Just when they began to have children after the recession of all recessions, take out housing loans, build careers, and nonchalantly refuse job offers, millennials have encountered a new economic mine and, it seems, lost every chance to build a relevant portfolio of their own assets and a more secure future, which is why they will go down in history as the first generation with a lower standard of living than the previous generation.
Moreover, after the corona hysteria, it is becoming increasingly popular to refer to those born roughly between 1981 and 1996, although definitions vary, as the lost generation (the oldest millennial today is 39, and the youngest is 24 years old). Of course, each has its sad story, so their grandparents will talk about walking miles through five meters of snow to the nearest school, hunger, and world wars, while parents will recount everything they did not have in their childhood compared to their spoiled offspring (in these regions, they will always conveniently insert stories about inflation, shortages, and one extra war), but millennials are not without their scars either, especially in some ‘niche’ groups.
A member of this generation in Zagreb, for example, has already recorded in their resume before the age of 40 the bloody disintegration of one state, war, slow and painful normalization of life after the war, then a severe economic crisis, the first serious earthquake in 140 years, the first global pandemic in a hundred years, and a new economic crisis, while those in war-torn areas have had a far worse start to life. With this in mind, it is not surprising that, generally speaking, millennials are one of the best-educated generations with the least tangible assets and economic success. Most of them had the misfortune of entering the labor market just when jobs dried up, as did salaries, then they struggled for years in jobs well below their qualifications and in miserable working conditions, and when economies finally began to offer opportunities suitable for their age and experience, the coronavirus arrived and began to send many back to square one.
