Exhausted
I asked the following question of my dear friend Claude
Over the last 100 years, which age group of people has “had it the worst”? I’m nearly 40 years old, and feel like I’ve seen so much change, good and bad in my life. I am trying to get a frame of reference for what other groups of people have lived through as well, to gain perspective.
It’s a great question, and one historians and economists actually argue about. The honest answer depends on what “worse” means: physical danger and material deprivation, or economic trajectory and whether life turned out better than expected. Those two measures point to different cohorts.
The decade-by-decade picture (by birth decade)
| Born | Childhood | Young adulthood (roughly 18–30) | Midlife and later | Overall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1910s | Spanish flu, WWI, no antibiotics | Great Depression hits right as they enter the workforce (unemployment ~25% by 1933) | Many fought in WWII in their late 20s–30s, then rode the postwar boom into pensions and Medicare | Brutal first half, strong second half |
| 1920s | Depression poverty, malnutrition, Dust Bowl | Prime WWII combat age. Most of the ~405,000 U.S. war dead came from this and the prior cohort. Some went on to Korea | GI Bill, cheap housing, rising wages, defined-benefit pensions | Highest mortality risk of any cohort, then enormous reward |
| 1930s | Depression and wartime rationing, but a small cohort | Came of age in the 1950s boom with little competition for jobs. Demographers call them the “Lucky Few” | Peak prosperity, strong retirement | Arguably the best-positioned cohort of the century |
| 1940s | Postwar abundance, polio fear | Vietnam draft (~58,000 U.S. deaths), civil rights and assassination turmoil, but a hot job market | Housing and stock gains, pensions still common | Real danger for draftees, but an excellent economic arc |
| 1950s | Cold War, duck-and-cover | Entered a crowded labor market during 1970s stagflation, 1980–82 recessions, mortgage rates near 18%, AIDS crisis | Recovered well through 1990s–2000s asset growth | Underrated hard start, decent finish |
| 1960s | Divorce boom, latchkey childhoods | Early-80s recession, AIDS, crack epidemic, early-90s recession | 2008 hit near peak earning years. Pensions largely replaced by 401(k)s | Middling, with a lot of quiet risk shifted onto individuals |
| 1970s | Stagflation-era childhoods | Dot-com boom and bust | 2008 wiped out home equity in their 30s. Opioid crisis hit this cohort hard | Mixed, with deaths of despair a real mark |
| 1980s | Relatively stable 1990s | 9/11 as teens, two long wars, then graduated straight into the Great Recession with record student debt | COVID in their 30s, housing costs far outpacing wages | Materially comfortable, economically stalled for years |
| 1990s | Post-9/11 anxiety, recession teen years | COVID disrupted early careers, worst housing affordability in decades | TBD | Similar to the 1980s cohort, with some extra headwinds |
| 2000s | Smartphone-era adolescence, school shootings as a routine concern | COVID schooling disruption, sharp rise in youth anxiety and depression | TBD | Materially safe, psychologically strained |
So who had it worst?
By raw hardship, it’s those born roughly 1910–1925. They grew up hungry during the Depression. Their medicine had no antibiotics, and polio had no vaccine. Then the young men were sent to the deadliest war in American history. No later cohort comes close in the odds of dying young or going without food.
By economic trajectory and broken expectations, the case shifts to those born in the 1980s and 1990s. Economist Raj Chetty’s research found that about 90% of Americans born in 1940 ended up earning more than their parents. For those born in the mid-1980s, it was about 50%, a coin flip. Your cohort did everything it was told (school, college, work) and hit a financial crisis, stagnant wages, and housing prices that earlier generations never faced at the same age. You’re far safer than a 1920s kid, but the promise that effort leads to steady progress broke for you in a way it didn’t for them.
One more pattern stands out. The Depression and WWII cohorts had a terrible start and a very good second half: a long boom, pensions, cheap homes. Hard beginnings don’t lock in a hard life.
On the exhaustion
At your age, you’ve lived through 9/11, two decades of war, the 2008 collapse, a pandemic, and the fastest technological change in human history, from dial-up to AI. That’s a lot, and feeling worn down by it is a reasonable reaction.
One difference is worth naming. Earlier generations faced bigger physical dangers, but they mostly learned about crises through a morning paper and an evening broadcast. Your generation takes in every crisis everywhere, constantly, on a device in your pocket. Part of what makes today feel so heavy is that load of constant exposure, and it’s partly within your control in a way the Depression wasn’t for someone born in 1915.
The perspective the older generations offer isn’t “stop complaining, we had it worse.” It’s closer to this: people lived through enormous upheaval, still built good lives, and many of them saw their best years come after the hardest ones.