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Almost every couple that I know in their 20s, 30s or even 40s has had the same argument with their parents before getting married.
The parents say to open a wedding registry. The couple responds that they do not want one. They don’t expect gifts from wedding guests (their “presence is enough”), and they have been cohabiting for years and already have plates, bedsheets and a blender. In fact, since they live in a small rented apartment, they barely have room for the plates that they do have – let alone a set of china.
Perhaps, they will timidly suggest, guests who really want to give a gift can donate to a honeymoon fund? Or better yet, makea small contribution toward a downpayment on a house?
The parents get upset. Asking for cash, they say, is “tacky”, and also puts people in the difficult position of having to choose an amount to give. The young couple will point out that they are not asking for cash, just giving an option for those who want to mark the occasion.
There will be a long argument, maybe even some shouting or tears, and the parents will win. As a compromise, there may be a house-fund bucket on the registry, down at the bottom after the really niche cookware. (If the couple is especially sneaky, they will pretend to go along with their parents, but rig the registry with unattractive gifts to make the fund look more appealing by comparison.)
In the end, the wedding will be lovely. And afterward the married couple may have a china set, but – like nearly half of US millennials – no house in which to put it.
Despite some signs that the wildly expensive housing market is cooling down, buying a home is still a fantasy for millions of younger Americans. In the 1980s, the median age of someone buying their first home was about 29. Today the median first-time buyer is 40 – and can expect their first home to cost twice as much money, adjusted for inflation, as their parents’ home did in the mid-1980s.
The situation is so bad that last month the Trump administration floated the idea of introducing a 50-year mortgage to make houses more affordable, then frantically walked back the idea when critics pointed out that a millennial buying their first home at 40 might die before paying it off.
This is a crisis, given how closely home ownership is tied to wealth creation in the US. The wealth gap between renters and owners has never been wider, and soaring prices keep enriching those who already own, while locking everyone else out. In fact, the newlyweds with the china set may be creeping into early middle age with few assets at all: no home, no significant investments, perhaps not even a car.
I am a millennial who came of age during a financial crisis, global recession and pandemic. No, most millennials and gen Zers are not starving to death. But our adult lives have been marked by stagnant wages, inflation, broken political institutions and a sense of national decline. Small wonder, then, that we feel cynical about our country and pessimistic about our future; that some of us are attracted to increasingly radical politics of both left and right; that we marry later and have children at far lower rates.
A recent study by economists at Northwestern and the University of Chicago predicted that Americans born in the 1990s “will reach retirement with a home ownership rate roughly 9.6 percentage points lower than that of their parents’ generation”, and that when owning a home feels impossible, people spend more, work less, and take on riskier investments – a recipe for economic disaster.
Some observers have dubbed this attitude “financial nihilism”. If you have been working for years yet feel no closer to paying off your student debt or buying a house, why not “quiet quit” your job, put a lavish vacation on your credit card, or liquidate your last savings bond from Grandma and bet it all on online poker or a dubious cryptocurrency?
American baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, are the richest cohort in the history of the entire world. Yet they are also the first generation of Americans to leave to their children a world that is, by most common economic metrics, worse. So why are we still being told we would own a house if we drank less Starbucks, or shamed for failing to meet the milestones of a vanishing age?
And why, when economic alarms have been ringing for years, does it often feel like only younger Americans hear them?
‘For most of history, including when boomers came of age, living was cheap and things were expensive; today it’s the opposite.’ Photograph: H Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock
Earlier this year, as part of my reporting on American politics, I was watching a video of Tucker Carlson, the rightwing commentator, giving a speech at a conservative political conference. I was somewhat distracted, until I heard something that made me rewind the video.
Between asides about how New York smells like “weed and Halal food”, Carlson made a prescient point. “At some point the basic economics really matter,” he said. Rather than GDP, he argued that the health of the economy should be measured by something simpler.
“I’ve got a bunch of kids,” he said. “Can they afford houses with full-time jobs at, like, 27, 28? And the answer is no way. And the answer is that 35-year-olds with really good jobs can’t afford a house unless they stretch and go deep into debt.”
He continued: “And I just think that’s a total disaster … why? Two reasons. One, if people don’t own things, they don’t feel ownership of the country they’re in, and the country gets super volatile because people feel like they’ve got nothing to lose; when you have a lawn, trust me, you’re thinking longterm. Second, it’s really hard to have a family without a house, it is. It’s, like, super fun to live in an apartment if … there’s, like, a bar downstairs, you’re in a cool neighborhood, [but] you’re not going to have three kids there. You can’t.”
The “only young people in general that you will ever meet who have houses are young people whose parents help them”, he added. “And God bless their parents, that’s a perfectly great thing to do for your kids, but most people’s parents can’t afford to do that” – in part, he noted, because some are already in debt for their children’s education.
He called the situation a “national emergency”.
Carlson is not the first person to make these points, and leftwingers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani have made similar arguments in different forms. You know something is structurally broken when Carlson and AOC are, at least on this subject, reading from the same page. Either way, what he said struck a chord. It also made me think about my own family.
My parents bought their first home in 1985, when my mother was 29 and my father was 31, for about $50,000 (or $150,000 in current dollars). My father was an accountant and my mother was a sales representative at a commercial wallpaper company. The home was an apartment that they were able to buy, below market rate, when the building where my father rented converted some rentals to owner units. It was tiny – a glorified studio – but it was in Lenox Hill, in Manhattan, and they sold it at a profit just two years later.
They moved to the New Jersey suburbs, where they bought a three-bedroom fixer-upper with a yard. In 1992, they sold it for a profit and bought another house with a larger lot down the street. They somehow also found the money, time and energy to buy and renovate a fishing cottage in Pennsylvania as a summer house.
No, my parents were not representative of everyone. They were white, college-educated professionals, who for part of that period had dual full-time incomes, and they were unusually adventurous about real estate. They also spent nights and weekends doing DIY home renovations and scrimped to save money. (“We got takeout maybe once every two or three months,” my mother said pointedly, when I asked her to recollect. “And we brought bag lunches to work.” My father partly disputed that characterization, saying, “Maybe your mother did … I used to buy my sandwich in the city.”) Mortgage rates were also higher than now.
When my parents later separated, the suburban house with the big lot and the summer cottage were the first financial casualties. Still, even after their separation they both managed to land on their feet, home-wise.
I am 35 and owning a home seems unfathomable. Like many millennials (usually defined as people currently between the ages of 29 and 44), I did everything my elders advised. I got good grades in high school, worked part-time jobs to “build character”, graduated from a good university, and have now been working full-time for years. I am a journalist – which means I work in an industry that has been in decline for decades – but I am one of the lucky few who has a good job with a decent income and benefits. My girlfriend, who works at a research and strategy firm, also has a good job. We both hold master’s degrees.
We could move to a cheaper area, but both our jobs require us to be in or near New York City. (ConsumerAffairs recently calculated that it would take a typical New York state household 23 years to save enough for a downpayment on a median-priced home.) So, like many millennials, we rent – spending, in our case, $27,000 a year.
You could say that that is a fair trade for a roof above your head. But that is all it gets. Our diligent rent payments build no equity – they are not even reflected in our credit scores. The more than $150,000 I have spent on rent in my life is money I will never see again.
None of this is a sob story, exactly. No one would call us poor. We get takeout, more than our parents would probably say we should, and we travel several times a year – though mainly to see family or attend weddings. We have nice things: good clothes, the obligatory (though secondhand) Le Creuset pot, a large and delightfully high-definition television. When you cannot have big things, you console yourself with small ones. Yet even scuttling these indulgences would not make much difference in our finances.
That’s partly because of an odd paradox of modern life. For most of history, including when boomers came of age, living was cheap and things were expensive; today it’s the opposite. As Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein note in their recent book, Abundance, the result is a weird dissonance for many Americans: luxuries and little treats are obtainable, yet the staples of life – housing, healthcare, groceries, transportation – are frustratingly costly.
Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, recently pointed out that if you get a hole in your wall, it is now cheaper to buy a flatscreen TV to cover the hole than it is to fix the drywall.
I called a handyman to see if that was true. It is.
Baby boomers may be one of the most resented groups in America. Every week, about 220,000 people visit a forum on Reddit that exists solely for the purpose of complaining about them – turning older people’s lectures about youth entitlement on their head in first-person reports of boomer “tantrums” or posts mocking the “Gravy SEAL” politics of conservative uncles.
On TikTok and Instagram, people debate why boomers have such a hard time empathizing with younger Americans. Some blame insufficient psychotherapy; others, more viciously, make insinuations about the long-term effects of 1960s lead-paint poisoning on the brain.
Some of this rage is just ageism, or the familiar rebellion of generation against generation, or theeternal standoff of parents wanting a “thank you” while their children wait for a “sorry”. But at its heart this ire has less to do with the actual realities of baby boomers’ lives – which are as variegated as those of any group, with some rich, some struggling and some lying in fields in Vietnam – than with what they symbolize: the disastrous mismanagement of our national inheritance.
‘A law that held true for most of US history – that each generation does better than the one before – has collapsed.’ Photograph: Bromberger Hoover Photography/Getty Images
Pundits working in more academic arenas than TikTok have described boomers as thieves of posterity (the Wall Street Journal’s Joseph Sternberg); as “strangely uncurious about how the world is not really working for their kids” (the rightwing financier Peter Thiel); as economic bullies (the former US labor secretary Robert Reich); and as a “generation of sociopaths” who rigged the system in their favor, then pulled up the ladder behind them (the writer and venture capitalist Bruce Gibney).
And it is undeniable that American boomers, who were conceived during an extraordinary postwar economic boom and born into the most powerful country in the history of the world, have not seemed like responsible custodians of what they inherited.
Sure, they were often good stewards of their own prosperity. The hippies who danced in puddles at Woodstock and held Marxist reading groups at their college campuses often turned out to be socialists, when it suited them, and canny capitalists, when it did not. Because wages were relatively strong, and education, healthcare, childcare, and housing were all more affordable in real terms than they are now, boomers had money for downpayments on “starter homes”, then more real estate, then for investing in a stock market that had decades of bull runs. Some also worked at the same company for years, at a time when loyalty was rewarded with promotions and pensions.
Pensions! Upward mobility! Starter homes! It all sounds quaint, but if you try to explain why, older Americans tend to get defensive and interrupt – “We worked our asses off!” multiple people have told me – before you get to the important point: not that boomers did not work very hard, but that they worked hard in a system that, at least for some, repaid that work.
Then there’s this: from around the early 1990s, when they began to come into political power, and for the decades since, boomers repeatedly voted for tax cuts for themselves, at the cost of a ballooning national debt, and slashed public works – while protecting Medicare and social security for their own retirements. Some taxpayer-subsidized private Medicare programs now pay for retirees’ pet supplies, hair-styling, golf-course fees, and ski passes.
Yet the taxpayer-funded public universities where many boomers were able to work their way through school with summer jobs are now four times more expensive, adjusted for inflation – which may be why millennials at 40 have three times the student debt that boomers did at the same age. And the social security and Medicare programs supporting boomers in retirement will be severely overextended by the time millennials try to use them.
At the same time, the prosaic middle-income jobs that once powered upward mobility – teacher, paralegal, professor, trucker, machinist – are now fighting rearguard battles against flat wages, job insecurity and automation, while the best-paid corporate and tech jobs are concentrated in regions where salaries are high but the cost of living is even higher.
In the process, a law that held true for most of US history – that each generation does better than the one before – has collapsed. “In 1940 there was a 90% chance that you were going to earn more than your parents. To somebody born today, it is just a coin flip,” Jeremy Ney, a professor at Columbia’s business school, recently told the Washington Post.
To put it another way, in 1989, when many boomers were hitting the stride of their careers, an American 35 to 44 years of age already had a median net worth almost 75% that of someone then 65 to 74. In 2022, someone 35 to 44 had just a third of the wealth of the older person.
In a 2016 essay about middle-class precarity, the writer Neal Gabler said: “In the 1950s and 60s, economic growth democratized prosperity. In the 2010s, we have democratized financial insecurity.” (It is worth noting that Gabler was writing before the shadow of AI job losses began to fall over many industries.)
Gabler’s line could refer to any number of problems today – but none more glaring than housing. The home ownership crisis is a mismatch between stagnant incomes and ever-rising prices. Most experts also view it as a problem of supply and demand: there is not enough housing being built in the parts of the US where people most want to live.
(Conservatives tend to blame this problem on overzealous regulations that have made building homes more expensive and difficult, particularly in areas that are already expensive, while progressives tend to blame real estate speculators, such as the private equity firms that buy houses to turn them into rentals, and zoning laws that discourage multifamily homes and apartment buildings. Both are probably correct.)
Older people, seeing the value of their nest eggs rise ever higher, do not want to sell them yet, and are often the first to lobby local boards to prevent the construction of new housing that might reduce the value of their own.
‘There are so many boomers, and they don’t want to die or move out of their housing,’ said William Gale, an economist at the Brookings Institution. Photograph: Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group/Getty Images
“There are so many boomers, and they don’t want to die or move out of their housing,” William Gale, an economist at the Brookings Institution, told me. It’s partly a “timing issue”, he said; many boomers are in good health, and not old enough to feel that they should be in a retirement community.
“I’m 66,” he added, almost apologetically. “I don’t want to move into retirement – so I’m taking up a house that some young family could otherwise occupy.”
Even when boomers are ready to vacate, it is not clear how many younger buyers can afford, or will want, their houses. After years lovingly perfecting their dream homes, some boomers no doubt hope their children will buy or inherit them. But millennials, according to some reports, tend to regard big, beautiful Martha Stewart-style houses with the puzzled admiration of middle-class Europeans of the 1950s looking at the half-empty mansions of the fading aristocracy: impressive, but who could afford the upkeep?
My cousin Matt, who also lives in New York, bought an apartment with his wife a few years ago, when he was 35. They got a third-floor walkup in Brooklyn with two bedrooms and 690 sq ft. Their building was built in 1937 and they cannot control their own heat. They paid $900,000 – an eye-popping sum, he acknowledged – and consider themselves lucky.
I called Matt to find out his secret. Had he and his wife made their downpayment with the help of family money – as is the case, by one estimate, for nearly a quarter of millennials and gen Zers who have recently bought homes?
No, he said. He and his wife paid themselves. (Their parents did pay for part of their wedding, and for his wife’s education and part of Matt’s.) They both had savings, well-paid corporate jobs (albeit with salaries that never seem to quite keep up with inflation) and no remaining student debt. They rushed to sign their mortgage when interest rates were low.
Even then, he said, it felt as if “both of us, put together, barely got across the line”. Just a couple weeks later, rates started to rise, and they might not have been able to afford the apartment. He and his wife were relieved to be home owners when, a few years later, they had their first child.
“And that’s kind of the shock around all this is,” he said. “Like, if we [could barely do it], who the hell is supposed to be able to do this? We have a lot of single friends who’ve been talking about buying places for years, and it’s just impossible. They’re just going to rent forever, unless they get married to someone who’s making almost as much as they are.”
He chuckled. “My parents had three children, two houses, two plots of land, and two businesses by the time they were 35.”
The “funny thing”, he said, is that many millennials, who already lag behind previous generations when it comes to typical milestones such as marriage, home ownership and children, are now waiting for wealth inheritances “so that we can live the lives we’ve been told we’re supposed to be living by our parents. But by the time we get them, it’ll be too late to live those lives.”
I asked him if gets into arguments with older people about economics. “It’s kind of a waste of time,” he said drily. “I don’t think our parents’ generation has ever been wrong. And they walked uphill, both ways, in the snow, their whole lives.”
Of course, you may have heard about the “great wealth transfer”, a day in the near-ish future when inheritances from their boomer parents will supposedly make younger people affluent overnight. Banks and asset management firms have estimated that trillions of dollars in wealth will be transferred over the next 25 years. That prediction has led to a flurry of sometimes breathless media coverage about the remaking of the global economy.
But Gale, the economist, believes that the transfer has been greatly overstated. The problem is that “intergenerational transfers are largely a phenomenon of the extremely rich giving to the very rich”, he said. “The median inheritance is not going to be life-transforming.”
Despite the stereotype of wealthy boomers careening around Florida in motorboats, not all have money to leave significant inheritances; people also live longer now, and have more medical and assisted-living costs. (Not for nothing, the healthcare industry is now the largest employer in 38 of 50 states.) And some boomers have indicated that they plan to live life to the fullest and leave nothing to their heirs (“die with zero”), or donate to charity to protect their children’s work ethic from the ravages of financial security.
But the biggest issue is that these inheritances, for those millennials or gen Zers who get them, will mostly arrive too late. “People need the money when they’re forming households and raising kids,” Gale said. “Getting it when they’re 60 or 65 isn’t as useful.”
Kurt Supe, a financial adviser with CFD Investments and Creative Financial Designs, helps clients plan retirement. His job often feels “more like [that of] a psychologist … than a financial planner”, he told me, because of the generational disconnect – and lack of communication – between clients and their children.
Many of his clients, Supe said, are boomers who worked decades at steady, middle-income jobs, lived conservatively, and now have a couple million dollars in retirement wealth. A typical client might be a midwestern couple who worked as teachers, enjoyed an excellent pension plan and low cost of living, and do not understand why their late-30s child in, say, California still does not own a home despite a low-six-figure salary as a software engineer.
‘The younger generation … [are] having to try to negotiate their way to get just a piece of the dream,’ said financial adviser Kurt Supe. Photograph: Bromberger Hoover Photography/Getty Images
He likes to make a board game analogy. Boomers and people of his generation (early gen X) were playing “with a Monopoly board where all the real estate pieces are still sitting in the box and we have the opportunity to buy them all”, he said. “The younger generation is playing with all of the real estate already bought, and they’re having to try to negotiate their way to get just a piece of the dream. I mean, it’s two very different games.”
If his clients are in good financial shape, he encourages them to give their children early inheritances or help them buy a house. Yet clients are often resistant – because they believe this will somehow make their progeny irresponsible; because previous financial advisers (who are often paid based on how much client money they manage) instilled in them a fear of touching their funds; or because they believe they may face an “emergency”.
“I’m like, what kind of $4m emergency could you possibly have?” he said. “But they’re terrified to give $10,000 away to their kids at Christmas, because what if they need that money someday?”
Many boomers, he thinks, unconsciously adopted the attitudes of parents who survived the Great Depression. He is fond of saying: “There is no prize for dying with the most money.”
It seems ridiculous that anyone would envy millennials’ fortunes, but the generation after – Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012 – may already wish they had a fraction of their economic security.
Recent college graduates are discovering that traditionally safe white-collar industries, such as tech, finance, and corporate law, are glutted or anticipate AI-related job losses. Perhaps the US will soon taste the kind of youth unemployment that has long haunted some European countries; newly minted computer engineers, the New York Times reports, are applying to jobs at Chipotle.
When you don’t have income or wealth, you turn to credit.According to the New York Federal Reserve, 15.3% of Gen Zers with credit cards have maxed out their cards.
These recent graduates may never have china sets, or much use for them, though they can console themselves with Domino’s pizzas bought with installment plans. Earlier this year, Klarna, a financing company, announced a program that would allow people to pay for food deliveries with “buy now, pay later” loans. In August, Klarna sold up to $26bn of these loans to Nelnet – the same firm that services millions of Americans’ student loan debts.
“If you take a long view,” Gale, the economist, told me, “the US economy is incredibly resilient.” That is undoubtedly true, and important to remember. The slowing of population growth, among other factors, may also eventually make housing cheaper. Yet it can be difficult to feel optimistic right now.
Recently, as my mother, girlfriend and I returned from visiting family for Thanksgiving, my mother asked how my article about young people’s financial travails was going. We were in a rental car, and I was driving through a tunnel. (It was already dark out, so no, there was no light on the other end.) I said that I was still working on it.
“I thought of some more points,” she said, “as devil’s advocate. Houses may be more expensive now, but we paid for your college.” (My parents paid for the lion’s share of my undergraduate education, which I appreciate.) “I had to work my way through college. My parents didn’t pay for anything. Not college, certainly not a meal plan.”
I started to point out that it was easier to work your way through school then, when colleges, adjusted for inflation, were –
“Well,” she said, sitting upright. “It didn’t feel easy. Not to me. Not at the time.”
Attendees walk through the main exhibition hall of Colombia 4.0 – Territorios Digitales in Bogota, closing a three month tech tour that brought digital innovation and training to 11 regions. Photo: Ministry of ICT of Colombia (MinTIC),…
A couple of years ago, 31-year-old charity worker Nicki Wedgwood had ordered Christmas presents online for friends and family. When the packages were delivered to her in Hackney, east London, the driver left them in the lobby of her building rather than taking them directly to her flat. She spotted them as she popped out to a nearby shop and decided to pick them up when she came back. When she returned 10 minutes later, the boxes had been ripped open and their contents were gone.
Wedgwood thinks she passed the thief in the hallway as she was leaving for the shop. “There was some random dude just inside the doorway, who had a Boris bike with him,” she says. She had assumed he was a guest of one of her neighbours. “I said hello to him … I think he even said Merry Christmas.”
Wedgwood and her flatmates have had “so much stuff stolen over the years”, she says. The external door to their block of flats is glass, so thieves can peer in and see packages that have been dropped off in the lobby. She believes there are thieves in her local area who follow delivery drivers on bikes “and immediately push on the door after the driver has driven off. If that’s been left open, they can just get the parcel – and a lot quicker than the person it’s for, who is maybe 15 floors up.”
Parcel theft has become a growing issue, with parcels worth a record-breaking £666.5m reported as stolen across the UK in the last year, according to data obtained by the technology company Quadient, nearly £290m more than in 2024. And those figures are just reported thefts, while many more go unreported. Wedgwood was able to get a refund from the retailer, and says she didn’t see any point in telling the police about the incident, given that when she has reported other crimes to them: “They just take a picture and you never hear anything again.” (A spokesperson for the Metropolitan police advises victims to “always report thefts to the police”, and said it is “carrying out intelligence-led operations to catch the criminal gangs who prey on delivery vans, which has already resulted in a number of arrests”.)
Why has this crime become so common? We know that people are buying more online than ever before but, according to Gary Winter, the vice-president of global strategic initiatives at Quadient, the increase in parcel thefts isn’t just proportional to the rise of online shopping – it’s bigger than that. Winter doesn’t believe that the rise is because people are getting better at reporting it. “I genuinely think it’s becoming more frequent,” he says. “People see it as a low-level crime opportunity and are taking advantage of it.”
A rise in parcels that don’t need to be signed for makes deliveries less secure. Photograph: Posed by model; Drazen Zigic/Getty Images
Leicestershire is the UK’s hotspot for parcel thefts, according to Quadient’s data (which doesn’t include figures from every British police force, as not all of them responded to the company’s freedom of information request), but city and town centres in general are where the greatest risk is. “It’s more likely that you haven’t got a safe place, that you’re living in an apartment or a multi-occupied building,” says Winter. In peak delivery season – unsurprisingly, parcel thefts are highest in December – piles of parcels can build up in lobbies and on doorsteps, and in busy areas where people don’t necessarily know their neighbours, and thieves can help themselves without too much difficulty.
Darren Walmsley, the vice chair of the National Courier and Despatch Association, thinks part of the reason parcel thefts are becoming so common is a change in the way deliveries are made. In the past, far more deliveries had to be signed for. With a signed-for delivery, he says: “Generally, you’re physically handing it over to someone, and therefore it’s a secure delivery.” In his personal view, it was when Amazon came on the scene that things started to change. It popularised delivering items without requiring proof of delivery, having worked out that it was more cost-efficient to risk having to refund losses than for drivers to take the extra time to get a signature. Then, during the Covid pandemic, contactless delivery became more common.
Independent courier companies that offer a same-day service are “the only guaranteed service there is”, says Walmsley. Multi-job couriers tend to have much less time for each delivery: “They’ll be asked to do 100-plus deliveries a day, whereas a same-day delivery driver might do 10 deliveries a day, so they can afford to take a lot more time. For example, if someone elderly ordered something quite large, the courier would be more able to assist them to get the package inside.”
Overstretched delivery drivers leaving parcels outside, or not closing doors properly as they leave a building, “is a large part of the problem”, says Wedgwood, though she admits she wouldn’t want to do their job.The trouble is that retailers and customers tend to look for the cheapest delivery options, which usually means a lower-quality service. Walmsley advocates opting for same-day delivery when you can. “The perception is that same-day is always significantly more expensive than overnight deliveries,” he says. “However, that’s not always strictly true. The bigger an item or the higher its value, and the closer the collection and delivery locations are to each other, the more cost-effective same-day deliveries become.”
Though the value of Wedgwood’s parcels came to about £100 in total – they contained trinket gifts and books for her family – the most expensive item was only worth £30. “I definitely don’t feel like you’d get a good price for them [in the secondhand market],” she says. What can be sold on more easily, however, is branded sportswear – and Winter’s research has shown that more of these items go missing, suggesting that thieves target parcels with sports brand packaging. “We know that they end up at places like car boot sales,” he says. “They end up on eBay or Facebook Marketplace or various other platforms to be resold.”
Not on your doorstep … getting deliveries sent to a locker is a safer option if you are not going to be home. Photograph: arcady_31/Getty Images
It is not only organised criminals who are taking advantage of parcels being left outside – opportunistic neighbours are another culprit. Asif, who lives in Derbyshire, had a parcel stolen from behind his bin, where it had been left by the courier, and he suspects his neighbour was responsible. “He denied it,” says the 53-year-old. But “I could tell from his face”.
Maddie from Bristol has a little more evidence to suggest that her neighbours were the culprits when her weekly box from the meal kit service Gousto went missing. She went downstairs to her building’s basement flat to ask its student occupiers if they had seen it. “They were in the process of moving out, and the cleaner, who was conducting the end-of-tenancy clean, answered,” she says. The cleaner claimed not to have seen the box, but as Maddie turned to leave, she saw “a pile of black sacks by the door in the alleyway, and poking out of one was the patterned cold box you get as part of a Gousto. We are 99% sure it was our box as no one else in the past has had a Gousto delivery to our building.” Though it was obviously disappointing to miss out on that week’s meals, Maddie was able to get a full refund from Gousto.
Even with police involvement, it can be difficult to catch parcel thieves, although it is sometimes possible with the help of video doorbell footage – as in the case of Peter Storer, who was caught on camera stealing from a woman’s doorstep in Leicester. Even if victims don’t have any evidence, Winter says it is important to report it. “You’ve got to report it to the police because you want to be in the statistics. You want to try to make sure that the police are paying attention to this.”
Some people, of course, have taken justice into their own hands. It is testament to how widespread the frustration about this issue is that videos of doorstep thieves, or “porch pirates” as they have become known, being tricked have gone viral on social media. Pranksters have left out “bait packages” that, when picked up, will set off everything from paint bombs to glitter explosions, with front-door cameras ready to capture the thief’s comeuppance. Arizona-based software engineer Alec Armbruster, who has had a number of parcels stolen, says he enjoys watching such videos because laughing at the thieves’ plans backfiring is “the only way I can take back control”.
Several years ago, Armbruster made a prank video of his own, filling a bait package with used cat litter. “I think it took a week and a half for the box to get picked up,” he says. “I came home one day and it was gone and I was like, ‘Yes!’ I ran inside to watch the footage. It was very exciting.” He had become used to having his parcels stolen, and says he would report every one. “Typically, they would send out an officer and I would never hear about it again.” So he decided to take matters into his own hands via the prank, “which helped because it turned from something extremely frustrating to something exciting and entertaining”.
It’s a steal … a man takes parcels from outside a house in Moreno Valley, California. Photograph: Posed by model; AvailableLight/Getty Images
He thinks the video was popular on social media because “it’s just extremely satisfying. We’ve all had things stolen from us and it’s very invading. And we all want to see justice for things like this. If someone thinks they are stealing something expensive, like an iPhone, but what they actually get is just dust, it’s quite funny.” That said, Armbruster admits that his prank “didn’t really bring justice”, in terms of stopping parcels getting stolen. “I thought or hoped it would, which sucks.”
There are more effective steps that can be taken to prevent parcel thefts. “The brands could do more to anonymise parcels or make it less attractive or less obvious to thieves that there might be something interesting inside,” Winter says. “Carriers can re-emphasise to their delivery agents: ‘Do not put things in a stupid place, if it’s visible from the road or visible to everybody.’” Instead, they should tell them to try “knocking the door a bit harder and waiting a few seconds”, though he says he is loth to criticise the carriers because, “they’re under massive pressure to deliver such high volumes, particularly at this time of year”.
Consumers need to play their part in preventing these thefts, too, by making sure they are ordering a delivery for a day they will be in, and providing the correct address. “It’s amazing how many times we see addresses given incorrectly,” Walmsley says. He also recommends buyers consider the different delivery methods on offer. “See if they’ve got signed-for options or carriers that you’ve used before, who you know you’ve received good delivery service from.” It could also be worth getting packages delivered to your work address, he says. “Business deliveries are a lot more successful.”
Winter agrees. “If you live in an apartment with no front garden or you’re on a street with a lot of visibility then, when you order, don’t have it delivered to home, select an out-of-home option.” He recommends corner shop and locker deliveries. He admits he has a vested interest in lockers because Quadient provides smart parcel locker solutions, but says he genuinely believes that “it’s a very convenient way to reduce that risk”.
Since Wedgwood’s parcels were stolen, she has become “quite paranoid” when she makes online orders. If she is out and receives a message to say something has been delivered, she texts her housemates to ask them to fetch it straight away. “When the buzzer goes now, we try to ask: ‘What’s the name on the parcel?’” before letting the courier in, to weed out impostors. She is not taking any chances, especially since she believes her parcel thief came back last year. “My flatmate said: ‘So weird, I’ve just come in and downstairs there was a random Boris bike left in the hallway.’ Alarm bells immediately went off,” she says.
Since Wedgwood has not had any luck asking her landlord to make her building more secure, she doesn’t expect the thieves to back down anytime soon. Unlike Armbruster, who managed to stop his parcels being stolen by moving to a more rural area, Wedgwood is not willing to find a new home because of this. “The rent is really low. I love the area. Also, I just don’t want to let the thieves win,” she says. “Why should I let them?”
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Thompson, chairman of the Chief Executive Alliance and previously ranked as the world’s top CEO coach, and Loflin, Nasdaq’s Global Head of Board Advisory, joined forces to provide a 360-view of this loaded moment for leadership, from the C-suite and board perspectives, respectively. In a wide-ranging conversation with Fortune, they talked about the Shakespearean themes of leadership and turmoil and the feeling that “heavy is the head that wears the crown.”
For those aspiring to reach the top, Thompson shared the conventional wisdom he’d learned from his mentor, Marshall Goldsmith: “What got you here got you halfway there.” (Goldsmith had a New York Times bestseller in 2007 with What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.)
The transition from being a high-performing executive in a “swim lane” to having the “aperture of having a full enterprise” requires substantial new learning and skill development, Thompson argued, because no matter how great an executive you are or how prepared you think you might be, the stakes are existentially high. The risk that a CEO might “lose his or her head within the next year or so” is “easily like 20% or at the big brands It feels like it’s twice that,” said Thompson, who recently penned an essay on the subject of CEO “decapitation” for Fortune.
Adding to this pressure, Thompson and Loflin added, is the radical shift in board member expectations. Board members, who once might have been “golf buddies,” are now “really under the gun to perform.” They are “less patient” and expected to “actually deliver,” based on their subject matter expertise.
This environment demands nearly every candidate be ready to serve as a “peacetime in a wartime CEO,” Thompson said, capable of harvesting the best aspects of the company culture while also being “disrupting and breaking new ground.” An executive promoted from a functional role, such as a CFO, may possess the “gravitas of understanding the street and the shareholders,” but often lacks the breadth to “light hearts and minds” across the workforce, or do “ride-alongs with customers.”
The loneliness of the tower, and ‘relationology’
Fortune has been tracking this tenuous moment for leaders throughout 2025. Top recruitment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas found 1,235 CEOs had left (or lost) their jobs through the first half of 2025, a stunning 12% increase from 2024 and the highest year-to-date total since Challenger began tracking CEO turnover in 2002.
Jim Rossman, Barclays’ global head of shareholder advisory, who’s been closely tracking shareholder activism for decades, similarly found record activist-linked turnover at the top for 2025. “It feels like what activists have done is basically [to hold] public companies to the standards of private equity,” Rossman told Fortune in a previous interview, as they have come to view the CEO “more as an operator, not somebody who’s risen through the ranks.” In other words: Results matter.
The intense environment contributes to feelings of isolation. As CEOs often note, being the boss is a lonely job where leaders are caught in the middle, with information they cannot share with reports but must share with the board, creating a huge information asymmetry, as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella previously told McKinsey.
Carolyn Dewar, the co-leader and founder of McKinsey’s CEO Practice, previously told Fortune that “No one else in your organization or above you, like your board or your investors, see all the pieces you see.” She advocated for leaders to surround themselves with trusted advisors—“a kitchen cabinet” of sorts.
Similarly, Loflin told Fortune he’s fond of the concept of “relationology,” which he describes as “sort of a study of relationships.” He suggested leaders must develop a “portfolio of relationships of intimacy” that are “very context-relevant.” A leader’s effectiveness hinges on having fluency, for instance, when speaking to a CFO about analyst days, or working with a compliance team to keep the business safe or connecting authentically with union executives. Loflin said he’s often seen it being a “big surprise” to accomplished leaders that they have, say, seven different groups they need to engage and maybe as many as six new skills to really flesh out before they’re ready to take the enterprise to the next level.
This need for deep, context-aware connection also applies to personal life, Loflin added. The idea that a personal life and professional life can be entirely separate “undermines leadership and undermines the fabric of a company.” Critically, Loflin said, the chair must really know his CEO “at a deep level, like a Shakespearean level,” requiring a transparency that ensures appropriate accountability. After all, Loflin noted as one example, boards have to be mindful that a personal relationship that violates company policy can jeopardize corporate governance at the drop of a hat. The board really needs to know who their CEO is, maybe better than the CEO knows themselves.
The power and the privilege, the hubris and the humility
Loflin, who admitted to Fortune that he’s a bit of a Shakespeare nerd, noted the difference between a tragedy and a comedy is determined by “the vulnerability and the self-awareness of the protagonist,” and a tragic outcome results from a feeling he likened to “never recognizing whether I needed to grow or change.”
Thompson added that surviving as a CEO requires an “odd combination” of traits you might read in a Greek tragedy: hubris and humility.
The CEO must possess the hubris, or excessive pride, to believe they can be the best in their field, but also the profound humility that acknowledges they can’t do it alone.
The professional mandate is relentless, Thompson added, citing a key interview for the book from Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon: if you were the “same guy you were a year ago, you don’t deserve to be promoted.” Thompson said he thinks of hubris of being at “the edge of your competence, so rather than retreating, you actually should lean into that” to acquire the skills and help you need to keep growing as a professional.
For top leaders, Thompson said, the top job is not a prize to be won, but a “privilege to do this role.” Just as Olympic athletes must constantly improve, he added, leaders must recognize that breaking a record only attracts more competition.
Loflin urged boards and executives alike to move beyond a Wolf of Wall Street mindset and into “what it means to authentically care for and build the confidence and foster appropriate accountability.” He said that for many executives, admitting you have areas to improve on and get better at is a “special vulnerability.” He argued boards need more genuine, interpersonal affection—sometimes of the tough love variety—is needed to prevent a truly Shakespearean tragedy on their watch.
Loflin said he’d just had breakfast with a board director for a $30 billion company and the subject of love arose: “Do you love your management team?” The director said yes, definitely, almost like relatives. After all, they had been with the company over a decade and come to have deep relationships with other directors and their C-suite. Loflin argued that over decades of advising boards on corporate governance, he wishes more would adopt this sort of attitude.
“I don’t think it’s going to hurt anything in business because a good father has to talk to a troubled son, hopefully he’s mentoring when [the son is] getting himself in trouble.” After all, Loflin continued, “bad stuff happens, and I think some of these metaphors are important.” In other words, it shouldn’t be the Wolf of Wall Street, but the wolf—or the activist—is always at the door.
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Anna Maxwell Martin in 1982 and 2025Anna Maxwell Martin in 1982 and 2025. Later photograph: Pål Hansen/The Guardian. Styling: Andie Redman. Hair and makeup: Celine Nonon at Arlington Artists. Archive image: courtesy of Anna Maxwell Martin
