Do you guys ever just get really fucking angry that every generation of workers gets a worse deal than the last? I mean I come from a white American family so take my opinion with a grain of salt. But damn.
I mean, my grampa had a high school diploma, did a little time as a navy engineer during the Korean war, and then comfortably supported a family of 5 and paid off a home in < 5 years on a single 9-5 income. It's not like they were ritzing it up or anything. They budgeted and didn't eat out much. My grandma had to do everything around the house, but the kids were never left to fend for themselves. They got good health benefits, time with the family, full pension, etc. It all came out to a pretty solid living in exchange for a reasonable effort.
Both of my parents on the other hand worked part time to put themselves through undergrad and full time to stay alive through grad school. They had 3 children by the time my mom got her PhD, and I have little doubt that they were consistently putting in 100+ hour weeks throughout grad school. They had to work like dogs, and they were dirt broke until they finished grad school, but they were young and scrappy. They made friends in the community who were on similar grinds, so they would pool responsibilities like watching a community's worth of kids one night so they could earn a little breathing room for some other days. I'm sure they found other ways of getting by that were lost on me when I was a kid. And for their efforts they were rewarded with demanding careers that paid pretty well. They still raised a family of 5 relatively comfortably, though it was on two incomes and not one. I mostly remember growing up in a house, though the mortgage was probably a 15 year plan more than a 5 year plan. It's not like my life was terrible, but there were definitely a lot of nights where I was just sitting home alone eating cereal for dinner, not that I really cared. Of course a lot of that went to shit during the 2008 recession, but on a long term average, they got a comfortable material living in exchange for brutal working hours, ironclad determination, fairly smart choices to pursue valuable skillsets, and a fair bit of luck.
Me? I worked my butt off to get an bachelor's degree at a prestigious university in what was 20 years ago a nearly universally employable discipline there were months where one in every three nights was an all-nighter. The idea that I could have worked summers to pay for tuition during the school year like my dad did is a laughable, childish fantasy, even if I had gone to a state school. After graduation, I spent months living in my parents' basement during the pandemic, getting paid minimum wage for a gig economy job, sending out hundreds of applications to better jobs with no responses, it became apparent to me that my degree was by itself worth fuck-all. So what did I do? I went back to school. Now if I do REALLY well in my grad program, just maybe I'll pull ~100k a year by working myself to death in a very high COL area like NYC or San Francisco. If my partner is similarly accomplished, she may make a comparable salary in those same areas, assuming we can even find jobs in the same city. After student loans, rent, insurance, and bills, this will be just enough to veil the image of poverty in the short term, but make no mistake, we will **never** own a house in those areas, and in this country, we will **always** be closer to going broke than we will be to real financial security and freedom. I can't imagine we'll ever be able to afford children unless I apply my skills towards fucking over everyone below me doing some meaningless, socially irresponsible bullshit like trading real estate options.
All I want is a little house, the certainty of food and healthcare, and a little free time to be a doting husband and father to a couple of kids. At this point, I would settle for some puppies instead of the kids. Almost none of that is on the table. Instead, the modern promised exchange is that if me and my partner are willing to scream at puppies all day for conglomerate #1, we'll be allowed to lease a quarter of that house from conglomerate #2, with just enough left over to pretend I can afford to rear a child at a hospital owned by conglomerate #3, at least least until conglomerate #1 figures out how to automate puppy misery using AI from mega-conglomerate #4. God help me if I get sick, because if I do, mega-conglomerate #5 will gladly give me the cure, as long as I'm willing to trade away the house, my partner, my kid, and my poor, sweet puppies.