Fleck wrote:
My pet theory on this is related to socio-economics.
Running, and triathlon and cycling pull heavily from the upper-middle class.
The population of those making this kind of money or in this upper-middle class group is not growing in North America. In fact, it may be shrinking.
That's why the millennials are key in all this, but the news on them in this thread, and what they are into, is NOT encouraging.
the missing link here is, millennials have
no money and
not much hope of
ever getting any - high expense sports like tri aren't possible for them.
Lower wages, student debt, jobs without benefits, and poverty account for 99% of what rich old people find strange about millennials.
My oldest boy is a millennial, he is smart, ambitious and works way harder than I ever had to as a teenager or young man. His friends are all like him, they have been working hard and long hours since 9th grade to try and qualify in the college lottery, now working long and hard hours at college and summer jobs to try to qualify for the postgrad lottery that is what college used to be. I can no longer afford my house in Denver so he has no hope of being able to buy a house here. My nieces and nephews in Australia cannot ever hope to afford houses in Perth, except by inheritance. They are engineers, Phd in microbiology, etc etc - worked hard, played by the rules, got shafted.
Sunday at church, was talking to a new engineer, had to work a year as an unpaid intern before he found a job. He's living at home now while paying off student debt. This is an engineer, supposedly one of the STEM winners in the new economy.
My younger boy is not quite a millennial, but he is a committed socialist, as he can quite easily see that capitalism
has failed.
"What’s their experience been with capitalism? They have had two recessions, one really bad one. They have a mountain of student-loan debt. They’ve got really high health-care costs, and their job prospects are mediocre at best. So that’s capitalism for you.”
It's very difficult to argue him out of this, since he is basically right. We don't have a millennial problem, we have a failed economy problem..
"It is a good feeling for old men who have begun to fear failure, any sort of failure, to set a schedule for exercise and stick to it. If an aging man can run a distance of three miles, for instance, he knows that whatever his other failures may be, he is not completely wasted away." Romain Gary, SI interview