Caffeine and Spite

That's my summary of an AskReddit thread that asked millennials how they're holding up [1].

I read a couple of hundred of the answers between midnight and one in the morning on 9 October. I'm writing this because the most hopeful sentence in the thread was sitting at the end of one of the worst answers in it, and because when I went looking for the numbers behind the thread, most of them were better than the thread felt.

> 1. How it feels

Most of the answers were some version of tired. "I'm tired, boss" [2], "Not great, Bob" [3], running on caffeine and spite, or Bilbo's line about feeling stretched thin [4]. None of it surprised me, because it's what I hear from my own friends.

I have friends who are struggling even though on paper they should have it all. I have friends who feel overwhelmed pretty much all the time. And I have friends who are happy. All of them are worried about the future, the happy ones included, and I think that part is just human.

The thread had all of them. The top answer came from someone earning more than they ever have and feeling more broke than they ever have, and versions of it ran all the way down the page. One man on a salary most people would envy said he has less to spend than his dad did as a union painter. Someone replied that he spends too much, and that he should try earning it in Belgium [5]. Another had the best week of his life, bonus and all, and said it barely registered.

I think both of them have a point, and it's what I hear from the friends who should have it all. You can earn more than you ever have and still feel like you're falling behind.

The rest of the page was about parents, friends and work. Parents getting old, like the dad who finally retired this year and then ended up in hospital after a heart attack. Friendships thinning out until you're texting two or three people once a week. Layoffs after a decade in the same job, one of them landing just before a paid sabbatical was due.

Further down, a man in his early forties wrote that he'd lost his job because his body can no longer do the work. He has $40 in the bank and dozens of applications out, with not one callback. He has no GED, and the jobs that don't ask for one are the physical jobs he can't do any more. He spends an hour or two every night trying not to break down in front of his family. He said he feels hopeless.

Then he wrote "But how are you?"

A man with forty dollars and no callbacks still turned the question around and asked after everyone else. If I had to pick one sentence to explain this generation to someone outside it, I'd pick that one.

> 2. The once-in-a-lifetime list

One elder millennial wrote out the whole timeline. Desert Storm, Oklahoma City, and being walked out of a food court by mall cops on the day of Columbine for wearing a long coat. Then 9/11, two wars, Columbia breaking up on live TV, Katrina, 2008 and Deepwater Horizon. Then Covid and seven funerals over Zoom in a single year, the Texas grid freezing, and now a war with Iran.

He says he runs on caffeine and spite. He also takes home twice his state's median income and has no idea how everyone below him gets through the month.

I'm a 1986 kid [6]. I was born in Romania three years before the revolution, and I spent half my childhood outside and the other half in front of a computer, which might be the most millennial sentence there is. I moved to London in 2009, a year into the crash, when nobody sensible was hiring.

So his list is the American one, and I've lived most of two others, the Romanian one and the British one. They overlap on the big events and diverge a lot everywhere else. Some of them are darker and some are less dark.

The Romanian one starts darker. Ration cards, the revolution, and then miners brought into Bucharest on special trains to beat up the students in University Square. Inflation ate whatever people had saved, and Caritas, a pyramid scheme that promised to multiply your money, took what was left from millions of people. Then a generation of parents went abroad to pick strawberries in Spain and build houses in Italy, while grandparents raised the kids. NATO and the EU came, and so did the crash, and in 2010 the government cut public sector pay by a quarter and put VAT up. In 2015 the Colectiv nightclub fire killed dozens of young people and brought down a government. Then Covid, with hospital wards catching fire more than once, a war next door with pieces of Russian drones landing on our side of the Danube, and in 2024 a presidential election cancelled by the courts over a social media campaign the intelligence reports pointed at Russia.

The British one is less dark and more of a grind. Diana and Dunblane when we were kids, then 9/11, Iraq and 7/7 on the Tube. Queues outside Northern Rock, then 2008, tuition fees nearly tripled for the younger half of us, a decade of austerity, the 2011 riots, Brexit and Grenfell. Then Covid and the parties in Downing Street, a mini-budget that sent mortgage rates up within days, and the cost of living crisis.

I've been lucky through both of them, and I know it. I spent twelve years building a company, then started again from nothing with this one. I'm not writing from the bottom of anything, so read what follows as one tired person talking to other tired people.

> 3. Where the booms went

Someone asked when millennials get one of the booms everyone keeps talking about. The best reply said the booms already happened. Dotcom, mortgage bonds, Covid money, crypto. They went to whoever already held capital when the music started, and everyone else got the job insecurity on the way down.

I spent over a decade running a price index for digital assets (CCCAGG, which An Index Is Not a Person is partly about), so I watched several of those cycles from inside the data. That reply is mostly right. A boom looks very different depending on whether you bought in early or arrived for the last chapter. In March I wrote about the other half of it, how London tech stopped training the people it would need, one outsourcing contract at a time (We Sold a Generation a Dream and Dismantled the Ladder While They Climbed).

The housing numbers say the same thing. Between 1997 and 2016, typical house prices in England and Wales rose 259% while typical earnings rose 68% [7]. By 2022 a home in England cost about 8.3 times a full-time worker's earnings, and in 1997 almost nine in ten areas had been under five times [8].

The thread had its own version of those numbers. One commenter's parents bought their starter home in the 1980s for a fraction of what he paid for a basic house, and his monthly payment is about six times theirs. Another has spent two years trying to buy at 7.5% interest while friends who bought ten years ago pay around 3% [9]. A third lived in a garage with no sink for three years to save, then got the best-paid job of his life and now saves nothing.

The same thread had people retiring at 40, a couple on good salaries who locked in 3% during Covid, and a man on a big salary watching his savings compound. One of the comfortable ones called it the K-shaped economy [10] and said he knows how lucky he is. Someone asked another how much of his success he'd put down to luck. Hard work is real, and so is timing.

> 4. Is it better, though?

The thread reads like the end of something, so I went and looked at how the world we grew up in has changed. Most of the big numbers are better than when I was born, and not by a little.

In 1990, about 93 of every 1,000 children born anywhere in the world died before they turned five. In 2024 it was 37, a drop of 60% [11]. A child born in 2024 can expect to live to 73, more than eight years longer than one born in 1995 [12]. Between 1990 and 2022 about 1.5 billion people got out of extreme poverty [13], and the share of the world living on less than $3 a day went from one person in every two or three to about one in ten [14].

So is life objectively better? Across the world, yes, and I don't think it's close. Where most of the people in that thread live it's more mixed, better on most of what you'd measure with a clipboard and worse on the things they were answering about, the price of a house, how long a job lasts and how many friends you still see.

There's a chart that shows why. In 2013 Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic plotted how much incomes grew between 1988 and 2008 for every slice of the world's population, poorest to richest [15]. The global middle, most of it in China and the rest of Asia, saw incomes rise 70 to 80%. The global top 1% got about 60%. The working and middle classes of the rich countries, which is where most of that thread grew up, got close to nothing. It's called the elephant curve because of its shape.

The feeling shows up in the data too. In the 2024 World Happiness Report the United States fell out of the top 20 for the first time, partly because people under 30 rated their lives lower than before, and in both the US and Canada the over-60s ranked at least 50 places higher than the under-30s [16]. Some of the good numbers have stopped moving as well. Life expectancy dipped from 72.6 to 70.9 during the pandemic before it came back [12], and the researchers at Our World in Data write that the fall in extreme poverty of the past decades has ended [14].

> 5. The tide going out

I think a lot of that progress rode on one thing. From the fall of the Berlin Wall to 2008 the world traded more with itself every year, and trade went from about a quarter of the world's output in 1970 to about 61% in 2008 [17]. I was three when it started for Romania. People call it the tide that lifted all boats. It lifted most of them, the ones in the middle of the world furthest of all, which is how a billion and a half people got out of extreme poverty, and it did very little for the families most of that thread grew up in.

Since 2008 the tide has stopped coming in, and lately it's started going out. Trade stopped growing faster than everything else, some supply chains moved closer to home after Covid, and tariffs came back. In April 2026 the average effective tariff on goods coming into the US was 11.8%, the highest since the early 1940s apart from 2025 itself [18].

It's going to hurt, and the IMF reckoned in 2023 that splitting the world economy into blocs could cost up to 7% of global output in the long run [19]. Things get more expensive when the cheapest place to make them is shut out, and I expect some of the jobs that come home to pay less than people are hoping.

I also think it's where the next good decades come from. Thirty years of everything flowing to the cheapest place left most of us renting our lives from a handful of companies a long way away, our photos, our music, our money and now our AI. A more local and more decentralised economy means more of what we use made and owned closer to where we live, and more of the value staying there. I wrote about the cost of tying everything to someone else's servers in The Integration Tax, and this is the same argument at the size of a country. It'll be slower and it'll cost more, and I still think it's worth it. It's also the first time in my life the world has been moving the same way as the thing I'm building.

> 6. The part about AI

One of the most upvoted answers in the whole thread was seven words long, "Glad to have grown up before AI". Further down, one person said their company has them training their own job into an AI platform while each round of layoffs gets bigger. A man in the middle of a breakup said he'd nearly been fooled by an AI political video that week.

I build AI, so I'm not a neutral party here. Most of what people in that thread fear is AI built to replace them or to sell them something, and those are choices companies are making (A Ghost Should Not Possess lists twenty-eight of the ways the selling gets done). I'm building LocalGhost so there's at least one kind that lives in your house, works for you, and has nothing to sell you.

It doesn't fix the job market. Nobody in the thread had an answer for that, and I don't have one either.

> 7. Sticking around

This was the hardest part of the thread to read.

One commenter said she has lost millennials this year who didn't stick around, and asked everyone else to stay. "The horrors persist, but so must we." People in their early thirties replied that more friends and old colleagues had died this way than any other. A man in his late forties said he'd lost three people he knew in six months.

One reply pushed back hard. He'd been an admin on a good salary, got laid off, and is homeless, with a roof only because a friend of a friend took pity on him. His point was that "stick around" costs nothing to type when every call for help ends in another form, hours on hold and months on a waiting list. He's right about the forms.

Another reply came from someone who didn't want to stay in January, and said it was strangers on Reddit who got them through. I don't think either of them is wrong.

If you're the one thinking about not staying, please tell one person tonight. In the UK, Samaritans answer 24 hours a day on 116 123 [20], and in the US you can call or text 988 [21]. You don't need to be in crisis to call.

> 8. What's holding

The same thread that was full of bad news was also full of people still standing, and a lot of what was holding them up was small and close to home. Five things kept showing up.

People are starting over, and some of them love it. One commenter made director, watched the whole industry fall apart, and retrained. They now fight fires in the mountains and say they love it, even while the reservoir drains. Another has a resignation letter written after more than a decade at a dream job. Within a day, strangers had replied with practical advice, don't quit into this market, take a week off first, ask about medical leave. Starting again in your thirties or forties feels like failure while you're in it. I've started over more than once, and each time it was the beginning of something (One Bad Quarter is about why I think the window for that is open right now).

The happiest answers were about small, specific things. A lawn ripped out and replaced with native plants and a garden that did well, scored 7 out of 10. A petroleum engineer renovating his house with his wife, who ends most days with the two of them in the bath, chatting. A homebody who is technically poor and weirdly fine with it. A new dad since April. Someone who watched a bear eat crabapples in British Columbia and enjoyed it. And one who is mostly broke but frolics on the regular, and says they can't take the frolic away.

We say the quiet parts out loud. A man who has spent over a decade in his industry had never needed a mental health break until this year. Another is holding his marriage, job and parents together on the outside, and says it's rot all the way through on the inside. One commenter was writing from a burnout clinic. Most people our parents' age didn't say sentences like that to strangers, and plenty of them paid for keeping quiet.

We still turn up for each other. One woman barely knew a friend who went into labour early while her husband and kids were out of town, and she has spent the week helping her and the baby. Her view was that we have to build community, because living as if nobody needs anybody is going to kill us. A man in the middle of a breakup went to play sand volleyball on his own for the first time in twenty years. Strangers invited him into a game, he played for hours, and he left with new friends.

We have more perspective than we get credit for. A man in his forties whose grandfather lived through the Depression and the Second World War pointed out that he has never had to fight in a war or survive the Spanish flu. Someone posted C.S. Lewis on living in the atomic age, where he argues that if the bomb comes it should find us doing ordinary human things, working, reading, bathing the children, having a pint with friends [22]. Another simply wrote that we've been through worse, and on the numbers in section 4 they're right.

> 9. Four small things

None of these is a life hack, and none of them fixes housing.

1. Ask the question back. Pick one person this week, ask how they're holding up, and wait through the first "fine". The man with $40 managed it, so the rest of us can.
2. Turn up somewhere in person. A volleyball court, a pub quiz, a friend's kitchen. The loneliest answers in the thread came from people whose friends had drifted down to a text once a week.
3. Stop pricing your life against your parents' receipts. If they bought a house on three and a half years of earnings and yours costs eight, you're running a different race on a steeper hill. Measure yourself against last year's you, which is the only comparison a ghost is built to make (An Index Is Not a Person).
4. Own one thing a market can't repossess. A skill, a garden, a body you look after, friendships you keep up, something you build with your own hands. One man in the thread got sick of renting his films and TV and is building his own media server. That's the same instinct LocalGhost is built on, and the one behind The Expensive Part Was Never the AI.

> REFERENCES

[1] "Millennials, how are you holding up?", r/AskReddit, October 2026. A thread of several thousand answers, a couple of hundred of which I read between midnight and one in the morning on 9 October 2026. Source for every quote and story from the thread in this post, none of which I could check beyond the commenters' own words. The thread is at reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1wzm9an.

[2] The Green Mile, directed by Frank Darabont, 1999, from Stephen King's 1996 novel. "I'm tired, boss" is John Coffey's line, and the thread's favourite way of answering the question. Source for the quote. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Green_Mile_(film).

[3] Mad Men, "In Care Of", the sixth season's finale, first shown on 23 June 2013. Bob Benson asks Pete Campbell how he is, just after Pete learns his mother has gone missing from a cruise Bob recommended, and Pete answers "Not great, Bob!" Source for the quote and where it comes from. Know Your Meme keeps the history of the line at knowyourmeme.com/memes/not-great-bob.

[4] J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring, 1954, chapter one, "A Long-expected Party". Bilbo tells Gandalf he feels thin and stretched, "like butter that has been scraped over too much bread". Source for the line the commenter borrowed. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fellowship_of_the_Ring.

[5] OECD, Taxing Wages 2026, published 22 April 2026. Belgium had the largest tax wedge in the OECD in 2025, 52.5% of labour costs for a single worker on the average wage, against an OECD average of 35.1%. The tax wedge counts employer contributions as well as income tax and the employee's own, so it isn't the same number as take-home pay. Source for Belgium as the country the commenter reached for. oecd.org.

[6] Michael Dimock, Defining generations, where Millennials end and Generation Z begins, Pew Research Center, 17 January 2019. Pew counts anyone born between 1981 and 1996 as a millennial, which puts a 1986 kid in the middle of it and the elder millennials in the early eighties. Source for who the thread was asking. pewresearch.org.

[7] Office for National Statistics, Housing affordability in England and Wales, 1997 to 2016, released 17 March 2017. The median price paid for a home rose 259% over those twenty years while median individual earnings rose 68%, and the typical home went from 3.6 times annual earnings to 7.6. Source for the 259% and 68%, and for the three and a half years of earnings in the list of small things. ons.gov.uk.

[8] Office for National Statistics, Housing affordability in England and Wales, 2022, released 22 March 2023. Full-time employees in England could expect to spend around 8.3 times their annual earnings on a home, and 6.2 times in Wales. In 1997, 89% of local authorities had a ratio under five times earnings, against 7% in 2022. Source for the 8.3 and the nine in ten. ons.gov.uk.

[9] Freddie Mac, Primary Mortgage Market Survey, the weekly US average for a 30-year fixed mortgage. It reached its record low, 2.65%, in the week ending 7 January 2021, the lowest since the survey began in 1971, and stood at 7.28% on 1 October 2026, as Fox Business reported that week. Source for the 3% that people who bought or refinanced around then are still paying, and the 7.5% the next buyer is quoted. freddiemac.com and foxbusiness.com.

[10] Recession shapes, Wikipedia. The K-shaped recovery is the name economists started using in 2020 for a recovery where one group's fortunes climb and another's fall at the same time, after the pandemic split along those lines. Source for the term the commenter used. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_shapes.

[11] UNICEF and the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation, under-five mortality, updated March 2026. The global rate fell from 93.5 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1990 to 37.4 in 2024, a decline of 60%, and 4.9 million children still died before their fifth birthday in 2024. Source for the 93 and the 37. data.unicef.org.

[12] United Nations, World Population Prospects 2024, summary of results, 11 July 2024. Life expectancy at birth reached 73.3 years in 2024, 8.4 years more than in 1995, after falling from 72.6 in 2019 to 70.9 during the pandemic. Source for the 73, the eight years and the dip. population.un.org.

[13] World Bank, June 2025 update to the global poverty lines, 5 June 2025. The extreme poverty line moved to $3.00 a day, about 838 million people lived under it in 2022, and an estimated 1.5 billion people escaped extreme poverty between 1990 and 2022. Source for the billion and a half. worldbank.org.

[14] Joe Hasell, Bertha Rohenkohl and Pablo Arriagada, $3 a day, a new poverty line has shifted the World Bank's data on extreme poverty, Our World in Data, 11 August 2025. Extreme poverty went from one in every two or three people to one in ten, 817 million people were under the line in 2024, and the authors write that the progress of the past decades has ended. Source for the one in ten and for the stall. ourworldindata.org.

[15] Christoph Lakner and Branko Milanovic, Global Income Distribution, From the Fall of the Berlin Wall to the Great Recession, World Bank, 2013. The chart of income growth by global percentile between 1988 and 2008 that became known as the elephant curve, with the global middle up 70 to 80%, the global top 1% up about 60%, and the working and middle classes of the rich countries close to flat. Source for those three numbers. Wikipedia keeps the chart and its later revisions at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Elephant_Curve.

[16] World Happiness Report 2024, built on the Gallup World Poll, March 2024. The United States dropped out of the top 20 for the first time in the report's twelve years, driven in part by how Americans under 30 rate their lives, and in the US and Canada the over-60s ranked at least 50 places higher than the under-30s. Source for both. CBS News covered it on 20 March 2024 at cbsnews.com.

[17] Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Annual Report 2022, The Shifting Tides of Global Trade, from World Bank data. World trade rose from about 25% of world GDP in 1970 to a peak of about 61% in 2008, a level it hadn't passed again when the report was written. Source for the 25%, the 61% and the flattening since. stlouisfed.org.

[18] The Budget Lab at Yale, State of U.S. Tariffs, 8 April 2026. The average effective tariff rate on US imports, before importers switch suppliers, stood at 11.8%, the highest since the early 1940s apart from 2025. Source for the 11.8%. budgetlab.yale.edu.

[19] Shekhar Aiyar and colleagues, Geo-Economic Fragmentation and the Future of Multilateralism, IMF Staff Discussion Note, January 2023. The long-run cost of trade fragmentation runs from 0.2% of global output in a mild scenario to almost 7% in a severe one, and higher again if technology splits as well. Source for the 7%. The note is at elibrary.imf.org, and CNBC covered it on 16 January 2023 at cnbc.com.

[20] Samaritans, the UK and Ireland helpline, free on 116 123 at any hour, or by email and letter for anyone who would rather write. Source for the UK number. samaritans.org.

[21] 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, the US line, by call or text to 988 or by chat online. Source for the US number. 988lifeline.org.

[22] C.S. Lewis, "On Living in an Atomic Age", 1948, collected in Present Concerns in 1986. The passage asks that the bomb, if it comes, find us "doing sensible and human things", among them bathing the children and chatting to friends over a pint and a game of darts. Source for the passage the commenter posted. Brad Feld quoted it at length in March 2020 at feld.com.