Employee explains why Gen Z has to work 'twice as hard' as Boomers in America — and it’s the painful truth

A post by Reddit user u/MikeTheBard is gaining widespread attention after they shared a detailed spreadsheet comparing the cost of living across generations. The post argues that Gen Z must "work twice as hard" as Baby Boomers just to survive. In a few days, it has received over 37,000 upvotes and sparked thousands of comments from users echoing the same frustrations that full-time work today simply doesn’t stretch the way it used to.

Deriving data from the Social Security Administration, the Department of Labor, Federal Reserve Bank, and many more sources, u/MikeTheBard, along with his colleague Colleen, analyzed minimum and average wages, college tuition, and rental prices from 1972 to 2022. The goal, they said, was to determine how many hours someone would need to work at minimum wage in different decades to afford basic necessities. According to their calculations, a Baby Boomer making minimum wage in 1972 had to work just 68 hours to cover rent and 268 hours for a year of public college. That’s about one-third of a full-time income going to housing, and just enough summer work to cover tuition. This cost of living is a distant dream today.

By comparison, someone making minimum wage in 2022 needs to work 183 hours per month — more than an entire full-time schedule — just to pay average rent. In fact, according to a StreetEasy analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), three in five Gen Z renters (ages 18–25) spend more than 30% of their income on housing, the threshold experts define as being rent-burdened. America's cost of living has evidently skyrocketed. Plus, college now costs 1,426 hours of minimum wage labor per year, or nearly two-thirds of a full-time job.

"Doing the bare minimum and working 40 hours a week for minimum wage, you could afford your own apartment, basic needs, and a car [in the 70s]. [Today], a Gen Z worker would need to put in their entire paycheck and would still come up short," the Redditor wrote. They added that while Gen X could still manage both rent and college with some sacrifice, Gen Z can realistically only afford one or the other, not both. That was part of the reason they created the spreadsheet in the first place. Speaking to Newsweek, they said, "People talk about rising costs, but it always revolves around adjusting the numbers, $X then was equal to $Y now. But that's misleading because there are just so many variables. I wanted to reduce that to the most simplistic metric." 

The post has triggered a wave of agreement from fellow users, many of whom shared their own experiences trying to stay afloat. u/LavisAlex said, "That change between 2012 and now is legit. I remember working tons of overtime in the early to mid-2010s, and you felt like it actually made a difference. Today it feels more like throwing a bucket of water into an ocean." Another user, u/universalkalea, wrote, "This is in part why I feel working feels so much worse these days. I go to work and I'm depressed, and I don't even get paid enough to live when I go home to compensate for a shitty job."

u/yourpaljax said, "I’m scraping by on $20/hr, living alone in a major Canadian city, and my dad said I should find something that pays better. Thanks. Thanks for the tip, Dad." "My family somehow just ignores math. They think someone making minimum wage should easily be able to afford $1500 per month rent, and have some savings to put aside at the end of each month," u/shoefarts666 commented.