Gen Z question saving money for a future that looks so bleak

I don't think this is a desirable outcome, but I can also see it being an option. Essentially people just checking out from conventional work hard, pay high taxes, have less. Not sure if people will stick with that for too long.

I looked up Australian house prices and they're so ridiculous it's hard to even fathom. It's a great place but really, wow?

Nah, we'll just adopt something like the Logan's Run solution: replace the pension with carrousel and otherwise stay the course.

Something i've been thinking about for a while. Gen Z and Millenials are not having children at replenishment. The older folks are living a lot longer, so our population is still going up today, but the 30 year olds who will have children are alive today, we can count them. There's less of them. As older generations start to dwindle, and are forced to move to long term care situations (which to be fair, I think a lot of boomers will resist as hard as possible), the housing supply crunch will probably go down. The real drain on society will be a raising retired population, and a dwindling working population. The older generations outnumbering the younger isn't going to help the younger generations politically either.

I think it's far more likely that there's a general reduction in standard of living for everyone below the 90/95/99th percentile.

There's not really any pressure to prevent it, people just keep waking up every morning and going to work regardless of how bad it gets.

10-15 years ago when I graduated we had basically the same situation - the bar to win has just been raised. You either aim to be in the top 10/5/1% (adjust as necessary), or you have a life of struggling to pay the bills forever.

We need social democracy, expanded government roles and investment in certain fields, stronger environmental protections, and other policies that are either known to work or very likely to work.

Indeterminate pessimism also means they aren't taking economic risks, whereas many Gen-Z are becoming content creators or starting businesses with their savings, so it could be more determinate optimism. Possibly naive, but time will tell.

Start investing the day you get your first job and let the exponential function do what it does best.

EDIT: I also wanted to add that in general the idea of compounding wealth is totally correct, but the biggest vehicle for this has been the family home for generations, and it seems that for all intents and purposes, my generation and most of the one before me have been locked out of this. Personally, I’m very regularly investing any spare money into a range of index and diversified funds to try and keep myself ahead but without the 10-1 leverage property here offers its not enough.