Gen Z’s aspirational salary threshold triple millennials’ drives felt income inadequacy

Evidence

Despite mocking millennials, Gen Z shared one of their key ambitions: to get rich through online hustles. It was a quite plausible career path by 2024, when thirteen million Americans—about 7 percent of the workforce—made a living through the creation of social media content. Living completely online, however, gave them skewed expectations about money. In a poll that year, millennials identified 180,900 as the salary required for "financial success," while Gen Z set the bar at 587,800. This explains why another survey found that over half of Gen Z respondents reported feeling as though they lacked the income to live the way they wanted. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 665

Categorization

• XREF: The inflated-salary expectation mechanism resembles the status-dynamics and comparison-failure logic elsewhere in the book (Haidt-era social comparison, or Easterlin paradox lines of argument).