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To both Boomers who ridicule the phrase "adulting is hard" while Scrooge McDucking into their pool of money and the Millennials who have adopted it as a reality while laughing ironically: hello. Here is my brief seminar, Adulting is Hard: 101.
It's not us, Millennials. Adulting IS hard. The Boomers aren't measuring us against the same rulers they use for themselves, and we don't need to take that shit.
1. Minimum wage hasn’t been raised in a decade.
2. It’s almost impossible to support a family on a single income, but it’s almost impossible to run a household while both parents work.
3. Societal pressures demand a clean house, home-cooked meals, and parent-raised children, all based on gender roles and heteronormativity that keep women at home to perform unpaid labor
4. Child care costs more than a mortgage (not that many of us have a mortgage).
5. We were raised to think we would be failures if we didn’t go to college, but our parents wouldn’t pay for college because they worked for it, so you can too.
6. Never mind that college costs have outpaced inflation by over 1005; we were led to believe our college debt would be worth it when we started getting awesome paychecks
7. ...but we entered the workforce at the same time the Great Recession started.
8. IF we could get an entry-level job without having experience.
9. Congrats, you got a job! But it's part-time, so you can't have healthcare. Got three part-time jobs? None of them will give you healthcare.
10. People born in the 80s would have 34% more money now if the Great Recession hadn’t occurred.
11. Millennials’ average salaries are 20% lower than Boomers’ in adjusted dollars.
12. The net wealth of Millennials is only half of what Boomers had at the same age.
13. On average, Boomers have 12 times the net worth of Millennials; when they were our age, their parents’ generation had only 7 times the net worth. Boomers are basically twice as rich as their parents were, and we are half as rich as them.
14. Pensions basically don’t exist anymore; 401(k)s are voluntary and not offered to PT employees; we can’t afford houses so we can’t build equity; we saw what happened to stocks in the Great Recession; the Social Security trust fund is going to run dry by 2035
15. So we can pretty much never retire...and our life expectancy is 10 years longer than Boomers.
16. Well, if we can live that long, what with not having universal healthcare while we face more chronic illness and higher early mortality rates than previous generations in recent history. 
17. Most of the food available to us is laden with addictive, harmful substances because of farm subsidies that *we pay for*, putting us on the path to obesity and diabetes and heart disease...
18. ...while we have to find time to *add* exercise to our already-packed lives because we are increasingly sedentary due to the growth of knowledge work and technology in general, and our commutes to work are longer than ever
19. What else? We’re faced with the morality of whether to have children while we’re impotent in the face of climate change, while being pressured from our parents who want to be grandparents, but who will not live long enough to see their grandchildren’s struggles
20. Black people ask not to be killed, women ask not to be raped, gay people ask to get married, and all of us are met with viscerally angry counter-movements
21. One of the parties in our idiotic two-party political system has ratfucked voters into virtual irrelevance across most of the country.
22. We’re expected to be the ones to stop polluting the planet with plastic, but y’all Graduate motherfuckers won’t stop putting things in plastic
23. We’re expected to be the ones to stop polluting the planet with carbon emissions, but you won’t put in bike lanes or improve transit...
24. ... and 71% of emissions come from just 100 companies anyhow.
25. Our grandparents were part of a generation that dealt with undiagnosed PTSD by drinking heavily and abusing their children. Their children—our parents—passed on the abuse...
...through beating (disguised as spanking), emotional abuse (disguised as making us tough), and neglect (disguised as “free-range” parenting)
26. But we’re snowflakes for championing therapy, deriding toxic masculinity, refusing to hit our children, and fighting rape culture.
27. Our parents gave us participation trophies then ridiculed us for having received participation trophies.
28. And, finally (--for this list, at least, which is absolutely not exhaustive--), NAZIS ARE BACK AND
So, yes, Millennials: Adulting IS hard. It's not your imagination. And you're doing amazing, sweeties, given all these fucked circumstances.
And yes, Boomers: Adulting IS hard--now. You aren't entirely to blame, but you don't exactly seem in a hurry to do anything about it.
We're begging you to prove us wrong.
