I have $63 in my checking account. I ate ramen for dinner. Not the good kind. The kind that's just noodles and salt. I don't understand how this is supposed to work. I did everything right.
00:05:12
Speaker
I did everything right. That sentence haunts me. Because I wasn't being dramatic. I genuinely didn't understand. I followed the roadmap.
00:05:23
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I'd done the work. And the reward was... debt instability the creeping sense that i had been scanned by a system that was already collapsing when i entered it and here's what i want to explore the psychological toll of being the generation that did everything right and got nothing the bitterness The exhaustion.
00:05:49
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The way adulting became a joke. Because if we didn't laugh, we would scream. Let's talk about the gig economy.
Critique of the Gig Economy
00:05:58
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Because Xenials, we were the first to fall for it.
00:06:02
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The first to believe that being your own boss was liberation. And not just a fancy way of saying no benefits, no stability, no safety net.
00:06:13
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I was an early adopter. I signed up for TaskRabbit in 2012. I drove for Uber in 2014. I freelanced on Upwork before it was called Upwork.
00:06:25
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And I genuinely believed, I genuinely believed this was the future. That traditional employment was a dinosaur and I was a nimble mammal adapting to the new climate.
00:06:38
Speaker
I was not a mammal. I was a frog in a pot of water that was slowly boiling. And was thanking the chef for the warm bath.
00:06:48
Speaker
The gig economy sold us a story. Flexibility, autonomy, and the ability to monetize your skills. What it actually delivered was no health insurance, no paid time off, no retirement contributions, no unemployment benefits.
00:07:07
Speaker
no worker protections, and the constant gnawing anxiety that if you stop working for even a day, the algorithm would punish you by deprioritizing your profile.
00:07:20
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I want to be clear. I'm not blaming gig workers. I am a gig worker. I'm blaming the system that convinced us this was freedom, that rebranded precarity as entrepreneurship, that told us we were hustling, we were actually just surviving.
00:07:38
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And the language. The language is insidious. Side hustle, passion project, personal brand, monetize your hobbies.
00:07:49
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These are not neutral terms. They are ideological weapons. They teach us that every aspect of our lives must be productive. The rest is waste. That leisure is laziness.
00:08:02
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That if you're not earning, you are not worthy.
The Pressure of Personal Branding
00:08:05
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I remember the first time someone asked me my personal brand. It was 2013. I was at a networking event, another concept that I hate, and a man in a blazer with no shirt underneath asked me, so what's your brand?
00:08:19
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I didn't have a brand. I had a personality. had interests. I had a complicated relationship with my family and a tendency to overthink text messages.
00:08:30
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But a brand? A brand is something you slap on a cereal box. A brand is a lie you tell consumers so they will buy your product. And I was supposed to be my own product?
00:08:42
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Yes, that was exactly what I was supposed to be. And tried. I made a website. I optimized my LinkedIn. I tweeted thought leadership content.
00:08:54
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And here's the raw truth. Some people made it work. Some people built real businesses, real wealth, real stability in the gig economy. But they're the exceptions.
00:09:07
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The rest of us, the median, the mode, the vast exhausted middle. We are just treading water. We're adulting.
00:09:19
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We're adulting our way through a life that bears no resemblance to the one we were promised. Time for the Zenial Confessional. This one is about money, about shame, about the gap between what was expected and what we got.
00:09:32
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It says, I'm 41. I have $12,000 in savings. That's it, $12,000. twelve thousand dollars I rent a one-bedroom apartment. I have no kids because I can't afford them.
00:09:45
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I have no partner because I work too much to meet anyone. And every time I see someone my age post about their new house, their renovation, their kid's birthday party in the backyard, I feel like I'm failing a game everyone else figured out.
00:10:00
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But I didn't fail. i did everything right. I went to college. I worked hard. I saved. And this is where it got me. I don't know what I did wrong. I don't know if I did anything wrong.
00:10:13
Speaker
I think maybe the game was rigged and just didn't know. I want to thank the person for writing that to me. And I want to say something to that person and to everyone who feels that way.
00:10:23
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You did not fail. The system failed you. The roadmap was a lie. The game was rigged and you were told it was fair. That is not your fault. But I also want to say that doesn't make it easier.
00:10:36
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Knowing it's not your fault doesn't pay your rent. Knowing it's systematic doesn't fix your savings account. The anger is valid. The exhaustion is valid. The bitterness valid.
00:10:48
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is of course valid.
Frustration and Collective Action
00:10:49
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And here's what I think we need to do with that bitterness. We need to weaponize it. Not against each other, obviously. Not against the person who bought a house and has kids or seems to have it all figured out.
00:11:01
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Against the system. Against the language. Against the idea that adulting is a skill and not a structural impossibility. We need to stop performing success and start naming failure.
00:11:14
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Not personal failure. Collective failure. The failure of an economy that demands infinite growth from finite humans. The failure of a culture that tells you we're lazy for wanting stability.
00:11:28
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The failure of a generation of leaders who sold us a dream and then pulled the ladder up behind them. I wanna end with a question, and it's the question I'm carrying into next episode.
Redefining Adulthood
00:11:41
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When was the last time you got truly lost? Not my GPS recalculated loss. Not, I took a wrong turn and found a faster route.
00:11:52
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I mean loss. No map, no phone, no idea where you are or how to get back. The kind of loss that forces you to ask for help, to pay attention to your surroundings because your survival depends on it.
00:12:06
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I think we need to get lost more often. Not literally, though maybe literally too, but metaphorically. We need to get lost from the roadmap. from the expectations, from the performance of adulting that we never agreed to because the roadmap is dead, the house, the pension, the stable job, and they're not coming back.
00:12:31
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And mourning them is necessary, but so is building something new, something that doesn't require us to monetize our hobbies or brand our personalities or hustle our way into an early grave.
00:12:45
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I don't know what that something is yet. I don't have a tidy conclusion or a five-step plan. But I know it starts with honesty, with admitting that we were sold a lie, with stopping the performance, with looking at each other, really looking and saying, I am exhausted.
00:13:05
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I am scared. I'm not okay. And this is not my fault. And maybe, just maybe, it starts with refusing to adult anymore.
00:13:17
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With rejecting the word and the concept and the entire framework. With demanding not the right to perform a adulthood, but the right to be human. To rest. To fail.
00:13:28
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To not know.
Conclusion: Humanity Over Productivity
00:13:30
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to get lost that's episode three zennialist we invented adulting and immediately regretted it if you have a confession about money about exhaustion about the lie you were sold send it in i'll read it i'll sit with it i won't monetize your trauma next episode the last time we asked for directions We're talking about the death of spatial memory, GPS as cognitive outsourcing, and why getting lost might be the last truly rebellious act.
00:14:04
Speaker
Until then, stop performing. Rest your face. Let the dishes sit. The world will not end if you are not productive for one day. The last word is yours.