I struggled for years and basically always was renting a room or something and a step above homelessness before ~2018. Before Covid, I move back in with my mother, who was also struggling and developed a plan to go back to online school.
That plan worked but torturously slow. This year, things turned a big corner for me. I was able to buy a small condo in Southern California, what felt like a near impossible feat. Tbh, I mostly did it the same way I got through school for the third fucking time retraining and quit drinking – I got pissed off enough to do it. My boss was talking about how she was loaning her 25 year old son $100,000 for a down payment, the kid does fuck all but annoy me at my job and gets $100,000+/yr salary and I said, “that’s it! I’m going to fucking own a place and I’m going to do it on my own and if I can’t afford it, the cops are going to have to come pull me out when the bank gets it back because I’m tired of being almost 40 and living like a rat!”
I snapped awake after 1 hour of sleep last night because I’m wired as hell all the time. They want to force us back to work in 2 weeks and I don’t want to go. I don’t want to be interrupted in person 50 times a shift by “superiors” for things that could be more efficiently asked by e-mail. I don’t want to risk life and limb on the 405 daily with drivers who drive like they’re trying to kill me, now that I’ve almost built a life I want. I don’t want one wrong merge to wipe me out. I started studying with a friend’s CFA materials a month ago and love it and if I could somehow freeze my environment in time, I think I could become a chartholder – but it takes time and I don’t think there’s a chance I’ll manage the stress without some kind of breakdown if my life’s switches to the way it was before.
I’m so tired of things switching. I’m on my third career that required a full re-training. I’m basically looking now to either do a partial re-training to be more specialized or maybe start my own business. I can’t see either happening in the next two years and it’s the next two years that matter most because the stupid fucking corporate suits and the stupid fucking Fed couldn’t figure jackshit out. But it’s our fault, we’re all quiet quitters and commies because we don’t have eight arms and four degrees and confidence of steel. I hear people in offices talk about these things and I just think about how they weren’t along the ride. I used to work a very hard labor job and I’ve seen people die at work and at bus stops I used to get to work – but they’re the ones that are suffering because “no one wants to work anymore.” And they’re going to crush us all with Great Recession 2 and then their problem will go away.
I don’t know what else to say. But I’m tired of being crushed. And I want it to be someone else’s problem this time around. To hell with this, even right now, during the best times economically I’ve seen, I’ve been miserable and alone and I know they’re not going to get what they think out of us by turning the misery dial back up.