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Fortunately, I knew my dad’s wishes from dozens of conversations: Spend as little on his death as possible, have him cremated without embalming, and spread his ashes at Ossipee Lake in New Hampshire where he spent every summer as a kid. I tried not to feel guilty as I turned down the options the funeral home director explained to me, picturing my dad’s blue eyes as he told me not to spend an extra dime on his death, his insistence that he wanted to keep this simple. I knew my mom’s funeral costs had been impossible for him to handle as a cab driver, and that her brother had paid for almost everything.

After a lengthy and transparent explanation of what was available, I was handed a breakdown sheet with itemized prices. In total, my dad’s cremation costs sat at around $3,700: $2,900 for professional services and basic cremation, $260 for a container to keep his ashes in, $84 for copies of the death certificate, $31 for a cremation permit, $260 for the crematory, and $200 for the medical examiner fee (which went up by 100 percent in Massachusetts in 2019). My wife and I put the cost on a credit card and went home, exhausted.

I grew up in the projects, and lived just above or at the poverty line for the first eighteen years of my life. My parents, like 40 percent of Americans, never had $400 in the bank for an emergency. When my dad received medical bills for things that MassHealth didn’t cover, he let them go to collections because we simply couldn’t afford to pay them. Just a few years ago, my wife and I were in a similar boat. If my father had died in 2016, neither of us would have had a single credit card with a high enough limit to pay for his cremation costs.

My dad’s death was the second expensive emergency we faced in 2020, a year where nearly ten months were spent in an unprecedented global pandemic. In May, we had to pay for our cat’s life-saving cystotomy. I remember how relieved I was when we paid off the credit card we used for her surgery about a month and a half after it happened.

About a week after my dad’s death when the shock wore off, I decided to start a fundraiser to cover the cost of my dad’s cremation. According to GoFundMe, 13 percent of its campaigns created in 2017 funded memorials, and a 2015 Funeral and Memorial Information Council study reported that 17 percent of adults between 20 and 39 solicited or donated money online for funeral-related arrangements. Sites dedicated specifically to funeral and memorial costs have launched, such as FuneralFund and Ever Loved. A 2019 survey from the National Funeral Directors Association showed that the cost of cremation had gone up 8.5 percent in the U.S. over the last five years, and the median cost of direct cremation is $2,495. The median price for a full funeral and burial in 2019 was $9,135, adding to the stress for the deceased’s next of kin. All of this is an even greater financial and emotional strain during a global pandemic, when many people have lost income and while low-income folks, people of color, and disabled people are dying at higher rates due to complications from COVID-19 compounded by racism, classism, and ableism in medical care.

Based on the 4.9 percent fee deducted from each donation at Fundly, I set my fundraiser at $5,000, hoping to raise enough to cover paying off the credit cards before any interest accrued plus a little extra to cover the cost of traveling to Ossipee for the weekend to spread my dad’s ashes once it’s safe to actually memorialize him.

As I shared my fundraiser on social media, I wondered if my dad’s wishes were simply because he didn’t believe much should be spent on death or because he understood that cremation and funeral costs can be pricey.

I thought of my dad, grieving my mom and unable to help pay for her funeral expenses, cutting back his hours at work because he had to take care of me full-time. I thought of him calling me the first time he qualified for a secured credit card after years of financial instability. I thought of my dad giving me and my wife a “mini honeymoon” weekend trip for our wedding because we couldn’t take enough time off to go on a full honeymoon right away, of him buying us dinner and champagne for our first anniversary, of the way he used to stop by and bring us desserts from an Italian bakery in Boston just because he could finally afford spontaneous gifts. My dad was financially secure for the last three years of his life, and he spent most of it in generous ways, helping residents at his sober home pay their rent and paying for aquarium memberships for the toddlers in our family.

Within two weeks, my fundraiser was fully funded, and we could pay off the credit card with zero interest. I almost cried when I saw the fundraiser total amount.

The fact that paying my dad’s cremation costs came down to luck and privilege isn’t lost on me. On average, only 22.4 percent of crowdfunding projects are successful and meet their goal, and 24 percent of Americans don’t have a credit card. There isn’t much support out there for young or low-income people shouldering the cost of a loved one’s end-of-life costs alone, aside from crowdfunding and asking for help from friends and family, if that’s even an option. Death — especially an unexpected, sudden loss — creates a seismic shift in your world, but it shouldn’t create an unmanageable financial burden.

What we aren’t talking about as often is credit card debt. Consumer debt recently exceeded $4 trillion for the first time, according to the Federal Reserve. The average American has a credit card balance of $4,293 and 1 in 3 people are afraid they’ll max out their credit cards when they make a large purchase (and most defined “large” as anything over $100).

Although research shows that young people are hesitant to take on credit card debt, one survey found that there are actually more older millennials who have outstanding credit card debt than have student loan debt. Millennials are also more likely to take out personal loans, which can be used for anything from consolidating existing debt to paying for a vacation or a wedding.

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You might be thinking: Millennials can’t avoid student loan debt and a college education is worth it, but it’s downright irresponsible to take on so much credit card debt. Young people just don’t understand how credit works, or they don’t care.

The reality for many millennials with credit card debt is very different — I know, I used to be one of them.

I still remember how I felt when I picked up my mail from the box downstairs in our on-campus apartment my junior year and found my first offer to apply for a credit card, a Discover student card. I was both excited at the opportunity to manage my financial future and terrified that I would wind up trapped in a pile of debt I could never dig myself out of.

I knew that credit cards should always be used responsibly — that you should never spend money you don’t have, that it made the most sense to pay off your balance in full before the due date every month, that racking up debt could seriously damage my credit score. I also knew that in the first two years of college, I’d had to borrow money from friends more times than I could count because I needed textbooks or a bus ticket home when we were required to leave campus for breaks.

So I applied for the credit card, and within days I was approved and had a $500 credit line.

At first, I tried to manage the card responsibly, following the financial advice my dad gave me that he’d never had enough financial freedom to follow himself. I didn’t want to pay more money for items because I’d accumulated a bunch of interest. I would go to the mall with my roommates on the weekend and resist the urge to splurge on new clothes with money I didn’t have in cash or in my bank account. But it’s also exhausting constantly denying yourself happiness when you’re poor, so there were occasional times when I pulled out a credit card, like when we all went out to Japanese food to celebrate my roommate’s 20th birthday.

As I spent small amounts and paid them off quickly, Discover increased my available credit to $1,000 and sent me a free report showing that my score had improved. I remember thinking, maybe everything will be okay after all.

Then I went home for five weeks for winter break and found out my dad and I were in danger of having our heat, electricity, and internet shut off. We both pleaded with representatives on the phone to put us on a payment plan to no avail. He was a night shift cab driver who was having trouble working due to his disabilities, and he’d already been making significantly less money per month than he did before the recession because people couldn’t afford to take cabs anymore.

“I’ll pay the bills if you can pay me back at least some of it,” I offered. At school, I was living off a stipend thanks to grants and scholarships. I also had two on-campus tutoring jobs that paid a little more than minimum wage in Massachusetts, which gave me enough spending money to put gas in my car and pay my phone bill each month.

We needed heat through the winter, and I needed the internet to research summer jobs and internships and get started on my senior thesis. I paid our bills with my credit card and cringed when I saw my available credit start to disappear. One study found that 1 in 5 millennials are helping to financially support their aging parents, and giving their parents an average of $18,250 a year. One third of that financial assistance goes toward living expenses such as food and housing.

The reality is that being poor is expensive. Every time I’d just about caught up with the latest round of credit card charges — $150 here for an emergency car repair on my 1998 Buick Century, $50 there on a book that the professor didn’t put on the syllabus before the semester started, $200 to pay off overdue bills to help my dad — something else would come up.

And then, during the fall of my senior year, my dad suffered from a traumatic brain injury during an on-the-job car accident. While it had been difficult for him to work before, now it was nearly impossible. As a cab driver, he was an independent contractor, not an employee, so he didn’t have any of the protections employees can get, like paid medical leave or unemployment benefits. If he couldn’t work, he simply wasn’t paid. The meager stipend and part-time jobs I had weren’t enough to keep us both afloat in an emergency.

The credit card charges mounted. When things were getting really desperate and our heat was about to be turned off in the middle of winter again, I even applied for a predatory payday loan online. I was denied because my credit score had dropped thanks to my high balances. I sat in my bed, covered in as many blankets as possible, wondering how cold the apartment would get if we didn’t have heat. Eventually, after searching the internet, I found another scammy credit card company that would give me a credit line of $400 in minutes with an APR of 29.9 percent.

By the time I’d become too untrustworthy to qualify for another line of credit, I had almost $5,000 in credit card debt across six cards and no plans to pay it off. My highest interest rate was 30.49 percent. I barely survived my senior year of college and first year after graduation, making only the $25 and $35 minimum payments on each card respectively.

I was only able to start tackling my debt when I began working full-time and freelancing on the side. I was really fortunate that I lived with my partner, so we shared bills and expenses and helped each other out during tough financial situations. She graduated with more student debt than I did, including a couple of private loans, so our priorities were paying off her highest interest student loans and my predatory credit cards as soon as possible. She also understood my frustration with credit, as she fell into a similar trap with her credit card after she was suddenly laid off from her first post-college job.

With our two incomes, we finally had enough for necessities with some to spare. Every month, I would throw more than the minimum payment at my credit cards, starting with those with the highest interest rates and balances. Whenever I had an unexpected amount of money, like if I got more well-paying freelance work that month or I received a bonus at work, I’d funnel $200-500 into paying off another card.

In December 2018, I sent in the last payment to the first credit card I opened from Discover back in 2013. With that payment, I’d paid off all my credit cards in full. I never thought I’d sign in and see a $0 balance due again; I no longer have to worry about years of interest fees piling up on what was originally a $50 purchase. My credit score also improved (although marginally) and I’m finally in the average bracket instead of poor, an assessment that feels even more ironic when I think about the fact that I’ve been poor my entire life and I’m only now just catching up to middle class.

I’m still a little scared to use my credit cards now, even responsibly. Last month at the checkout at Target, I used my store credit card for the first time in years, saving 5 percent off my total purchase. When the balance popped up in my account in a few days, I paid it in full 10 days before the due date.

The fundamental flaw of such pieces — often beautifully written and deeply intimate — is that they are personal. They highlight the struggles of a narrow swath of the authors’ generation, but fail to consider the larger implications that their experiences may have for the country as a whole. They bemoan a failure to achieve a promised life, but this life was only promised to, and expected by, a specific group of people.

That life includes a specific set of circumstances to measure against, with a further expectation that you love what you do for a living or you’re not living the life you deserve. But this concept of a promised land is not limited to the millennial generation. In fact, for a hundred years, that dream lifestyle has mostly looked the same: The ability to buy a nice home in a cute neighborhood with a middle-class income, an emotionally rewarding dream job, and exotic vacations to warm climates every winter. (For a uniquely millennial twist, add a French bulldog with an active social media presence.)

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The idea of “passion jobs,” where people pursue jobs that are emotionally fulfilling, has its roots in the 1900s. Every generation since has experienced frustrations when running up against the reality of the working world, whether the aftermath of the Depression for the Silent Generation, the corporate restructuring that narrowed opportunities for Generation X, or the tyranny of the precarious “gig economy” for millennials.

This dream is a specifically middle-class one, though, and it speaks primarily to a relatively small group of people: Those who always assumed they would go to college, for example, and who undertook debt to do so. People who assumed that they would be rewarded with gainful employment as a rite of passage, because this, too, was something they were told. White people. Nondisabled people. People who haven’t been thrown out of their homes or excluded from jobs because of their gender or sexual orientation. People who don’t have financial obligations to family members that may have started as soon as they were old enough to work.

For a disabled Latinx millennial with no college degree scrubbing toilets and caring for two generations at home, reading about how getting knives sharpened is too exhausting to contemplate is not necessarily relatable, even if that person is struggling with the same fundamental problem: Employers who view them as disposable and the familiar refrain that if you bootstrap hard enough, you’ll come out on top. The failed promise for many people from working and lower-class backgrounds isn’t a house with a picket fence, but basic human dignity, a life where your needs are met and you are treated with respect, whether janitor or CEO.

Treating the experience of feeling beaten down by a job that abuses you as something exceptional that primarily affects a class of predominantly white knowledge workers in New York, D.C., and Los Angeles makes commentary on the subject feel self-indulgent and privileged. It confuses a lost middle-class dream with something much deeper. It fails to expand to a larger conversation about what it means to be poor — not broke — and working class in America, and how exhausting and demoralizing it can be to have no money and feel like you have no future.

There is a nagging sense, while reading works like these, that the authors are desperately striving for class mobility to distance themselves from their imagined vision of poverty. They aren’t like those other people — the ones without college degrees, the ones caring for family members at home, the ones with messy lives who are experiencing intergenerational poverty. They’re better than that and deserve better, and thus have no reason to find common cause with the garbage men and housekeepers, doormen and farmworkers of the world, even if both are experiencing sexual harassment, a vast wage gap between worker and executive, workplace instability, and other “millennial burnout” woes.

This is a basic function of capitalism: Walling off communities that should be able to find common ground before they have an opportunity to build coalitions and power. Sweeping rhetoric that claims to speak for a whole generation while only describing narrow experiences is fundamentally alienating for members of the same generation who may find little in common with the way “burnout” is presented, even if they are also experiencing it. It can verge on the offensive when it borrows from the language marginalized people have developed to describe the bone-deep, existential pain of living in a world where they, and their lives, are not valued.

This isn’t a “millennial burnout” problem. This is a capitalism problem. Let’s start treating it like one.

After coming of age in the wake of the Great Recession, millennials have inherited decades of wage stagnation and growing inequality. While median annual wages have grown just $1,422 in real dollars from 1986 to 2013, the average cost of attending a four-year college has more than doubled. Unless these trends reverse, many millennials will have to defer saving for retirement in order to pay off their educational debts, leaving them with fewer resources in retirement beyond Social Security. Indeed, millennials have accumulated less wealth than their parents’ generation had at the same age 25 years ago. These factors, combined with the disappearance of employer-sponsored traditional pension plans, mean that 3 in 5 younger households are at risk of being unable to maintain their standard of living in retirement.

The problem is particularly acute among millennials of color. Black and Latino households typically have lower incomes and significantly fewer assets than white, non-Hispanic households. And although Social Security benefits replace a larger percentage of lower earners’ incomes, their benefits are still smaller than those received by higher earners—leaving households of color less able to contend with the high healthcare costs experienced by seniors and people with disabilities.

Social Security is also critical to millennials during their working years. Before reaching their full retirement age, an estimated 1 in 4 of today’s 20-year-olds will become disabled, and 1 in 8 will die. Such events can be devastating at any age, but they are especially harmful to young workers and their families, who will have had fewer years to pay off educational debts and accumulate wealth. Many of these young workers and their families—especially those with low incomes—are also unlikely to be covered by private insurance, particularly in the case of disability.

Fortunately, virtually all working Americans are covered by Social Security’s disability and survivors’ protections, and can expect to receive benefits for themselves and their families. These benefits are significant—a 30-year-old worker who earns $30,000 a year with a spouse and two children has earned the equivalent of roughly $1.1 million in disability and life insurance protections through Social Security. Although no one anticipates dying young or experiencing a permanent disability, Social Security’s modest but vital benefits are often the only way families can continue to afford basic necessities and avoid falling into poverty.

But instead of increasing benefits, opponents of Social Security suggest that spending on the old is stealing from the young, and that the nation must choose between supporting one generation or the other. They call for “generational equity”—the idea that unless we cut benefits soon, we will run out of resources to protect younger workers in retirement. But this is false. Even after 2034, when the program’s shortfall is projected to occur, Social Security will still be able to pay around 75 percent of promised benefits. And it’s worth noting that the same individuals who call for changes to protect the young also promise to protect current beneficiaries by forcing benefit reductions entirely on new beneficiaries—that is, by cutting the benefits of the same younger generations they claim to be protecting. These are unnecessary choices that other nations aren’t making—countries that spend more on seniors also spend more on children.

Social Security should be expanded now; not just for today’s seniors, but for millennials as well. The program was created in response to economic circumstances similar to those that have shaped the formative years of today’s young workers: the Great Depression. Social Security was a cornerstone of the New Deal, a range of policies which created jobs, invested in national infrastructure, regulated big banks, and protected workers’ rights. Similarly, expanding Social Security should be a cornerstone of an agenda for young workers, accompanying policies such as raising the minimum wage, closing the gender pay gap, and adopting paid family leave. Not only would these policies improve the economic security of today’s young workers; many of them would help to improve Social Security’s long-range solvency as well.

Most importantly, millennials recognize that Social Security is a symbol of intergenerational solidarity, in which workers make contributions to fund current benefits while earning vital insurance protections for themselves and their families. Nearly 7 in 10 millennials agree that “we should consider increasing Social Security benefits.” It’s time for policymakers to listen to them, and expand Social Security for all generations of Americans.

But all that changed this February when I was sitting on the train on my way to my graduate class and felt my heart race. I wasn’t nervous or stressed, but could feel my pulse thundering throughout my body—the type of feeling you get when your professor is cold-calling students with questions and you haven’t done the reading.

Chastened, I resolved to start running again and cut back on my caffeine. But my palpitations didn’t go away. After two months of diet and exercise (and persistent chiding from my mother), I reluctantly went to the doctor. I didn’t expect much to come out of it. Why would I need to see a doctor? I was young and healthy and heart problems only happened to older people—I was a young invincible.

My first real sense of concern arose when the nurse practitioner put her stethoscope to my chest and her eyes widened. She proceeded to tell me that I had a very clear heart murmur, a whooshing sound indicating turbulent blood around my heart. An echocardiogram later revealed a mitral valve prolapse, and a subsequent test showed significant regurgitation.

Put into plain English, one of the valves of my heart doesn’t close properly, allowing blood that should be pumped out of my heart to spill back in. In cases like this, the heart compensates and pumps harder to keep the blood out. My doctor recommended mitral valve repair surgery, an open-heart surgery that will require me to stay in the hospital for at least five days after the operation, followed by four to six weeks’ recuperation.

And so, in a period of three months, I went from being a healthy young adult to one in need of heart surgery. I was shocked, but in some ways I was lucky. I was insured, thanks to the Affordable Care Act.

The ACA helped me when I transferred from a full-time position to a part-time one and lost my employer-provided health insurance. After conversations with multiple people about the risks of forgoing health insurance, I decided to purchase coverage through the New York marketplace.

I am incredibly fortunate that I chose—and was able to afford—the route of subsidized insurance premiums. While the cost for mitral valve repair surgery before insurance is around $30,000, the entire ordeal can cost upwards of $200,000. With that high of a price tag, the surgery would have financially crippled me. But due to my insurance, I will only be responsible for copays and deductibles.

I cannot imagine the stress of knowing I could not afford a surgery that could save my life. But that’s a reality for too many Americans—particularly millennials of color—even though the ACA has resulted in the largest gains in coverage in decades. These gaps are in part due to the fact that 20 states have refused to expand Medicaid, which has meant that 3.1 million otherwise eligible adults fall into what is known as the “coverage gap”—they earn too much for Medicaid but too little to access the subsidies they need to afford insurance. Of that group, nearly half are adults aged 19 to 34.

The fact that vulnerable people have been left without insurance doesn’t seem to bother some on the right, including governor-elect Matt Bevin of Kentucky. Although the state has already expanded Medicaid, Bevin has promised to dismantle the state-run Kynect exchange, leaving over 300,000 people that were previously covered through the expansion without affordable health insurance. This disastrous move would undo the immense good that the policy has achieved, including the second largest drop in uninsured rates in the nation.

Furthermore, the Senate recently passed a bill that can only be described as highly destructive. The proposed legislation would nearly double the number of uninsured Americans by dismantling Medicaid expansion for the 30 states, plus the District of Columbia, that have already implemented it. Simultaneously, it would eliminate subsidies that help low-income people purchase coverage.

This proposal represents a callous disregard for the lives of low-income Americans. We should be removing barriers to insurance, not impeding paths to coverage. I hope that our elected officials consider the human costs of their decisions and remember citizens like myself whose lives might depend on accessing that coverage.