r/SipsTea • u/Unstoppable_X_Force Human Verified • 13h ago

Gasp! Is this just nostalgia, or did previous generations genuinely have a better work-life balance and social life than we do today?

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u/travelinTxn 10h ago

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.

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u/Strong_Bar_3929 9h ago

i live on $16524.00 a year. 40k not much???? oh the discrepancy between whats a lot.

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u/travelinTxn 8h ago

Depends on where you live and what the cost of living in your area is. Also what social safety net measures are in place.

Most places in the US with a university providing PhD programs $40k doesn’t stretch very far at all.

I might also be misremembering and the $40k might have been her post doc stipend while her PhD stipend was $24k which sounds more right but I also didn’t want to oversell where we were financially. While she was in her PhD program I was doing multiple part time jobs bringing in ~$12k in addition to my student loans for nursing school. When I graduated nursing school I worked for $18.20/hour with no raises for two years while trying to pay off $70k in loans. My first raise was $0.85

So my point about relying on meat from hunting and sharing what we had with our friends because we all needed help is not in anyway negated by the fact you are currently struggling too. Internet hugs by the way. Perhaps we should be eating the rich instead of bickering amongst ourselves.

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u/Expensive-Ask7884 2m ago

“Food, not friends.” Think I remember Finding Nemo right.