Millennial women were told to chase our dreams. That's left us burnt out, broke and dreaming of a rich patron

The Guardian

5 days ago

A couple of weeks ago, I came across an Amy Poehler joke in which she sums up the different generational experiences of money: 'Boomers are all about money. Gen X is like: 'Is it all about money?' Millennials ask: 'Where is the money?' And gen Z is like: 'What is money?''
It made me laugh – but it also hit a nerve. It felt painfully accurate and oddly comforting. Maybe it's not just me. I'm a millennial, and financial insecurity has been a theme in my life for a while. But recently, it's grown louder, and I literally can't stop asking: 'WHERE IS THE GODDAMN MONEY?'
I used to ask nicely. After all, I was raised to be a grateful, polite millennial – the kind who believed that magic always happens outside your comfort zone and therefore did unpaid internships in her 20s and sent thank-you emails after being underpaid. But no more. Hence the capital letters. I'm raging.
Maybe it's because I'm approaching 40. Maybe it's because I keep comparing myself with my parents, who by this age had two kids, a car, a house, a garden and three holidays a year.
I'm not just raging. After 15 years of working non-stop, I'm exhausted. And there are days when I ask myself: is it really meant to be this way – or am I just failing? Am I simply not grownup enough when it comes to money?
I know the answer isn't that simple – or that harsh. Because usually, after days spent examining my shortcomings, I also think: no, this can't just be personal failure. Maybe the odds were never in my favour.
Millennial women like myself were told to work hard and follow our passion. Because if you work hard and find something you're good at, it'll pay off. It doesn't, though. The path I've chosen – creative, independent – offers very little in the way of long-term security and when I look around, a pattern emerges.
Over dinner recently with three friends – two men and one woman, all about my age – we started talking about money worries. The woman, a talented sculptor, said she had been feeling deeply anxious. She thought it was partly hormones, but more than that, it was existential. She was considering retraining, maybe going into teaching – anything to build a more stable life. At one point, she turned to me and asked: 'How do you do it?' I said: 'I juggle three things at once.'
Meanwhile, the two men nodded sympathetically. They work in the arts – but both have full-time jobs and permanent contracts. One just bought a plot of land. The other has tenure. The women are freelancers. The men are secure. Is it our fault? Couldn't we just do what they did?
I don't think so. Our economic system doesn't just undervalue women's work. It depends on it. It relies on our flexibility, our unpaid labour, our creative output, our willingness to 'make it work'. It assumes women will absorb the risk, subsidise culture and care with their own time, energy and savings. In creative industries, this is especially stark: women are expected to be grateful to be there at all. To work 'for exposure', for the opportunity – not the paycheque. And that gratitude has kept us quiet, compliant – and broke.
This is no accident – it's systemic. In Germany, women across all age groups earn less, save less and live longer. If you're single and self-employed, you're automatically walking a financial tightrope with no net and you'll likely belong to the 70% of working women today who are at risk of poverty in old age. (Recent data from the German Federal Statistical Office reports that the gender gap in retirement income amounts to 29.9%.)
I can't believe I'm saying this out loud, but it feels like the only safety net is a rich spouse.
When I told my friend a few days ago that I prefer dating artists, she threw up her hands: 'No! You need to find a hedge fund manager!' I thought of that meme – 'I'm looking for a man in finance' – and rolled my eyes. But she wasn't wrong. A wealthy and steady partner is the most reliable pension plan for many women.
I don't want a husband, though. What I secretly long for is a patron. The 18th-century kind. Someone who says: 'I believe in your work. Go write. Don't worry about anything.' Or, more realistically: universal basic income. And a proper educational system for the next generation of women. One that teaches them how to handle money, so they don't fall into the same trap.
Seriously: can someone explain to me why we didn't learn about compound interest, mortgages, tax brackets and pensions in school? Isn't financial literacy a basic part of education, if the goal is to raise well-equipped adults?
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I've worked my heart out for more than a decade. I've built a body of work I'm proud of. And yet, I still get nervous opening my banking app. Still avoid deep financial talk. Still don't fully understand the German tax system.
I fell for the silly belief that talking about money is obscene.
Sometimes I want to slap myself for not having made smarter choices. For not having planned, protected myself by investing or talking to experts. Instead, I kept dreaming about a life filled with interesting encounters, stories, intellectually stimulating conversations.
And honestly, there's still a part of me that cherishes that softness. To be a European millennial now – in our late 30s – means witnessing the erosion of the ideals we grew up with, yet still holding on to something tender. Maybe naive. Maybe vital. We were promised a lot and trained for little. And perhaps this vulnerability – this capacity to imagine a different, less materialistic world – is not only a weakness. It might be a strength, of a playful sort.
In Istanbul, my current place of residence, people buy gold. I own some gold jewellery – some pieces were gifts, others inherited. I don't like most of them and rarely wear them. But with gold prices soaring, I've been looking at them differently. Gold is finite, after all, which means it keeps its value. Unlike stocks.
My plan: take these items to a friend in the Grand Bazaar who deals in gold. There's something almost magical about the idea of turning my few rings and necklaces into gold plaques – a quiet stash I can cash in quickly, to be kept in a velvet pouch that would look like a fairytale treasure chest. A reminder of how much I'm still clinging to a world of fantasy.
And maybe that's the whole trick. Keep going. Keep improvising. Because our boomer parents told us to follow our passion. And now? We're melting down our jewellery.
Carolin Würfel is a writer, screenwriter and journalist who lives in Berlin and Istanbul. She is the author of Three Women Dreamed of Socialism