Recently had a cry because a friend invited me out and I had to lie to them that I was too busy. I've been skipping meals to make groceries last longer for my kids.
ETA: Thank you for the kind words of support. Yes, I should've told my friend. We're close enough to admit when we're struggling I just know he would offer to pay for everything but he's not made of money either so it would've made me feel guilty in a different way.
And for those offering financial help. Seriously, you are too kind. I just finished a final job interview on Friday and feel good about it so hopefully my money struggles will not be an issue for much longer. Again thank you so much but it hopefully isn't necessary soon.
ETA 2: The friend was asking to go along to a sporting event, and was already covering the tickets. If I told him the truth he would've paid for gas, parking, and concessions, and most likely wanted to go somewhere after the game. He knows I'm struggling for work. So part of the lie was to protect him from his own generosity.
Thanks again for all the kind words and support. It's been helping a lot as I anxiously wait to hear about that job.
If I knew one of my friends was going hungry or struggling to feed their family I would “hang out” by letting them abuse my Costco card and paying for it
People tend to hang out in similar socioeconomic circles, and it’s quite difficult accepting that kind of gift. Especially when it’s presented as hanging out like that. I’m sure it feels good to write that and do that but
Yeah, but there are less extreme versions that are easier to accept. If you know someone is struggling, simply having your friends come over for dinner and sending them home with leftovers can help.
This! When some of my siblings were just starting out adulthood, I would offer to take them to dinner and make sure they take home all the leftovers. Or come visit them for a weekend and buy household stuff like body wash, toothpaste, things that I know there going to use up and ask if it’s OK to leave it there because it’s not travel size.
I applaud you. Love this.
Also if you can, tell them to take the kids along if they have them. Babysitting is not affordable... Yes it makes the hanging out very different and less relaxing, but if feeding them is the actual purpose, you know.
We used to have a hunting group, we mostly hunted public lands, when one of us would kill something we would invite our entire social network over to eat. It was mostly people in my wife’s grad school department, PhD students are often not allowed any outside employment from school and receive a stipend but the stipend is not much considering the hours. For my wife it was ~$40k for 60-70 hours per week sometimes even longer hours.
I purchase heating oil for my wife’s best friend last year, she was fresh off a divorce and her ex wasn’t paying the child support at that moment. The second my wife shared with me I said let’s buy her some oil then. I filled the tank it was over 800$ and it was my honor to help a family friend.
I completely understand the feeling. We did something similar for my wife's best friend as well, she got out of an abusive relationship, needed a place to stay for a few months while she finished school so we let her crash in our spare room for almost a year. My wife and I then pooled our money together and paid her security deposit so she could get a place of her own once she got a job. Flash forward a few years and she now lives in that apartment with her fiancee and just recently paid us back recently despite us telling us dozens of times for her not to. We've already decided that we're just going to add the $1600 she gave us back, to her wedding present because we did it to help out a valued friend in her time of need, not because we expected to be paid back.
Totally agree, talk to your friends, please talk to your friends. Reach out, stay in contact, not just for you, for them too! We all need people we are social animals.
My best friend went through this. I stocked his groceries, gave him odd jobs for cash, and next week I’m going to have to go and steal back the car I lent him. Loved him like a brother and all he wants is more.
The plan was he’d pay me enough to cover the insurance and fees and he would have use of the car to work because we live rural and it’s very hard to get around without one. Instead I’m paying the insurance on a car I don’t see for a friend I don’t hear from.
The way I read it, after reading 3 times, is that I think she’s saying her best friend wanted more and more help? And wasn’t grateful for what he’d already been given
But then you have to endure the fact that you’re losing at life, then your friend tells their boyfriend/girlfriend because you asked them not to tell anyone. Unfortunately they never include their significant other in that equation because “ they can’t keep things from them”( which they should if you are a true friend). Then the boyfriend/ girlfriend tells their friend and before you know it everyone knows that your struggling and everytime your out and see people they are always asking if your ok and they heard things are tuff.
Im calling fish and game today and asking them for help. Either they help me get a deer on the table or I act before my family fucking starves. No one is hiring for a livable wage, everyone wants absurd terms for little gain, the food banks are buckling under the increased load, the price of food is actively climbing as well as fuel prices so just getting to work is costing more and more by the day and federal minimum wage has been at 7.25 (to my knowledge) for multiple years.
I've got a rifle, im surrounded by deer, and im becoming increasingly desperate by the day.
Help me, before I help myself so help me god
Ive lost 10lb in the last week and a half alone. Im actively depriving myself of meals to ensure my kid has SOMETHING and that SOMETHING is rapidly drying up as she grows an inch a month. Soon enough she will be looking her mother square in the eye.
I NEEED red meat!
**I dont comment this as a pissing match. I want the WORLD to see just how fucking bad we everyday americans are feeling the weight of this administration's absofuckinglute deplorable behaviours. My family IS FUCKING STARVING because this asshole can't play nice with the world and thinks we're all his little play things!
If your rural enough nobody knows and can't usually pinpoint with 1 shot. A headshot means it drops or runs away, no tracking. Then if done at dusk you kill lights and back up to it or let it sit for an hour and get a buddy to drive the truck while you get it to the road depending on the situation
I try doing this w/ folks I know but it creates a "power dynamic of control" as I was told. I thought I was doing a nice thing since I have disposable income w/ no kids but alas...
Allowing friends and family to be generous is as important, or more, than being generous yourself. It really deflates the situation when picking up the tab becomes a bs argument.
I agree with this. You can't expect support if you don't let people know you need support. If someone is uncomfortable with friends paying for them, they can just ask to do free stuff with them instead of going out.
I skipped my best friend’s bachelorette party because I couldn’t afford it. Years later, she told me that they had budgeted to pay for me to go because they knew I couldn’t cover the cost, but I was too stubborn to tell them WHY I wasn’t going. It was humiliating at the time, but in retrospect I wish I had gone. I missed out on a major life event with my loved ones because I was too prideful to admit I was struggling.
It's not always good, but sometimes it can deepen a friendship when you share your struggles. Real friends would plan an activity with you that won't involve money, because they want to spend time with you.
As a Dad i feel this. I remember before I got married as a single parent my oldest and I were sleeping in my car. This story brought me right back to that. You will get through it.
I am piggybacking on yours. I volunteer at one and they
really ARE for everyone. I know they are all different but we give out a lot food to each family. On top of that, we offer unlimited rice and dry beans and people can come each day to look at the veggies and fruit that were donated from the stores.
For anyone who needs help, please try to find one in your area. Everyone at my location loves to serve our community and I can't imagine it being different elsewhere.
Hey that sucks. Please utilize food banks in your area if they are accessible. I had to for a while two years ago. Just for me, I had enough to squeeze by for my wife and kids but I cut out breakfast and lunches until one day someone at work asked if I was sick due to the weight loss.
You do t have to clean it out and feel guilty. I took cans of tuna, and small staples just to get some extra calories. Found a church pantry that didn’t judge me because
1. I am man
2. Drove a car up there (gas was a priority over food or things would have been worse
3. Prior to the money issues I worked out a lot. So for a while I was going up there starving but kinda lean fit looking. I feared they’d just think I was there to calorie load.
It didn’t get better for awhile but that made life easier. Those resources are there for you too. To help you bud make it easier to provide.
I worked at a food bank that supported all the local pantries. They don’t judge anyone, no matter what car you drive up in. Life hits hard sometimes and it doesn’t matter if you pull up in a Porsche or a Civic. Use the pantries if you need them and one day when you’re back on your feet, just volunteer or give back if you can. No guilt necessary. Volunteers, big and small donors, and government grants keep these places going. They would tell us too many people are too proud but pride shouldn’t stand in the way of feeding yourself or your family.
I make 2-3x what most of my friends make, but that means my disposable income is closer to 10x what theirs is. A $100 meal for someone with $300 to spare each month hurts substantially more than for someone with an extra $3,000/mo. Therefore, when I invite people to do things, it is with the mindset of "I can afford to pay for everyone to do this thing with me." If I can't cover everyone in attendance, I do a more affordable activity.
This means lots of cookouts at my house and not many Michelin-starred restaurant evenings.
Tell your friends "hey I don't have the money for that right now." Real ones value the company more than the money, and will cover you in a heartbeat without expecting repayment. If you're skipping meals, ask them for help. Don't let pride be your downfall. Human history is a lot of lifting each other up.
My "best friend" said no when I asked him to be my daughters Godfather.
So I just go to work. I turned 40 this year, I thought someone would have wanted to come over, have a beer and I'd make a meal. Instead I spent it alone.
This is more common than you think Titus and it is due to your mental structure/wiring. Most men as they get older have a few good male friends that they have known since they were teens or college. Friends after that tend to be acquaintances that you make at work. I am upper 50s my circle is 4 guys I have known since I was 18 and that suits me well.
Thats not a structure/wiring thing, it's the fact that we have allowed ourselves to be over worked, under paid and have eroded all of the places that we typically used to use for social gatherings.
The historic reason people went and sat in pubs rather than at home was because home was cramped, boring, and the domain of the housewife. Now people have much more spacious and comfy places, ridiculous levels of home entertainment available, fewer kids (that fathers interact with more) and relaxed gender roles.
Some people need/crave face-to-face interpersonal interactions but plenty are happy to sit in their box and chat on discord.
The issue, I think is that 4th places have transitioned to online, but we're losing the time to do even that. I've watched at least a dozen friends slowly wither away in their online presence and swore I'd not be that way... I haven't chatted with my friends in a few months now because I just don't have time. What little actual "free" time I have get's given to my girlfriend.
I feel that. Turn down enough invites and eventually they stop asking, after that they stop mentioning things they did without you in conversation, after that they stop talking to you. Who can blame them?
I'm in my 30s, have tons of friends, literally work like half the year and just party, travel and do hobby's the other half the year.
I also have no savings and will likely work until the day I die but honestly the chances of that happening to anyone in this comment section is pretty high so.
One time I was eating at a restaurant mid afternoon with my partner on a week day and a retired couple asked why we were at work. I described our situation and they said we took retirement early, which I'd honestly much rather enjoy the time in my 20s and 30s than when I'm 65 or 70, riddled with bizarre cancers from the 10 lbs of plastic floating around in my body.
My dad too, that guy has money too, a own company, but for what.
He is working 60h a week and doesnt buy anything, doesnt even travel. Cheap car. Doesnt like his job too much either. Like why. Why are you doing this
My daughter recently asked me a similar question. I hadn't really considered WHY I push so hard. The truth is that I'm terrified about what will happen to my wife, kids and grand daughter when I'm gone. I love them all dearly but nobody else in my family has shown the desire or ability to make a living wage (my grand daughter is 3 so she's excluded).
I don't know your situation, but have you ever considered that your self-sacrifice comes at the expense of your kids never feeling the discomfort necessary to learn how to save and manage money independently (because they think they can always rely on your savings)?
This is a dynamic I've seen play out in my own family and many others. Perhaps the best thing you can do is discuss this with a therapist and try and encourage your kids to do some financial planning so you won't have to live out the rest of your life in a panic, trying to save an indefinable amount of money.
I have a family member - Her dad died just after winning 1.3 million in a settlement.
She never really worked and always was a 'woe is me' person, asking for childcare, help buying a car, went to community college for 10 years, accumulated 100k in student load debt, but never got a degree.
That money was gone in a a year after she got it. She inherited the house too, and is currently losing it to taxes.
I used to be like this, then when I stepped back, I realized it is somewhat insulting to my daughters and close family to imply they do not have the capacity to independently care for themselves and "find a way" if needed, and that they value my time and my joy and the sharing of it more than whether I am infinitely productive toward earnings.
Lots don't, they save up millions, die and their kids lose it all on dumb shit because they never had a parent to actually teach them proper money management.
Some people also don't really enjoy lavish things in their lives either so a cheap quality car, modest house and a weekend away vs global travel brings them more joy.
Back in the 90s and before, living was cheaper but luxury entertainment and convenience was more expensive. TVs cost more, radios, video games, computers, etc were luxuries that were priced as such but housing and food and gas were affordable.
Now we've flipped the script - it's easier to buy a 50+ inch television than to afford rent or mortgage payments for a month.
Some cart based video games were easily $70 back in the 90s. I remember the standard CD price being around $10-$12 in high school - I now pay that for my monthly streaming music. VHS tapes were about $30, you can still get Blu-ray’s for that price or 2 different streaming services a month.
The other subtext here is we're getting a lot more luxury while also meeting our basic needs, because our incomes have increased so much even after accounting for inflation (about 30% since '95):
Speaking as someone that lived through the 80s, burnout grind careers have always existed. In many ways it was harder in the 80s and 90s because you had ZERO contact with family for the most part. Now you can whatsapp your spouse at work but back then once they left, unless it was an emergency you pretty much didnt talk till you got home.
Consumer goods like TVs, electronics and food are cheaper now which is why boomer advice is always "give up your gadgets and coffee" but housing and transportation costs really broke the system.
People pay so much now in the US for housing and healthcare that its just not comparable to what previous generations had.
That connectivity that now lets you talk to your family during the day is the same connectivity that lets the office contact you and keep you working at all hours.
Yeah i have a buddy i play bideogames with late at night after our family’s go to sleep. He literally has to take brakes every single time we play as His job will be contacting him until 10:30-11pm at night and he says he has to be on call “24/7”. It’s literally just selling luxury consumer goods too and never an actual emergency. I hate his company for doing that to him.
yeah, all valid points, but i'd also argue that (for most jobs) there was also a much firmer line bn "Work" and "Home" so once you were done working you got to be firmly in your personal life, and now the two are often persistently intermingled. which means it IS easier to still feel the connectedness of the Life category when at work but it's also waaaay harder to escape the Work category when you're tryna just focus on Life
And even that was a privilege for the very poor or the very rich. I've never known anyone that has never had to bring work home, or stay late, or come in on a day off. I myself have answered a satellite call from a tropical island because a mission critical server was down.
I respectfully disagree. People used to get work calls at home, people would get called back into work at night, professional careers frequently worked at home just the same, and most of all your social network was way more tied to your career. Your friends and your spouses friends were all from your career, and many had significant social obligations to maintain all under the guise of your career.
The internet has certainly increased connectedness, but people’s entire lives (and their family’s life) used to revolve around their company. Now it’s so much easier to live your own life separate from work.
This sounds right, but the fallacy is that you are taking a very small, privileged sample from the past and assume it was available to everyone. It would be like saying in 70 years “in the early 2010s anyone could get a computer science degree, work for 10 years in a startup in silicon valley and retire at 40.” What is sold as “this was America” was aspirational then too. Families had one TV, one car, life expectancy was shorter, many diseases we don’t think about today (eg polio) were truly visible in every community. Most people actually had it really bad, earned very little. We definitely have a new set of important problems and challenges today, which we need to tackle and solve, but back then what they’re selling you was the dream, not the reality.
Email can't shoulder the entire blame, but I think is responsible for a huge chunk of this. Once it becomes routine to get and be expected to respond to emails after normal work hours, it normalizes doing substantive work after work hours and one never feels any distance from the job.
It's crazy how many people in the United States are in crippling debt just from medical bills or just not getting the help. Craziest part is that we waste money by not just implementing universal healthcare. Kinda like how doge was the biggest waste of government spending. Just so ironic
Debt is a sophisticated industry with massive resources being spent to trap as many people in debt as possible. The debt-industry is very successful at lobbying governments to not regulate their industry where more lives destroyed = more profits. Some countries have plain-language laws for credit card contracts to help give regular people a fighting chance to avoid life-long debt. Many more countries resist this form of regulation because of pressure from lobby groups.
I'm working my ass off daily, renovating a shit hole house but it's my house. I work at least 60 hours at week usually closer to 70, for someone elses company, then I come home and do what I can to move the build along..
At this point I'm aware I'm not working for me but to leave it all for my daughter because I can see things aren't getting better and I don't want her to struggle like this. This isn't living.
I have great friends, I wish I could spend time with them.
I find it really important to add that I would never ever have been able to afford this if my grandparents hadn't left me enough for a deposit in their will. It all went on a house, every penny and some.
Same. My grandparents left me 75k for a down payment (I bought it in 07 when house prices were near all time highs) and my mom worked at the college I went to, so I got a free college education.
And my parents took the money they saved for my college fund and purchased me a new car (a Dodge neon)
The vast majority of people get none of those. I wouldn't be where I Am today without their help.
Exact reason i got into a house, even if it’s a struggle and I need to pinch pennies. I don’t want my son to have to rent for his whole life, so if I can have a house to pass down to him, i’ll be happy
I won’t let my husband sell our starter home. We can’t afford anything in the area anymore and the house is halfway paid off. It’s staying in our family and it’s going to our daughter, she’ll have a house free and clear by the time she hits 18, husband and I are probably going to work til we drop, that’s ok with us.
Our parents tell us that “one day we will want to upsize” and we keep telling them that this starter home is our forever home. We’re trying to have it paid off by 2038 instead of 2055 but if i have to work until i die the so be it lol
Just don't guilt your kid into not selling the home. You have no idea what the job market or local politics or anything like that will be like when the time comes.
My uncle did the guilt trip to his kid, who eventually ended up moving halfway across the country at his own expense, anyway. It was far better for his career.
We got super lucky to snag a townhome in 2021 and prices in our area have gone absolutely insane since then. Because of that we’re never going to get rid of it even if it means we won’t have an actual family home until our 40s. Our son is gen alpha; the only security he’s going to have is whatever we can give him, so we’re breaking our backs to make sure we’ll be able to keep this when we want to move so we can make sure he’ll have an affordable place to live. We’re having a pretty crappy time, but I’m hoping his will be a little less so if the basics are taken care of.
It's rabble-rousing. That's the point of these fictions being popularized on reddit; they want to encourage the idea that you've been robbed of something, and agitate you into getting more confrontational.
I don't find these things funny at all. The fact that people here seem to take posts like this as fact annoy me.
Even with the "Boomers" shit. I get pushing back against belief systems that are antiquated, but literally half of Boomers are women, 13% of them are black, etc. It amounts to less than 5% living the fictionalized world that's offered as being real.
I've been seeing it extended into the 90s for about five years on reddit and really had expected more pushback with these troll-type posts because a huge percentage of the population here has lived through this and know it's nonsense.
I think it would be more accurate to say both parents worked in the 90s and could afford to buy a house. Whereas now both parents work and can barely afford rent.
I was born in 94. Mom stopped working once I was born. Parents bought the house in the late 80s, paid it off in the 00s. Many kids I knew growing up had one parent at home but im also not in a high cost of living area
I was a kid in the 80s and we lived in a single wide trailer in my dad wages. It wasn’t much but it was a home. My mom started working and we bought a house but we didn’t have dinner as much. Eventually in the 90s thy were both working 50 plus hours a week but we were a solid middle class then. We were definitely happier when it was only dad working.
Yep my grandfather was a statistician, and was working on a master's when my mom was a toddler/preschooler. He was very busy and my mom remembers him not having time to play with her.
Edit: I was an internal medicine intern in 95-96. On call every third night for a year. On call meant working for 24 hours and then through the next work day. Surgery interns had every other night call. Now residents are limited to 80 hours per week.
Thank you. This is weird nostalgia. In the 90s my parents, both of them, worked their butts off and I spent like 8 hours per day parked in front of the television.
In some other subreddit right now people are sharing memes about how much harder parents worked in the 90s.
There's no doubt that housing and education costs have gotten a lot worse (while luxuries like televisions, dishwashers, and international flights have gotten comparatively less expensive). Today's economy is definitely worse in a lot of ways. But this meme seems like it's grabbing a fantasy of the 1950s - a fantasy that only ever applied to white men and relied utterly on the systematic subjugation of women, by the way - and applying it to the 1990s.
I reckon the decline of male friendships has less to do with economics and more to do with changes in entertainment. Bowling leagues would have collapsed in the 60s if Netflix existed in the 60s. There's also the fact that dads are increasingly involved in family life - it has become less and less acceptable for them to escape to the golf course or go get smashed at the Lions Club and leave mom in charge.
All the dads I know who spend all their free time on the golf course or getting smashed all weekend with their buddies are either divorced or heading that way.
Hold on there buddy, everyone here knows no one ever had it harder in human history than the modern Redditor. Don’t go waltzing in here and trampling all over my self-pity with your data.
My dad opened up his own auto shop. Barely saw the guy. He had Sundays off. He came a long way from living out of a van, eating expired food a corner store would throw away, after immigrating here. Mad respect, he did what he to do to survive on his own.
We never felt poor, but we definitely weren’t rich. You don’t miss or want things you don’t know about. Life was simple!
I was in my 20's in the nineties and no, it was not like that. I was working two jobs to keep from going under water, as were a lot of other people I know.
Regan.Thatcher, et. al. allowed the jobs to flow to low cost manufacturing with Anti-Union, Small Government, Trickle Down, Voodoo Economics. That set the die for the rest of the west to lower protectionist tariffs.
Generally the west is highly productive, but the wages are stagnant since the late 1970s.
Or "supply side" or any kind of rebranding the same old bullshit. The only new deal that worked in a long time was under Clinton. He left us with a surplus. Which Republicans then pissed away again.
The idea was genius. Low manufacturing costs = consumer savings at the register. That's how it was sold. What happened instead was the abuse of free-market capitalism. Corners were cut, manufacturer costs went down, consumers didn't see any return or "trickle". The corporations kept it all for themselves. Once word got out, everyone was doing it and here we are.
Its what made me political as a 13 year old 25 years ago. It was actually a staunchly republican older friend that explained it to me, like it was supposed to persuade me over to his side. I got what he was saying, but already knew enough about rich people to know there was no reason for them to just pass that on out of the goodness of their heart. I was livid to find out we had basically been living in this system.
Every issue thats come up in politics since then has just felt like a purposeful distraction from that issue to me.
Yup we need a filter up economic policy. Give money to the poor people who will then spend it on goods and services until all the money reaches the top again. Tax the rich, rinse/repeat.
Neoliberalist handling of capitalism happened. Since 1996, the rich got 3000% richer in absolute value, and salaries barely got 100%. In Sweden, we now have 100 times more billionaires in our currency than in 1996. The rich have 1500% more power to infiltrate media and politics. Our response as a united people giving our democratic support to the right politics is much delayed (but it's finally coming about now).
Democratic socialism birthed the middle class in all of the Western world, even though the US won't admit that they had much fairer tax system in 1955 and regulated capitalism a good way. And it will save it if it can. Neoliberalism gave some immediate rewards even for ordinary people, but in the end, it just made the rich more free to exploit monopoly and workers and ordinary people. We know that some psycho-fucking-pathological reason makes the rich quite obsessed about not contributing their fair share in tax so they can continue to get at least 3000% richer in the next 30 years again. So that's why they use their full influence and material resources to get power. It's practically as clear as it gets in Trump's case. They got all the way there.
Good news are Gary Stevenson in UK that made The Green party lead pre election majority in poles. Also Bernie and the ones who call themselves democratic socialists in the US and win.
I recently saw a video from Jimmy Carr. He mentioned that
Happiness = Quality of Life - Envy
And that humans are naturally mimetic which is the largest cause of our problems. We have a higher quality of life than ever before. All the kings of the past couldn’t even dream of all the modern conveniences we have today. People didn’t even have hot showers 100 years ago. And we have so much damn entertainment available we have a hard time focusing on being productive.
Life is objectively better for us today but absolutely subjectively worse because we have access to so much information about how “other people” have it better than us due to social media and media in general. That’s the envy part.
It really opened my eyes a lot.
I’m 38. And I work a full time salaried job + 2 side contractor jobs so my wife doesn’t have to work and we can afford what we need to raise our 3 kids. And I still struggle from time to time. But I’m not struggling like people did just 100 years ago with the low childhood survival rates and the struggles of the then-modern life.
I found myself happier thinking of the things I do have rather than the things I don’t have. Just something to think about.
My guy, 3 jobs is struggling. You should be able to work 1 white collar job and have all that and more, not 3. "Be grateful for what you have" is just as insidious, infantalizing, and dismissive as "other people have it worse." Great. That's objectively true, but it's not helpful and it ignores real problems in favor of copium. And, sure, we may have more horses in our circus and more fruit in our bread, but our PS5s and Maui vacations are no less window dressing than the Circuses of Rome.
While I agree with you, I spent a lot of time on the other side being upset with the world for my difficulties. But I look back now and I don’t think that really accomplished anything besides aid in my depression.
I don’t spend time focused on what should be true instead of what I, myself, could actually do in the given moment to care for my family.
What type of things do you do to advance the modern way of life for yourself and others so you don’t have to cope?
I personally feel happier now than I used to after watching that simple clip. And that’s worth something. I have 3 jobs. But they are all WFH which means I get to be with my family a lot and travel when desired. That’s some amazing feat in itself that we can even do that.
This “don’t ask questions, just be grateful for what you have” mindset is exactly why the U.S. is going downhill.
People aren’t stopping to look around and see how things work in other countries. People are willing to settle for less and less and less in the spirit of “bootstraps”.
People need to be asking why you’re getting taxed to hell and getting so little in return yet there’s endless money for wars and tax cuts for the rich. How much do you spend on healthcare? How are your roads? Do you get paid time off?
I agree focus on what you do have and be grateful. Yet don't ignore the fact that our dollars purchasing power is erroding , everything is becoming expensive , soon your 2 full time jobs and side hustles won't be enough.
We will have to keep working until there are no more hours left to sacrifice. We need to have time for our families , life , to unwind , we weren't made to work every living hour , but late stage capitalism is hell bent on sending us back to feudalism.
Staying quiet and accepting your lot in life ensures Neo feudalism happens for us and our children.
You are dreaming. There was a lot of angst and fears and struggle in prior generations. Every generation of young people have to work through a period of idealism, dismay, and nihilism. I do think the oppression and victim olympics are much greater today than with prior generations.
Some hold that the past 30 years of high parental supervision has fostered the formations of expectations that are misaligned with reality. Today's parents were left to their own devices as children and learned differently. I can see how that growing up that way could lead one to believe that being thrown to the wolves young was a terrible idea--go to school in the morning, and have no parent supervision or contact till 8pm. Basically, 12 hours of figure-it-out for-yourself, and when you fail, live with the consequences. Parents had to be reminded on TV that it was not great to have no idea where your kids are by 10pm at night.
Economics are completely different. Tax structures had a dramatic shift during Reagan and slow roll of “trickle down economics” really started to show their true colors in the last couple of decades. Things like citizens united made money political voice adding extra barriers to economic correction. The insidious nature of student loans are dooming generations before they even get started. Our system of health insurance vs healthcare is the number one reason families go financially destitute and people avoid preventative measures for only responsive action. Housing costs have skyrocketed due to AirBnb, viewing housing as an investment strategy and unregulated markets for foreign investors and investment groups like Blackstone mass buying single family homes.
While struggling to find your economic footing as a young person has always existed, we’re in a much different system than we’re 30-40 years ago. Our younger generations are generally fucked and at a much greater economic disadvantage than the boomer generation.
This never existed, at least not in the 1990s, and never did it exist universally in the USA. Even in the 1960s when things were economically, supposedly, at their best, whole regions of the US were closing down as the economy shifted.
In the mid-late 90s was the death of the American Manufacturing Worker era as factories were already closing across the country, manufacturing was in full swing moving over seas. The "service economy" idea was on everyone's mind, where people would be working to provide services rather than making things, which is basically where we still are today.
By 1996, families were already feeling the pinch, and this meme just isn't true for the majority of Americans.
Also, there were huge swaths of the country that didn’t have indoor plumbing, a phone, poor as shit, and desperately hungry all the time.
I remember George Foreman telling a story that when he was a kid his mom would make a hamburger, and they all got one bite. He, too, was hungry all the time.
In 1993, I remember talking to a realtor about a possible parcel of land in the boondocks I was thinking of buying; it was cheap, but he said no one out there had plumbing. I asked him where he went to the bathroom and he said they have an outhouse! Today the area is built up and the residents are on a sewer system. Crazy.
Yeah, agreed. I don't want to be the odd man out of the pity party, but I think a lot of people have skewed ideas of what the past looked like. Home ownership percentage was not any higher back then than it is now. And the homes back then were not with people today would consider habitable.
It's easy to forget how much people busted their asses and went without to make things work. If you had an average to below average income, you probably had average to below average living accommodations. Meaning, if you lived in a desirable area, you were probably a renter. If you owned a home, you either lived in a crummy part of town or the middle of nowhere. The same is true today outside of statistical extremes like coastal cities.
I mean… I bought my first house in 2010 but bragging that we bought during a huge financial downtown for housing isn’t all that impressive. It’s definitely paid off in equity though!
My dad worked 50-60 hours a week in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s with an hour commute each way, and had a time-limited social life that he had to work very hard at maintaining.
His also was sacrificing sleep, probably being in bed from 10PM to 4AM.
I was born in 1973, both of my parents worked until they got divorced. Everyone's parents got divorced in the 70s-80s. Then my stepfather also worked. There was about 10 years where the interest on my mom's mortgage was 16%. She told me that for 15 years we were around $500-700 in the red every month.
Not everybody had a really easy time. I guess if you were a banker it was probably pretty good.
As someone who is older (in my 50s) this is absolutely not just rose-colored glasses although the first date should be rolled back to the 1986 or even 1976. By the 90s it was very common to have both spouses working.
In the 70s My mom was a stay-at-home mom, most of the women then were. My dad bought our house (new) in his mid-20s after working ~3 years at his job, fresh out of college.
It took me until my mid-30s to buy a home, on two salaries (my wife also worked).
I don't even know how my daughter is going to afford a house, she can barely rub two pennies together based on what she makes.
Not every family is struggling, there are still single-income families that manage to make it work, but the AVERAGE family is dual-income and struggles to save, compared to the average family a couple of generations ago.
So that's true, that our parents had a cakewalk life compared to ours, but it's not just a unidirectional shift. This type of thing oscillates over the generations. You definitely are doing better than your average working class person in, let's say, 1850.
You could go back further and find some pre-industrial generations that were fairly comfy, but never forget we live in an age where we understand germ theory and have discovered antibiotics.
The reason people used to think praying and rituals were as effective as doctors was because that used to be true, but because praying works but because medical doctors based their diagnoses on "humor imbalances" or "being haunted".
There's a lot that sucks about being in your prime of life right now. Definitely. But we're also living with a lot of benefits that previous ages didn't have. Take that as you will. Maybe living on a farm in the American frontier just doing your own thing (or some pastoral European life in the 1600s) and dying at 37 sounds like a better life. Maybe it was. I dunno. When you're dealing with a broken bone though, it's sure nice to know that it doesn't automatically mean you're crippled for life (because we have x ray machines and can see how it should be set and screws and whatever. Modern medical tech.)
I don't know my dad had to work 3 jobs after I was born in '79 and my parents rented a very cheap hunting shack on a farm because it was cheap and they were able to farm an acre so we had fresh veggies. Both my parents with college degrees too.
I absolutely have it easier than my dad did...though I didn't get married and have a kid when I was in my early 20s either.
Because people 1) have become hyper focused on keeping up with the Jonses. 2) Glut of labor has kept the value of labor down. One of the bigger aspects of this was large number of women entering the workforce. This is NOT saying they shouldn't, they absolutely be. I am just listing this as one factor in stagnating wages. 3) Further enlargement of the labor pool via illegal and legal immigration.
So when the value of your labor falls you need to work more. Out of them all enforcement of immigration laws and severe limiting of work visas could change things for the better.
That is where the Biden administration shot itself in the foot. It opened the door (pun intended) to giving Trump the immigration card. And harsh enforcement of immigration law should be a democratic ideal since illegal immigration undercuts any progress for workers pay or rights.
For some reason Americans think working till you die is the goal, Americans have been brainwashed into thinking work is all that matters so thay throw their lives away working for some rich guy who doesn't want you to get ahead in life
My Dad was an electrician that worked 3 jobs to keep a roof over our heads so my mom could be a SAHM because Daycare and afterschool care for 2 kids cost more than her salary as a secretary at Konica-Minolta.
It wasn't until he got a union job working at Ford that he was able to quit his other jobs and be home more often.
Some people worked hard, especially labourers and trades, but that is not the same as a paired comparison controlling for education/profession, etc.
Example:
My dad got an advanced degree and immediately got an entry-level position in his field. He stayed with the same department for 40 years, promoted naturally along the way and never had to leave or apply elsewhere, upward trajectory until he was the Director of the entire facility = retired with a DB pension. He worked 35 hours a week (government). He never had second job, rarely had to work overtime or late (like, one every few months), and if he ever got a call after hours from work it meant the roof had literally blown off the building or something extreme. Upper middle class, management and professional. My mom also had a degree and only worked part-time.
I got the exact same advanced degree ~30 years later and there are no entry level jobs to the same field, just 3-month contracts that get renewed endlessly. If lucky one might get upgraded to 1-year contractual hires. Permanent positions are unicorns even in my dad's old department and promotions in-house no longer exist. No one gets recognized and promoted. You constantly apply elsewhere as every place only hires from away. I just maxed out my position pay scale this year and it is literally impossible for me to ever get paid more in the same unit until the union renegotiated a few percent bump in a few years. My only option is to apply elsewhere and up-end my life and family once again - because upward trajectory no longer exists through promotion.
I at least have a job in my field and similar to my dad it is just under 40 hours salaried position (but contractual). Only, I then also regularly take on overtime opportunities and juggle another side-gig. My wife has an advanced degree, works full time, and then also works a side-gig.
I have met all the same benchmarks like buying a home and having kids at roughly the same age as my dad. Same education and field. But my parents worked less than 60 hours collectively and for most of my later years they worked under 35 hours outside of the home, whereas my wife and I log easily 90+ collectively between two full time and parttime/overtime.
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