All generations have rich nostalgia for the decade of their childhood. Our coming of age is our purest time. And for the millennials, it’s probably best encapsulated by the 1990s.
The 90s are milk and honey for us. We remain so fond of the music, the TV and cinematic treasures, our first AOL experiences and the quintessentially middle class comfort many of us experienced, whether we fit into the lower or upper levels of that sector.
Despite not being born in the U.S. and immigrating here from Eastern Europe in the early 90s, I remember America feeling safe and my future feeling full of hope. America was the dominant force in the world. The 90s were the peak of American power and influence. Everyone felt proud to be an American.
Millennials didn’t understand it at the time, but the 90s ushered in the most important informational age in history, the birth of the internet and the digitization of the world. The first oligarchs were born out of the software and technology that would eventually touch every aspect of daily lives and businesses.
But the age of innocence was suddenly shattered before our eyes.
Many of us were in high school or early college when 9/11 happened, marking what I believe to be the breaking point between American dominance and security to the post-9/11 world of American vulnerability. America’s romantic phase for millennials was over and our country moved into a perpetual security state to feel protected. It was the first of several federal crises we would come to face that got etched into our formation as adults.
Our deepest vulnerabilities as a nation were soon laid bare in the financial system. There was a point in time where the idea of the U.S. financial system collapsing the way it did in 2008 seemed impossible. We learned we were no longer secure from national security threats, we also weren’t secure from a massive bubble burst. And due to the lack of financial literacy in the U.S., my generation didn’t understand that the government’s response to that burst would rob our futures.
The problems began long before we were born, but during our coming of age, America plunged further and further into excessive borrowing, regulations and taxes, all of which stunted economic growth rather than allowing it to flourish, and put an increasing tab on the millennial generation.
America went from being the paradigm of economic freedom to the paradigm of government spending. Our generation bears the greatest burden of the decline of freedom and economic prosperity in the nation, and the glaring reason is our country’s spiral of debt.
The average millennial graduates college with significant debt, starting their professional lives five steps behind from an economic standpoint. If you study the history of fiat currency, it becomes clear why the costs of college have skyrocketed. Cheap loans guaranteed by easy government money printed out of oblivion increase the cost of your books, your tuition and your college dorms, rendering degrees worthless in comparison to the ballooning cost to attend most universities.
He may be Bitcoin’s staunchest critic, but at least Peter Schiff gets this.
Currently our student loan debt stands at more than $1.7 trillion, which is more than both credit card debt and mortgage debt combined, by a long shot.
Millennials are the most educated generation, yet hold the least amount of wealth. Millennials have a record number of members who are unemployed, underemployed, in debt and in a lower standard of living than their parents. It isn’t surprising why they often share sad-but-true memes like these below on their social media pages, their technological vehicles for vocal rebellion.
And sorry, boomers and Generation X, but we are in this position mainly because of the policies of those you elected. Thanks to the generations that came before us, we are responsible for the bills that financed costly entitlement programs and those which bailed out the banks during the last financial crisis. Previous generations mortgaged their children and grandchildren’s futures by taking on more and more debt to pay for those benefits, some of which we surely won’t be able to enjoy ourselves.
Almost half of federal spending goes to Medicare and Social Security. Now add trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities at federal, state and local and the price tag for the future has become insurmountable. You certainly can’t tax us for the money; we aren’t making enough or getting paid enough. So the government has resorted to robbing Peter to pay Paul, printing money to pay off the debt and making it impossible for millennials to afford what their parents did. And somehow many of my college-educated peers seem to think the debt ceiling can keep going up forever.
We’ve been stripped of our ability to save, to work just one job that doesn’t require us to risk our money on meme coins and stocks, and some of my peers can no longer even see the possibility of having families because it’s simply not affordable. How terribly sad for our once-great nation.
We desperately need one thing and that is open access to an asset that appreciates in value and isn’t manipulated by out-of-reach insiders. But as Tucker Carlson pointed out in a recent broadcast, after being orange-pilled by Michael Saylor, young people have been excluded from the traditional systems of wealth creation in our economy.
When governments put together multitrillion dollar spending packages, the money must come from somewhere (despite some politicians around the world today taking no responsibility for explaining how to pay for their programs as evidenced here).
Here in the U.S., our government has shown that no matter which color is in office, it will turn to inflation in order to finance debt with more debt and continue to dole out promises of free lunches with no opportunity costs.
Yet out of all of this, rises a glowing orange light of hope.
The future is being taken back by the resilient and expressive millennials and it is being taken back through Bitcoin. We are learning about economic theory, not just swallowing the Keynesian pill every university hands out. We are getting involved in the political process holding leaders accountable for racking up more debt and fighting to elect pro-Bitcoin candidates. In 2022 and beyond, we will not stand living through another economic crisis without a life raft.
We are ushering in a brighter future filled with hope through monetary technology.
Bitcoin is the free market expression of all the American ideologies we grew up enjoying: freedom, individualism, and purity. It has allowed us to once again think about the future without worrying so much about how we will pay for it.
Those millennials who took their $1200 stimulus check and invested it instead of spending it on Amazon now have more than $10,000 because they took a risk in something a big chunk of Americans still view as a Ponzi scheme. Some of them turned a few thousand into deep six figures over the last few years. It’s the epitome of free markets.
Bitcoin is such a pure example of American ideology that the Chinese banned it. And now that we have it, Millennials can orange-pill their parents, grandparents and children to project our technological freedom to the whole world.
Through absolute digital scarcity and decentralization, Bitcoin offers young people not just a savings technology, but also a vehicle for understanding and engaging with the economic system at large, and the ability to help bridge the gaping wealth gap that was created through fiat debt.
It’s our chance to fix not only the money but all the things money touches, from education and housing costs that have ballooned as the result of moral hazards like government-backed loans, all the way to our disastrous fiat food system.
Even the Millennials who can’t agree on other things, from wokeism to conservatism, will all come to the conclusion that Bitcoin is virtuous, purpose-driven, and extremely necessary.
Software is not political, it’s not capable of manipulation or fraud. It is what it is. It’s math. It’s authentic, and if there is one word that Millennials care about more than anything in their culture, it’s authenticity.
Bitcoin is the one thing that can save us from the debt we inherited, so that we can build a new world order on a foundation of freedom, value and security.
This is a guest post by Natalie Brunell. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC, Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
