Claire*, 42, was always told: “Follow your dreams and the money will follow.” So that’s what she did. At 24, she opened a retail store with a friend in downtown Ottawa, Canada. She’d managed to save enough from a part-time government job during university to start the business without taking out a loan.
For many years, the store did well – they even opened a second location. Claire started to feel financially secure. “A few years ago I was like, wow, I actually might be able to do this until I retire,” she told me. “I’ll never be rich, but I have a really wonderful work-life balance and I’ll have enough.”
But in midlife, she can’t afford to buy a house, and she’s increasingly worried about what retirement would look like, or if it would even be possible. “Was I foolish to think this could work?” she now wonders.
She’s one of many millennials who, in their 40s, are panicking about the realities of midlife: financial precarity, housing insecurity, job instability and difficulty saving for the future. It’s a different kind of midlife crisis – less impulsive sports car purchase and more “will I ever retire?” In fact, a new survey of 1,000 millennials showed that 81% feel they can’t afford to have a midlife crisis. Our generation is the first to be downwardly mobile, at least in the US, and do less well than our parents financially. What will the next 40 years will look like?
I’m one of these people. I’m looking at possible war with several countries thanks to Putin and Trumpfus. At the same time I’m making good money but the children below me are already making more so how can I even think I’ll have the same chances. But at least I’m not at the bottom of the barrel. I can imagine my mother for example cannot sell her house and she can barely pay for the incorrect in water electric and taxes in San Diego. She’s basically locked until her death. Then my brother will be in the same boat.
No.
But one day I will get so desperatly poor that taking out someone in siphoning wealth from the country and ending them might seem like a fitting end.
If we don’t change things anyways.
I always wonder why people shoot up schools and parks when their problems are caused by people in board rooms. Never see a mass shooting in a board room for some reason.
Maybe there’s a selection bias, and we only hear about the dumb ones who target innocent people and get caught.
Believe it or not, people willing to murder others aren’t the best at thinking clearly.
Well one of the original mass shootings resulted in the expression ‘going postal’, but I don’t recall what was ever theorized as a motive there. Workplace frustration maybe?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
- John F. Kennedy
Let’s make peaceful revolution possible by campaigning for electoral reform at the state level! We should all be free to vote for those who best represent us, secure in the knowledge that our vote will still be cast against those we don’t want in office.
We don’t need to wait for trump to have a hamburger heart attack, we dont need to wait for the republicans to stop existing. We can do this right now… and some states already have!
Yours can to, most especially the blue states. Who is stopping you in those blue states?
You won’t retire, no. No longer work a job because everything is slowly falling apart as our climate apocalypse trudges on? Sure, but you’ll still be working hard to survive.
LOL I’m never retiring. I’ve already accepted that I’ll be working until I’m dead. There are those who get dealt the right cards and will get to retire comfortably. I’m just not one of them.
Hell. Gen X also are worried about retirement.
Will social security be here in 15 years? My 401k has not kept up at all… Everything today costs soooooooo much there’s no real room for saving.
Early Gen X, late millennial here. This, wondering how we are going to pay for the skyrocketing health care, day to to living, and send our kids to school. We are told to invest in 401k’s which after living through the dot com bust and housing crash, is a total fucking gamble. How are we going to live? I.have.no.fucking.idea. To be blunt, this country just doesn’t give a fuck, I expect to be working until I die.
Right??
Early Gen Z / very tail end of millennial here.
Got a job that pays ~80k (with promotion potential to 100k in a year) and I’m just… dumbfounded at how yall are making it. I didn’t grow up wealthy at all, and struggled with homelessness for a time, so I’m not new to the frugal game, but being able to put away only a hundred or two bucks a month after taxes is crazy with the hours and time I put into existing. I’d rather just not work at all if the end result is the same.
Doordash is a crux in my life and something I’ve definitely splurged on in the past, but groceries are just as expensive outside of rice beans and chicken. Baffling. :(
At this point, I’m still looking at working till the day I die.
being able to put away only a hundred or two bucks a month after taxes is crazy with the hours and time I put into existing.
Every little bit helps. Future you will thank you for even putting that amount away.
I try, but of course life finds a way to rip whatever savings I’ve got slowly but surely.
What do you invest your 401k in?
Most recent social security trustees report says the trust fund will run out in 2035. What happens in 2035? Benefits are still funded at 83% in perpetuity. By the way, last year it was going to run out in 2033, and the year before that it was going to run out in 2031. And also by the way, the trust fund was specifically set up because they knew the baby boomers were going to stress the system, so it’s supposed to get depleted as the boomers use it.
Everything is working mostly as intended, and yet there’s all this anxiety around Social Security. Why? Because Republicans want you to think Social Security is fucked all on its own so that you don’t question it when they ratfuck it. That and they want to constantly frame the conversation as such so that the conversation doesn’t turn to “how do we make social security more robust and generous?” or some other radical socialist nonsense.
Thus millennial thinks we will all die in 10 years or so from climate related disasters and none of us will live to retirement age as things currently stand.
Thus millennial
thinkshopes we will all die in 10 years or so from climate related disastersand none of us will live to retirement age as things currently standso they don’t have to worry about retirement.Ftfy. The entire “collapse” thing is a coping mechanism.
We can have different opinions. Imo climate change denialism is a cope. I also hedge my bets by also planning for retirement. But as it stands, we’re all on hospice.
Imo climate change denialism is a cope.
I agree. And I think both doomerism and denialism are encouraged by the fossil fuel industry, because they both lead to inaction.
The reality is:
- the climate is getting worse because of fossil fuels
- through action, we can make it less worse
- this action will be difficult
- this action will cause a lot of very rich people and companies to lose money
Maybe, but we’re getting into a classic discussion about nihilism here when it comes to doomerism - if nothing matters, how should I feel? Depressed, or finally free to do whatever since it doesn’t matter anyway?
The reality is:
- As it currently stands, with current technology and current input/output, we are facing literally 6 of 9 separate world ending catastrophes which are feeding into each other. https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/07/recklessness-defined-breaking-6-of-9-planetary-boundaries-of-safety/
As of 2021, according to SRI, we had already gone beyond the safe limit for five of these planetary boundaries: • climate change; • biogeochemical flows (i.e., excessive phosphorus and nitrogen pollution from fertilizer use); • biosphere integrity (e.g., extinction rate and loss of insect pollination); • land-system change (e.g., deforestation); • and novel entities (e.g., pollution from plastics, heavy metals, and what are commonly referred to as “forever chemicals”).
In an April 2022 update, SRI found that a portion of a sixth planetary boundary – fresh water use – had also been crossed. In addition, in a June 2021 interview with the journal Globalizations, Dr. Will Stefan of SRI said that a seventh planetary boundary had also likely been crossed: ocean acidification (one that has been theorized as a key contributor to previous mass extinction events in geologic history). One other boundary has been too uncertain to judge: atmospheric aerosols from fine particle pollution caused by fossil fuel combustion. Yet, we are clearly pushing this boundary too, when considering that air pollution from burning fossil fuels has been blamed for 8.8 million deaths worldwide per year.
If a used car salesman said, “just get this baby a new engine, new transmission, new brakes, tires, and new radiator and she’ll be perfect!” Would you buy the car or trust that’s everything wrong with it? Or would you assume it’s “as is” or worse?
Best case scenario, we put up a gigantic aluminum or whatever space blanket in space to reflect a certain percentage of the sun’s energy to buy us some time. But it doesn’t appear to be happening.
Because the rich genuinely think they are immune to the laws of science. Look at the Titanic sub - they will bet their own lives on their hubris. Including with the planet.
If a used car salesman said, “just get this baby a new engine, new transmission, new brakes, tires, and new radiator and she’ll be perfect!” Would you buy the car or trust that’s everything wrong with it? Or would you assume it’s “as is” or worse?
I kinda did that. Not with a car, but a house. Bought my mom a cheap shitty house because she’s poor as shit and I’m trying to get her to be able to retire with some dignity.
But it’s a start. We have the house. We just redid the plumbing. Next the foundation. Next the electrical, then the hvac. Improving over time as we have the money and the capacity. Eventually, it will be a perfectly fine, liveable house.
It’s a LOT of work. And ridiculously expensive. But it’s DOABLE, and buying a “normal” house is NOT doable because they’re crazy expensive nowadays. We improve as we can, and over time things get better as long as we keep moving forward.
That’s what I think the best case scenario is for the planet. Renewables. Electric vehicles. Public transit. Carbon capture. Reforestation. Zero waste. I have a vision of a planet Earth in 500 years that is not an apocalyptic hellhole, but a green, vibrant, forward looking one, mildly embarrassed about how their ancestors let things get so bad before fixing it.
We can do that. A lot of us are working towards it.
Yes, with a house and just you and your mom, it’s doable. Even with a car, it’s doable. Why? Because it’s been done before (so parts are already made, how to guides, etc), not an entire planet of 8 billion people AND a completely new series of issues we have to engineer around and can’t fuck up or we all literally die. We also don’t have the time (like we are out of time) to implement much.
I think trying to fix it is completely imperative. I simply don’t believe it will get fixed. It should be fixed, yes, imo - but I doubt it will be. Partially because our government isn’t taking serious action to do so. Partially because every environmental scientist, environmental engineer, biologist, ecologist, I know is extremely depressed or suicidal.
The worst thing that would happen if you didn’t fix up that house, is that you’d be living in bad conditions but not unlivable ones. The amount of dissociation people have from the seriousness of what’s going on around us is stunning. I assume a profound lack of education about the environment or biology. Things are bad.
Partially because our government isn’t taking serious action to do so. Partially because every environmental scientist, environmental engineer, biologist, ecologist, I know is extremely depressed or suicidal.
Look, this is lemmy. Everyone and their fucking dog is suicidal here. It’s damn near a death cult.
it’s doable. Why? Because it’s been done before
That’s not an issue. We have the science. Sure, there are efficiency gains from improved science, but it’s not like we’re fumbling in the dark here. We know exactly what we need to do and how to do it. And it’s not a braindead simplistic soundbyte like “just do a revolution” or “everyone bike everywhere”. It’s complex, it’s complicated, but it is known. Stop using fossil fuels. Start using renewables. Capture the carbon that has already been released. It’s a super simple equation. It’s like dieting, you can have all the fancy diets in the world but the absolute core of it is that you need to take in less calories than you burn in order to lose weight.
or we all literally die.
That’s not true and I can tell you’re smart enough to know it, so I won’t dwell on it. But it dovetails into the next point
We also don’t have the time (like we are out of time)
It’s not a binary. We have passed the threshold where we can prevent negative effects. In that sense, we are out of time, yes. Species have gone extinct and we can’t get them back. Not like, “very soon this will happen”, but like “this has already happened”. It will keep getting worse. That’s how you have to think of it. Not like a video game. Not like “fix the problem in x years or else we all immediately die, game over!” It’s “the longer it takes to fix, the worse the world gets in the mean time.”
I believe, as long as the US doesn’t fall into a regressive fascist science-denying hellhole (which is a whole nother thing but bears mentioning), we will fix it. Possibly in my life time, or at least be on a trajectory to complete recovery (minus extinct species) within my lifetime. A lot of people are putting a lot of money and time and effort into it.
Alas, I do have a plan involving retirement. It is filed under “things that happen to other people”.
The probability I’ll survive to retirement age is negligible, why worry about it?
What a quaint question. I honestly wonder if I’ll live my full life and die with a dignity instead of how i suspect, with a fistfull of dirt and a pigs boot on my skull.
Who told her that? That’s obviously bad advise.
This is another one of many things that the government should be taking care of for people (and they sort of tried to with Social Security) but of course the “privatize everything” sociopath elites killed that idea, and our culture expects everyone to just learn how to Warren Buffet better. Bro, do you even index fund?
she has about $75,000 saved up for a downpayment
Oh you poor child. That’s not even close to enough. 💀
It’ll get somewhere just north of half a million.
So a two bedroom condo. Probably not what most people had in mind for that much work.
Studio condo here…
You got four walls? Lucky.
Yeah that’s about it where I am but in other places that’s a 2b/2b house with a half acre yard, which isn’t horrible.
I guess that means you can add on to the house. Like one of those shanty towns.
It is tho. 75k gets u closed on a 300k house with 20% down basically
Retiring in a cheap country in South America seems like the best option. Makes the money stretch way farther.
I tried that, then it got gentrified and expensive.
Man, we really are more alike then different eh?
My wife has a job with an awesome pension and as a result there is basically no situation she will ever leave. I pointed out to her that the golden handcuffs are still golden.
One day some MBAs are going to learn that if you don’t want constant turn over you give workers a pension so great they would crawl over their mother’s corpse to get it.
What am I saying? MBAs learning? Hahaha I love being silly.
Wasn’t there a study that said MBAs don’t have object permanence nor a real conscious understanding of the passage of time?
Money today. That’s all these businesses understand.
I searched what MBA actually means. Fuck that shit. Degree in “Business Administration” sounds like degree in praying. Wait, there is one! Fuck!
It doesn’t matter if any specific MBA learns a lesson. Some other douche canoe will swing by and have their single brain cell fire off just this one time and they’ll start hacking away at the pensions to make Q3 look better.
Boeing style.
No more moon shots, contract out everything, slash pensions, fight a war against your union, move corporate away from production, buy your own stock.
One day some MBAs are going to learn that if you don’t want constant turn over you give workers a pension so great they would crawl over their mother’s corpse to get it.
Plus, modern MBAs see turnover as a good things because it makes the short-term investors happy.
Wtf why?
Sociopathy, lack of long term planning skills, drugs (metaphorical and physical). Some combination of those I suspect.
This is an appropriate reaction, in my opinion. Modern economic philosophy is entirely myopic with no apparent perceived value in anything beyond the next quarter. From that perspective, if your employees have already created value and you’ve budgeted more than severance would cost (or think you can get away with constructive dismissal), then, for the quarter, getting rid of employees looks like a financial positive.
For some, you get the Jack Walsh thinking that some employees are going to be statistically bad performers, so it is good to get rid of them.
You also have other cases where lowering the time to train means you can expand faster since you don’t need to find quality staff. The original McDonald’s trained its staff to be able to be high output restaurants. The business model changed to needing less worker training to help fuel expansion.
You also have the case where some managers believe some jobs only require a commodity level labor. At that point, there is no value in training.
Christ…
Faust…
So tired of hearing that shitstain’s name. I admit there is some wisdom to the up or out approach. You know for very very high level workers. Like C-suite or a rank below. Doing it across the company just promises misery and failure.
Unfortunately, living in the US, I would not take a job with a pension because the (private) pension system cannot be trusted. I remember the 00s when many company pension accounts went bankrupt, because companies were no longer offering it as a benefit and it was easy enough to screw over retired past employees. Companies would take poorly performing divisions and their pension plans, spin them off as a new company that would quickly file for bankruptcy.
I would not trust a pension without it being insured by an organization like the FDIC. Even then, I would be afraid that my pension would not cover living costs due to inflation.
Luckily there are alternatives. I have a 401k, which should give me a steady flow of inflation proof dividends… until a market downturn wipes it out. If that happens, I can fall back to Social Security. Don’t believe the baloney that the government will ever let Social Security go bankrupt. They will just cut down benefits.
I don’t deny things like that happened. You heard about them right? So did I. But that’s the thing, these are the stories you heard. It’s man bites dog, it is observation bias.
Also her pension is insured. And I am pretty sure the bankruptcy thing you mentioned was one particular case with a car part maker.
Just give them a box of crayons to eat so the adults can get some work done for once.
That’s a cool image. Doesn’t look AI. Anyone know the artist? Probably stock art.
Illustration: Loanne Le & Matt Blue/The Guardian
edit: Found their site. https://leblue.net/Bio
Oh wow thanks. They have good stuff.
Lol!
No.
