I just need a place to vent where I know others are feeling the same way.
I didn't realize that the word for what I always believed was antiwork until I came across this subreddit a few months ago. I don't mind work. I don't mind hard work. But for me, work has always been a means to an ends and not the end in and of itself. There came a point over a decade ago where I decided that if I was going to be poor, I might as well be poor doing what I love. It's been hard, but I've made due.
But it feels as if the last few years it has gotten harder and harder to make due, even when I've been seeing success in my goals. And me and my family are in a much better place, income-wise than we have ever been: I'm an author with two books published and working on a third, my husband has a full-time job with benefits (something he hasn't had in the past). We should be doing okay.
But our rent has increased over the last four years and we're now at a place where 2/3 of our income goes to housing alone. We have spent the last two years paying off our debt, and bettering our credit scores in anticipation of buying a house to lower the cost of housing. But we're still unable to do so because we don't have a down payment. We don't have a down payment because we couldn't save any money because our rent is so high.
We're not living an extravagent lifestyle. We don't eat out. We don't have cable. We don't go on vacation or buy toys or go to shows. We aren't really living, just existing.
It's so damn frustrating. We have two children, 11 and 17, and our teenager is already exhausted by the idea of toiling away her life just to exist. We're trying to hard to give the two of them a better life. We've told them both that they will be welcome to live with us for as long as they want. Our teen is going to be taking a gap year and we're encouraging her. The 11 year old doesn't really understand yet how hard things are.
I'm just tired and worn down and needed to vent.