To put it simply, you can’t control when you were born. And that makes sense. We just accept it because we have to. What we don’t consider often enough is how much of an impact the timing of our birth has on our lives. It’s a product of fate and your parents’ friskiness. Independent of birth order, not only is the generation of your birth critical, the exact year is too. Generationally, some people were born and brought up during the depression. These were kids who were raised with next to nothing so they appreciated everything. Then there were the kids who grew up in the relative economic prosperity of the 90’s. They had it all, (at least materially), even though that didn’t necessarily make their lives much better. Kids who are born with a lot and then must sacrifice have it rough, especially when they took things for granted. On the other hand, those who grew up with nothing and found themselves becoming prosperous may be more cautious about giving in to spending temptation.
I was born in one of the many Gen X years and Gen Y followed right after. I had a tough job market when I came out of college, but people a few years later hit a boom. They received many offers out of school and their salaries leap-frogged ours. And we never really caught up unless we took drastic action like changing employers. I do feel fortunate now. At least with grad school, you can choose when you start. I have found that many of the benefits I received from my prior employers were taken away for new hires that started a few years after I did. I was also lucky enough to have access to student loans to finance my private university education. With the current economic crisis, there is more limited loan availability and fewer jobs. College-aged kids' parents have little money in their stock portfolios or home equity to fund a college education. Also, the later a kid is born, the longer they have to work before they can retire to collect Social Security. (See image pop-up). This counteracts the fact that the kid can expect to live longer.
Think of the implications of being born thirty years too early. Perhaps you were genetically cut out to be a computer programming whiz but computers weren’t invented yet. Working a calculator doesn't make a person much money. And what if you were born a hundred years earlier? I would say that if you were born that long ago at least in a middle class family, the higher the chance you had of succeeding or becoming famous. There were just less people then and the odds of becoming a success were better. There was less competition for available resources. It was a lot easier to start a business and everything hadn’t seemingly already been invented yet. On the flip-side, people used to die of colds or catch polio and have to live off iron lungs.
So when you look back on your life and wish you had things easier or feel fortunate, perhaps you should attribute much of that to the timing of your birth. It's the one thing that we have no control over and that has so much control over our whole lives. There may be an optimal year to be born based on all the things I mentioned. I would say it was some time in the 1950's. I just don't know whether being born in a "good" year is due to luck or fate.
+ Atul
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