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64 comments
  • This person is pretty lucky, they have a place to stay rent free. A lot of folks are dealing with this economy by splitting a two bedroom four ways (or more) and working whatever shit jobs they can manage to land.

    Which really.. makes it worse

    • I often think about how I'd probably be homeless if I was out there trying to pay rent

      I work full time, sometimes 60 hours a week for months at a time. And I can't afford to be independent

  • I only got my job because of nepotism, otherwise I'd still be a mid 30s barista. I am convinced every single person that works in tech was only hired because they knew someone. And this was back in early 2023, I imagine it's literally impossible to be hired as a software dev now.

  • Boomers don't actually believe this works. They just hate their children and want to shame them for not being as successful as them.

    • They don't hate their children*, they are just more psychologically prepared to believe that their children are fuck ups than believe that capitalism is bad

      *Some of them definitely hate their children

      • I've met a weird number of Boomer with kids who admit openly they actually didn't want kids, including my own dad, who said it openly to me and my sister.

      • “My child who is under 18 is struggling, must be the fault of the teachers, doctors, etc…”

        “My child who is over 18 is struggling, they just be a failure and deserve to the suffering they are enduring. “

  • I did everything so wrong my teachers let me graduate school just because they could not tolerate my presence. All while my schoolmates were bringing in bribes for the director, to achieve the same thing.

    At the same time I've only managed to get this far because I talk a lot and run into people who like me? I know it's hard to believe, but it's true!

    My life is basically failing forwards

  • It's possible to get ahead on minimum wage in some states. It requires working full-time, not having dependents or expensive habits, and preferably splitting costs of housing and car ownership.

    If you buy into the narrative, perpetuated by the rich, that luxuries are necessities, you will go broke trying to keep up. If instead you aim for direct production of what gives life its substance, you'll be better off.

    Baseline living rates are below the equivalent of 20 hours a week in many places. Anything beyond that is your decision of what to do with the slack that life in the imperial core affords you. We are in fact not fucked, as long as we can make wise decisions amd act collectively in accordance with our values and analysis.

    I am "downwardly-mobile"; it took me at least 2 years to accept that I wasn't going to have a prestigious professional career, and instead I'd be hanging out close to the bottom, doing manual and menial labor, and most of the environment I grew up in would less or not at all affordable. I had to say goodbye to that life. Yet for 3 of the past 5 years, I have sent more to my savings account than I sent to my landlord, and amidst this, I have traveled on many adventures and reveled in all kinds of communal luxury, and that feels way better than "upper middle class" ever did.

    I don't want a white picket fence in the suburbs with 3 cars in a 4-person family that accumulates material possessions. I want a shared house in a commune with 0.2 vehicles per person and where people live an ecologically net-zero lifestyle and still do cool stuff.

64 comments