Of parents, inheritance, and greed

 

I could hardly believe my eyes when I read this whiny, self-centered, greedy complaint.

... my parents seem to have developed a full-on travel bug. And with every taken-on-a-whim excursion to Provence, every luxury jaunt to Thailand, New York or Costa Rica, I'm afraid to say I grow ever more resentful.

It is not a pleasant thing to admit, but the fact is their dream holidays are draining my inheritance.

As an impecunious 34-year-old millennial in an impossibly expensive property market, I am relying on, at some stage, a handout from them. But all I can see is my money receding into the distance on a long-haul trip to Bali.

With many of my friends in a similar position, and the cost of living crisis still at full throttle, the question troubling us over the generational divide is this. Who is being selfish? Us for wanting them to save their money so we can one day have it? Or them, for splurging it all so freely on themselves?

. . .

While their pensions are healthy, this level of travel is eating into their savings. Is it unbelievably awful to think of the money they spend on these trips as mine?

They had, after all, mentioned they'd divide any eventual sum between my sister and me, and I've been quietly counting on that to get a leg up.

At 34, I am still renting and living hand-to-mouth. Unlike the boomers, my generation are more used to working freelance or making do with gig economy jobs than climbing the corporate ladder in a solid job for life. Soon, AI will come for the white collar workers among us anyway.

I know that when I finally get on the property ladder, I'm going to be in so much debt that there will be no way out without help.

How can I ever settle down and give them grandchildren if there isn't any money in the pipeline to support them? Do they want to go on holiday more than they want me to be able to have and bring up children?

There's more at the link.

I'm at a loss to explain the writer's attitude.  Where on earth did he get the idea that someone else's money was actually his, by entitlement if not by actual transfer?

I can't speak for others, I guess, but I can use myself as an example.  I was raised by parents who survived the Great Depression in England in the 1930's.  My father and his younger brother were abandoned in a workhouse by their mother after their father left home, because she couldn't cope with the cost of feeding them during economic hard times.  They almost certainly hated every minute of their time there;  but they nevertheless buckled down and got on with it, because there was no alternative.  Dad joined the Royal Air Force in 1936 as a mid-teenager under the Aircraft Apprentice Scheme, and worked like a dog to pass the three-year course and become an aircraft fitter.  He then used that background and his own nose for opportunity to become a commissioned engineer officer, which saw him through World War II.  He and my mother (neither having so much as a Grade 12 school education to begin with) went on to complete their Ph. D.'s after the war, emigrated to two countries, raised four kids, and had, all in all, a pretty successful life.  Did we kids think they "owed" us the fruits of their quite incredibly hard labors?  No way!  They clawed their way out of the gutter and into a middle-class lifestyle through their own blood, sweat and tears, then told us that if they could do it, we could too - and they expected us to do precisely that.  It was up to us to succeed, not up to them to do it for us.

I don't like the way the economy has gone over the past couple of decades, but that's my problem, not something I can expect others to magically resolve.  I don't have a pension from my service as a pastor - I forfeited that when I took a stand over the clergy child sexual abuse issue, as regular readers will understand.  That hasn't made me whine and weep and look to others for support.  It's just thrown me back on my own resources, and I'm using them as best I can to support our family (along with my wife's income, of course).  What right do I have to expect others to pay for me?  None whatsoever, as far as I can see.

Therefore, to read such expectations of his parents, and the implied guilt-trip he's trying to lay on them, infuriates me.  Sure, he's going to have a harder time of it, economically speaking, than his parents did - but their parents probably had it worse than he does, and if he goes back far enough, I'm sure he'll find some ancestors who starved during famines or perished during plagues.

President Theodore Roosevelt had some sage advice that I've made my own since I first read it:

Do what you can,

with what you have,

where you are.

That sums up my life, and the writer's, and everybody else's life too.  We can't rely on anyone else to do those things.  It's up to us.  Anything extra, like winning the lottery, or having generous parents, or whatever, is a bonus - but it's not guaranteed.  We could inherit a million dollars tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow watch as the bottom falls out of the economy and our fiat-currency-millionaire status evaporates like snow on a hot rock.  It boils down to making our own way as best we can under the circumstances confronting us.  If those circumstances are worse than our parents had them - so what?  We still have to cope with them.  They're our problem, nobody else's.

He needs to get his own life, and stop hankering after his parents' lives.

Peter