‘I cannot afford to live’: Gen Z is full of financial angst despite inheriting a golden job market
https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/10/business/gen-zs-financial-angst/index.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.worldhttps://www.cnn.com/2024/04/10/business/gen-zs-financial-angst/index.htmlOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
Tldr:
Author doesn't understand "the economy" is just about corporate profits
Wages are (slightly) up, but not enough to afford food and housing.
Author looks at mean instead of median retirement savings and say everything is great.
If you're wondering why she has such bad takes, she's a self described "crypto reporter" who was trying to convince us inflation was a good thing a while ago.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/01/economy/inflation-good-bad-winners-losers/index.html
She's completely detached from reality
Her name is Allison Morrow if anyone is curious but doesn’t want to give her clicks
I appreciate the summary and the warning about the reporter. I had a feeling, but confirmation helps. 👍
Read Hunter Thompson's book "Hell's Angels." There's a section where he breaks down the economics of being a biker/hippie/artist circa 1970. An Angel could get a job as a Union stevedore and earn enough in six months to live on the road for two years. A part time waitress could support herself and her boyfriend.
The Good Doctor is the only person who died before the shitshow we find ourselves in today both politically and economically whose opinions on it I really want to hear. In football terms he and his writings always had incredible down the field vision in part because he had such a firm grasp on the cultural flows of the present and the national temperature of the US people.
Now I have to dig out "...On The Campaign Trail" and reread the part where he writes about talking football with Nixon.
A lot of people told me that I should watch the series "The Deuce" with Maggie Gyllenhaal. I stopped watching ten minutes into the first episode because they had a pimp recite some of Thompson's wisdom as if the writers had come up with it on their own.
Hunter’s influence is everywhere but it is infuriating when someone tries to claim some sort of brilliance he wrote down 50 years ago. I need to read hells angels again it’s been a decade at this point but it will have to wait until I both start and finish the illuminatist tirlogy. I read his 9/11 article regularly just to get a fix for his particular voice and perspective
Golden job market? Tha fuck?
My dude, there are hundreds of jobs available that have no benefits, no security, no retirement investment, no advancement, no personal satisfaction, and don't pay enough to live on. Gen Z should be thrilled at such a golden (shower) of opportunity!
Well they inherited a market that was golden for the Boomers and GenX
Sadly, those two groups, instead of continuing to fight for workers rights like generations before them, grandfathered their rights into contracts in exchange for sacrificing our rights.
Having a job doesn't mean you can afford to live. Ask anyone who has been on minimum wage for the past 50+ years.
If you've been on minimum wage for 50 years, you're doing something wrong.
Be born in a small town hours away from anywhere. All the jobs in your town pay minimum wage. Remember you have no public transportation and no support. Now crawl out of that.
Poverty is something very difficult to claw your way out of.
Although I meant 'over' rather than 'for.'
There's not enough higher level jobs. Someone will work minimum wage their entire life. They deserve to be treated humanely.
The problem is not finding a job, it's finding a job that pays well while not destroying your mental health, and ideally also feeling somewhat rewarding or otherwise meaningful.
You can earn money doing "something IT" no problem, but say you don't wanna do webdev, your options are easily cut in half. Don't wanna do ML/data science either? Half that again. And then you apply what I mentioned above und suddenly you look at a tiny market.
Mental health?!?!1! What are you some sort of commie??? I just put my feelings into a bottle of Jack Daniel’s like a REAL ‘MURICAN
Based on all of the people I know who work in IT, mental health seems to be a sacrifice that often has to be made in favor of meeting deadlines.
The entire tech sector took off when they realized they could exploit our autism for profit
Based on my own experience (albeit in Germany) that's all too often a problem we create ourselves. Devs don't like to be late or seem bad, so they'll take deadlines seriously, even though deadlines are almost always made up and irrelevant.
This is of course not helped by the fact that most of us actually like what we do. Last week I closed my work laptop where I wrote a deployment pipeline, and opened my own laptop - to write a deployment pipeline.
It's different in the U.S. Germany doesn't have America's "Protestant Work Ethic" bullshit where you're expected to work your ass off and go well above what is required of you if you want to get ahead.
I never went along with that nonsense myself, which is why I've probably never succeeded in the corporate world.
Well, first of all, that term has been coined by Max Weber, who wrote that at least in part about Germany as well.
Anyway, the behavior you described is also kind of self inflicted pain. Developers simply don't have much room to grow, unless you want to get into management, and there are countless cushy, well paying, but somewhat boring jobs where you can just coast along doing 40h. And that's perfectly fine. But for some reason, Americans seem to be unable to get out of their total competition mindset and absolutely need to grind all the time and especially need to talk about how they are grinding.
It's been drilled into us for many years that hard work means you'll get ahead. That's something Republicans like to say a lot when things like structural racism. The myth that all it takes to stop being poor is working hard enough. Never mind that some people work two full time low-wage jobs just to keep their kids fed.
Some of the hardest working ppl get shit pay.
That should only be occasional tho. If you struggle to meet deadlines all the time, something is wrong. You're either understaffed, mismanaged or maliciously exploited.
Sounds like the average American worker to me.