My parents once asked me why I didn’t have enough savings to buy a house yet.
I almost lost my shit.
The only people my age that I know who own their own house are also drug dealers.
Guess I should sell drugs if I want a house.
I had a legitimate talk about doing this with my girlfriend. As much as I hate how sketchy it is, it still just seems sooo tempting.
But is it worse than tricking other people to work 40+ hours a week doing whatever you say and giving you most of the value they create? Because that’s the other option.
Plus if you buy a bunch of houses you can get them to give back most of the money you pay them.
Just accept the fact you’ll never own a house and will forever live in a shoebox.
It’s like selling merch to the maga crowd. It’s obviously really easy to scam money off those people, but it’s so scummy I can’t bring myself to do it.
In comic, dystopian reality, selling drugs (really just weed) was how I graduated college debt-free, and graduating without debt was the only way I could take out/afford a loan for a house.
So apparently, it’s true what they say, whether planting or selling trees, the best time to do it was 10 years ago. The second best time is now! (Except don’t)
I’m not sure if selling weed alone would be good enough in a legal state. I could corner the market on LSD tho. Ain’t nobody got that 'round here!
I’m 35, and if you squint a bit at the mortgage, I “own” home. With my partner. And we’ll be paying it off for another 27 years. And we’re the lucky ones of this generation.
Buying a home with saving, fucking lol
Well, the good news is if you have a fixed rate mortgage the crushing amount of incoming inflation may cut that back to like 15-20 years!
I’m a couple years older than you, but my partner and I feel incredibly lucky to own a home as well. We bought an abandoned property back in 09’ for 35k and have spent the last ten years fixing it up. If I wasn’t able to borrow 20k from USAA back then, I don’t think I’d even be able to afford the rent in my neighborhood nowadays.
Once I hit my 40s, massive home diy projects have either become necessities (too expensive to hire out), pipe dreams, or like PA DOT working on route 202 in my youth (never ending with incremental steps that never improve the experience of driving). The energy loss is off the hook, and I’m not a flubbynutter.
Pay off over 15 years if you can or you’ll pay about double the total value just from interest.
I do like that theory. Unfortunately my wallet disagrees with it. Thankfully we’ve locked it in for 2.2% for 20 year, and semi-realistically we should be able to pay it off before that runs out. But the official period is 30 years, since that’s the legal maximum.
To keep your sanity you just have to lower your expectations.
I, for example, am really stoked for the burrito I ordered. Fuck, it’s good to be alive.
I’m stoked about having learned how to repair PCs in my last 6 hour hyperfixation, and then actually fixing two PCs.
I am! I am also sleep deprived lmaooo.
First time in years though I felt genuinely content with my life and it’s over something as insignificant as this!
Is it hard? I’ve built several PCs and repair seems like a good line of work for me, but I know nothing about the individual components of the parts
Yes and no! It’s a difficult initial process if you have no idea but becomes extremely easy once you know how PCs work.
Knowing how to diagnose problems is I feel a more difficult part. It’s more complicated than knowing “These parts go there and have cables that connect to the CPU switch, main power and hard drives” because cables and parts, to a huge degree, can only fit where they belong.
I imagine in the line of PC repair work you’ll encounter much more complicated issues and often multi-part damage. Also probably a lot of filth, I heard most normal people NEVER clean their PCs, change Thermal Paste or even let some nasty bugs accumulate in their PC.
Bonus points for if it’s a laptop instead of a PC. Their tight compact nature makes repairing them hell I’d imagine. BONUS bonus points if you’re working on an outdated PC who’s parts you can’t just easily swap out.
My life goal was to live in a house in the woods, support myself on 30 hours of work per week at the most, have 2 cats and a wood stove.
I mean the house is small (60 square meters of living space), I rent it, I have to use the wood stove for heating cause I can’t afford gas, and my retirement plan is to die in the climate wars, but hey, I made it.
Did health insurance figure into your life plan or do you live somewhere where the government functions properly?
You ever had a deep fried burrito? That shit is life changing and good enough reason for me to keep going.
Something called a chimichanga in my neck of the woods. You can get one smothered or dry. You can even get one stuffed with fruit and covered with sweet and spicy sauces
i was and still am confused that chimichanga isnt a universal term
if i may ask are you from southern usa area?
If you had written “hot burrito with melted cheese on top and inside”, i would be craving it now.
The century of find out with almost no active participation in the previous century of fuck around.
A lot of “climate collapse global late stage capitalism and food is more and more plastic” stick with very little “convenience products are kinda nifty” carrot
It’s kind of bittersweet being a very tail-end Gen X person. On the happy side, I got to do my childhood and teen years in the “fuck about” era, but on the unhappy side my entire adulthood has been in the “find out” era, and I get to remember what it was like briefly living in a world that wasn’t entirely going to shit.
As a zillenial (to young for millennial to old for gen Z) I can tell you that if feels basically awful only ever knowing the ruinous aftermath of the “fuck around” era
Outside of my immediate friends and family, whom I cherish, I couldn’t be fucked anymore. Everything is so shit all the time. I hope things get better of course and I look out for others when I can. But I’m just trying to keep me and my own afloat at the moment.
my whole childhood in the 90s was the “ozone layer is dying” but at the same time optimistic outlook on life?
Eh. It didn’t really start going to shit until 2001. Things stayed pretty darn good after 92. Not a lot of decades with that track record.
I mean, in the 90s we bitched about mostly distant global things because things were pretty good in general for most. And we had time to worry about less-catastrophic domestic things like Mumia or Peltier or what have you.
Now things aren’t so good and we end up bitching about far more local things because things around us are so bad.
It’s a great trick
I feel like I could still join in on all the fuck around going on, but the find out has simultaneously already started and I can’t deal with the cognitive incongruence. Most people seem to be just fine with that tho. Must be nice being able to just turn your brain off and keep fucking the planet like that.
Congratulations. You’re the favorite person of every oil company executive and petty dictator-wannabe. You think when the unions fought against child labor and 80+ hour work most people didn’t think they were crazy?
We live in a world where I could be arrested or canceled for trying to contribute to it.
Go ahead, make a YouTube channel that tries to bring to awareness the evils of sexual assault. You will be accused of having something to hide by the audience and you will be screwed by the network when they make you use the weirdest and most awkward euphemisms to describe these heinous acts, meanwhile Penis Prager can say the N Word as long as his show keeps the lights on…
I’m 32, I am infertile, but that is for the best. The human race doesn’t deserve to continue, I can only hope that reincarnation is real and that we can be reborn as something else, something that won’t fuck it up quite so magnificently.
I’m not sure what your you’re asking here.
They should do something … but do it quietly, so you don’t have to hear about it again?
Discussing the issue with parents doesn’t count as doing something? Have you considered that they are doing things and of the various avenues they’re pursuing, the part that hurts most is explaining the problem to their own parents? People who should have been on their side from the start?
And what exactly to you propose they do? It seems like the current system is designed to exhaust prolatariat to the point where action is too difficult, and then crush anyone who tries. At least they’re posting memes to keep the memory of a better world alive.
Beau of the Fifth Column recently noted that there are people who believe they could survive the OceanGate submersible collapse or the cold Atlantic waters after Titanic sank. There are folks who believe they could win a fight with a grizzly bear in full hungry, fighting form.
And he encourages such fearlessness among people who want to take up the mantle and fight for change to save civilization.
I suffer from ASD and major depression. I was crushed underfoot by parents and kids alike (that is three at a time, each twice my size) and learned early the futility of fighting. I saw how efforts to fit in were useless and have the suicide attempts in my history to demonstrate my awareness that all is hopeless all around me.
But you go!
There are people who have fought a hungry grizzly bear and won, against all odds, so, not impossible.
Sure, but those were extreme outliers.
The oceangate thing is a better example. Like “I’d just hold my breath and swim to the surface, no big deal”.
Except for the whole turning into ketchup in a millisecond or two part, ofc. Some people just don’t understand things like that.
That kid on the sub was smarter than the rest of them combined.
Unless you are advocating for the mass slaughter of Republicans and Christian conservatives, I am not sure what you think is going to fix anything- because they have a lot of power for some reason, and aren’t keen on changing their mind on their whole, “The world is ending but that’s good actually” thing.
I don’t think being “mopey” about the historical context you live in is necessarily self-defeating or nihilistic. Accepting things are shitty and feeling hopeless is what can motivate people to act against it together. In a time of hyper-capitalism, alienation, and commodification of all forms of “happiness,” being unhappy and embracing it can be an act of protest. When other people see you’re unhappy with the current state of things it can help them be comfortable with expressing the same feeling. The idea that expressing unhappiness is a bad thing prevents it from being a force to bring people together. Instead people feel like they should always be happy and hopeful and motivated, and that only losers are unhappy, but everyone is unhappy to varying degrees and not accepting it fully causes a lot of issues for people.
I think if anything we live in a time where we’re struggling to find balance between these anxieties and hope for any potential change for good, but I think the two are more connected than most realize.
Bootstrap Bill has entered the chat. You’ve got no problems, eh? Every issue that arises in your life you tackle head on? Amazing.
This guy’s doing better than us, everyone! Look at him being above it all and thriving under the assumption his experience is everyone’s experience!
You can kindly go fuck yourself. By assuming people not only aren’t doing anything about the state of the world because they complain about it online but also assuming that they are in a position where they can do more, you are part of the problem. Especially by giving such polarized statements that simply shame people and have no clear, actionable suggestions on what to do. The system is designed to isolate people and prevent them from utilizing the power that they have to change things, and here you are, whining that people aren’t utilizing their power to change things. You’re just as bad as the people you’re complaining about. You’re not changing anything other than the number of people in the world who want to punch you in the throat.
There’s a reason that historically, most protests in the US were centered around a core group made up of college age kids, up until the past 50 or so years. It’s because that demographic has (had) the most free time and least financial burden. It’s the reason that college is so expensive nowadays. It was retaliation against the college kids who protested against Reagan when he was governor of California. The lack of free time and financial pressure on the workforce ensures that we’ll be less able to exert our power to change things.
If you actually want to help, you can help get people to the polls, especially for state and local level elections, or help aid groups that support striking workers. The reason old white people control so much of the state and local level government isn’t because people are sitting at home whining - it’s because their boss told them that they’ll be fired if they take the day off to go to the polls, and their district is so gerrymandered that it wouldnt make a difference anyways. The racist retirees are the ones who go to every town meeting and show up to all the hearings and community polls because they have all the time in the world while they live on their pensions. So, if you want to change the world, start by driving people to town meetings and to the polls on the local election days. Fight to ensure that people have the time and can afford to exercise their rights to make the world better. Or you can keep whining on the internet like a baby.
Things are changing, guys! Ace is on the case! If you just stop being mopey billionaires will stop being greedy, forests will stop disappearing, vulnerable populations will be safe, racism will disappear, the climate will sort itself out, everyone will get the medical care they need, no more starving… Thanks, Ace. We couldn’t have done it without you and your keen sense of dealing with all these minor little things.
It’s not whining. It’s not doomerism. We need to fight indeed. But it’s not for a better future. It’s for the future to not get too bad.
And in a world where 60+ years old a more numerous than 25- yo, it is important to make them understand where their shitty usual vote is taking us. For us to have a chance, the 60+ need to change their vote or to stop voting.
Work for the government. Civil service positions are always starving for people with skills and talent, because we do not pay as well as the private sector. It’s doesn’t offer the prestige of working for Google or Apple but you get better stability and benefits than most other jobs. I’m not saying civil service is for everyone. But if you’re struggling to build a future with your three part-time jobs plus driving rideshare on the side, we’re paying $23 / hour for entry-level IT work.
I lived in poverty for most of my 20s and had no hope for the future. I told myself I’d never sell out and slave away in some anonymous cubicle. In my mid 30s I sold out, I work a predictable 8-4 schedule, I have health benefits, I have a retirement plan, and I’ve been able to leapfrog ahead from working one full time and two part time jobs and eating mostly peanut butter to having my nights and weekends free, AND being able to afford to go out and do stuff, AND being able to buy a home.
Principles are great but man they’re expensive.
In my experience, civil sector jobs suffer greatly from the Peter Principle. Aside from bennies and pension, perks are shit (coffee? water? buy your own). And departments are heavily balkanized and have SERIOUSLY obsessive control freak issues. That’s before you get into the arcane paperwork. Oh, and in many cases, the general public is so anal about spending money that you should consider yourself lucky if you have a work party of any kind.
Aside from bennies and pension, perks are shit (coffee? water? buy your own)
You are correct. It is definitely not a flashy career option. However, if someone is unable to get ahead financially, but then turns down that government IT job because “I have to buy my own coffee”, then they are their own worst enemy. They’re the reason they’re drowning.
Just like any other job, entirely dependent on your particular unit/department and manager. In the US Fed gov’t there’s a huge difference between working for CBP, civil Marines, and NASA, just to name 3 random agencies.
The difference with the feds is that you get a basically predictable paycheck (as long as Congress does its damn job), health benefits that make life habitable, the best possible version of a 401k around (TSP), and you’re extraordinarily unlikely to get downsized.
Last I checked, the plurality of civilian federal employees make GS-13, which in 2023 was between $98k and $153k depending on where you were located, and how long you’ve been at that pay-grade. It’s not an overwhelming plurality, butnit’s not unusual to promote into a GS-13, and then hang out there for most of your career.
Retirement is a three-legged stool: your TSP (aka 401k), Social Security, and a small pension. People hired before 1985 were the ones who got the sweet fat pensions, but it doesn’t work that way anymore.
My plan is going full hedonist and mock and laugh at fucking everything and encourage the collapse. Fuck humans. Y’all did this not me.
I feel like there’s a large voting demographic that believes in “fuck you, got mine” and the last 20 years do not give me hope for a future where it is fixable
Let’s say I raise an army, take over the world and kill anyone who shows signs of opposition.
If I fix all of the world’s problems then what’s to stop someone from killing me so they can step into that role and ruin it? If I live to be 100, what’s to say my replacement puts the issues of the many above themselves?
You wanna hear mopey shit, come back to yourself after your election.
I’ve run for office, and I don’t plan on ever doing it again. Unless you’re already famous or have a huge local support network with lots of free time, stay home and save your money and time and sanity.
I really wish my generation was a bit more optimistic. Yeah shit sucks, don’t get me wrong. But have you guys seen all of history? This is par for the course. Yeah the challenges are different but every generation had their challenges. And yeah baby boomers definitely had it better than us, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing but bad stuff to come. You have to take life with the good and the bad and make the most of it.
The bad is starting to look more and more like an impending global societal collapse with every passing day though
Yeah I don’t know about “par for the course”
What other generation had the threat of scientifically proven ecological collapse looming over them?
scientifically proven ecological collapse
This is a pretty specific thing, but the general “we’re all doomed” vibe is definitely not unique to today. Boomers and older had the threat of nuclear annihilation looming over them, and before that… well, disease and famine and death and destruction due to war have historically been the norm.
Imagine how you’d feel living in the Americas in the 16th or 17th centuries and either watching the destruction wrought by European settlers firsthand or, maybe worse, watching your peers die en masse of the diseases introduced by those settlers. Imagine living in Eurasia in the 13th century and watching the Mongol army sweep through.
None of this is to say that today’s challenges aren’t real and serious. Just that we’re not the first to face such challenges.
Considering science has only gotten robust enough to prove anything like that far more recently than any good examples of ecological collapse, I’d say this parameter is a little arbitrary.
The best example I can think of regarding ecological collapse is during and after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Their climate decreased in temperature, which reduces crop yields, which weakened the empire and encouraged migration from northern Europe, which brought their collapse (plus like 12 other things lol).
In 535AD, during Justinian’s reign in the east, the first black plague happened following a supermassive volcano that left the sky covered in ash blocking the sun. This was a massively ecologically damaging period of history and it caused the death of countless plant and animal life, along with the deaths of half the population of the Mediterranean.
It’s not like people of this age were taking soil samples and references trends or whatever, but they certainly understood how things were going poorly.
The ozone layer depletion was a very serious threat. The solutions were a lot easier though.
I mean, they literally thought WW1 and WW2 would start the apocalypse.
Nuclear armageddon was a daily fear of the Cold War, and almost happened several times.
The difference now is that we know all we need to do to ruin Earth for human life is to do nothing.
This is an interesting perspective, because in previous generations most of the long term fears were settled by simply doing nothing. They held their breath and it worked out.
The key difference is that the current generations are acutely aware that if we do nothing and just “stay calm and carry on”, we’re totally fucked. Inaction isn’t going to save us this time. We can’t put our heads in the sand and just sing ourselves to sleep then expect a good outcome when we resurface.
I think that’s a key differentiator. Previous generations were fearful of something happening. Current generations are fearful of nothing happening, because if nothing happens then the world will become uninhabitable by humans.
Yet, the majority of the decision-makers in our society are silent generation/boomers that drove to success by inaction and they’re largely doing nothing. We see this and understandably know how fucked we are.
You need to give articles making predictions about the future a heavy amount of doubt. We may be relatively intelligent as a species, but I genuinely think we way over-estimate our abilities. Predicting the future is hard. The biggest problem is that predictions are based on past data, and cannot account for what might happen that hasn’t happened before. Which when faced with a brand new problem tends to be a brand new response.
Look at our lives right now. While certainly not ideal (who could make that claim, in all history?) it’s pretty damn nice if you look back in time. Yes lotsa awful stuff MIGHT happen, but that’s always been true. And compared to the challenges of the past it’s not on any scale we haven’t been on before (I mean the Cold War literally could have resulted in the planet becoming uninhabitable due to nukes).
I’m not saying I disagree with you, I’m merely trying to give it a glass half full perspective. I agree some scale of societal collapse does seem like it is a real possibility, but it’s by no means guaranteed or necessarily even likely. We don’t know what we don’t know. Embrace not knowing what the future holds and just enjoy life for what it is today.
This is what gave me some peace: it could all end horribly for me at any minute. Anything could happen. I could get hit by a bus. I could die painfully from some fucked up disease. A fat asteroid could hit the earth. It’s all out of my control. Or things could turn out for the better, by some way I never foresaw. The best thing for us to do is to strive to be good people and care for what is in front of us.
I still find it a bit of a mindfuck that humanity is being such a deleterious effect on this beautiful world.
… and I do think that growing up under the threat of nuclear holocaust must have been similarly terrifying.
Most generations don’t need to deal with an impending threat to the whole planet. Nuclear apocalypse, sure, but at least there was no pretending that it wasn’t a problem.
This is ignoring all of the other ways in which we’re fucked.
For me, the first world (i.e. the part of the world allied with the US) had a common enemy to get behind and that allowed people to live in peace for 1.5 generations or so. When the USSR collapsed, that bogeyman suddenly disappeared and the infighting started nearly instantly.
I think the Internet is partially to blame.
The negative stuff happening in the world seems to spread so much faster and get so much more publicity that it’s easy to end up in a constant negative spiral
Yeah I think you’re dead on. I’m evidently not alone in thinking that the age of information is driving a lot of consciousness of worldwide issues on a scale we’ve never seen before. People in the Middle Ages only knew the small world they lived in on the scale of a city or region. If that city or region was prospering, their life was likely pretty damn nice.
These days, we’re aware of all issues everywhere. And if you don’t create that perspective for yourself, that can be incredibly overwhelming. You have to give in to a certain sense of wilful ignorance because you literally cannot be involved with every one of those problems. Not clicking on all the doom and gloom news articles has done wonders for my mental health. I guess you could say this thread was a moment of weakness… :p
What’s interesting when you look at birthrate declines is not that they are declining, it’s that they are declining to NORMAL LEVELS. Everyone is freaking out that the next generation won’t be big enough to support retiring Boomers without understanding that there should never have been so many Boomers in the first place.
baby boomers definitely had it better than us
Dunno, man. Boomers in my home country went through such shit time that they think that becoming literal nazis still isn’t the worst thing to happen in their lifetime. They did get free housing before that, though, so I’m not sure they actually had it worse overall…
As someone that’s been around for some of history it’s bad now. Just the cost of living stuff is dark. Grown adults are sharing bedrooms because they can’t afford to rent a room by themselves on a full time wage. People have raised entire families on a single factory workers wage for hundreds of years before now, now two people with decent jobs can’t afford one kid. It’s dark.
“some history” lol all you’re doing is describing things as Not As Bad As The Great Depression
It’s a different situation but I don’t think ‘not as bad’ really works here. The average house during the 30’s was only twice the average wage, you could absolutely support a family on a single income. Other things were bad, like the unemployment rate, but it was temporary.
The issue in this post is that what we’re dealing with is ‘life’ being unattainable for the majority of people. For people in their 20’s now it’s always been that way. They can’t move out, they can’t get an education, they can’t get a career going, it’s grim.
