Being in your twenties is both exhilarating and stressful. We finish our studies, we start our career, we look for a roof and we think about the future… But it’s not easy when the cost of living explodes, the price of houses soars and the climate plummets, like right now. Was it easier when we were the same age at early years 1980 ? Perspectives of young people today and those of yesterday on the torments of early adulthood, when economic gloom hits. First text in a series of five.
1982. Dark times for the Quebec economy. The unemployment rate is skyrocketing. Inflation reached 13% and interest rates exploded. Like many industrialized countries, Canada is facing a major recession that will leave its mark.
“Even though I’m supposed to have had it all baked in because I’m a baby boomer, my reality was very different,” recalls Ann-Marie Gagné, who was 24 at the time. She was studying in Quebec in communication and says to have accumulated precarious jobs.
2022. Four decades later. The world is just waking up from a pandemic that put it on hiatus for two years. Russia invades Ukraine and disrupts the geopolitical and commercial relations of the globe. This is the Molotov cocktail that has caused the cost of living to soar: gas prices are skyrocketing, so are grocery bills, not to mention home values, all of this combined with a rampant rise in interest rates. interest in controlling inflation.
“I have the impression of living under very great pressure, especially economic, because literally everything has increased, but it’s not just that. There is the social, political and environmental context which is also distressing, ”says Sol’Abraham Castaneda Ouellet, a 23-year-old neuroscience student who lives in Montreal.
From one era to another, how do young people endure economic crises? And how do they feel about their respective backgrounds?
Dive into the past
The way we generally have of delimiting the generations does not always correspond well to reality. Thus, those in their twenties today may be among the youngest of so-called millennials (born between 1981 and 1996), or the oldest of Generation Z (1997 to 2012). The status of those aged 20 to 29 in 1982 appears much simpler, because they all belonged to the famous generation of baby boomers (1946 to 1965). But nothing is ever so simple.
“It must have been such a good time growing up when we were setting up universal health insurance, Hydro-Québec, and lots of great collective projects that changed Quebec,” marvels Henri Villandre, a 27-year-old economist who evokes the end of the 1960s rather than the beginning of the 1980s.
“That was in another era,” says Denys Lamontagne, who was 25 in 1982 and had just obtained his baccalaureate in physical education at the University of Quebec in Trois-Rivières. When we arrived, all that was over. When people say I was a baby boomer, I tell them, “Excuse me, but that was before me!” he says, thinking of his own youthful years, which were marked above all by the defeat in the referendum, the economic crisis and the rise of right-wing individualist values carried by American President Ronald Reagan or British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. There were indeed two kinds of baby boomers, says the economist emeritus of the University of Quebec in Montreal Pierre Fortin. In fact, after almost two decades of steady progress, real wage growth stopped, and even reversed, beginning in the late 1970s, after which Quebec experienced one of its worst recessions.
“The young people who arrived on the job market in 1980, like those who arrived during the other big crisis, in 1990, were in the m… for several years before really being able to take a more reasonable cruising speed” , says the economist.
Back to present
Which does not mean that times are not difficult for young people today, observes Henri’s spouse, Gabrielle Longin, 23. Even when, like her, you have already landed a good job in the federal public service in your field of study. The young woman is not sure to like it so much.
“I feel like a poisoned gift. I tell myself that your twenties are the perfect time to take more professional risks, but everyone tells me that it would be the worst time to make this kind of decision. »
It is that there is the threat of economic recession which grows and the cost of living which does not cease increasing, notes the couple which has just moved from Ottawa to Montreal. It is also that Gabrielle and Henri would like to be able to afford, one day, a house in which they could raise children, but that the dream always seems to be moving away so much the price of housing is high and the interest rates are only increasing. In his parents’ time, says Henri, “you could buy a house with a living wage. We, even with our two very decent salaries, seem completely impossible. »
A dream that Sol’Abraham also cherishes, and which also seems less and less within his reach. “Each expense becomes heavier and heavier. At the start, we tell ourselves that it doesn’t matter and that the time will soon come when we will be financially comfortable. But the years pass and I have the impression of pedaling very hard for not much, “summarizes the one who would like to leave his 4 and a half one day in the Saint-Michel district, located opposite the A-40, for a house in the Laurentians, where his family comes from.
Father of two daughters who are now in their thirties, Denys Lamontagne sees similarities between our time and that of his twenties. “On the one hand, the two situations are not different: everyone is taken to manage. On the other hand, in our time, this anxiety was experienced as something individual, whereas today it seems to me to be experienced more as a social phenomenon. It’s everyone, for example, who is worried about the future of the planet. »