I lived in TX for 47 years & then got invited to Southern CA by a long time FB friend to work in aerospace where he was a supervisor & got me on, I was in a union & became the lead of my area building de-icing systems then bid out to a higher paying position as a cleanroom operator. This was at a time when a new corporate “regime” (that's what they called themselves literally) took over & they actually compromised our union & messed everything up. They actually let union leaders vote instead of everyone voting & took away our 3 day weekend every other week & gave that schedule to the new corporate regime, plus made all these new rules like checking on us in the bathroom & making our clock in/out times more stringent.
I ended up getting the most I could get on unemployment during the lockdown & was ok but when they cut us off I lost my place & ended up staying in a hotel for awhile & then in my car in a grocery store parking lot. I couldn't find any work I could commute to from my area so I ended up using my CDL (I worked in the oilfield back in TX for a decade) driving a truck but I was just so depressed living in the sleeper & met someone who had mercy on me recently & let me stay with them to live a normal home life until I could find a job & get on my feet.
I have been living here in a nice condo with this person near San Diego for months looking for work & finally got hired on a very well known sub sandwich shop that started in New Jersey if that's not too much info. I just f'ing hate it, crappy pay, horrible schedule that's all over the place with a few hours a day, like 3 – 6 maybe. I'm 52 years old so I'm like 12.5 years away from being able to retire & have no idea how I'll make it. I'll never be able to land a job that will allow me to actually live in this current economic climate, it's just insane & I can't figure out we don't have a massive general strike or some kind of worker revolt yet.
Most of the wealth created by workers is now being redistributed to corporate predators who really aren't doing any real “work”, just maintaining the status quo, & parasitic shareholders who have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the long term nor day to day operations of the businesses that are traded on wall st.
I'm so depressed I don't play guitar anymore, been playing since I was 12, & I have an extensive collection of custom guitars & I really have no interest in life at all, I have lost all interest in any kind of intimacy & really don't even want to be around people anymore. I absolutely dread daily life & knowing I have to back to this place again tomorrow & be somewhere I don't want to be & not really making any money to speak of, certainly not enough for a new car, because mine broke down, a place of my own to live & all of the essentials for living like bills & food.
Where is this going? What are we going to do? When I was in my 20's about 30 years ago I could afford an apartment working in fast food & then I raised 3 kids & bought a house, (which I left to the kids & their mom & the now grown kids can't afford to move out on their own) working $10 – $12 hr manufacturing jobs but now that is gone.
Wages are too low & the cost of living, especially rent, is way too high. This is full on fascism with corporate in control of government at every level, the mainstream corporate media & even online platforms are now spreading anti-worker lies & nothing is really being done at all about this dire situation which has made many of us simply give up any hope of ever having any kind of real “life” at all.
I don't know what I'll do or how I'll ever even get my desire to live back, I've lost everything except a few clothes & my musical equipment but I am too depressed to even play guitar anymore. I used to go to the gym & have a personal trainer now I don't exercise at all & just don't even care about my health or how I look, who cares. Any money I get I literally use it to buy booze so I can forget how miserable I am. I am actually sad that I'm in such great health & wish I had some terminal disease & was on the way out soon, I actually envy people are dying or dead lol. They're lucky they escaped this hell.
This country is now a dystopian nightmare for many of us who are not lazy at all but actually just working class people & I'll be glad when the time comes that I don't wake up in it ever again. This is not something that voting or protesting is going fix, we've been doing that for decades with no real results & even Einstein said part of the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over & over expecting different results so I don't know what we're going to do but something different is going to have to be attempted.