The generation before mine had a peculiar relationship with the idea of money. They saved things because they might be useful and saved money, despite not having much, because something might go wrong. A shirt was kept for an occasion or another cousin. Furniture was repaired again and again. Even the kitchen containers were retained for years with the seriousness of an asset manager. A family holiday required justification. A purchase was followed by a small internal committee meeting, usually chaired by the person who had earned the money and attended by everyone who wanted to spend it.

For them, money meant security because nobody had promised to provide it. A fixed deposit could produce a happiness that a restaurant could not. Owning a house mattered and was a status symbol, because it needed years of saving and juggling other spends like education, healthcare, marriages in the family. Debt was something you escaped, not something you optimised.

They were saving for a future they had never seen, but had learnt to fear.

My generation inherited this psychology and then encountered a different India. The economy opened, incomes rose, brands arrived, credit became respectable and the world became available for purchase. Money could now buy convenience, education, mobility, travel and experiences. We still saved because the generation before us had trained us to, but we also learnt to spend. We were perhaps the first generation to buy the things our parents had called unnecessary and then feel guilty about having bought them.

Then came our NextGen.

They inherited a society and mindset where consumption is almost frictionless. A meal arrives at the door in minutes. A cab arrives downstairs. A flight can be booked in minutes. A hotel can be compared with hundreds of others. A concert ticket can vanish from the bank account before a parent understands why anyone would pay that much to stand among several thousand people sweating in synchronised excitement. Anything the parent asks is met with sulking and a drama of self-doubt of their self-worth.

What this has done to ordinary life is even more revealing. A generation can order breakfast without knowing how to toast a bread, use a cab without knowing what the bus or train route is, have laundry collected without knowing which clothes should not be washed together and stream entertainment without ever asking what the monthly debits add up to. Swiggy (no promotion here) is apparently expected to remain available for the rest of civilisation. Netflix is treated with the confidence of a family inheritance. A Dua Lipa or Arijit Singh concert can provide two hours of enchantment, but the EMI for that unnecessary foreign holiday taken to “chill out” has the irritating stamina to continue after the chilling has ended months ago.

The holiday has memories. The EMI has stamina.

There is nothing wrong with spending money. The strange part begins when convenience becomes expectation, wants acquire the status of needs and lifestyle becomes an entitlement before the income required to sustain it has arrived.

For much of the NextGen and many of my generation, the ability to pay for something today is mistaken for the ability to afford it. A generation that has rarely had to wait, repair, cook, save or do without can begin to regard ordinary effort as an unreasonable inconvenience.

And my generation has some explaining to do.

Did we (not) teach them financial literacy and financial accountability, or did we simply make life too comfortable for our children and congratulate ourselves for being good parents?

We paid for the better school, the better phone, the better holiday, the better and more gadgets, the best coaching and the life conveniences.

Sometimes because we could.
Sometimes because their friends had them.
Sometimes because saying yes was easier than explaining no.
Sometimes because giving our children what we never had felt like settling an old account with our own childhood.

We may have used money to assuage parental guilt and called it love.

That comfort can produce entitlement without anybody ever consciously deciding to create it. A young person grows accustomed to a certain home, certain holidays, certain restaurants, certain gadgets and a certain standard of living. The lifestyle becomes familiar, then normal, then necessary. The income required to sustain it remains somebody else’s headache.

The parents become the invisible financial infrastructure.

Not every adult child receiving parental support is irresponsible. Housing is expensive. Careers are uncertain. Genuine hardship exists. The uncomfortable situation is when grown children earn, yet their lifestyle needs and wants exceed what they earn and save, and parents quietly bridge the gap because they don’t have a choice but to hold onto family peace.

A child may have a respectable salary, a respectable job and absolutely no respectable surplus. The parents become the emergency fund, travel fund, wedding fund, housing fund and, occasionally, the fund that funds the other funds.

 

We may not become empty nesters. We may become lifetime subscribers to our children’s lifestyle. Sadly.

Social media has made this more expensive.

Money now has an audience. A holiday is no longer simply a holiday. It is a must show off. Dinner becomes content. A restaurant becomes a backdrop. A watch becomes a signal. A wedding becomes a production. A weekend away becomes proof that life is being lived correctly.

The younger person can therefore spend twice. First on the thing, and then on the version of themselves that the thing permits them to display.

Instagram has given vanity a financial adviser.

The deeper disruption is the alter ego. The public self is constructed to look more successful, more attractive, more adventurous and more fulfilled than the private self may actually feel. Likes arrive as tiny votes for this manufactured person. Soon the person begins making real financial decisions to keep an imaginary audience impressed.

When your alter ego develops expensive tastes, your real self, or worse still - your parents get the bill.

Then comes the uncertainty that should make every young spender more worried.
Work, or the opportunities of work, in itself is changing.

A young Indian entering the workforce cannot confidently assume that the career structure awaiting them will resemble the one their parents entered. Artificial intelligence is changing tasks, skills and organisational structures. Some jobs will disappear, others will be transformed and new ones will emerge. The old equation of education, employment, salary and retirement has become considerably less predictable.

Yet lifestyles are being built as though future income is guaranteed.
There is another complication.

Humans are living longer. A person retiring at sixty and living to ninety may have thirty years to finance without a salary. Healthcare becomes more expensive with age. Inflation continues its career long after ours has ended. Housing, food, care and dignity do not become free merely because employment has stopped.

India has no social security cushion that can make this somebody else’s problem.

So the younger generation faces a peculiar financial equation. Their working lives may become less predictable while their lives themselves become longer.

That should make financial literacy an essential life skill, not an optional chapter between school and the first salary.

What they cannot afford to inherit is the illusion that money will always arrive as effortlessly as the food delivery.

Money is ultimately about freedom. The freedom to leave a bad job, survive a recession, care for an ageing parent, fund an education, take a break, travel while the body still cooperates or face a medical emergency without asking tomorrow for a loan.

Social media makes spending visible and saving invisible. Nobody posts the boring investment account quietly protecting them at seventy. Nobody gets applause for saying no to something they can afford.

My generation should have one uncomfortable conversation with the younger one.

Enjoy the money.
Travel.
Eat well.
Go to the concert.
Buy the shoes.
But learn to cook something.
Learn to cringe.
Learn to earn your own living.
Learn what your subscriptions cost. 
Understand what an EMI does to future income.
Know the difference between wanting something and being able to afford it.
And understand that your parents’ bank account is not an extension of your salary.
Most importantly, learn the most unfashionable financial word of all.

Enough.