Take whatever job you can get.
Humble yourself and move back in with your parents.
Stop buying things on credit you can’t afford. Delete your Klarna.

This is the type of content making the rounds on social media. In a dystopian turn, TikTok’s latest viral trend is … Millennials giving advice to Gen Z on how to survive a recession. The generation that entered the workforce during the 2008 crisis is now sharing tips for eking out an existence during the next downturn.

According to one of these Millennial “content creators,” Gen Z’s videos on the platform show them as feeling “downtrodden, frustrated, very bleak and hopeless about the future.” And they’re right to be. As two of them aptly put it:

im never gonna be able to retire or afford groceries or even buy a house
living thru a horribly mishandled pandemic and now 2 recessions in my lifetime?? at only 23??

Young people today have no memory of anything resembling an “American dream.” They know only grinding economic and political chaos, inflation, pandemics, wars, mass shootings, and mental health crises. Nearly 1 in 4 young people say they won’t have kids due to their financial situation. And things have gotten worse for each passing generation: those in their early 20s earn less, have more debt, and see higher delinquency rates than Millennials did at their age.

Faced with the hard realities of capitalism’s senile decay, the advice given is defeatist because it assumes capitalism is the only possible alternative: Start “bartering” and “making alliances” with your friends for access to Netflix. If your apartment is too small to buy groceries in bulk—split them with neighbors.

Still, that’s better than the advice you’ll get from “experts.” A professor at Georgetown University’s School of Business chimed in to say: “It may be a good time to self-reflect if you have enough emergency savings.” We can safely assume that young workers are fully aware that “self-reflection” will not result in a higher account balance.

However, as one TikTok user explained, it’s not a simple “generational” question—it is fundamentally a class question. “Gen Z are living 2 vastly different experiences: the ones who are struggling and broke, and the ones who are on yachts and planes and Coachella … The reality of the situation is, the vast majority of us are struggling.”

The truth is that there is no real way out of this humiliating existence under capitalism. Once the struggling-to-make-ends-meet majority unites, we can transform society and end the exploitation by the parasites at the top. Penny-pinching is no substitute for expropriating the billionaires!