For millennials, financial security feels like a fairytale. What will the next 40 years look like?

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?

  • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
    5·
    5 months ago

    I guess I spoke too quickly as well. Probably people do write the news, but (a) how do you even find things these days, when searching is crap; and (b) it would perhaps do little to counteract the mis- (neutral), even active dis-information that is out there now. Also those sources I mentioned tend to be rather high-end, e.g. of the scale of intelligence required to make use of and especially to really enjoy watching them.

    Speaking of the Bush administration, I recall hearing about the event where they pulled down Sadam Hussein’s statue (iirc?) but later when I watched it happen with my own eyes - with the audio ON mind you - it told a 100% different story. Crowds cheering, or booing, or something, but the important thing is that with the audio OFF they can say whatever they wish to, and we’d believe it b/c how else could we know the reality? Unless someone happened to have the original source… except even then, what if they swapped the audio out, how could we tell!?

    The only real way to tell a counterfeit is to know the real thing so well that nobody can tell you otherwise. So what, I am supposed to know about the entire history of the Middle East, and all of the machinations of the US government within that!? I have a fucking job you know, and as a not-Boomer, may never see retirement or own a home even then - who has time to add all of that to their schedule, on top of every single other thing like climate change, ThE eCoNoMy ThO, Covid and/or vaccines, and all of the other myriad things out there (like gay frogs for some damn reason, I dunno)?!

    Highly ironically then, the internet may have slowed down the pace of systemic and active disinformation - by providing an “alternate” source of real, true facts - even as in other ways it also sped it up (by providing a source of “alternative facts” that are not true).

    And in response to all of that, the Democrats choose to nominate… HRC, smdh. Remember, Trump did not win, so much as she lost - worse than any candidate in modern history, and the second-worst btw was… him. Conservatives, liberals, voters, apathetic people - we brought this upon ourselves. I really hope that we get to live, but if we die, I cannot really blame anyone else? The wealthy elites, ahem excuse me, the Democrat politicians, don’t really exist within the same world as 99.999999% of the rest of Americans, which might be fine except neither do they seem to bother even so much as learning about them - except, you know, enough to carry hot sauce in her purse I suppose.

    What you are describing sounds an awful lot to me like the mantra of “move fast and break things”, which as I understand it was popularized by Mark Zuckerberg of Facism FaceBook, and refers basically to the fact that we can move so quickly nowadays - with the abilities of code monkies hopped up on crack (one presumes, this on top of the Red Bull and Dorritos combo:-P) that even if we screw up, we can still move quickly enough to fix it. Now, you might say that even one second’s thought would be enough to dispell that rumor, however my counter to that is… he’s rich. (and!? WTF does that even have to do with anything!? oh wait, he took all that money from society regardless of the harm that it did to us all, okay then)

    Anyway, there have always been the elites - the idea of the Illuminati, regardless of whether they are “really” real or not, like seriously, how could they not be, that’s simply how the world works!? - who have controlled society. The problem is, the elites feel like they no longer need the backing of irl human beings, b/c of (a) globalism (so humans here don’t need educating, if you can get sufficient number of coders somewhere, who are willing to work for bananas and cocaine), and (b) automation (so… do we really need human beings at all? and also climate change makes it unlikely that we’ll all survive? welp, better start killing them off in mass numbers, or better yet just let them do it to themselves, whilst *I* simply accumulate all of the wealth that I possibly can until then).

    We are all so damn naive - and yes I include myself first and foremost among that set.:-P I am not sure that this problem even is fixable, but if it were, it would take an amount of collective effort that… I am not certain exists any longer. Or the backing of an elite. I guess we’ll see what happens. :-|

    • uis@lemm.ee
      3·
      5 months ago

      with the abilities of code monkies hopped up on crack (one presumes, this on top of the Red Bull and Dorritos combo:-P)

      You underestimate coffee and power of Ballmer’s Peak.

      automation (so… do we really need human beings at all? and also climate change makes it unlikely that we’ll all survive? welp, better start killing them off in mass numbers, or better yet just let them do it to themselves, whilst *I* simply accumulate all of the wealth that I possibly can until then).

      I hate neofeudalism. They use what can be used for societal progress for social regress.

      • OpenStars@discuss.onlineEnglish
        1·
        5 months ago

        Their decision, whether they have spent even one second’s thought about it or not, is “strategic” as in one that will get them personally some benefits, but it is also short-sighted as in one that may doom us all. On the other hand, my naivite is perhaps far worse so I should be careful throwing stones in glass houses.

        I rarely like popular TV shows but one that does make me think is The 100 that illustrates thougher choices needing to be made and all the gamesmanship going on surrounding those. e.g. will neoliberals survive whereas progressivism was too impractical to ever have a chance? I don’t know the answer but those seem like the kinds of questions that needed to be explored by people far smarter in such matters than I. Unfortunately, they instead have been explored by people who are fairly smart but whose defining characteristic may be a desire to become personally richer, which again far exceeds my own.