I feel like it was on purpose

Suddenly
As if this hasn't been going on for decades.
My solution is to do the very minimum I can to get by and otherwise enjoy my minimalist life. Fuck consumerism with a 10ft pole. Let it rot.
- I mean things were looking up and then Trump happened
  
  We can't lay all of the blame on trump.
  The problem is conservatism in general. Every Republican president of the past 50 years has caused economic turmoil. When Republicans get power in the legislature, the only notable thing they work towards is tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and gutting things that help people in order to pay for it.
  Trump isn't singularly the problem here, but he is so fucking stupid that he's speedrunning the economic crisis. A Republican with a halfway functional brain would know to move slowly enough that the economy falls apart as they're heading out the door, not within the first 20% of their term.
  Start selling trump "I did that!" stickers of him pointing up at the eclipse. You'll start seeing them everywhere soon. Gas pumps, grocery store shelves, car dealerships, etc.
  
  Capitalism has been rotting out the interior of the industrialized world for decades. The dogged belief that Gore or Kerry or Hillary or Harris would have insulated the US (much less the rest of the world) from the same foibles and failures committed by Clinton and Obama and Biden is painfully naive. Nevermind the disastrous administrations of Trudeau and Starmer and Felipe Caldaron.
  The idea that you just need a competent liberal technocrat in charge to make a country work never seems to bare out in practice. We get an earful about liberal reforms that will fix everything, but then those reforms either never arrive or get so watered down in the offering that they're meaningless.
  Trump's revanchism is actively breaking a rotted out institutional economy. But we've been living in a progressively-more-gutted-out house since the end of the Reagan Admin. "The Free Market" is the root of this decay, not any one of its particularly boorish champions.
  
  Trump is a symptom of the US, not the cause.
- Yeah, after being taken advantage of by every employer I ever had and still struggling financially I started to realize it's beneficial for my mental health to fuck off as much as I can without getting fired. Just ride that fine line. If they treat you like they want subpar work, give them subpar work.
  And yeah, stay minimalist. Don't burden yourself with subscriptions. Don't buy things that require a lot of maintenance. Don't over-extend yourself. It's better for your mental health.
- Can’t be sad about being poor if you just stop wanting things.
  
  This is how I started off, earning £600 a month on apprenticeship wages and having to pay rent for a bedroom in a shared house. When my wages increased I continued living as I was. Holy shit, now I can save £5-10k a year on minimum wage.
  Now my new "problem" is not knowing how to spend my money. I still barely earn over minimum wage (£26k) but even though I now have a mortgage, I earn a fair bit more than enough to pay for it and all the essentials. I don't want bullshit consumerist crap. Currently it goes into savings but I have nothing I particularly want to save for, maybe pay off the mortgage sooner and cut back on hours worked?

Same thing happened to the millennials... It's almost like it's planned...
- As a millennial (in the middle) I legit assumed this was referring to me 😅
  
  Everything has been a downward slide our entire lives which means it also rolls downhill for all the future generations too until someone can yank back on the economic flightstick and get us out of this dive.
- Welcome to your fourth or fifth once-in-a-lifetime crisis!
- I blame it on the lizard people

Most millennials graduated shortly after the crisis of 2008. Its a major reason so many of us are unusually much much poorer than the average Gen Xer (who are only somewhat poorer compared to Boomers).
- Yeah. It sure was "fun" competing with people with decades of experience and advanced degrees right after graduation. I hope that our generation and those after us are able to course correct and undo the bullshit that Boomers have inflicted upon humanity.
  Note: Not generation war (no war but class war) but unfortunate reality. Boomers overwhelmingly supported neo-liberal politicians that to pulled up the ladder behind them and robbed future generations in exchange for short-term gains.
  
  I decided to finally do my masters in biotech after a decade in data engineering got me to have some savings, mostly because I did want to do one eventually.
  Man, these kids don't know what's waiting for them. None of the companies in biotech are hiring, as in their career pages are empty. LinkedIn, Indeed and the usual suspects only throw up listings which are obviously just staffing orgs fishing for data to sell. I feel there is a similar break in the industry with the pandemic, nobody is hiring people just graduating, the barest minimum is 5-6 years of experience.
  I'm seeing some of the best minds in Europe here, doing something that is both hard and useful science, I mean we just had a worldwide pandemic and this masters should be extremely relevant for that, and apparently the system will not let them work in their field.
  Only way out is academics, on barely-decent, you-will-never-have-a-house-much-less-a-family wages. If they can get in to the limited number of exceptionally "well" paying PhD slots, for 40-45k gross. They may earn as much as me doing random bullshit internal tooling two years ago for a bank that went bankrupt since if they can get tenure as a full prof at a good uni in like 30 years of hard work.
  This is bullshit.
  
  I'm working on it, I guess.
- Older millennial here. Economy took a shit right as I was getting out of college and into the workforce. Good times.
  My friends and I weren't financially stable-ish until our mid-30s. And by that I mean we were able to start buying some name brand stuff instead of the knock-offs. Felt like we were kings. But only if we had a significant other to split the bills with.
  I'm tired and I don't care about this country anymore.
- Immediately before, in my case. I'm thinking of welding some armor to a bulldozer.
  
  Going to pull a Marvin Heemeyer?
- Yep, got out of school right in time for a recession.
  Changed paths, got certified as a pharmacy tech. You can work for a year without being certified as a pharmacy tech, so I was applying before I ever had my piece of paper. I didn't receive my first call about any of those applications until 2012.
  I never found work in that field, and left my home state for seasonal work. I later came back home and crashed into a two year depression. Like, clinical emergency intervention depression. Not sleeping, not eating, not bathing, all that shit.
  This time Trump is at the helm. I have no hope. I have no faith in the country I was born in to do the right thing. I assume the military oath all service members take will be forgotten under a banner dripping the blood of "undesirables", and chants of MAGA.
  Makes me fucking sick.
- Isn't it more so that boomers in western EU and USA had an exceptional easy time? Everyone before, after or elsewhere less so.
  
  IDK, maybe. I'm no expert. I would imagine it depends on how globalized the market was during Boomer's 20's and 30's.

- I started working in shops around 2000. I'm so fucken over it.
  Learn a trade, may not always pay great but you can always find something.
  Live below your means, assume you could be laid off at any time. If you're able to buy a house, don't buy too much house.

- When does the character build/customization end so I can start playing the game?
  
  A young salmon swims downriver searching for an ocean he has never seen. Eventually the riverbanks give way to a vast blue expanse. He approaches the first fish he sees and asks them where he might find the ocean. The other fish replies
  "You're in it!"
  The salmon shakes his head.
  "This? This is water. I'm looking for the ocean!"
  The character building and customization never ends, but it's also not something that has to be a burden. The way school and such introduces things like reading and learning or physical activity is sometimes very damaging because it gives you this impression that these things have to be work, that it's all about deadlines and what you can get out of them instead of enjoying them for the sake of the thing.
  Suffice it to say if you're waiting to one day start your life and become who you want to be you're missing the point. The journey is supposed to be the focus, don't wait to start living for some lofty time you're allowed to begin building the life you want. Start the journey for it now and find passions to savor along the way. Life doesn't begin at 20, 30, or even 40, you just get different content so you might as well make the most of the fleeting window to enjoy the things that make life at your age special.
  A long ramble, but I hope it conveys my point. Good luck!
  
  never
  
  Sorry there's no game, just a character screen with microtransactions.
- My character is so big by now.
- Doomer mentality
  
  Yes. Be a harbinger of doom.
- I guess? If it did you’d Luigi. Too comfortable for that? I’d do it too, but you first.

The economy is always bad. The idea is to make people feel insecure and desperate so that they take on more/worse work for less pay. They'll use every excuse under the sun, from "we can't afford to pay workers" to "AI could do your job" and it doesn't matter if it's true because there are fewer companies growing larger who control so much of the employment landscape that they can unify against workers and make it so.

As someone born in the early 80’s, just for once I’d like a nice, boring decade. Pretty please.
Saw the fall of communism, the Balkan wars, 9/11, the rise and fall of the internet, the dotcom bust, the 2008 financial crisis, Arab Spring, Brexit, global pandemic, war in Europe again, US politics, middle-east still fucked as usual. And then there’s climate change to fuck over everything in general.
So yeah, I’d love a decade where nothing happens. Heck, I’ll take a boring six months at this point. Gimme a fucking break.
- Every generation could have a "We didn't start the fire song.". It is just politics and the human race on repeat, until it can't or won't.
  
  It was always burning, since the world's been turning.
- Well yeah you could also go like that backwards in time. Iran kidnap crisis, OPEP, cold war, hot wars ( proxy and ww i, ii) and so on and so on.
  At least 1st world was steadily growing and improving since 1945, almost uninterrupted (yep, crisis in 1st world are amateur levels). If you were NOT born in 1st world you have to add corruption levels you can't imagine, economy rollercoaster that makes 10% inflation look like an utopia, and CIA destabilizing your country every single time it starts catching up.
  
  We didn't start the fire comes to mind. Things have always been crazy, welcome to life since the dawn of society as we know it.
- Also born in early 80s and I agree.
- Fall of the internet? The interet does not appear fallen to me
  
  It's hard to see it falling when you're falling right along with it.
  
  There's more people on the internet than ever but they are mostly all on one central part of it being manipulated by ads and algorithms designed to drain them of money and data.

The US is in decline. Hastened by Republican ideology, accelerationists, and general willful stupidity and ignorance to varying degrees across the board. The “economy” revolves more and more around the stock market which only serves to enrich the already well off and wealthy while the rest of the ~90% flounder.

Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives

Soon there will be a critical mass of people who have nothing left to lose

Recessions in the USA are just constant. Nothing personal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_United_States
- Not personal, def. on purpose.

I got my MBA a couple months before the dot com bubble burst. Tell me about it.
- I started college at the same time... also I graduated with my second bachelor's when 2008 happened...
  
  Okay you just need to stop pursuing higher education lmao.
  I graduated with my associates in 2008, which is how I ended up joining the military later that year.

*Gen Y graduating from high school directly into Great Recession*
- Should have voted... And not for the guy whose favorite president is known for genocide and crashing the economy.
  Gen Z boys failed both steps (statistically)
  
  graduating from high school
  Should have voted...
  Pretty sure that would have been illegal for most of them. Can't vote under 18.