There's been lots of talk about how our generation may be the first to be worse off than that of our parents. I'm fairly certain it's going to be true in my case, and Christmas really cemented for me how huge that gap is.
I swear, I am going to lose it if I hear one more thing along the lines of how we should just buy a house. For the love of god. Anyone who keeps up with the news knows what's going on, and the latest round of updated council valuations backs that up. My parents' property is now worth more than 3x what they paid for it - and that's just the council valuation, which around here is always less than actual market reality. Have incomes also tripled/quadrupled/etc? No, no they have not. I'm not saying it was easy back then, but it is a hell of a lot harder now. There is no way I will have a paid-off house by my 40s in Auckland.
It was a hard year for me and T, and while our family are experts in Not Talking About Things, it doesn't take a genius or a mind reader to figure out that we're still nowhere near a down payment, particularly when I VERY OBVIOUSLY shut down the idea of affording a house every time the topic comes up (which has been constantly since we got back to NZ).
Look, there are some things my parents went through that I will never understand. Leaving home and going to university in a strange new country. Being denied promotion outright because of my skin colour, in the country of my birth. Reaching the point of frustration in my marriage where I'm making inappropriate disclosures to my teenage daughter (that's what professional therapists are for, guys).
Likewise, they won't understand the lack of job security today, or what it's like to enter the workforce during a global financial meltdown. And to be fair, I'm not immune either. A growing part of me sometimes just wants to scream 'how have you gone on that many interviews yet still don't have a job? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?'
Really, I only feel comfortable discussing successes with them, and there haven't been any of those to report on in a long time. Maybe it's a terrible reason to avoid my family, but it's a sanity-saving defence mechanism.
