The Young and the Debtless

By CALVIN TRILLIN

I know a number of people in their 20s and 30s who are not multimillionaires. I know people that age who have no stock options whatsoever. Some of them, in fact, have no stock. Given all we read about 28-year-old Internet executives whose holdings were cut by recent stock dips to only about $40 million, or investment bankers who now feel they have a nest egg large enough to allow them to ease into retirement at 27, or 30-year-old writers who wandered onto the staff of the right sitcom while waiting for the first novel to jell and have now been able to purchase a small publishing house, I just thought I'd get that on the record.

I should also get on the record that the non-stock-optioned young people I know seem to be showing no signs of suffering mightily from the new disease that I've been reading about--"millionaire angst," a condition that can apparently disable an otherwise healthy and prosperous 28-year-old who, while stripping paint from what ought to be a perfectly adequate starter house, can't keep himself from dwelling on the fact that a contemporary of his in Silicon Valley is starting with a house that costs $9 million.

I wouldn't be willing to say for certain, though, that the sudden prominence of so many peach-fuzz millionaires has not raised the angst quotient among the parents of my younger friends. Twenty years ago, baby boomers were written about as if every one of them had as a life goal making enough money to accumulate the same superfluous material objects that everyone else had. Now that those boomers are feeling an occasional twinge in the lower back as they take that big step up into the driver's seat of the sport-utility vehicles they worked so hard to acquire, along comes another generation known not for wanting to be rich but for having suddenly become rich--seemingly without working very hard, or at least very long. That has to sting.

I suppose some of the sting is taken out of it if your own kid is the one who has suddenly become unspeakably wealthy. Even then, there must be something disorienting about having to answer, when an old friend asks how little Ethan is getting along in his first job, "Well, he doesn't tell us much--you know how boys that age are--but the last issue of Forbes said he's worth $2 billion."

If it's not your own kid, there is a temptation for more mature citizens to view great wealth at an early age as contrary to the laws of nature. Did God really mean for someone to have a private jet and a flat abdomen at the same time? Isn't one supposed to compensate for the absence of the other? On a related subject, how old should a trophy wife be if the fabulously successful businessman who feels the need of a trophy is only 27 years old himself?

I'm afraid I see all this as a further cause of generational tension. If middle-aged citizens who are puffing up a hill on their bicycles find themselves passed with embarrassing ease by some 25-year-old who tosses off a "Hi ya, Pops," they have yet another way to express their irritation. "If you're so young," they can shout after him, "why aren't you rich?"