delayed gratification

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]As a Gen Z American, here's my two cents on the take that our generation can't handle delayed gratification. We've watched the promise of delayed gratification, fail Gen X and millennials repeatedly in real time because we've had access to the internet since childhood. In elementary and middle school, I watched in real time on TV and online as Gen X had their entire life savings wiped out by the 2008 2009 depression. And as a teenager and college kid, I see millennials get absolutely shafted by jobs and degrees that when impromising them stable lives and then repeatedly rip the rug out from under them, leaving millennials with no solid career progression or economic betterment to show after over a decade of consistent effort, even outside of the internet. I watched my grandfather, who was a computer programmer at IBM in the 60s, have his pension retroactively canled after being a pensioner for decades. And I watched this man in his 80s who's had two heart attacks have to go back to work four days of the week as an Uber driver to make ends meet after he spent three decades of his life in a high paid office job that promised him healthcare and pension in the entire American dream.