[Source] I saw this chart making the rounds on Twitter this week, and it stopped me cold. While the specific figures combine data from multiple sources, the trend is undeniable: in 1950, over half of 30-year-olds were married homeowners. By 2025, some analysts project that number as low as 13%.
That's not a societal transformation. It's not an economic fluke. It's the visible outcome of an invisible strategy—one that extracted everything it could from a three-generation arc and left only illusions in its place.
They'll tell you people just choose differently now—that marriage rates fell because of changing values. But people can't choose what they can't afford. When the economic foundation for family formation disappears, cultural changes follow inevitably. That chart doesn't show us changing values or new priorities. It shows systemic breakdown, disguised for decades as freedom.
It maps the slow evaporation of the social contract. For one generation, adulthood was a starting point. For the next, a struggle. For the latest, an abstraction—marketed endlessly but almost never attained. What began as a rite of passage has become a paywalled simulation.
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