WHAT LIFE HAS TAUGHT ME
There is a question worth asking when we hear young people today say they cannot afford a home, cannot afford to have children, and sometimes can barely afford to live.
Are they struggling because adulthood has become harder? Or are they struggling because every generation has to find its own way through life, and we tend to forget how difficult our own beginning was?
Having been 25 in the 1980s, I can look back across four decades and see two very different worlds. Neither generation has a monopoly on hardship. But the obstacles facing a young adult today are not quite the same as the ones I faced.
And understanding that difference matters.
When I was 25
The 1980s were not some golden age when everything fell neatly into place.
Inflation had taken its toll. Interest rates were painfully high. Jobs could be uncertain, and buying a home was far from easy when mortgage rates were eating into every paycheck. Recessions, unemployment, and economic insecurity were real problems.
You could work hard and still struggle. You could make sensible decisions and still have things go wrong.
But there was something about the world that feels different when I look back.
You could often build a life gradually. You might rent a modest place, work your way into a better job, save what you could, and eventually think about buying a home. It wasn't easy, and it certainly wasn't possible for everyone. But for many people, the steps seemed more visible.
You didn't need to have your entire life figured out at 25.
You could make mistakes, change direction, and start again. You could be young without feeling that every decision was a permanent verdict on your future.
And perhaps most importantly, you weren't constantly watching thousands of other people display their lives as if they had everything worked out.
We had our own pressures, of course. Family expectations, social comparisons, and the fear of falling behind were nothing new. But the comparisons were generally closer to home. You compared yourself with friends, relatives, colleagues, and the people you knew.
You weren't carrying the lives of the entire world around in your pocket.
When you're 25 in 2026
Today's 25-year-olds face a different landscape.
In many places, housing costs have moved far beyond what ordinary wages can comfortably support. Rent can consume so much income that saving for a deposit becomes an exercise in frustration. Childcare can cost so much that having a child feels less like a natural next step and more like a financial calculation.
Education can leave people carrying substantial debt. Jobs may demand qualifications, experience, flexibility, and constant adaptation, without necessarily offering the security that people associate with a stable career.
And then there is the pressure to appear successful while trying to become successful.
Social media puts other people's achievements on permanent display: the house, the holiday, the relationship, the career, the perfect family photograph. You see the results, often without the debt, assistance, compromises, or luck that helped produce them.
It can make an ordinary life feel like a failed one.
Imagine working full-time, paying your bills, trying to save, and doing what you're supposed to do—only to discover that the milestones your parents reached may be beyond your financial reach.
You may be told to work harder, spend less, be patient, and stop complaining. Some of that advice may be sensible. But it cannot solve a problem when the arithmetic itself no longer works.
Personal responsibility matters. So do the economic conditions in which that responsibility has to operate.
Telling someone to save for a house is not much of a solution if rising rents leave almost nothing to save.
And telling someone to delay having children until they are financially secure can become a cruel paradox if the cost of achieving that security keeps moving further away.
These aren't simply problems of attitude. Some are structural problems, and pretending otherwise doesn't make them disappear.
But was life really easier back then?
This is where the argument often goes wrong.
Older people can remember their struggles so vividly that they forget how much has changed for the better. Younger people can see the advantages of an earlier era without seeing all its limitations.
The past was not a universal paradise.
There were fewer protections in many workplaces, less awareness of mental health, and fewer opportunities for some people to challenge the roles society had assigned them. Medical treatments, communication, access to information, and many everyday conveniences have improved enormously.
And high mortgage rates in the 1980s could make buying a home extraordinarily expensive, even when the purchase price looked modest by today's standards.
A fair comparison has to consider both prices and incomes, as well as interest rates, access to credit, family assistance, and the cost of raising children.
It also has to acknowledge that people's experiences have always differed. A person with a supportive family, a secure job, or help with a deposit has never faced the same starting line as someone without those advantages.
So I wouldn't say that every 25-year-old in the 1980s had an easier life than every 25-year-old today.
That would be nonsense.
But neither is it nonsense to recognize that some of the traditional milestones of adulthood have become harder to reach for many young people.
Both things can be true: the past had serious difficulties, and today's economic pressures are different.
We don't have to diminish one generation's struggles to acknowledge another's.
The burden of expectations
Perhaps the deepest difference is not purely financial. It is the relationship between what people expect from life and what life allows them to achieve.
When we are young, we absorb an idea of how adulthood is supposed to work.
You grow up. You get a job. You find a partner, perhaps have children, buy a home, and gradually become more secure. There may be detours, but the general direction seems clear.
That picture is not a promise. It is a cultural expectation.
Yet when the expectation becomes deeply ingrained, failing to reach it can feel like personal failure—even when circumstances have changed dramatically.
A 25-year-old who cannot afford a home may feel behind. Someone who cannot afford children may feel that life is passing them by. Someone who hasn't found a career may believe they have wasted their potential.
But behind those feelings is an assumption worth questioning: that there is one correct timetable for becoming an adult.
There never really was.
Some people find their direction early. Others take decades. Some build families; others discover that a different life suits them better. Some achieve financial security and still feel empty. Others live modestly and find a great deal of meaning in their lives.
The milestones can be valuable. They can provide stability, belonging, and purpose. But they are not a universal measure of human worth.
The danger comes when we confuse the life we expected to have with the only life worth living.
What age teaches you
At 25, the future can seem like a narrow corridor. You imagine a particular destination, and every delay feels as though you are falling behind.
With age, if you're paying attention, something changes.
You begin to understand how much of life is shaped by things you never controlled: the economy, the people you meet, the opportunities available to you, the health you enjoy, the losses you endure, and the sheer unpredictability of events.
Effort matters. Decisions matter. Habits matter.
But effort does not guarantee an outcome, and a disappointing outcome does not automatically mean you made the wrong choices.
That is not an excuse to abandon responsibility. It is a reason to understand responsibility more honestly.
You do what you can with the circumstances you have. You make the best decisions available to you. You learn, adjust, and try again.
And when the world changes, you have to be willing to change your expectations too.
This may be particularly important for young people today. They need practical skills, financial awareness, persistence, and the ability to adapt. But they also need to understand that they are not personally defective because the traditional route to security has become more difficult.
There is no wisdom in telling people that everything is their fault when it isn't.
There is equally little wisdom in telling them that nothing they do matters.
The truth sits between those extremes.
Don't let the economy define your worth
If I could offer one thought to someone who is 25 today, it would be this:
Don't confuse the difficulty of building a life with the value of your life.
You may not own a home by 30. You may not have children by the age you once imagined. You may change careers, return to study, live with family longer than you expected, or discover that the path you planned is no longer realistic.
None of those things, by themselves, makes you a failure.
Be realistic about money. Make sensible decisions. Develop skills that give you options. Avoid unnecessary debt where you can. Build relationships with people who genuinely care about you. Look for opportunities, even when they don't arrive in the form you expected.
But don't spend your life apologizing for failing to meet a timetable that was never guaranteed.
And don't assume that because one generation reached a milestone under different conditions, everyone else should be able to do the same.
The responsibility of older generations is not to lecture younger people about how easy they have it—or to pretend that the past was perfect. It is to share what experience has actually taught them, including the mistakes, the uncertainties, and the lessons they learned too late.
The responsibility of younger generations is not to copy the lives of their parents. It is to understand the world they have inherited and find a way to live meaningfully within it, while working to improve what needs improving.
That is how generations learn from one another rather than simply argue about who had it harder.
A life is more than its milestones
Looking back, I can see that being 25 was difficult in ways I couldn't fully understand at the time. Looking at today's 25-year-olds, I can see that their difficulties are real, even when they are different from mine.
I don't believe we need to declare a winner in the struggle between generations.
Life is not a competition in suffering.
What matters is whether we can recognize the circumstances people face, offer honest advice rather than easy judgments, and help one another build lives that are both practical and meaningful.
A home can provide security. A family can bring extraordinary joy. A successful career can open doors. These things matter.
But they are not the whole of life.
There is also friendship, curiosity, love, freedom, the satisfaction of learning something new, the pleasure of an ordinary day, and the gradual discovery that you don't have to prove your worth to everyone around you.
At 25, you may think the task is to build the life you imagined.
As the years pass, you may discover that the deeper task is to build a good life from the circumstances you actually have.
That doesn't mean giving up on your ambitions or accepting injustice as inevitable. It means refusing to let circumstances you cannot fully control determine how you see yourself.
The world may have changed dramatically between the 1980s and 2026. The route to adulthood may be more difficult in some important respects. The old promises may no longer hold for everyone.
But one lesson remains worth passing on.
Your life is not a failure because it doesn't look the way you expected. The challenge is to see your circumstances clearly, do what you can to improve them, and remember that your worth was never measured by the milestones you managed to reach.
What Life Has Taught Me
Every generation inherits a different world, with its own obstacles and opportunities. We should be honest about those differences without romanticizing the past or dismissing the present.
Work hard, take responsibility, and make the best of the circumstances you face. But don't mistake a difficult economic environment for a personal failure, and don't allow someone else's timetable to become the measure of your life.
A meaningful life isn't something you earn only after you've achieved every milestone. It's something you build, imperfectly and gradually, along the way.