The Costs of Being a Millennial

In economics, they measure costs in time, effort, and ultimately money. The Millennial character is a product of life spent investing in your own potential and being managed like a risk. Keeping track of economic costs is important, especially when so few commentators and analysts consciously consider the lives of young people in these terms. But there are other kinds of costs as well. Just because economists don't consider the psychic costs for workers who have learned to keep up with contemporary capitalism, that doesn't mean we shouldn't.

More competition among young people—whether they want to be drummers, power forwards, scientists, or just not broke—means higher costs in the economic sense, but also in the area of mental health and social trust. If Americans are learning better and better to take whatever personal advantage we can get our hands on, then we'd be fools to trust each other. And as the stakes rise, we are also learning not to be fools.