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Someday, Kids, None of This Will Be Yours
My children will never be nepo babies
As we drove home from school, my youngest was chatting in a stream of non-sequiturs the way only thirteen-year-olds can when she announced that she wished she could be a nepo baby. I laughed, and she quickly added, “Don’t worry, Dad, you still have time. I believe in you.”
I laughed again because, with middle schoolers, it’s hard to tell the difference between sarcasm and earnestness.
I told my daughter that the only way she would ever be a nepo baby was if she decided to go into haiku comics, and then I could help her grow an audience of dozens with almost no effort. But her train of thought had already moved onto the mysteries of pop-star lyrics.
My train of thought remained stubbornly on the nepo baby track. When I was a young man, magazines and newspapers would frequently run articles about how much money we Gen-Xers would inherit when our boomer parents finally passed on.
Over time, as newspapers died and magazines became a mockery of their former glory, online stories began discussing how the Great Wealth Transfer was skipping Gen-X.
And so it goes.
My father was quite briefly worth tens of millions of dollars, but it was all in stock options, and his paper wealth was erased with the dot com bust of the early 2000s. He kept waiting for the stock to climb a little higher before selling. He and my mom had no savings, and when they both died six years ago, all I inherited was a funeral bill that I could not afford to pay.
And so it goes.
Dad was an engineer in Silicon Valley. I’m the only one of us four children who went to college — paid for by student loans I still carry. One of my younger brothers works in IT for a school district — he and his family still live in Silicon Valley, barely holding on as housing prices soar and wages for normal people fail to keep up.
My other two siblings are estranged from IT-brother and me. They both occasionally surface online, in the throes of a mental…
