The traditional measure of success, which consisted of having an apartment, a house, and a car, has gone out of style. Or at least, a large number of young people around the world have stopped buying this idea.
According to research shared by Bright Side, the Millennial Generation who are born after 1980, rarely buy apartments and even fewer, cars. They stopped buying expensive things and instead came to be called “The Income Generation”
What is this about?
Some sociologists argue that modern youth have lived and suffered financial crises, which makes them afraid of taking large loans that they must pay for many years. However, this is not an important reason.
The point is that the current generation of young people has completely different principles than their parents.
Today’s young people have redesigned the concept of success, which includes aspects such as:
- Successful people don’t necessarily buy properties, they rent.
- If you want to be considered successful, invest in experiences like travel, and extreme sports, build businesses from scratch and live your life to the fullest.
How is this explained? Millennials are not interested in instability or security; what they are looking for is flexible hours and the financial freedom to be able to work from any corner of the planet.
People are not interested in material goods
Why buy a car if you can get around by Uber or taxi? In addition, you do not have to get into debt to be able to mobilize.
Why buy an expensive house in a beautiful place and go on vacation, when you can find a similar space on Airbnb in any corner of the planet?
This new life alternative became much more interesting due to factors such as:
- You don’t know how long you’ll stay and live where you currently are.
- You will be able to pay a mortgage for more than 20 years or accept the fact that you can spend the rest of your life paying rent.
- You may change jobs soon, or if you want to give your life a chance and pay rent you can simply change your living space without much complication.
Moreover, according to a Forbes article, it has been established that modern young people tend to change jobs every 3 years on average. Something that supports this new lifestyle and definition of success.
The concept of ownership is no longer relevant
James Hamblin, a columnist for The Atlantic publication, explains the phenomenon as follows:
“Over the last decade, psychologists have carried out a large number of studies showing that, in terms of happiness and sense of well-being, spending money on new experiences is much more profitable than buying new things. The first brings more joy»
Experiences allow us to make friends
Social interactions between people are a determining factor when a person feels happy or not. In other words, talking to other people and having lots of friends makes you a happier person.
What do you think people will prefer to hear; about your experiences after living a year in a distant country or about the number of apartments you have bought?
In one of his articles, James Hamblin added “It turns out that people don’t really like hearing about other people’s belongings, but they do like hearing about the last movie they saw.”
Remember that a bad experience can become a great story. A material object, no.
Buying things makes us worry:
Additionally, when we buy expensive things, their condition becomes our concern. If you buy a car and hear its alarm sound, you will feel overwhelmed. If you buy a house and decorate it with expensive things, you will live worried that you will not be robbed.
Lastly, all purchases will lose their value over time
Your parents did not have the fortune to travel as often as you can. There was no chance to have so much fun and the options were quite limited.
Nor did they enjoy the ease of starting a profitable business like you can do today.
Having this reality, they invested their money in cars, houses, and apartments (something that does not apply to us). Furthermore, every new purchase goes down in value and worse still during the recent financial crises.
Experiences, and those experiences that are worthwhile in your life, do not lose their value over time, they cannot be stolen from you and ultimately support your definition of success.
