Most millennials grew up on the fantasy of The American Dream: happiness predicated on amassing enormous wealth, promised to be achievable through relentless work ethic. Many were raised to see and value money as the key to having more opportunities and enjoyment in life than their parents did. 

But today, people around the world are questioning if the pursuit of wealth will truly pay off and whether or not The American Dream is a dream worth pursuing at all. 

Can Money Buy Happiness?

Dan Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard University, says that “Once you get basic human needs met, a lot more money doesn’t make a lot more happiness.” As reported in TIME Magazine, going from “$20,000 a year to making more than $50,000 makes you twice as likely to be happy, yet the payoff for then surpassing $90,000 is slight.”

Why?

Firstly, humans tend to experience hedonic adaptation: returning to one’s baseline happiness after the novelty of a significant increase in material abundance has worn off. The more you acquire, the more fleeting it becomes, and the more you feel accustomed to wanting more. Secondly, earning more usually means more pressure from a highly demanding job, or it means more anxiety around managing more money. Thirdly, the comparison game can eat away at people no matter how much wealth they possess so long as they feel that it is less than that of their neighbors or peers.

Investing During The Great Resignation 

Millennials have become highly conscientious of the ways in which rampant consumerism has harmed our planet while making people more materialistic, superficial, and shallow. One of the most prominent topics of our cultural conversation today is how people in their twenties and thirties aren’t as driven by the allure of wealth as previous generations were. As a culture, we are collectively realizing that while money can solve many of life’s issues, more money isn’t inherently always the solution. 

Fractional Real Estate Investing

Homeownership is an iconic status symbol of wealth and the achievement of the American Dream. But a lot of people are tired of status symbols and the pressure that comes with them.

A seemingly sudden rise in people quitting or changing careers has been dubbed “The Great Resignation”. Many cite the pandemic as a huge reason for a shift in priorities and values, believing that a lifestyle change is due either now or never. Without the desire for traditional markers of success such as homeownership, young adults are looking to fractional real estate as a way to capitalize on market opportunities without the obligations and pressures of a mortgage. For most people, a down payment and mortgage for a home are extremely daunting and unattainable without toiling for decades at at a job that they may strongly dislike.

Financial wealth is being redefined as flexibility rather than sheer quantity. Innovation has  led to cryptocurrency, a combination of technology and decentralization, both of which have massive appeal to millennials, allowing them to make secure purchases on everything from digital art to shares of real estate. Real estate defi is a more accessible than traditional real estate investing, breaking the cost and ownership of a home into shares that can be traded in digital marketplaces like Real T.