Chapter one: Completing School
I remember when I was twenty-two, and someone said, "Oh, I'm thirty-one," I just thought they were so old, and now I'm thirty-one, and I don't feel old at all. —Charles
I used to assume that when I grew up, my life would look like an adult's in the 1950s. Back then, in both the middle class and popular culture, it went down like this: A man and a woman married. The man worked. The woman probably didn't. They owned a house in the suburbs, had kids, and ate dinner as a family every night.
I started picturing this as a kid. I'm white and was raised middle class, and even though I grew up thirty years after the fifties, in the eighties, my parents' lives were playing out like fifties versions.
They married when they were both twenty-six and are still married. They were raising my brother and me in the suburbs of Dallas, where they'd bought a house. My mom had been a teacher, but quit before I was born, and didn't go back to work until I was in middle school. When my dad came home from the job he wore a suit to, she had dinner ready for the family. After we were done eating, my dad would tell my brother and me, "Help your mother," then disappear for the rest of the night.
As I got older, toward the end of high school and in college, I started to have doubts about if I really wanted this life. As a high school graduation present, my mom and my aunt took me to New York City. I walked around, openmouthed and immediately in love. I thought to myself, I'm going to live here one day. After I graduated from college, I moved there to try to become a writer. The immediate future I wanted was to own an apartment and live by myself in the city. Marriage felt like it could wait a long time. I wasn't sure I ever wanted kids. But, still, I kept looking toward the 1950s model of adulthood. I saw the house, the husband, and the kids as my endpoint, no matter what else I fantasized about.
It's confusing to me still. Why was it the standard I kept looking to? Why couldn't I shake it off even though I was clearly trying to figure out my own version of adulthood?
Tom W. Smith, the former director of the General Social Survey, says the fifties are so pervasive, in part, because a huge percentage of the current adults, mostly baby boomers, a generation that was born from 1946 to 1964, grew up during that time. They watched their parents live like that, even if they didn't do it themselves. "You can't have a living memory of what America once was in the 1920s because there aren't enough people left," Smith says. "But there's more than enough who grew up in the 1950s to make that part of living memory."
Plus, it was the advent of television, and the images from that time are some of the most iconic of American life. The neat, low-slung houses. The square yards. The picket fences. The mom in an apron. The dad setting down his briefcase. The two kids watching television while lying on their stomachs on the floor.
The collective memory, and the idealized pictures, have resulted in romanticizing the time period-there's a feeling that life was easier then. Some of this perceived ease comes from people having a script to follow. Adults were expected to live a certain way. "Marriage was considered to be universal," says Steven Mintz, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of The Prime of Life, a book about the challenges of modern adulthood. "It wasn't a decision you made. Even many gay people got married [to someone of the opposite sex] because it was assumed they would. The assumption was that marriage was part of the script of life. Buying a home was part of the script of life. Having children after marriage was part of the script of life."
This script made it so that people didn't have to make any choices about how to go about their lives-they knew how their stories would end. So even though that meant that they were constrained to the Leave It to Beaver model, they also didn't have to agonize over whether to marry the person they liked at the moment, wait for someone who might be an even better match, or not marry at all. They didn't have to choose between staying in a job or going back to school. There was no question they were having children. "There were certain psychic benefits of this pattern," Mintz says. "My own personal view is that we have far more options now, and that's generally a good thing, but it does produce this incredible sense of pressure, stress, and anxiety."
Stephanie Coontz, a historian and the author of The Way We Never Were, which takes a critical look at Americans' nostalgia for the 1950s, doesn't agree that things were better back then either, but she understands longing for a time when all of your choices were made for you. "When people walk into a store with too many choices, they sometimes walk out because they're overwhelmed," she says. "And as we have more choices about our lives, it becomes more difficult, more anxiety producing, than when it was, Oh well, there are two choices: vanilla or chocolate."
A few months after Yasin's thirty-first birthday, he said to his business partner of the networking app for sports fans they founded, "I can't believe I'm thirty." She told him that he was actually thirty-one. "It did not register to me that I had hit thirty," he says. "Not just hit thirty but was a year and a half into my thirties. It just didn't register."
What mostly registers for him these days is the pings alerting him to new tweets, chats, emails, or texts as he works. His life is marked by a string of beeps. It's easy for him to be in front of his computer and not know if he's been there for one hour or four. "There's so much that's getting done that I can't even pay attention to the time anymore," he says.
In his twenties, he worked in finance at J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley, managing money for executives at publicly traded companies, and got promoted at both banks. These jobs made him lots of money, which he'd wanted ever since he was in college at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, where he majored in economics and political science and minored in Middle Eastern studies.
Yasin is intense and driven, obsessed with making his app a success. He mostly talks about work and uses plenty of corporatespeak, bringing up "benchmarks" he wants to achieve and speculating about when "things should hit for me." But he shares his emotions too, even if that means confessing envy or tears. In college, "I felt like everyone around me had money," he says. "They had more than I did, and I felt insecure about it." Classmates were driving Range Rovers bought for them by their dads, who were managing partners at investment banks. Yasin's parents had emigrated to the United States from Turkey and moved between jobs and business opportunities trying to earn enough to support him and his three siblings. They owned their home in Lincoln Park, New Jersey, where he shared a bedroom with his three brothers,but there were never long stretches when the family knew they'd have plenty of money. Sometimes they were doing well; sometimes they weren't.
At school, Yasin didn't have a car and got free housing because he worked as a resident assistant in his dorm. He took extra shifts at his job waiting tables and spent his tips on a used Mercedes, his first attempt at feeling less inferior to the rich kids around him. I know I can work harder than these people, he told himself. I'm going to hustle and I'm going to get it done.
For a while his career in banking gave him exactly what he wanted. "I was farting money," he says. But he didn't actually know what to do with this money. He had nothing he wanted to spend it on. Yasin is Muslim and doesn't drink. He didn't want to go to nightclubs until 3:00 a.m. He wanted to get up early and ride bikes with his friends. "I thought I had everything figured out when I was twenty-five," he says. "I had nothing figured out. I had money, and that was it."
Beyond the fifties being idealized as a simpler time, they are also thought of fondly because the country was doing well economically. Jobs were plentiful, wages were good, and consumer debt was almost nonexistent.
The majority of America was middle class. That meant having a household income of between $3,000 and $7,000 a year, according to Mintz (that's between $32,000 and $75,000 in today's dollars).
"The gap was the difference between having a Chevy and having a Buick," he says. "It wasn't like having a BMW." Most people owned houses too. "You could work at a factory and own a cottage by a lake," Mintz says. "You didn't feel like you were poor. You felt like you were doing great."
But the reality of this prosperous era was that it disproportionately benefited white men. White women had access to the middle class primarily through marriage, not through their own achievements, and African Americans were kept out almost completely. Government policies, as well as universities, business owners, and housing developers were set on excluding them from gaining any wealth. "They were the bottom of the heap," Coontz says.
During World War II in 1944, the government passed the GI Bill, which is best known for giving veterans free college tuition. By 1956, some 2.2 million veterans had taken advantage of this, but even though 1.2 million Black men had fought in the war, in segregated ranks, they were effectively excluded from the new law. What was then called the Veterans Association encouraged them to apply for vocational training instead, and in some cases, arbitrarily denied their educational benefits.
If Black veterans did apply to school, Northern universities were slow to let them in, while Southern colleges refused them entirely. "Though Congress granted all soldiers the same benefits theoretically," historian Hilary Herbold writes in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, "the segregationist principles of almost every institution of higher learning effectively disbarred a huge proportion of Black veterans from earning a college degree."
Not having a degree prevented them from getting more-secure, better-paying jobs. African American men were mainly hired for low-level, manual-labor jobs, both by commercial businesses and government organizations. Even Black college graduates could sometimes only find these kinds of positions. And after they were hired, they couldn't get promoted. In Memphis, for example, big companies International Harvester, Southern Bell Telephone, and the Memphis General Depot employed Black men only at the lowest pay levels.
There was "no greater instrument for widening an already huge racial gap in postwar America than the GI Bill," historian Ira Katznelson writes in his book When Affirmative Action Was White, about racial inequality in the twentieth century.
As time went on, the civil rights movement helped minorities begin to be accepted into college in greater numbers (more women than ever before were attending too), and the government introduced other bills that would assist with the cost. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 gave financial aid to students studying science and technology who might help the United States gain an advantage against the Soviet Union. The Higher Education Act of 1965 subsidized poor and working-class students.
But the government had also shifted from paying tuition outright to an increasingly complicated system of federal and private loans. At first, this seemed fine. The credit card was becoming popular, and Americans were getting more comfortable with the idea of personal debt. Besides, college was seen as a good investment, a way to guarantee you'd get a high-paying job with benefits. In 1972, President Richard Nixon created Sallie Mae, which was then a government-sponsored student-loan company.
Attendance kept increasing in the 1980s, but so did tuition. From the late 1980s to the present, tuition has risen at a rate of four times that of inflation and eight times that of household income.
The income range for the middle class has ballooned too. Today, households with an annual income of anywhere from $40,000 to $250,000 count themselves in the middle class.
And many of these families can no longer afford to send their kids to college. For students, leaving school with debt has become as common as leaving with a favorite cheap beer. According to estimates, forty-five million people in the United States have school debt, and the total is about $1.5 trillion, which is more than Americans owe on their credit cards or car loans.
Journalist M. H. Miller took on more than $100,000 in debt while earning a BA and MA from New York University, with his father as a cosigner on the loans. While he was growing up, his family had just enough money to pay their bills, and what things cost was a constant topic of conversation. But when it came to the $50,000 a year his education would cost, his parents told him repeatedly, "We'll find a way to pay for it."
After Miller graduated, most of what he thought about was how he was going to make his loan payments. With every paycheck he got, he subtracted the amount he needed for rent, as little food as he could live on (a carton of eggs and a can of beans), and one of his loan payments. His paycheck was never big enough. "How I would eat or pay my rent without defaulting was a constant refrain," he writes in an essay for the Baffler about struggling to pay his debt. "At my lowest points, I began fantasizing about dying, not because I was suicidal but because death would have meant relief from having to come up with an answer. My life, I felt, had been assigned a monetary value-I knew what I was worth, and I couldn't afford it, so all the better to cash out early."
One afternoon at a diner in Brooklyn, he asked his father what would happen to the debt if he did kill himself. Matter-of-factly, his dad answered that he would have to pay the debt by himself.
Then his dad smiled, which Miller writes, "I sensed had caused him great strain."
"Listen," he told his son, "it's just debt. No one is dying from this."
Today, Miller is in his early thirties and no longer shares the debt with his dad. Instead, his wife helps him with the monthly payments when she can, "a small, depressing victory, a milestone perhaps unique to members of my generation," Miller writes.
Chapter one: Completing School
I remember when I was twenty-two, and someone said, "Oh, I'm thirty-one," I just thought they were so old, and now I'm thirty-one, and I don't feel old at all. —Charles
I used to assume that when I grew up, my life would look like an adult's in the 1950s. Back then, in both the middle class and popular culture, it went down like this: A man and a woman married. The man worked. The woman probably didn't. They owned a house in the suburbs, had kids, and ate dinner as a family every night.
I started picturing this as a kid. I'm white and was raised middle class, and even though I grew up thirty years after the fifties, in the eighties, my parents' lives were playing out like fifties versions.
They married when they were both twenty-six and are still married. They were raising my brother and me in the suburbs of Dallas, where they'd bought a house. My mom had been a teacher, but quit before I was born, and didn't go back to work until I was in middle school. When my dad came home from the job he wore a suit to, she had dinner ready for the family. After we were done eating, my dad would tell my brother and me, "Help your mother," then disappear for the rest of the night.
As I got older, toward the end of high school and in college, I started to have doubts about if I really wanted this life. As a high school graduation present, my mom and my aunt took me to New York City. I walked around, openmouthed and immediately in love. I thought to myself, I'm going to live here one day. After I graduated from college, I moved there to try to become a writer. The immediate future I wanted was to own an apartment and live by myself in the city. Marriage felt like it could wait a long time. I wasn't sure I ever wanted kids. But, still, I kept looking toward the 1950s model of adulthood. I saw the house, the husband, and the kids as my endpoint, no matter what else I fantasized about.
It's confusing to me still. Why was it the standard I kept looking to? Why couldn't I shake it off even though I was clearly trying to figure out my own version of adulthood?
Tom W. Smith, the former director of the General Social Survey, says the fifties are so pervasive, in part, because a huge percentage of the current adults, mostly baby boomers, a generation that was born from 1946 to 1964, grew up during that time. They watched their parents live like that, even if they didn't do it themselves. "You can't have a living memory of what America once was in the 1920s because there aren't enough people left," Smith says. "But there's more than enough who grew up in the 1950s to make that part of living memory."
Plus, it was the advent of television, and the images from that time are some of the most iconic of American life. The neat, low-slung houses. The square yards. The picket fences. The mom in an apron. The dad setting down his briefcase. The two kids watching television while lying on their stomachs on the floor.
The collective memory, and the idealized pictures, have resulted in romanticizing the time period-there's a feeling that life was easier then. Some of this perceived ease comes from people having a script to follow. Adults were expected to live a certain way. "Marriage was considered to be universal," says Steven Mintz, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of The Prime of Life, a book about the challenges of modern adulthood. "It wasn't a decision you made. Even many gay people got married [to someone of the opposite sex] because it was assumed they would. The assumption was that marriage was part of the script of life. Buying a home was part of the script of life. Having children after marriage was part of the script of life."
This script made it so that people didn't have to make any choices about how to go about their lives-they knew how their stories would end. So even though that meant that they were constrained to the Leave It to Beaver model, they also didn't have to agonize over whether to marry the person they liked at the moment, wait for someone who might be an even better match, or not marry at all. They didn't have to choose between staying in a job or going back to school. There was no question they were having children. "There were certain psychic benefits of this pattern," Mintz says. "My own personal view is that we have far more options now, and that's generally a good thing, but it does produce this incredible sense of pressure, stress, and anxiety."
Stephanie Coontz, a historian and the author of The Way We Never Were, which takes a critical look at Americans' nostalgia for the 1950s, doesn't agree that things were better back then either, but she understands longing for a time when all of your choices were made for you. "When people walk into a store with too many choices, they sometimes walk out because they're overwhelmed," she says. "And as we have more choices about our lives, it becomes more difficult, more anxiety producing, than when it was, Oh well, there are two choices: vanilla or chocolate."
A few months after Yasin's thirty-first birthday, he said to his business partner of the networking app for sports fans they founded, "I can't believe I'm thirty." She told him that he was actually thirty-one. "It did not register to me that I had hit thirty," he says. "Not just hit thirty but was a year and a half into my thirties. It just didn't register."
What mostly registers for him these days is the pings alerting him to new tweets, chats, emails, or texts as he works. His life is marked by a string of beeps. It's easy for him to be in front of his computer and not know if he's been there for one hour or four. "There's so much that's getting done that I can't even pay attention to the time anymore," he says.
In his twenties, he worked in finance at J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley, managing money for executives at publicly traded companies, and got promoted at both banks. These jobs made him lots of money, which he'd wanted ever since he was in college at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, where he majored in economics and political science and minored in Middle Eastern studies.
Yasin is intense and driven, obsessed with making his app a success. He mostly talks about work and uses plenty of corporatespeak, bringing up "benchmarks" he wants to achieve and speculating about when "things should hit for me." But he shares his emotions too, even if that means confessing envy or tears. In college, "I felt like everyone around me had money," he says. "They had more than I did, and I felt insecure about it." Classmates were driving Range Rovers bought for them by their dads, who were managing partners at investment banks. Yasin's parents had emigrated to the United States from Turkey and moved between jobs and business opportunities trying to earn enough to support him and his three siblings. They owned their home in Lincoln Park, New Jersey, where he shared a bedroom with his three brothers,but there were never long stretches when the family knew they'd have plenty of money. Sometimes they were doing well; sometimes they weren't.
At school, Yasin didn't have a car and got free housing because he worked as a resident assistant in his dorm. He took extra shifts at his job waiting tables and spent his tips on a used Mercedes, his first attempt at feeling less inferior to the rich kids around him. I know I can work harder than these people, he told himself. I'm going to hustle and I'm going to get it done.
For a while his career in banking gave him exactly what he wanted. "I was farting money," he says. But he didn't actually know what to do with this money. He had nothing he wanted to spend it on. Yasin is Muslim and doesn't drink. He didn't want to go to nightclubs until 3:00 a.m. He wanted to get up early and ride bikes with his friends. "I thought I had everything figured out when I was twenty-five," he says. "I had nothing figured out. I had money, and that was it."
Beyond the fifties being idealized as a simpler time, they are also thought of fondly because the country was doing well economically. Jobs were plentiful, wages were good, and consumer debt was almost nonexistent.
The majority of America was middle class. That meant having a household income of between $3,000 and $7,000 a year, according to Mintz (that's between $32,000 and $75,000 in today's dollars).
"The gap was the difference between having a Chevy and having a Buick," he says. "It wasn't like having a BMW." Most people owned houses too. "You could work at a factory and own a cottage by a lake," Mintz says. "You didn't feel like you were poor. You felt like you were doing great."
But the reality of this prosperous era was that it disproportionately benefited white men. White women had access to the middle class primarily through marriage, not through their own achievements, and African Americans were kept out almost completely. Government policies, as well as universities, business owners, and housing developers were set on excluding them from gaining any wealth. "They were the bottom of the heap," Coontz says.
During World War II in 1944, the government passed the GI Bill, which is best known for giving veterans free college tuition. By 1956, some 2.2 million veterans had taken advantage of this, but even though 1.2 million Black men had fought in the war, in segregated ranks, they were effectively excluded from the new law. What was then called the Veterans Association encouraged them to apply for vocational training instead, and in some cases, arbitrarily denied their educational benefits.
If Black veterans did apply to school, Northern universities were slow to let them in, while Southern colleges refused them entirely. "Though Congress granted all soldiers the same benefits theoretically," historian Hilary Herbold writes in The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, "the segregationist principles of almost every institution of higher learning effectively disbarred a huge proportion of Black veterans from earning a college degree."
Not having a degree prevented them from getting more-secure, better-paying jobs. African American men were mainly hired for low-level, manual-labor jobs, both by commercial businesses and government organizations. Even Black college graduates could sometimes only find these kinds of positions. And after they were hired, they couldn't get promoted. In Memphis, for example, big companies International Harvester, Southern Bell Telephone, and the Memphis General Depot employed Black men only at the lowest pay levels.
There was "no greater instrument for widening an already huge racial gap in postwar America than the GI Bill," historian Ira Katznelson writes in his book When Affirmative Action Was White, about racial inequality in the twentieth century.
As time went on, the civil rights movement helped minorities begin to be accepted into college in greater numbers (more women than ever before were attending too), and the government introduced other bills that would assist with the cost. The National Defense Education Act of 1958 gave financial aid to students studying science and technology who might help the United States gain an advantage against the Soviet Union. The Higher Education Act of 1965 subsidized poor and working-class students.
But the government had also shifted from paying tuition outright to an increasingly complicated system of federal and private loans. At first, this seemed fine. The credit card was becoming popular, and Americans were getting more comfortable with the idea of personal debt. Besides, college was seen as a good investment, a way to guarantee you'd get a high-paying job with benefits. In 1972, President Richard Nixon created Sallie Mae, which was then a government-sponsored student-loan company.
Attendance kept increasing in the 1980s, but so did tuition. From the late 1980s to the present, tuition has risen at a rate of four times that of inflation and eight times that of household income.
The income range for the middle class has ballooned too. Today, households with an annual income of anywhere from $40,000 to $250,000 count themselves in the middle class.
And many of these families can no longer afford to send their kids to college. For students, leaving school with debt has become as common as leaving with a favorite cheap beer. According to estimates, forty-five million people in the United States have school debt, and the total is about $1.5 trillion, which is more than Americans owe on their credit cards or car loans.
Journalist M. H. Miller took on more than $100,000 in debt while earning a BA and MA from New York University, with his father as a cosigner on the loans. While he was growing up, his family had just enough money to pay their bills, and what things cost was a constant topic of conversation. But when it came to the $50,000 a year his education would cost, his parents told him repeatedly, "We'll find a way to pay for it."
After Miller graduated, most of what he thought about was how he was going to make his loan payments. With every paycheck he got, he subtracted the amount he needed for rent, as little food as he could live on (a carton of eggs and a can of beans), and one of his loan payments. His paycheck was never big enough. "How I would eat or pay my rent without defaulting was a constant refrain," he writes in an essay for the Baffler about struggling to pay his debt. "At my lowest points, I began fantasizing about dying, not because I was suicidal but because death would have meant relief from having to come up with an answer. My life, I felt, had been assigned a monetary value-I knew what I was worth, and I couldn't afford it, so all the better to cash out early."
One afternoon at a diner in Brooklyn, he asked his father what would happen to the debt if he did kill himself. Matter-of-factly, his dad answered that he would have to pay the debt by himself.
Then his dad smiled, which Miller writes, "I sensed had caused him great strain."
"Listen," he told his son, "it's just debt. No one is dying from this."
Today, Miller is in his early thirties and no longer shares the debt with his dad. Instead, his wife helps him with the monthly payments when she can, "a small, depressing victory, a milestone perhaps unique to members of my generation," Miller writes.
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