Why Gen-Z Is Rethinking Financial Literacy And The Value Of Work

Last week's column about entitlement leads in well to this week. Much as not looking beyond the short-term in our professional lives when it comes to employee trust or hard-work and wanting to be paid well up front, our personal spending is some of the worst.

Gen-Z spend, they save, and they invest, and not on a much wider scale than previous generations even as things like stocks have become more accessible and the bar for entry lowered with digital credit card companies becoming more accessible than ever. The difference for us is that many of these more accessible apps are all we can hope to join.

For example, real high-stakes investing or simply working in that industry is not easy or accessible to everyone just by nature of where the great financial centres of the world are located. But for just half a week's pay you can put a little money on this or that token or stablecoin or get a dopamine hit by downloading an app that will let you win just long enough to hook you into thinking you'll win again.

Where did this come from? The data points at small business growth and entrepreneurship. Mass media was the cause, showing us the bang and bust of the market like a game played by the cunning and not someone simply in the middle of the pyramid with foundations in imperialism and its capstone as number on a computer screen so large that you could not conceive that there is such wealth in the world at the same time as famine. Not human-caused like in Gaza, but“we can't pay for wheat after crops failed due to climate change and desertification”.

People want to climb the pyramid though, and it makes you feel good to see the number go up and, in your core, believe you are special and talented for that improvement to the number. But in using these apps, whether to gamble or order food in, you are losing out on connection, because it is all just you and the phone.

But in discussing financial literacy today, it is so much bigger than just credit cards and budgeting, because me and my sister and parents, and all my classmates and their parents, and everyone just my age with masters degrees around the world and their parents, all having nice and comfortable six-figure USD salaries while raising our children to believe in the same? I don't mean to cry Star Trek, but the oil will run out. There is value in entrepreneurship and ideation, but the pace of things will not be able to keep up and, eventually, it will come to improving the material conditions of the bottommost rung of society rather than enriching the top. Financial literacy to Gen Z means understanding your place in that system and not making the mistakes that make it harder to do your life.

Because the lesson of both of these columns is that your professional life is not your life, it's just work. Life is love, funerals, birthdays and bringing your friends soup when they're sick even though it's flu season. Life is not money, numbers on a screen or credit ratings, and even if we have to live and even thrive inside this system, and work to improve it from within or build something better, it's not everything.

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