Natural Wine, Inherited Money, and the Delusions of the “Future-Rich Millennial”
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Current generations were sold on the promise that you can be what you want. That you have the right (and almost the duty) to follow your passion. In reality the game is rigged. The article points this out correctly, in my opinion, and conveys the bitterness that comes from unveiling this illusion.
Among the writers and curators in my social circles (I would add artists, musicians, actors, …), there is a tacit agreement that if you want to pursue such careers, you have to (1) come from wealth, (2) marry a banker, (3) live frugally. I perceive some sense of happiness, or at least peace with oneself, mostly from the ones falling under option (3), even if they have by far the toughest lives.
Of course, there's always the promise of (4) become tremendously successful, but I don't know anyone who made it. And (5) give up and perform a job that people are willing to pay real money for.
Personally, I support high inheritance taxes to balance things out a bit. I think it's healthier for everyone. Those trust fund kids are in a permanent struggle to live up to unrealistic expectations and I'm not sure that's so great.
As for the natural wines detour, it feels quite weird for me. I don't see how they're much different from craft beer in 2005 or nutmeg in the 1500s. There are perfectly good wines for under 5€, drink that instead. If your friends are looking down on you for that, find new friends, seriously.
The case against #1 is that no inheritance tax unless absurdly comprehensive could capture many pre-inheritance benefits. The article explicitly notes how some postpone accepting their inheritance as a form of virtue signaling. The very fact this can be done shows that wealth is being passed down prior to any taxable event.
The difference it will make is so small you probably couldn't measure it. All that would happen is that it would apply to a handful of people each year who die very suddenly. The rich who grow old would simply transfer everything to their children before they die.
Even worse, this opens up a ton of loopholes that would only be exploitable by the very rich[1], leaving the middle-class paying the largest amount of taxes (again). Nailing down all the special exceptions in the inheritance tax code will probably cost more than you'd receive in inheritance taxes.
Taxing people simply because "they didn't work for it" is just another puritanical way of trying to punish people who were luckier than others. Doing it via inheritance taxes is especially puritanical, because it makes a mockery of fundamental property laws as well.
You may as well just proclaim "to each according to his need". At least that's an honest statement about the intentions behind the tax.
[1] Trust funds are already one of the ways to dodge inheritance taxes, as the "fund" doesn't necessarily hold cash. For example it could be holding shares in a private company that pays dividends. While tax authorities can liquidate any shares held in a public exchange to settle the taxes, they can't do the same with shares held in private companies[2].
[2] This is because there may be no willing seller at the price being asked. If high inheritance taxes becomes the norm, you can bet that every shareholder in a private company is going to regard a tax authorities need to sell the shares as a jackpot day, and buy accordingly for pennies on the dollar, at which point the taxes on the proceeds are going to be close to nothing anyway, and may not even be owed anymore.
If you are a writer/artist/etc then likely your circle of friends will be disproportionately people with at least some safety net from home. That doesn’t mean it reflect all of societ
This sounds strange from a Finnish perspective. Fields with a clear professional identity and good career prospects are highly competitive, and it takes more than just being academically strong to get to study them. At least in my time, students of fields such as law and medicine were far more likely to come from wealthy high-status families with educated parents than those in more academic fields such as CS and history.
I used to know someone who joked he was the only leftist law student in his class of ~200. Leftist medical students were more common, but both fields were strongly associated with right-wing politics.
You might suggest that all that money will cause people to produce more stuff - but whatever we produce comes instead of producing something else. We don’t have a large pool of non-workers that would suddenly become productive.
Giving poor and middle class people a bunch more money will simply drive inflation, empty shelves and lower quality overall. Which is exactly what we got with COVID related assistance.
"What about the, say 19 percent of Americans in the upper-class income tier": who seriously thinks that 19% of Americans are upper-class? She's confusing the upper quintile with upper class.
"The world’s future landlords, multinational business owners, CEOs and media executives": one category here isn't like the others. Landlords (of which there are 8 million in the US) really have nothing in common with multinational business owners.
At least in the nordic countries you can pursue whatever passion you have while still living comfortably and compromising very little, even if you have nothing to your name.
Literally any peoples around the Earth can do it, if they really want to.
That feeling of "really want to" is enshrined in the Finnish language as "sisu", "described as stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardiness."
I personally have a lot of friends to who fit this description to a T - they will complain about living paycheck to paycheck but then also tell you which island in Hawaii is their favorite. And when you wonder why they are still turning down good paying jobs in their 30s you realize they eventually have a house and a sizable inheritance they are looking forward to one day.
Also, I think calling it roleplaying is a little misleading because it implies they could stop if they wanted to. You can have a gigantic parental safety net and still have no great job prospects. It’s infinitely better than actually being poor, but there’s enough overlap to commiserate I think? People want to be self sufficient and can’t.
- One was morally opposed to working at a software company
- One didn't want to get a drivers' license
- One started then quit after an internship because they didn't like the industry (it wasn't video games) and did not want to put up with a learning curve.
So while I commiserate who benefit from from a parental safety net (I would have loved to have had more rent-free years if I could), for my relationship with my friends it is often very frustrating. And it's easiest mentally if I treat them as someone enjoying the luxury of choices rather than chronically enfeebled.
There is a huge gap between someone who lives frugally and is under employed while the "figure it out" and someone who works two jobs because they must. The former will eventually have the problem solved via inheritance, while the latter must deal with the existential risk that they work two jobs until they die or become homeless.
Edit: It occurred to me that’s probably my fault from saying “enormous parental safety net” which maybe does imply trust fund kids. I really meant “people who have any parental support at all”, which seemed to be the net the author was casting. Even top quintile probably isn’t “financially support my children forever” money, is it?
In Boston, The value per bedroom to be ~300-600k dollars depending on location. This value is appreciating at ~8-20% per year in the current environment. If this trend were to continue for 30 years, a parent owning a 2-bedroom stands to impart 5 million+ to the child inheriting that property.
Obviously (hopefully), this trend can't continue - but having a free place to sleep is becoming a massive financial leg up. In many cases, this has become equivalent to the classic example of a "trust fund kid" from prior years. With most home owners earning money from their primary residence on paper for the last decade, simply providing the down payment for a child's home will yield a million dollar+ asset difference over 10 years compared to renting.
I think it’s important that young folks see this and internalize it so they’re not caught with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt in a field that ultimately depends on time and luck. You’re risking a lot more than many of your peers, and you’re going to have less freedom and energy to make it work.
More news at 11, thank you for attending my TED Talk.
> self made
The two concepts cannot coexist. Someone who is supported by others is not self-made.
Turning wealth into wealth is not an accomplishment. It was already there.
Is there a point in even having this word, if it is literally impossible for it to correctly(according to you) be used in any scenario?
I do think it's possible for a person to be self-made. But I think the much narrower concept of the "self-made American millionaire" does more harm than good, as a mythological idea in US politics.
Edit: Before you reply to this, read a little more of the thread I'm saying this in, where other people are making this point more eloquently.
What about someone that had neither, but due to the country they grew up in or the colour of their skin they have access to government funded incentive programs, or bank loans?
What if you benefited from colonialism hundreds of years ago, or the establishment of infrastucture such as roads or telephone lines? Are you self made?
This weird privilege check doesn't make much sense to me. The "self-made" test to me is "did you put in the work and do the grind?". That's it.
Where do you draw the line?
How is the work of doubling the wealth received as inheritance different from doubling the wealth of a client?
Any data on whether inherited or gifted assets have become a larger fraction of net worth than labor for most Americans? (Or Australians for that matter? I’m sure Hacker News is full of people who are living proof that social mobility through wages exists. I don’t know if it’s up or down, but am sure it has nothing to do with the author’s friends taste in wine.
Also, all the talk of “inheritance” is weird in the context of millennials. The average person will only inherit their parents in their fifties or sixties, and even then split it with one or more siblings.
Personally, it kinda grates on me. I'm very much a soft socialist, who believes in everybody paying their fair share of tax. I've also derived a lot of satisfaction over the years in becoming self-sufficient[1] and being able to pay my own way without them having to prop me up. But it's their money and they're free to do with it as they wish.
As it stands, I'm doing the privileged thing that the author mentions, and 'refusing' it: it's going in an investment account and I'll continue to live within the means that I earn myself. But I know that that still means that I'll never be afraid of having to live on the dole, or do a job that I utterly hate.
In any case, even without that money, as an ex-FAANG developer I'm still significantly more privileged than most of my peers: I don't have any debt, I own my (fairly cheap) home outright, and I own a (very cheap) car and motorbike, also outright. Amongst my friends, most of whom are renters working in precarious jobs, I just don't mention money.
[1] How does that work with the socialism? Well - I'm happy to take from the government, because everybody can get the same, and I've repaid that with taxes over the years.
Presumably there are (relatively) straight-forward solutions to this issue no? For instance; accept the money from your parents, invest it into an Index Fund without touching it, and when your parents do pass on, donate the inheritance to GiveDirectly or whatever charity you deem worthwhile.
Presumably, that's what the book The Asset Economy studies in detail, but unfortunately this essay only touches on it in broad strokes and does not serve as a review of it. Looks like here's one, though:
*I’m very sorry I’m not able to post the link, which despite looking for myself again recently, I cannot find.
This is, and has been, the truth since forever. There was never an era when you could get rich selling your back. Never. The best you could hope for was comfort. Anyone who says differently is glamorizing a past that they didn't live in.
Pretending that every boomer had a good union job is like pretending every millennial is a tech-bro with a six figure job and RSUs out of college. Younger boomers struggled. There was loads of social strife in the 70s as they came of age. They became adults in a world of massive inflation, war, and a general feeling of everything being awful.
That house they bought so cheap in the 80s came with a mortgage with double digit interest payments. That pension they had was probably gutted at several points by terrible business people. They faced challenges, much like we do. And they had their fair share of wealthy layabouts, much like we do.
[0] https://money.com/parents-adult-children-house-down-payments...
As an example, at around 10 years old or so, he sat me down every month to go through budgeting, paying the mortgage, etc. He showed me how to make basic models that showed the benefit of various length mortgages assuming certain house appreciation percentages per year, and showed me the danger and the benefit of leverage.
As an aside, he never finished high school and worked a skilled manual labor job that combined hands on mechanical and basic electrical engineering, and still can’t spell for shit.
Through him I met many people with similar backgrounds, which formed the basis for my worldview of “the trades” being a great option for smart people, college not being the only route, etc.
Mine are boomers. I've had assistance from them equivalent to probably $100,000 since turning 18 (I'm approaching 40). I have three siblings and I bet the total they've helped us all out amounts to something over $500,000 (some have received/needed a lot more help than me)
No down payment help for me. But they did buy me a house to live in for a couple years, once. (they broke even or made a little money on that one, but still, you'd have to reckon the value as at least what it'd have cost me to rent the same thing). And paid for my (very cheap) college tuition. Among lots of other things like a being gifted a hand-me-down car when I left the house.
My dad owned a couple barely-successful blue-collar small businesses when he was young, after growing up literally in a barn because their house was a cobbled-together four-room farmhouse in the middle of nowhere and didn't have enough space for all six of the kids, then had a blue-collar industrial job for 2ish decades and retired after making it into the lower tier of middle management for another decade or so. They briefly tried renting a house they bought and fixed up, but hated it and by the end had basically just paid to have a sub-minimum-wage job and a lot of stress, so that didn't help much (this is before house prices went insane, so the appreciation from owning that over the couple years they had it was minimal—I think it was the early 90s, and not a hot market).
That's all. Not a doctor or anything. My mom didn't work past about age 30, and worked in a low-level federal job before that. My dad even had a divorce in his background (a couple of my siblings are from that marriage).
It really, really was different for the boomers. I come from "privilege" but all they did to get me/us there was just live a totally mundane, middling life, and didn't colossally fuck up.
[EDIT] Oh, and their educations are "high school diploma" (dad) and "junior college secretarial certificate" (mom)
It was really, really, really different for that generation.
When you have a lot of 0s in data the average can be misleading.
Why does she not consider managing investments work?
> What about the, say 19 percent of Americans in the upper-class income tier, who will defend their right to be landlords, to increase their unearned wealth through their investments?
It's not as if inherited wealth, greenwashing, landlords, or conspicuous consumption were just invented within the last couple years by older Millennials with inherited wealth.
Similarly,
> As the growth limits of free-market economies are approached, the logic of late-stage capitalism dictates that new markets must be identified and aggressively pursued.
Identifying new markets isn't "late-stage" capitalism... It's just capitalism, period. Many people also believe that capitalism inherently leads to wealth inequality unless efforts are taken to stop that.
This whole article seems to be implying that the situation is some sort of moral failing of people who drink "natural wine" but if there's a problem here it's the underlying inequality, not the choice of wealthy people to spend money on veblen goods?
The trick is that the article isn't about anything, really. There might have been a smattering of true facts in there, but the authors profession is getting paid to paint generational stereotypes and then talk shit about them.
> The trend is now in full swing worldwide, and in my area, you can order a “natty” at most good small bars and many larger establishments.
It’s not the item, it’s the culture around it. I understand the Australian predilection for shortening words but this makes my skin crawl. But responding to your statement:
> Many people also believe that capitalism inherently leads to wealth inequality unless efforts are taken to stop that.
Because there’s a lot of evidence to support that. I can grab you some references if you like.
Also, "late-stage capitalism" was first identified... 120 years ago. If it's late stage, it's lasting an awful long time.
The reality is this is happening everywhere - how have we not run out of movies or music or books or ideas? New genres must be identified and aggressively pursued - and yet we are dealing with growth limits there as well. If late-stage capitalism is a thing, I would argue we are more in a late stage society.
While maybe "late-stage" is a newish term, of course the idea itself isn't. Why might we credibly think that what's happening now is really "late-stage" as compared to, e.g. the industrial revolution?
I think you can make a case for it. You can make a case against it as well, but that leaves you arguing essentially "it's been just as bad for a long time, so there's nothing special about now". And at that point, it's a semantic quibble and you've nearly bought into the idea behind the phrase, which is "maybe something is going to have to change".
Or alternatively, capitalism is gamed by legislation passed by the government, written by lobbyists, to ensure corporate cash cows are never troubled. Medical, pharmaceutical, insurance, banking industries are good examples. That's not really capitalism.
As is "buying people" and "paying someone to make the dead hooker go away and not be a problem"
One of the core ideas of a constitutional republic is that there are fundamental rights and laws that are not for sale. As such "efforts are taken" to prevent the worst that pure unrestrained capitalism could do.
Same goes for wealth inequality. Collecting taxes to finance schools available for free to those who could not pay for a school out of their own livelihood is "not really capitalism" and yet it is one of the key elements of social upwards mobility.
And yes unrestrained capitalism is creating more inequality. A core concept of a capitalist-social-democratic-republic is that workers can unionize to have more power in wage negotiations. In a pure capitalist society a factory owner would consider paying mercenaries to shoot the union leaders and beat up anyone willing to protest the conditions. That happened a lot in the last two centuries.
That's exactly capitalism: the system that emerged as the mercantile class leveraged their growing influence to wrest control of government from the titled aristocracy to themselves, and organized it to suit their ends as a class.
(It's not the utopian vision created to justify capitalism after critics identified “capitalism“ as a thing and started attacking it, but...that vision was always a lie to keep the working classes in line and believing that the dominion exercised over them was fair.)
Natural wine is one example, a more topical one is the entire 'crypto-industry'. Which isn't really an industry because nothing industrial is going on. There's not really any employment, productive work or goods produced as much as it is one big desperate attempt to get your foot into ownership schemes of various sorts.
'Economic activity' in that realm primarily consists of shoveling symbolic value from one purse into the other without producing or consuming anything of actual use value.
If you believe Piketty, this was true for most of human history, and the high value of labor was just a temporary blip from industrialization.
It's not really any better or worse. People are excited about it now because the power structures aren't so entrenched yet. It looks like a chance to re-write the same history, but with yourself and your friends on the New Wall Street by dint of your cleverness and honest (ok, maybe not honest, but ) work... two things which no longer get you anywhere in the traditional finance sector.
I can't in good-faith argue very strongly _for_ crypto, but I can't argue against it either.
So wine is a great equalizer. Rich dumb people are paying a lot of money to be stupider. Literally.
So don't play that game. Don't buy wine, don't buy expensive traditional watches (my 25USD Decathlon watch has time,date,alarm,chrono, light and the battery last 5+ years).
Do buy property and assets. Buy ETFs and invest wisely. The people splashing their money are headed down. You are meeting them in the middle because you are headed up. Don't follow them downstairs. Avoid the decadence of dumb people inheriting wealth and thinking that's the way to go.
Also, you never know when life will end - got to enjoy it while you have it.
I did and I do, I lived in 15 countries 6 months each while nomading and founding my company for 10 years. I've already had more adventures than the vast majority of people ever will. After some crazy 20ies I'm now having some serious 30s. Raising 2 kids and working hard on my boostrapped company. I'm setting the stage for another round of wild achievements.
> unwearable number of watches
The thinks I want can't be bought. They can be made with a huge amount of money and work. I would never be satisfied in buying a great object, I would rather make a mediocre one I made myself. Some people want watches and wine, some people want to go to Mars, to populate the oceans, dig tunnels, build awesome stuff, fix an illness for all humanity and generations to come. I'm sure you and most hacker news are closer to 2nd group.
This is hyperbole. There is a wide world of difference between someone who enjoys a 6 pack a week and the alcoholic who downs a fifth of whiskey a day. Alcohol's ill effects are a J-Shaped curve that increase exponentially after 20 drinks a week, but that's a lot of booze. One can consume in moderation with almost no consequence.
> the logic of late-stage capitalism dictates that new markets must be identified and aggressively pursued. With natural wine, a win-win situation emerges. The drinkers get the social capital, and the liquor industry gets the actual capital.
In reality, the natural wine world is full of enthusiastic independent makers who are challenging the dominance of the old chateaux, and getting people as excited about $30 bottles as the previous generation was about $300 or $3000 bottles. Visit a natural wine fair, and you’ll find one-man operations making interesting wine that can compete again the big wineries.
But if the upbringing was that good it should maybe net a better education.
My hypothetical friend was complaining that he will only inherit $5M from his parents, because they made some bad investments, when he should really be getting $15M.
Does no one have a right to tell that person to stop complaining and accept what they have? After all, how does it help my hypothetical friend that some people happen to be struggling more than he is?
Our poorest people are also our fattest, so it isn't food.
Less than .2% of our population is homeless, so it isn't shelter. And there are state and privately run shelters for those .2%.
Health care is state-provided and free if you have too low of an income, so it isn't health care.
So...what is it exactly?
My thoughts on this: its kind of self-fulfilling by the culture.
Although I was raised to rely on my own earnings for everything, some of my parent's colleagues quipped that some of my accomplishments and risks I took were because I could fall back on my parents. My parents were insulted, I was insulted .... at the time. Were my 13 hour days and multiple jobs and barely making rent after barely finishing a college degree irrelevant!? But then I started to wonder if subconsciously it was true. Or what other forms of privilege I was enjoying. What I found was that the support system while I was in grade school and college was very important, and the lack of some distractions is important, but I still found that I had to play the cards I was dealt very meticulously, I was relying completely on my own acumen and finances - at the time.
Where this introspection did lead me though, was that I wasn't taking enough risk because they were correct, my parents would support me. So I took on more risk because "the proletariat" forced that perception on me and there's
A) No point in bragging about having no support from parents.
B) No point in wasting time being poor for the bragging rights. We are not the same no matter what.
My parents were familiar with corporate America and a career like that. I did that and I was good at that. But as I had begun noticing what a "friends and family" round was, and all these startup founders had their seed rounds filled by their parents, I noticed the complete cultural difference between the other side of society that says "don't take money from family" because of the idea that it will ruin all relationships. No, turns out when the covenants are clear, like with equity, as opposed to a promissory note, people are willing to be professional about it. So I did the same. Something I wouldn't have done, and made money on that, and took the difference as described in the contract. It wasn't all uphill, it was dangerous and scary and sometimes a loosing bet. But there was enough resources to do it again if necessary. I wouldn't have ever even tested the limits of my parents willingness to support. But now I can more clearly see other groups of people who have actual generational wealth based around this. Based around asking for millions of dollars of support into their new hedge fund, from their parents or community. The legal trusts that unlock as different rites of passage are hit, correlated with age. Something previously unrelatable, but now I see it. And I wouldn't have noticed if salty people didn't force their differences on me.
I feel like others have reached similar conclusions. That its gotten kind of boring pretending that "I got a good deal on rent" in that expensive area. Not everyone is rent controlled and good deal meant market price. The paths diverge, just own it.
If you have a card to play that helps your goals, then play it.
The trust fund kid that has a successful startup they didn't need to save up for could just as easily been an ambitionless person, perhaps even distracted by vices.
So its all about playing the cards you were dealt. I respect that, no matter what the cards are now.
I think the push to “recognize privilege” actually accelerates people to double down on it. Like oh we’re not pretending anymore, then lets make this gulf as wide as it can go.
We have 3 kids, and eventually I want them to be able to take the financial risks we can't. I'd like to see how high they can fly when they've got what they need. I think all parents want that for their kids, even if it's not fashionable to say so.
Privilege is a tool that can be used to minimize or maximize inequality. If you have privilege, you can (and arguably should) use it to pull others up, rather than pulling up the ladder behind you, so to speak.
You can do this by running or working for successful companies that provide valuable, dignifying services and employ thousands of people to give them a pathway out of poverty, without making yourself obscenely rich and "widening the gulf".
The “argument” or observation was “Society says I should recognize my privilege, and holy moly I was not leveraging that nearly enough!”
There is no guilt associated with that. It was about seeing if anybody could relate, since it isn’t talked about enough but the article was about how some people stopped pretending.
I’m totally down with normalizing that. Pretending was insufferable to the people that had wealth and a safety net, it was insufferable to the people that could tell there was a difference in the struggles.
Lever tf up, is my argument.
This is something I want to drum from the rooftops - the political effects of a handful of billionaires is vastly overrated compared to the sheer number of "merely" wealthy people. Your local zoning issues aren't because Jeff Bezos has taken a personal interest in destroying the lives of poor people in your neighborhood, it's because there are enough doctors and lawyers and children of doctors and lawyers acting selfishly to protect their investments.
In this regard, I wish more people would read Progress and Poverty. The book is a lightning flash of clarity. Especially in the last decade, it has become shockingly prescient.
It gets a bit heady near the end when it diverges into politics and philosophy, but the economic observations are on point.
In feudal times it was between the aristocracy and the peasantry, now it's between business owners and investors, and employees.
> Millennials are the first to live through an era in which asset ownership matters more than income and job mobility.
In the US I will add that this is a predictable outcome on intentional changes in patterns of wealth capture which began c. 1970 and accelerated in several stages thereafter via the feedback systems between wealth accumulation, and political and media capture.
TL;DR: in the US almost all real wealth gains have since 1970 gone to the upper few percent of wealth holders; the "19%" mentioned in the article refers primarily to what I call the "halo class" or DMZ of the uber-wealthy, which others have called the precariate: those wealthy enough to enjoy the trappings of what was in the 70s an upper-middle class income/wealth, but is now a precarious prerogative today. It is arguably the function of this precariate class to defend wealth recovery by lower tiers, out of fear of falling into them, regardless that the main impact of this is to prevent wealth recovery from the very few who have captured almost all of it.
These btw are not opinions and the data is no way controversial, editorialization such as attribution of anxiety and behavior to the upper 10-20% aside. This is well-known, richly documented, easy to prove, etc.,
yet almost entirely undiscussed in mainstream media including allegedly nonpartisan outlets like NPR whose intended function (at least on paper) was to serve public interest.
I will assert that this is directly related to the capture of media and government by extreme wealth.
--
Why mention this? Because it is reversible; and reversing it is IMO a mandatory step if we seek not just to preserve social coherence and democracy in the US (and West),
but also as a precondition for taking meaningful collective action wrt climate change.
Prediction: we won't do either; and my children will live to see an almost unimaginably more brutal and ugly world than the one I was myself promised.
No thanks.
While the author might not look at it the same way, it's absolutely parental support that some of my former friends who are nearing (or into) their 40s are able to still live at home (which might be a trailer) with their parents in a small Midwest town and play video games all day while working a minimum wage job. One former friend was one of the most capable developers I've ever known, did tons of open source work, but just doesn't want to work in the industry and instead has worked fast food jobs for the nearly 25 years I've known them, while I was earning a six figure income that entire time working in tech with less skills.
Through some of my other personal connections, I know plenty of people in the art world as well, and pretty much all of them fall into one of four categories (1) inherited wealth [the focus of her article], (2) married well, (3) struggling working for mostly non-profits at mid-level or lower roles, or (4) art became a hobby while they went into a "real" job. The folks in (1) make up a tiny tiny tiny fraction of the people I've met in the art world, but a significant portion of those who make art their "career". I think this, to some degree or another, has always been the case. While this may be a shocking reality to stumble upon in your 30s, I'd suggest this means you haven't really been paying attention, rather than the world is an unjust and unfair place and all extant systems should be torn down.
As a Millennial, my observations and experiences have strongly supported a conclusion that life is mostly what you make of it. All but a handful of the people I call friends now came from very modest beginnings, myself included, mostly from small towns in the Midwest, with no special treatment to speak of in their education, yet all managed to build successful professional careers in technology by focusing on the right motivations and making the right choices for their goals. Most of the folks I know in arts in category (3) above love their position in life, because they get to do what they're passionate about every day, but they're also not under any illusion that they'll ever make as much money as the people who pursued high-demand professional careers. I don't know what it is about the author and many of the folks who end up in (2) or (4) above, but they almost always feel like life is unfair because they wanted to have the lifestyle of (1) or somebody in a professional career, while not doing the things necessary to earn it.
Thems the breaks, life's not fair, but it's not /that/ hard to figure out either. If you're figuring this out in your 30s, it's not ideal, but it's also not too late to make different choices now. It starts with accepting accountability for your own choices and making a change, not with whining about it, though.