Overview

'Somewhere in the multiverse, innumerable possibilities are collapsing into infinite different realities. Am I happier in any of them? I still don't know. The answer to that question is just one more thing that $1.2 million could never buy.' In 2020, Alexander Hurst was 29 years old and broke, living as a writer in a cramped Paris flat-share. There were murmurs that a global pandemic was coming. Financial stability seemed unattainable, so far removed from his reality - the reality of the generation who came of age during the 2008 financial crisis. On a whim, he poured his meagre savings into highly risky options trading. Within a year this small set of stocks was worth $1.2 million. Enough to turn his life on its head - but not in the way he had imagined, as he began a slow motion descent into losing it all. In exploring Alexander's remarkable rise and fall from wealth, Generation Desperation grapples with the vital questions of our age: what do class and status mean in a late-stage capitalist society? Can everyone really build the life they want? Or is there a cost to pursuing money above everything? Generation Desperation is an urgent, unmissable fable for our times.

Full Product Details

9781399728287

Table of Contents

Reviews

A fantastically compelling personal story that is also the story of a generation. Hurst captures millennial desperation about money, and the seduction of get-rich-quick stories in the social-media era. Told with perfect timing. -- Simon Kuper Generation Desperation is an epic cautionary tale for our age of feast or famine inequality. Told with the depth of feeling and lucidity that only the son of leftist anti-capitalist Catholic hippies turned day trader could tell, Hurst speaks to the contradictions inside all of us. I couldn't turn away. -- Angelica Ferrara A clever and brutally honest, Zeitgeisty tale of an ambitious thirty-something trying to make sense of his generation, its hurdles, and what it means to let enough be enough. -- Lindsey Tramuta

Author Information

Alexander Hurst is a writer whose long-form essays and reportage have appeared in the Guardian, Hazlitt, The New Republic, Eater, The Caravan, and elsewhere. Originally from Cleveland, Ohio, he has an undergraduate degree from Amherst College, Massachusetts, an MSc in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and an MA in Public Policy from Sciences Po, where he has also taught a first-year seminar on contemporary democracy in the United States. He writes a wide-ranging, regular column about French and European issues for the Guardian. He lives in Paris.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available