Every older generation eventually accuses the one behind it of the same crime: no discipline, no patience, no sense of tomorrow. Right now, that accusation has a specific shape. Young people, the complaint goes, would rather buy the newest phone than save for a flat, order food at midnight instead of cooking at home, spend a month’s bonus on a weekend trip instead of banking it. The verdict writes itself: a spoiled generation, undone by comfort. It is also almost entirely backwards.
Their parents faced high prices too, but a stable job and twenty years of patience could still solve the problem. Run that same twenty-year plan today, and the numbers do not resolve. When a goal stops being reachable, the discipline built around reaching it stops making sense too. What looks like impatience is closer to a verdict, quietly reached: better to live well now than sacrifice for a future that was cancelled without anyone announcing it.
The job market delivers the second verdict. Per the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics’ Labour Force Survey, youth unemployment stood at 9.65 percent in 2024, the highest of any age group. Among university graduates, it climbed to 13.54 percent, the worst of any education level, with nearly 885,000 graduates jobless. Almost a third of the country’s unemployed young people hold a degree. A person watching that happen to a classmate, or to themselves, is not reckless for abandoning a decade-long plan. They are pricing in risk their parents never had to.
In the United States, a worker earning the median monthly wage, $5,217 per Bureau of Labour Statistics data, needs about three working days to afford an iPhone 16. In Bangladesh, a worker earning the average monthly salary of BDT15,554, needs close to eight months, assuming every taka is saved and nothing is spent on rent, food, or anything else. Saved realistically, the honest timeline stretches well past a year. Yet showrooms across Dhaka sell the same phone on 0 percent EMI through banks including City Bank, EBL, and BRAC Bank, spread across three to twelve months. Nearly a year’s income becomes, on paper, painless, sliced small enough that no single month feels like the sacrifice it is. This is buy now, save never, made physical.
Bangladeshi teenagers and young adults report averaging five to eight hours a day on social media, well above the global norm of about two and a half. Every purchase starts to look less like indulgence and more like keeping pace with a scoreboard nobody agreed to be measured against.
Here is the detail that should embarrass anyone still reaching for the word ‘reckless.’ Bangladesh Bank has itself flagged near-zero real deposit returns as a threat to household purchasing power. When the central bank’s own data amounts to a warning that saving does not currently pay, a young person who spends instead is following the only advice the numbers support.
None of this means the coming decade is fine. A generation spending through a housing crisis, a graduate unemployment crisis, and an unguarded lending boom is still heading toward a specific kind of poverty: no assets, and small debts scattered across twelve-month installment plans. But the blame sits elsewhere. Fix the price of land before lecturing anyone about the price of a coffee. Fix a labour market that cannot absorb its own graduates before asking why a phone had to be split into twelve payments to feel affordable. Limit an app that can hand a nineteen-year-old a loan in five minutes before calling that nineteen-year-old undisciplined. Somewhere between a 480-taka wage and a 550-taka latte, between eight months of saving and a painless EMI, is the real story: a country where prices have quietly stopped answering to wages at all, and no one has said so out loud. This generation reads the numbers correctly. It’s the system around them that needs rewriting, not their spending habits.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author
The writer is a CA aspirant, KPMG Bangladesh
