This week’s topic has been suggested by Shackman for the weekly Friday LBC blog posts.
Millennials are persons reaching young adulthood around the year 2000. Which means that they will be in their mid thirties now.
In India, this is the time when they are already married and have become parents unless that they have decided not to become for a number of reasons.
In the latter case, it is mostly due to pressure of careers of both husband and wife and / or fear of the future for the children. Fear arising out of the prohibitively high cost of education, pollution, commuting to school / college etc and also the uncertainties of a satisfying career at the end. It is also possible that they may decide not to have children so that they can be carefree and focus on enjoying life without the added responsibilities.
In the former case, that is for those who are already parents, the future is full of the same problems that caused the latter from having children. On the other hand, they are already in careers and hopefully well settled in their lives unless they are in transferable jobs like I was.
In India, society is going through very rapid changes and aspiration levels across the spectrum of income levels are very high. This is particularly so for the millennials who are neither in the beginning of their careers nor at the peak. One keeps hearing about job hopping, serial entrepreneurship etc which would indicate a churning. Quite how this would translate into creation of wealth and improved lifestyles is not very clear. Because of such aspiration, debt levels for millennials due to home loans, automobile loans, consumer durables bought on hire purchase etc generates stress and related illnesses.
The laid back lifestyles that my generation enjoyed is no longer possible and the future for the millennials till their retirement would seem to be full of stress again affecting health.
I would conclude that the future for them till their retirement will not be the same as it was for my generation.
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