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.
Damn I just thought about it and the only home owner friend I have that isn’t a drug dealer, is a cop.
I think you’re on to something.
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)
Not too far from reality where I live. One dude already is doing time because he was blatantly dropping cash payments on things like a HOUSE and multiple cars.
The feds had a FIELD DAY with him.
ask them why didn’t they have savings to “buy a private yacht yet” at your age, because I would guess it’s roughly similar in the proportion of pay/cost
LOL when my father asked me how much savings I had, I immediately knew that our life experiences were vastly different.
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
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.
Thank you! This was very well put. Felt like a big puzzle piece just fell in place and this discomfort of not knowing why stuff feels so weird nowadays let go a bit. ❤️🤜
it’s kind of affirming to hear you say that. As a gen Z person I feel like we’re constantly being gaslit into thinking stuff has always been bad and we just complain more or something
Older millennial here, so about your age, I have really early childhood memories before ozone issues, recessions, and planet fucking, after that it’s been one paper straw after another
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.
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.
Oh man, that’s the good shit right there! Ride that dopamine wave.
The Ukraine-Russia & Israel-Palestine wars, and the likelyhood of China going after Taiwan before 2027, and the Koreas continually being a powder keg influenced by all of this. Between all that and me being 23 years old I sincerely think I might witness World War 3, it’s terrifying, yet it feels inevitable with our era of false 1st world peace built on a house of cards.
That’s not even mentioning the Republican Project 2025, as a trans person I might have to fight for my life.
What do you mean by house of cards? Seems to me like the current political order is the most stability the world has ever seen and is only threatened by an axis of fascist countries that deliberatly wants to plunge the world into war and chaos.
It’s been stable based on temporary peace and Mutually Assured Destruction (not just from nukes). For example China-Taiwan are still in a civil war that never officially ended, and China has always wanted to reabsorb Taiwan and Taiwan has always been opposed to. The Koreas are actively still in a cease fire for a war that also never concluded. And the middle east has always been churning with armed conflicts.
The western 1st world countries managed to extract enough wealth to stay far and away from these kinds of conflicts, but they are still heavily dependent on these countries and we’ll all feel the impacts if things get worse.
My GenX existential horror was learning in my thirties that all the western American Exceptionalism ideology I was indoctrinated in as a kid was just a way of keeping us from getting proactive for sake of the future generations, and my parents and teachers and ministers knew this and actively lied to me anyway.
I also think that a lot of bad things about the US that a blind eye was turned to because they seemed to be getting better have since become relevant again because they’ve started getting worse
Conservatives are well known for acting against their own self interest.
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.
I think the doom is real, but we’re all looking at it through 6" x 3" magnifying glasses that condense all the shit into one giant nugget, and then the easy thing is to comment on that nugget because, well it’s right there, and last winter was unseasonably warm and there were some pretty catastrophic wildfires, and the ocean is doing weird shit, and it’s easy to think that that’s all there is, but you can still take a walk in the woods on a sunny day, and say hi to some people, and maybe make a friend.
For now
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.
Boomers without understanding that there should never have been so many Boomers in the first place.
its literally in their name too: ‘baby boomers’. too many in too short a time and they have dominated politics for the better part of a century now
Not just those under 40. I do feel bad I sorta got a brief taste of “good times” and worry eventually younger folks will think the post 2000’s are normal.
Yeah, I’m juuuust old enough to have a firm memory of when things that were laughably petty were the biggest problems in the world. You mean to tell me the PRESIDENT got a BLOWJOB?!
All the real issues that sowed the seeds for our intractably broken future were sidelined and mostly ignored. Desert Storm, woowoo go world police. LA Riots, oh you crazy minorities and your intolerance for extrajudicial murder. Climate change, what’s that?
Desert Storm was the good one. Sadam invaded Kuwait, a large international coalition ended the occupation. Today’s analogue would be NATO entering Ukraine, kicking the Russians out, and showing that wars of aggression are unacceptable.
Iraq in '03 was the problematic one. Falsified casus belli, war crimes galore.
There hasn’t been a “good one” since WW2.
Short explanation: The arms Iraqi forces fought with during the Gulf War were largely bought or built by Americans. Isn’t that interesting?
Long explanation: It’s all connected to the Israel-Palestine issues we are seeing this very day. Iraq was dealt a very nasty hand by the UN after the dissolution of the Ottoman empire, becoming a landlocked country, with lines drawn such that they were made caretakers of ethnic enemies and forced to forsake much of their geopolitical power and resources to tribal rivals. It’s difficult to say their claim to Kuwait was justified, but it’s certainly just as difficult to say it was unjustified.
On top of that, we had just gotten done with fucking over Iraq due to their failure in the Iraq-Iran war. They had initially allied with the USSR to prop themselves up, and when that went to shit they turned around and tried doing the west and themselves a favor by grabbing a piece of Iran. We were directly supporting them (anybody taking a punch at Iran is a friend of ours!), and had been increasing our support, but when they agreed to a ceasefire we stopped, leaving them war-torn, deeply in debt, and with really nothing to show for their experiment of working with the west aside from all these shiny American weapons of course.Medium explanation?: Iraq had been engineered to be an Israel-like anti-Arab agent in the region, but when they failed and sued for peace, we left them no other option but to wage another war to survive. When they went in a direction we didn’t like, we got all our buddies together (including a surprising number of old enemies) and decimated them. Twice!
It is normal. It’s been this way for ± 15 years. Certainly the entirety of my adulthood and I’m nearly 30.
If it’s any comfort, 99% of human existence before us was worse. 100 years ago no one cared what you thought if the powers that be wanted to send you to war. Don’t even get me started about your life if you were a woman or minority. You don’t like it? There must be something wrong with you, off to the insane asylum for shock therapy.
That’s not the present yet, but a simple reminder that fascism is lurking and war will come because of food, water and mass migrations.
You’re also diabolizing the past. But that’s another matter.
and yet we essentially live in the best of times.
Sad we can’t find a political way for everyone to have enough of what we have.
primal needs to hoard are strong in humans.
We’re still using instincts that were designed for the wild.
We’re a perfect example of what happens when a predator species becomes overpopulated. They over indulge in a plentiful bounty not realizing they’re killing out their food source.
That’s why we hunt dear or kill wolves. A balance must exist or everything goes awry.
Humans destroyed this balance.
Over 40? For me is even worst! You younglings still have time to do something. I have no house, no savings, no retirement plan and no time to do all that! I’m the most fucked! Do you think I expect good things?
You will own nothing, and you will love it! 😠
I know, right? Who decided that things get better after 40?
As a GenXer pushing 50 I can guarantee that things have always been tough and they’re not getting better.
Some of us are doing ok and just trying to keep our heads down and not get caught in the crossfire. Good luck you guys. I wish you better fortune in the future.
Every day I wake up exhausted trying to look for a silver lining but more often not finding it until sleep.
You can sleep!? Shit, that’s pure gold you got right there.
My method is hoping that I’m just old and western enough that I’ll be dead before the real bad shit hits me. I’m 35 though, so… let’s say there’s a smidge of optimism in there.
I can’t smoke cigarettes fast enough to keep up
That’s a bit dramatic
