Childless, Houseless Thirtysomethings: The Portrait Dividing Spain

No home, no savings, no children: the portrait of the thirtysomething

According to a calculation circulating online, Germany needs around 300,000 new workers each year; here, a thirtysomething with a salary still sleeps in their parents' basement. This contradiction —surplus people in one place, shortage in another— has turned a generational portrait into a score-settling. The starting diagnosis is as simple as it is uncomfortable: no home, poorly paid jobs, no savings, no children.

The portrait that opens the discussion

The photograph on the table describes a generation that arrived late to everything: stable employment, mortgages, family. Some add that many still live with their parents, opening the door only to collect their dinner tray. The image is harsh and deliberately exaggerated, but the core —the delay in leaving home— is not an opinion.

Against this reading, another current responds with sarcasm: what a drama, at least they are not dragging a mortgage. And several messages point out a detail that is forgotten: everything changes depending on who you compare yourself to.

Did life improve in 2007? The debate remains open

Here, any consensus breaks down. One side argues that 2007 was the last year of good life in Spain: there was work, mortgages were granted with relative ease, and housing, even if expensive, left room. The other rebuttal is that it was precarious even then: perversos wages, unemployment, and piecework construction.

The data that best illustrates the blow is signed by a plumbing supplies delivery driver. In 2007 he delivered 54 orders per day between him and his partner; in March 2008, after the construction pause, they went down to 6. From two weeks to nothing. This same worker had mortgaged in 2006, at 27, and since then pays around 300 euros a month for his home. His testimony is the yardstick used by both sides.

The parents' house as a financial plan

Not everyone views it as a defeat. A thirtysomething says he has a job, stays with his parents, and dedicates his salary to saving: he does not travel, does not spend, and reads about four books a month. His strategy is not resignation, it is calculation. Others elevate it to ideology: less consumption, less rent, more balance.

Fits into this framework is degrowth and the idea of not collaborating with the wheel —living with the minimum, renting instead of buying—. The paradox is that forced savings are disguised as ecological virtue. Those who can afford a good home and a good partner, some point out, do not stay in the basement by conviction.

Work that no longer allows prosperity

The most technical analysis crossing the conversation is the law of diminishing returns, as a forum user argues: each technology becomes cheaper, productivity rises, and added value falls; except in leading sectors, wages do not keep up.

The exit proposed from the other side is mobility. In Germany, 300,000 workers are needed per year and, it is argued, just by being alive you get hired. Conditions are harsher, but the argument is that there is a lack of initiative. And a coda that repeats: it has never been so easy to make money from home with the internet.

Partners, children, and the demographic knot

The portrait is completed with the matchmaking market. Part of the analysis argues that the economic independence of women has raised expectations that many men do not reach, and that this delays or cancels family formation. Another current rejects it: the problem would not be expectations, but the lack of land and wages.

The result, in any case, is the same: fewer children and more loneliness. There is even someone who reads it in a Darwinian key, asserting that certain profiles will leave no offspring. It is a fatalistic reading, not a fact. And on the background —a birth rate that does not rise— almost no one argues.

Housing, the knot no one unties

If something cuts across all positions it is housing. Rent eats the salary and public aid arrives unequally. There even appears the example of a public rental apartment in Madrid for about 100 euros a month, with community and repairs included, as a reminder of what another model would allow for another type of tenant.

The full calculation of the 2006 mortgage, with its frozen installment compared to current rent, is what sustains much of the anger. It is not nostalgia: it is arithmetic.

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How much must the land, the salary, or the policy change for the portrait to stop repeating itself? Three and a half decades after the last good summer, the answer still has not arrived.