Yes, Virginia, There Is Life Before 30

If you are a Baby Boomer, as I am, “Millennials” and “Gen-Zers” are people you read about and then rail about. From a distance, the whole lot of them seem indulged, unmoored, and generally useless. Their primary contributions to the culture, as far as I could see, were safe spaces, cry rooms, and bespoke pronouns. I despaired for the future.

And then I met my cousin Tyler—not “met” in the flesh but on Facebook. And “cousin” is a bit of a stretch as well. His great-uncle Mickey, who died this past year, was my mother’s first cousin. Tyler reached out to me after reading my account of Mickey’s life in my book, “Untenable.”

For Tyler and me both, Mickey was something of an inspiration. Although Mick was my age, he did not get beyond the sixth grade. His parents, both drinkers, died when he was young. He took to the streets, spent his adolescence in prison, and then, through the love of a good woman, turned his life around. 

Mick did not need a college degree to wield a sledgehammer and dismantle boilers. This he did for as many hours as they let him. He saved his money and, in time, bought his own truck, then a second truck, then his own scrap metal yard, then another truck, then another yard, and in time moved, with his sons’ help, into the entirely respectable world of “environmental remediation”—a rose by any other name.

That was then. Today, however, we’re told the American Dream, if not dead, is dying. Happily, Tyler did not get that memo. “As my 30th birthday approaches in a few months,” he posted recently on Facebook, “I’m not sure where I will end up in the next 30 years, but if they are anything like the last 10, I am hopeful that I will achieve my goals.” 

Those goals are old school: “To be a good Father, to own a lot of land to raise my future family, and to always do the best I can to provide a great life for them.”

I didn’t know such young people existed, let alone in my own (extended) family. To get the back story, I gave Tyler a call. It was the first time we had ever talked. I assumed he had started his career from a better launching pad than his Uncle Mick. I assumed wrong.

Mick, at least, grew up with two parents. Tyler’s parents split before he was born. For the first 15 or so years of his life, Tyler bounced between homes and schools, an uneasy process that ended in his junior year when he found himself in “juvie”—“just weed,” he reassures me. Tyler spent most of that school year and all of his senior year in either rehab or the hoosegow.

Getting busted stirred what Tyler calls “the old soul” within. He somehow mustered the will to keep up his studies while detained. “I had a lot of time to reflect on my life,” he tells me. To the surprise of his friends, he showed up at his graduation two days after being sprung. 

Tyler had a degree now and more focus, but there were many things he did not have: money, a car, a driver’s license, a permanent home, and a resumé any employer would want to see. For a year or so, he worked at the one place that would take him—Dunkin Donuts—but there were no obvious sprinkles in his future.

Eager to escape the world of Munchkin holes and French crullers, Tyler commenced to send out job applications. It did not go well. Every place to which he applied, he was rejected. Rather than wait for a rejection letter from a local bank, he put on his best suit—only suit—walked in boldly and asked for a job. Impressed by his gumption, the bank hired him.

After six months on the job, he met the woman who would one day become his wife. Although she, too, was a bank teller, they shared a belief in the future. In fact, they met at the local community college where each was taking classes. 

For the next eight years, Tyler put the party life behind him and “grinded it out.” Having grown up in households in which living paycheck to paycheck was a given, Tyler did not want his young family to live on the margins the way his parents had. 

Says Tyler, “I didn’t want to disappoint her. I was determined to do the right thing.” They married in a Catholic church and bought a home while still in their mid-twenties.

Writes Tyler on Facebook, “Who would have thought that I would one day become a vice president at a Bank doing million-dollar deals and in a position to help so many people?” Not his pals, not his parents.

I asked Tyler why so many people his age seem to have given up on the American Dream. For too many of them, he tells me, “getting by” is the model they see at home and absorb.

One way to break that discouraging cycle, Tyler strongly believes, is through financial education. If Tyler had his ’druthers, he would install a business curriculum as early as grade school.

“People need to be taught not just to get by,” he says, “but to succeed.”

On this subject, Tyler slips easily into preacher mode. 

“My mission now,” he posts on Facebook, “as it always has been, is to help my friends and family and those that come from the similar places that I did. To help you rise to the top, and to help you achieve your business dreams.” 

Working at the bank and doing deals has shown Tyler the myriad ways one can make a living. “There is so much vast opportunity there,” he insists. “People have to get out of their comfort zones.”

“Cuz,” I said to him at conversation’s end, “you need to write a book.”