“Consumers demoralized by capitalism…” …paywall…
Let’s go a little hollow, as a treat 💀
Lots of news articles this week using a lot of words to say “Americans don’t have savings”
“Prices are going up but wages aren’t. What have millennials done to cause this?”
Millennial here.
We exist.
And whose fault is that??? HMMMMM points at you
Thanks, Skeletor!
Generation X here.
We sound coolest, and nobody blames us for shit.
Millennial here.
I wish I didn’t.
thoughts (no self harm talk, just sadness!)
My society clearly hates me and doesn’t want me to exist, my parents bought the modern austerity riddled American dream hook line and sinker and so they believed they shouldn’t help me too much after I became an adult and basically they severed that deep link between parent and child for… some shitty neoliberal ideologies that are empty as fuck?
I am a millenial and I exist, I don’t want to, even though I was given a lot of privilege when I was younger I am ADHD as fuck and life is honestly genuinely miserable. The world wasn’t designed for my brain, it was designed to shunt someone with my brain into jail or a death spiral of some kind of addiction (you ever looked up the percentage of prisoners in US prisons that likely have ADHD? It is shocking).
It would be one thing if things were getting better for ADHD people, but they are quickly accelerating towards being worse in every aspect, random ADHD med shortages because the FDA wants us to die, more and more executive function required for basic tasks (more paperwork, more scheduling, more consequences for not following rigid schedules perfectly), less and less energy and free time available left over after work, less and less tolerance for simple mistakes at work, more complex and brittle steps to get healthcare help that involve a million carefully designed give-up points custom designed to coax an ADHD person into never utilizing their healthcare because they can never get through the hoops to do it. The job application process of sending out resumes to online job after online job alone is catastrophic for my ADHD.
I am not going to hurt myself, or by extension others around me, after all that is precisely what is making me sad in the first place. I have lost that flame inside me because I know I won’t be able to live a fulfilling life where I am genuinely happy in a way that I don’t always go to sleep at night wishing I could disappear painlessly and be forgotten by all…. unless I win the lottery either literally or get the rare job that doesn’t treat me like shit. (Then I am happy and am surrounded by a bunch of dying people like me that I have to try to ignore…?).
It is hard because therapists are usually older adults and they just can’t understand this depression as a rational response from an entire chunk of a generation rather than an individual pathology. Focus on the positives! they say….and I think… I will eventually die of old age or health problems (hey can’t afford the doctor or dentist so that will speed it up :P ) and wont have to force myself to survive in a society with rules designed to put me in a constant state of suffering while constantly coding my desperate struggle to keep basic aspects of my life together as laziness, naiveness, lack of work ethic, lack of personal responsibility etc…
hey, I’m sorry you’ve been feeling down. I can’t offer a solution, but I just wanted you to know you’re seen. and if you want to talk about it more, absolutely feel free to shoot a message.
fwiw, I absolutely sympathize. I’m a young adult with adhd, and struggling with depression, though the latter is getting better I think. I went pretty quickly from being a “gifted kid” to being what most would consider an underachiever. I don’t, to be clear; I’m proud of where I am, regardless of how it seems to compare to some of my friends. it’s still a mad reality check, though.
on a related note, I left christianity a year ago, and holy fuck has that been an adjustment. most of my optimism was always rooted in religion, and without that worldview, it’s suddenly on me to find new reasons to be even a little hopeful, even to want to be alive. I’m not suicidal, but for a while there I couldn’t say that I wasn’t. I do feel like I’m happy to be alive now, and that’s great, but holy crap this is not as easy as it was when I believed in an all-powerful benevolent god. ah well.
I hope you have a lovely day, but if you don’t, that’s valid too. life isn’t always lovely, and there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that. there’s nothing wrong with feeling down about it. all we can do is try to support ourselves and one another, y’know?
i’m sorry for the dreams that’ve been taken from you and the injustices you’ve experienced. you deserved better, and so did I, and so did most of us. thank you for being honest about it. 🫂
Thank you so much, I deeply appreciate these kinds of posts that don’t attempt to fix me but just engage in solidarity :)
on a related note, I left christianity a year ago, and holy fuck has that been an adjustment. most of my optimism was always rooted in religion, and without that worldview, it’s suddenly on me to find new reasons to be even a little hopeful, even to want to be alive. I’m not suicidal, but for a while there I couldn’t say that I wasn’t. I do feel like I’m happy to be alive now, and that’s great, but holy crap this is not as easy as it was when I believed in an all-powerful benevolent god. ah well.
I think the least interesting question about religion is whether god exists or not. There are many things you can take away from yourself about christianity that don’t have anything to do with a bearded man in the sky existing or not. It is enough to appreciate the beauty of how a spiritual perspective on life and the beings around you can lead you into a happier, better life even if you that spiritual perspective is fundamentally not reflective of science or reality as we know it.
It is like how I don’t necessarily believe we have souls (I mean whatever, but there is zero scientific evidence of souls or even suggestions that they exist), but the concept of a soul and how it can be affected by the world and other people is an incredibly useful way of looking at the human condition. It is a concept and word that does not derive its power from the fact that it exists, and you can appreciate that outside of believing there is something like a soul literally imbued into ourselves in some magic/spiritual way.
i’m sorry for the dreams that’ve been taken from you and the injustices you’ve experienced. you deserved better, and so did I, and so did most of us. thank you for being honest about it. 🫂
thank you for being honest and listening!
<INTERNET HUGS>
I relate to this immensley.
🫂
There are dozens of us. Dozens!
Now there’s a baker’s dozen!
We didn’t do chit… the problem is and always has been, always will be, government.
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pretty much.
i purchased a new car in 2018. it was 20K. that same car today is close to 30K. in another 5 years it will be closer to 40 probably.
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I don’t want anything anymore. Everything on the shelves is just crap
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Someone much smarter than me explained how you don’t own stuff, it ends up owning you. This is outside of necessities.
You buy some decorations? Now you have to dust them, keep a place for them in your home. There are all kinds of examples, and collecting trinkets and oddities will never make you happy or fulfilled.
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Well damn, I wanted to talk about the neat things made during Covid when the hardware stores were closed.
It was fun modeling household items.
It’d really be great if journalists even attempted “educating” readers or providing meaningful context. But then again, would it get this kind of traction?
The interesting story here is that interest rates are raised to SLOW spending and encourage saving. The interest rates spiked to CURB inflation. It has worked, despite most journalists seeming keenness for it not to, for the most part. If consumers and businesses reduce their spending due to higher costs of borrowing, this will bring down prices over time, aligning with the Fed’s inflation targets.
No one explains this to the average person, ever. Ironically, the story here should be consumers are spending money even when saving it should be incentivized because they can’t afford not to… because of profiteering by large companies, grocery chains, etc as well as stagnate wages for the past few decades. This means that inflation will creep up faster than it should because of demand-driven inflation. This makes the problem worse for low-income earners.
It seems to me that THAT type of inflation might require less of an “interest rate adjustment fix”, and more of a wage adjustment fix. Even potentially a regulatory fix to go after price gougers.
douchebags gonna douche
Every time I read the phrase ‘the American Dream’ I think of the part of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas when, after spending the whole novel trying to find the American Dream, they’re given directions, only to find the remains of a burnt-down nightclub, “a huge slab of cracked, scorched concrete in a vacant lot full of tall weeds.”
Fear and Loathing should be required reading in schools. A lot of the meaning gets lost in all of the drugs, but in the midst of that haze one can find a lot true things about America.
Never read it because I assumed it was just a funny story about guys on drugs with his characteristic cool writing style, but if it had actual things to say about America, maybe I’ll read it sometime. Or watch the movie lol.
The movie actually takes all of that out unfortunately and makes it much more of a funny story about guys on drugs. I still like the movie, but the book is so much deeper and more meaningful.
I liked the book and I was surprised how close to it was the movie, the part tgat got there. And yes, they left out many things, but it’s understandable, because the movie was planned as a “funny movie”, not a “socio-economical movie”. So the book was like “drugs-capitalism-drugs-Vietnam-drugs”, tgey cut out all the “boring” parts, leaving only drugs.
The movie is cool though, but It’s just me always trying to appreciate what is shown to me, and not trying to compare with another media.It’s definitely not a bad movie or even a terrible adaptation of a book. Like you said, it just had a different goal with the same story. That’s fine.
I think of the Carlin bit… It’s the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it.
Thompson rightly concludes that the American dream is already dead by the 70s.
If you look west you can almost see the place where the wave broke and rolled back…
Thompson rightly concludes that the American dream is already dead by the 70s.
Important context for that is that the novel is a famous, and relatively early meditation on the failures of the 1960s counterculture movement and the intense, if ultimately unfocused vision for a better future for the nation that was central to it.
This is what happens when history is forgotten. Obviously we’ve had inflation B4. Don’t read all the negative sh*t out there. And don’t let other people with their agenda run your life.
We’ve had inflation before and, on a historic timescale, we’ve had revolutions to correct that inflation. France existed for almost a thousand years before they had the big one.
Pretty fun stuff I mean I wonder where it is going. Will there be some kind of collapse crisis or smh
I’ve gone the other way with this. I’ve significantly cut my spending down in the last couple years. No more eating out, no vacations, grow my own food, don’t eat meat, no ac and minimal heating to only to keep pipes from freezing. Even with all that and more I’m spending as much as I did a few years ago but a much more restricted lifestyle. Be cool if my pay rate kept up with this inflation but my union agreed to a shit contract just before all this started.
We have been very lucky and fortunate to acquire the American dream. My wife and I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the help of her family though. Every time I look at the housing market it’s only gotten crazier.
having family help isn’t the american dream.
The median home prices in California where I’m at.
I’ll see ya’ll in the Far North I guess. I’ll bring my own meth.
No need, there’s plenty up there for you!
I’m in the SF bay area. FML
Living there for two years… I realized I needed to gtfo of California. Thankfully I did two years ago.
So is that what’s keeping the economy afloat?
And that’s while already having a trillion in credit card debt.
The wonderful thing about debt is, if you have enough of it, it suddenly becomes somebody else’s problem.
The headline reads like big retail trying to squeeze more profits. Of course people aren’t saving as much, they have to buy groceries.
No, but even for those of us with some extra money… we’re not building a savings pile for a house or anything… we’re just spending the extra on doing things and buying stuff beyond our needs.
This is how you never accumulate wealth…
Itty bitty savings will never lead to wealth either. The working class and “middle class” that remains has a low enough income to recognize this.
It depends on what you call “itty bitty” and “wealth”. Saving $1,000/month is doable for many people and will make you a millionaire by retirement age, even adjusting for inflation.
lol. It’d actually be kinda disrespectful if it wasn’t clear you’ve never met a struggling American in your life
Bro, what?! Who the fuck can save $1000/month with current rents and home prices? 🤣
I thought you were serious for a second! Good one.
Saving $1,000/month is doable for many people
You’re not being serious, right?
Crackitalism is a serious drug Jimmy, it’s deadly serious.
$1,000/mo in savings is pretty difficult for most people.
$300/mo, invested earning 8% for 40 years, does get to a million though (10% rate of return + 2% interest safe assumption.) This is as $60k/yr job, contributing 3% to a 401k with an employer match, not something that’s particularly rare.
I know prices are high and people are hurting… but there’s a lot of people who are just not really trying.
Not if you’te middle aged by the time you get a job that allows you to save.
we’re just spending the extra on doing things and buying stuff beyond our needs.
That’s one of many problems and majority of the people who fit this category like to point the finger at anything and everything else… when the problem is themselves and their spending habits.
This is literally a tool tip in the fascist parody helldivers 2.
Bootstraps are too expensive to buy because your daddy thinks his broken ass house should be worth a cool mil.
