Thinking about the future is an exercise in and of itself. What’s ahead is uncertain but those of us in Generation Z are surely going to pick up the pieces left behind by the ones who came before.
Our parents and grandparents talk about the days when houses and cars were affordable on jobs that now barely carry someone through a single season.
It is getting increasingly harder to look forward to the future.
Our generation — born between the years 1997 to 2012 — has spent so many years hearing about the importance of education only then to hear about how hard it is to make it in any profession. It becomes upsetting to know that no matter how hard you study, how hard you work to learn something you’re interested in, it can often come down to who you know over what you know. At minimum wage.
It’s no longer possible to work a job while going to school, having a space to live as well as being able to afford bills and other necessities. The issue is that our incomes didn’t follow the pace of the costs for these things.
We’re moving into a time where we’re living at home for longer periods of time because of the skyrocketing costs of buying or renting a home. It seems like we’re going backwards, not forward, much like how it was common for extended families to live under one roof prior to the Second World War. But the concept of extended families feels like it is one of the more reasonable — and affordable — options now.
According to the Government of Canada’s 2019 Canadian Financial Capability Survey, since 2019 a little more than 70 per cent of Canadians are struggling because of outstanding debts.
The pandemic also showed us that learning and working remotely offered an alternative to the commonplace practice of having to go to work or school. So much so that students and workers in a number of industries, including our own in the media, are seeking more time to work from home which deviates greatly from the routine we’ve come to know.
Students adapted to work from home because of the pandemic, and it was a relief, a financial relief. Some students who drive to school, work, and elsewhere live that stress. Some people of the previous generations don’t understand the difficulty of having to juggle all these responsibilities — a work week piled on top of a secondary school week piled on not having enough money.
The solution is that the world needs to move forward collectively. If costs go up, wages should too. Working for eight or more hours a day, five days a week should not result in barely getting by and having to pick and choose what to pay for — food, transportation or shelter — at the end of the month.