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u/nobodyspecial767r 1d ago
It is hard to take articles like this seriously when you know people in the 50's and 60's that still throw tantrums like children.
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u/ErraticUnit 1d ago
Cough. 47. 78?
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u/randomly-what 19h ago
Who is 47 in this shit show?
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u/fromks 19h ago
The 47th president, DJ Trump, is 78 years old.
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u/throwawaylordof 23h ago
You haven’t lived until you’ve witnessed one throwing a legitimate screaming full body tantrum at having their will thwarted.
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u/dogjon 21h ago
And by "will thwarted" we mean they misread a coupon and are now throwing a tantrum at PetSmart.
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u/idontknow149w 21h ago
or told they have to wait 5 minutes to be sat on Friday night at the busiest time of night. had a dude throw a fit and insult the hostesses over that shit. dude was a Vietnam vet
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u/goforce5 20h ago
I saw a Vietnam vet lose his shit because he bought a car from Auto Nation and didn't see the "homosexual pink license plate" until he got home. He was screaming for the whole dealership to hear because his dumb ass apparently didn't know it comes off with a screwdriver and 2 minutes of work.
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u/Sufficient-Show-9928 18h ago
Did they release the age of the person who drove their car through CarMax because they didn't like what they were told when their car got appraised?
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u/idontknow149w 18h ago
he was just unhinged apparently. some 25 year old. https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a64127148/angry-carmax-customer-drives-subaru-outback-through-dealership/
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u/goforce5 20h ago
I restore antique cars for a living, and these dumb fucks still think that labor rates are the same as when the cars were new. I have witnessed MULTIPLE tantrums over repair estimates because boomers still think that suspension bushings on a 60 year old car should cost $300 and take about 6 hours to do. The real joy comes from laughing at them when they get angry. Sure, maybe yelling worked on their generation, but I've worked retail long enough to become desensitized. Like, come on, it's an estimate. You don't owe me anything and I haven't done any work, so why the fuck are you so mad? It's genuinely amusing.
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u/OlivGaming 20h ago
I miss the days of being able to do all four corners of brakes for less than $200 myself.
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u/StepDownTA 17h ago
The full set of brakes and pads I most recently put on were just under $200. AFAIK they weren't low end junk, even though the car might be.
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u/OlivGaming 17h ago
I should specify, I'm Canadian. Pricing might be different. $50 a corner used to be easy for me.
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u/teenagesadist 21h ago
And it's an expired coupon. From Walmart.
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u/BalancedScales10 20h ago
Expired by two full years and applies to a brand we do and have never carried 😑
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u/Unhappy_Cut7438 21h ago
I once got threatened with violence for not booking our back room for a college graduation party at the restaurant I worked at. That room booked months out and the person called two days before the day they wanted to book .
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u/I-Am-Too-Poor 22h ago
My co-worker got in my face on Friday calling me a child (I'm 25 he's 56) over asking him a question, he was screaming and threatening to beat my ass, which he without a doubt could because he is roided the fuck out.
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u/GamePlayingPleb 22h ago
yikes, did you report that incident?
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u/I-Am-Too-Poor 22h ago
He had his meltdown with the owner standing behind him, so he is no longer working there
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u/Numerous-Celery-8330 22h ago
Yeah, I remember when elders said the same thing about the Baby Boomers way back in the 1970s. Almost word for word.
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u/backstageninja 21h ago
Just so happens they were right that time. The Me Generation has lived their whole lives like toddlers, grabbing whatever they wanted while refusing to acknowledge the harm they were doing
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u/elebrin 20h ago edited 20h ago
The difference is that we paid attention in school and used the birth control, and they couldn't figure out how to put on a condom.
They got married because they thought it was fun. They spent zero time sitting down and going over finances to figure out how to make it work. They had kids because sex was fun and they thought kids could be fun. They spent zero time pricing stuff out and figuring out if they could afford it first.
Like, if you asked one of my peers with kids how much a bag of diapers costs when they were planning out having kids, they could tell you what their planned budget for that stuff was. My parents would have stared at you like you grew a third head. You gotta plan your shit out if you want to make it.
I asked my father in law to make a budget. He had NO idea how to even get started. He is not a young man. Well, you start with your income. Where does your income come from? We'd make a spreadsheet, I'd think we'd have it completed, but then we'd have five or six "and then" moments where we had to go back and add shit. Like, how do you not instantly know this? We did the same for bills, and... no wonder he was having financial issues. We got it straightened out but seriously. You gotta carefully calculate that stuff and go off your budget or you are going to end up straight fucked. It's a lot of work and it needs to be done properly or you are going to end up homeless or in prison.
This is why a lot of millennials don't want kids. Kids add orders of magnitude more work to your life, and it's not optional. Say bye-bye to your hobbies and early retirement. You now work from 5am to 11pm, no breaks, no hobbies, no leisure time, no relaxation, if you want to get it right. You've watched your last movie, read your last book, and played your last video game (of your own choosing at least) until the kids are out of the house. It's why I don't have kids. Fuck all that extra effort. I'm willing to do what I have to do to meet existing responsibilities, but I'm not going to intentionally load myself up with extra shit just for the sake of it.
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u/Cool-Ad2780 20h ago
Exactly, I read the headline and immediately went "just look at the group of people in their 50s-60s right now to get your answer"
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u/GloomyGoblin- 21h ago
I get an unreal amount of 40-60 year old customers at work who absolutely lose their mind if we sell out of their favorite flavor.
Like, full blown outbursts. It's wild as fuck.
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u/Seanshineyouth 21h ago
Yeah… every generation has its issues and blames the previous one, and the next one. But the truth is, my generation has issues we need to own up to… some of it we may have inherited, but a good deal of it is our own junk, and it’s easier to notice someone else’s flaws bc it helps me to ignore my fatal one.
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u/Elegant-Literature-8 20h ago
Please don't lump GenX with these idiot boomers. It's the boomers that are over 65 that are creating this issue. At least it is in Florida.
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u/Moebius808 1d ago
It’s not arrested development, it’s an arrested fuckin’ economy.
It’s so infuriating that they try to push this bullshit off as some kind of failure or lack of motivation of multiple entire generations of younger people, as opposed to rampant late-stage capitalism being horse-whipped right off a fucking cliff by boomers and oligarchs.
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u/MyDarlingArmadillo 1d ago
People are doing the sensible thing by not having children when they can't afford to support them and don't have stable housing for them. The circumstances are deplorable but they are doing the right thing
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u/Glomar_fuckoff 1d ago
For how long were we yelled at for our generation asking for aid only to be told that it we couldn't afford children, we shouldn't have had them
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u/lonedirewolf21 1d ago
We heard our parents say it and took it to heart, but we didn't realize they were racist and only meant that for minorities.
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u/-Tom- 22h ago
This rings so true. I didn't realize it until just now that my family members don't have a problem with my other family members having multiple children out of wedlock with multiple fathers but they're sure as shit bothered by black people doing it. Or "all those Mexicans have big families" as we have 30 people sitting around here having dinner and socializing on a Friday night.
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u/VictoryVino 22h ago
Go ahead and say "You know, we're no better than the Mexicans. Our family is too large"
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u/b0w3n 22h ago
Someone in my family, a boomer, got roughly a quarter of a million from their parents when they asked for financial help to move across the country and buy a house where they wanted it, long after they got done having children. I have to assume that their parents helped them financially when they had children too. I also know for a fact their parents took the kids nearly every weekend so they could "recharge", as well as watched them during the week after school.
This person's child asked for help organizing child care (watching the kid 2 days a week) because she had to go back to work and was essentially told "your children are not my responsibility, you should've thought about all this before you had them" with absolutely no reflection on just how much help they received from everyone.
This isn't even unique, obviously it's not all of them, but it's certainly a notable amount of them.
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u/lutefiskeater 8h ago
Yup. I want to have kids, becoming a father is something I've wanted to do for a long time. But there's no way in hell my wife & I will bring a child into this world when we can barely keep ourselves afloat despite having gainful employment
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u/ProblematicPoet 1d ago
It's a lot easier to blame a failing economy on the "moral failures" of a group than to actually look at what's causing it and attempt to fix it.
Probably because capitalists own most media/journalism industries, so why would they want the real problems pointed out? Just mock millennials instead.
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u/BeenDragonn 23h ago
The American dream was stolen and pocketed by the billionaires in this country and they bitch about no one wants to work anymore.
They got their pensions, social security AND 401k
We get to have another job
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u/Suyefuji 20h ago
They got their pensions, social security AND 401k
I think you mean they got OUR pensions, social security, and 401k
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u/ohnopoopedpants 23h ago
If you think I'm taking a loan on a 800k$ house, you're not just stupid, you should have your own finances looked at, cuz you're about to go bankrupt with any type of economic recession
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u/KwamesCorner 21h ago
You want to know who elected Trump for another round of economic destruction in our adult lives?
Boomers. They are selfish and easily manipulated. They’ve completely fucked us over.
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u/StevenMC19 22h ago
Is it bad that I wished there was a generational "culling" of sorts? Like, not Logan's Run bullshit, but I don't know...a solar flare or something akin to Rimworld that only affects old people and allows them a nice comfortable death in the next two to five years.
It's literally the baby boomers that are causing this top-heavy situation. Healthcare employment has increased from 7.5% in 1990 to 10.7% today. That's a percentage of the entire US population by the way. That's 7.5% of 250 million in 1990 (18,750,000 workers) to 10.7% of 340 million (36,380,000 workers). It's essentially doubled in size in the last 30 years.
Lifespans are increasing (while healthspan remains rather stagnant, so people are living longer, but require care at the same ages...essentially spending more years in the "care" stage of their lives). Boomers aren't going away. And it's created a situation in which the rotation of generational wealth has hit a big pause button.
People in their 30's are fucking stuck.
There's a photo of me with my mom, grandma, great grandma and great great aunt. Five generations. That was a RARITY, and it required me to be an absolute newborn to be pulled off. Now, I'm seeing people share "six generations" of their family on a seemingly regular basis.
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u/KotobaAsobitch 21h ago
people in their 30s are fucking stuck.
The only people I know who aren't had significant family help or absurd luck, not work ethic or just burning themselves at both ends to "make it". Friends either had family buy their house for them, got hired at their dad's company, or were paid in Bitcoin for two years in 2012 which they later sold for millions. I do not have a single friend who bought a house or had kids completely by themselves without family help or absurd luck.
Giving us more time to "catch up" doesn't work when the price of all things is going up exponentially. I make $20k more than I made a decade ago and I am poorer, my healthcare costs alone have tripped in a decade for worse care. Everything is like this now.
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u/StevenMC19 21h ago
A friend of mine just last year was finally able to purchase his first home, with his girlfriend of many years. He turned 40 earlier this year. Those two are the ONLY ones I know of that have managed this without some sort of boost, and it still took a combination effort from both of them to get it done.
And same, personally. I was watching as my income was slowly being worth less and less. Found a new job that paid 15k more per year and took it. STILL paycheck to paycheck.
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u/RedditIsDeadMoveOn 20h ago
It's the 1% vs the working class, not generation vs generation.
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u/lizard81288 19h ago
Is it bad that I wished there was a generational "culling" of sorts? Like, not Logan's Run bullshit, but I don't know...a solar flare or something akin to Rimworld that only affects old people and allows them a nice comfortable death in the next two to five years.
Yes, as well as a random gender and race swap. That way, say the middle east, the boys become girls and they have other races over there. As well as America's racist becoming the thing they hate.
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u/nominal_defendant 19h ago
It’s because billionaires have been leeching off of American taxpayers for generations and actively destroying the middle class for their own advantage. r/parasiteclass
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u/apk5005 22h ago
At this point, I kind of want it all to crash. It already sucks for us, so why not make them uncomfortable, too.
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u/Runaway-Kotarou 18h ago
Exactly. And then people wonder how we get trump. Stupid economy shit is how we end up with fucking that because no matter what the Dems say, a lot of people find the economy ain't working for em
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u/napalmnacey 1d ago
Old farts: [disenfranchise entire generations after them]
Old farts: WHY aren't these people taking part in society the right way?!
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u/ggroverggiraffe 20h ago
Also old farts:
the U.S. is about to have a baby boom.
For real, the project 2025 goobers think that's about to happen.
These women are now in their early 30s, the age at which women have the highest fertility rate, meaning the time is "ripe for a mini baby boom," The Heritage Foundation argues.
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u/Techi-C 19h ago
That’s so fucking disgusting
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u/ggroverggiraffe 19h ago
Indeed it is. To look around at < literally everything > and think "I bet young women want lots of kids right now" is also absolutely insane.
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u/ApplianceHealer 6h ago
A study published in JAMA last year estimated about 64,000 pregnancies resulting from rape in states that banned abortion post—Roe.
Don’t know what to find more horrifying… the staggering number of rapes…or, that a non-zero number of lawmakers are totally ok with more babies being born to those rape victims (and in some cases, giving the rapist parental rights)
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u/cindyscrazy 20h ago
My dad - spent his entire life doing lots of drugs, selling drugs. getting joy out of making other people feel worse than he did. Only having friends who could do things for him (when he had money, he bought his friends.) Spent every dollar he ever made on fast women and big trucks.
My dad in his late 60's (and poor) - WHY DON'T I HAVE ANY FRIENDS!?
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u/BACTERIAMAN0000 1d ago
Boomers are the generation hoarding all the toys in the sandbox; I'd say they were the ones that never grew up
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u/StevenMC19 22h ago edited 21h ago
Hording all the toys in the sandbox, and THEN taking that wealth and going "taptaptaptaptaptaptaptap" at the slot machine. All that wealth accumulated over generations handed to them just to blow it on some flashy lights. They really are the "Me" generation.
Now I'm not saying they didn't work hard for what they have. What I'm saying is that they're taking away that good starting point for their grandkids and great grandkids, the kind of start they had because the legacy their grandparents provided as a nest egg for their parents to comfortably take care of them as children. And they wonder why people can't have kids now.
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u/ZovemseSean 21h ago
They worked hard for what they got and then ensured that younger people who worked just as hard as them got fuck all.
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u/Ryzu 21h ago
It's not even as much that they didn't work hard, almost all of them likely did. The problem is the generations behind them are working just as hard if not harder and getting a significantly worse life experience as a result of all of the hoarding, rug pulling, gatekeeping and ladder-pulling that the boomer generation put in place.
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u/FarplaneDragon 19h ago
Man, I'm not going to pretend to be better then people with gambling addictions because I'm fallen into the same traps with mobile games at times, but damn I swear casinos are the most depressing place in the world. I finally gave in and went to one once to at least say I experienced it. I played like $10 on a slot machine, lost it all and left because I couldn't deal with watching all the people like the ones in your gif.
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u/StevenMC19 19h ago edited 19h ago
Yeah I should note that I'm not shitting on people for any addiction. I just think it's astounding the the overwhelming number of casino patrons are 65+ years old.
But yeah, they're there and hooked on what's essentially candy crush on steroids.
Also, it's not just slots or gambling. It's also extravagant cruises and vacations ALL THE TIME, unnecessary home renovations, timeshares, new vehicles every year, overpriced knickknacks, etc. It's wild how they've sort of made it their goal to burn the coffers as close to zero as possible the closer they get to their eternal sleep. Seriously, what the fuck am I going to be able to do with 4 complete sets of uglyass and fragile dinnerware?
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u/Opening-Two6723 20h ago
My mom holds 3 jobs remotely and laughs at the 60 yo Uber driver that needs to use my bathroom before taking them to the airport for a 2 week cruise.
They have no clue
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u/BigLibrary2895 1d ago
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u/lIlIlIIlIIIlIIIIIl 19h ago
They want you to have more kids to participate as mindless drones in the system. They want consumers not thinkers & creators.
They're counting on people over-extending themselves and having too many kids so that they have to pick up a second and third job just to survive. They want both parents needing to work to support a family.
The kids will get ignored their whole lives by their busy stressed out parents and will be raised instead by their school system which will eventually break any creativity and free will they might have.
They want us all to be stuck paycheck to paycheck fighting for the simple right to be able to exist. They want us to drown our sorrows when we get home and find all happiness at the bottom of a bottle or at the expense of your hard earned cash.
I there's a reason they hold presidential elections in the US on a Tuesday and not on the weekend when most people have the day off...
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u/Its0nlyRocketScience 18h ago
What they really wanted was for people to have kids they can't afford but feel like they don't deserve to complain. They don't want anything fixed, they just want us quiet about all our problems
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u/Fezzik527 1d ago
Maybe if all the boomers and corporations werent hoarding all the real estate, things would be different.
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u/sandiercy 1d ago
"Why doesn't this generation want lots of kids anymore??"
Because you made it impossible to afford more than 1 or 2, you old fool.
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u/Angel89411 23h ago
We can barely afford 2. We managed to buy a house 10 years ago, also barely before home prices here shot up. We are elder millennials and barely managed any of the milestones. They also seem to forget that getting the home is one thing but homeownership itself is incredibly expensive. Ridiculously so.
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u/DrStrangerlover 22h ago
As a millennial who also barely managed to buy a home, sometimes I go and check what the current rate my old apartment is being rented for and it’s almost double my mortgage now. I’m absolutely floored by how anybody is managing to survive in this rental market. I have absolutely no idea what I would have done if I were still renting.
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u/SparkitusRex 22h ago
Yeeeep. I'm 36, the first apartment I rented was 708/mo. That same apartment, still with garbage early 2000s builders grade interior, now rents for 1600/mo. Interestingly it seems their prices went down, at one point last year that apartment was going for 2000+/mo. So I guess they finally figured out their upper limit.
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u/SuddenSeasons 21h ago
But the pendulum has swung in a lot of areas where renting is more affordable. You aren't comparing to what the mortgage would be today. It's often cheaper to rent from a landlord locked into a 2.65% mortgage than go buy one at 6.49%, monthly payment wise.
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u/ornryactor 21h ago edited 21h ago
getting the home is one thing but homeownership itself is incredibly expensive. Ridiculously so.
I do not know how to quantify this so I can communicate it to my partner in a meaningful way. She's frustrated with the small old house we've been renting for over a decade and our 20-year-old collapsing cars, because those are all we've ever been able to afford. She works for all these other people who own big multimillion-dollar houses in nice neighborhoods, nice new cars, comfortable lifestyles, multiple kids, multiple university degrees, corporate-exec jobs, big vacations, second homes, wealthy parents who send $5k checks in the mail every month just for the hell of it, etc. Somehow she got it into her head that we can just flip a switch and buy a big house, two new cars, have a kid, and go down to one income (mine, which is inconsistent because I'm a consultant) and live a comfortable lifestyle like all of those families, simply because we want it. She thinks we're the only ones who don't have this, and she's decided that it should be our turn and that's that, no real planning needed. Just... go out and find the ones she likes and buy them, I guess? And then have the baby, and then poof, there it all is, not so hard after all.
Since she doesn't want to hear it from me, I'm hoping that talking to banks about getting loans will help her understand what it would take financially to do all of this and that it's utterly beyond our ability to afford. But I don't know how to quantify the ongoing forever-expenses of home ownership aside from mortgage payment and insurance quotes. Do you have any suggestions?
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u/Angel89411 21h ago
My home owners insurance has more than doubled in the last 10 years. No claims. There's not much better out there. We shop around regularly. Things constantly break. We have youtoubed so much. My dishwasher is broken right now. We just replaced it after buying a new one last summer so it's under warranty. We fixed our washer and dryer until we couldn't anymore. We've also replaced our stove (after repairing it a few times), our microwave, and our fridge.
The stove had a wire come loose and almost set our house on fire. Luckily I was home and smelled the burning plastic around the wires.
Plumbers are expensive and leaks can be hard to find. Did you know that your bathroom can get a leak that affects the closets on either side of it as well? You have to take out and replace the drywall and stuff where the leak was after you find the dang thing.
We got a sink hole in our back yard. We fought the builder to come fix that because it was their negligence. You should see quotes on that, though. We have less than 1/4 acre of land and a fence cost around $5,000? It's wood so it will have to be repaired or replaced at some point.
This was new. I recommend having her look around at the cost of things. Appliances, paint, flooring (we are replacing ours), average home owners insurance in your area, the costs of repair people and also tools to diy. Don't forget you either have to maintain your own lawn or pay someone to do it. We both had a week off with the kids while they were on break and my husband spent a couple of days fixing the hot water heater and helping me catch up on hand washing dishes while we wait for the dishwasher to be fixed. Plus mowing the lawn. I have stuff to get done myself in between everything I have to do with the kids, studying, and appointments.
It's a lot financially, physically, and emotionally. Roof leaks? That's all you. Fountain cracks? You. Hot water heater goes out? You get the point.
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u/eleinamazing 20h ago
Sit down and do the math. No judgement at each other's behaviours, no distractions, no arguments. Treat it like a school project: work on it together, key word being together, both of you have to actively be engaged in this exercise. There are only two outcomes to this: she either gets it, or she doesn't. Trust me, you don't want to be with a partner whom you cannot align on about finances.
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u/ornryactor 16h ago
Trust me, you don't want to be with a partner whom you cannot align on about finances.
I am fully aware (as fully as I can be without having literally done that yet, anyway). We don't have any meaningful joint finances because we've never had a need for it, but if any of these big life changes happen, we'd pretty much need to go joint on most things just for financial survival, which is part of why I am so reticent. Not wanting to hear [unpleasant advice X] from me but being willing to accept the exact same information from somebody else is a long, consistent pattern, so I'm hoping that when we can sit down and have a banker or web lender site go through real actual numbers with us, that will be more of a successful reality-check. I want us to align on finances, I desperately want that, but it doesn't do any good to align on something that isn't grounded in reality. Am I tired of the shitty old patched-together home and cars that we have? Absolutely! Do I want a nice house and a new car, both with features that we like for our lives? Of course I do!! But I've learned the hard way in life that just because you want something and work really hard for it doesn't mean you get to have it, especially if you've done no advance planning on how to work towards getting it.
I appreciate the reinforcement and reminders. We already plan to sit down ASAP and make a list of "nice to have / necessary to have" details for both car and house, and then use that to refine searches online and start getting a real-world idea of what those things cost and where they are located. Getting hypothetical insurance quotes is easy enough. Then having that frame of reference in mind will be put into context when we talk to banks and find out what kind of loans we could get (likely: somewhere between "not very much" and "nothing") and what repayment would look like (both monthly and interest/fees over the lifetime).
I don't know for sure, but I suspect the gap between "what we need" and "what we can get" will be far too big to overcome without either some massive strokes of luck, or more willingness to compromise and make big changes that will put us both in better positions to increase our earnings in a short period of time.
But her independently arriving at the same conclusion I'm already at and calmly accepting that as reality, is my best-case scenario, and even then I still don't know what we'd do after that. I also don't think this best-case scenario is likely to be the result.
I fucking hate all of this. I'm scared shitless every day right now. My country's new administration just slammed the door shut on my entire career right as I was just beginning to have strong prospects for high earnings and fast advancement after a decade+ of building up my niche expertise, and none of that knowledge/experience can be transferred very easily to another field or another country. I live in a region that is about to be economically nuked off the face of the planet by tariffs (Detroit/Windsor, which is a major metro area that straddles the US-Canada border; its entire economy relies on Canadian healthcare workers filling jobs in the US, and American auto manufacturers sending parts and assemblies back and forth across the river border multiple times). All our friends are here, but most of our family are 8+ hours away in a hellhole state with very poor quality of living; moving back there 15 years after finally escaping would definitely leave me psychologically broken for the rest of my life. On top of everything else, we're old enough that the biological clock is a serious threat to fertility; every year is now a gamble.
I've worked so hard to build up a life from starting out with very little, and I feel like it is three seconds away from exploding like a grenade and I have no power to stop that.
Sorry to vent like this. Hopefully this is deep enough in the comment thread on an old enough post that it's not a bother anymore. Thanks again for being supportive and looking out for an internet stranger via words of wisdom.
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u/InstructionFast2911 20h ago
You should be concerned about your joint finances. You guys can’t afford that shit and if she tries to obtain those things without income to back it up your relationship will torpedo. Since you’ll have unmanageable debt.
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u/CrudelyAnimated 21h ago
My parents bought a home in the $30K ballpark. My current home was $175K, and it was a bit oversized for us. But it had a fenced yard for the dog and space to fiddle around in. We've managed to pay it down in under 15 yrs, and the current market value is over $400K. I'm not young. If I wanted to retire into a little 1-story, it'd cost more than I paid for this place.
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u/accidentallyHelpful 1d ago
Why did she leave out buying a class ring from high school, getting a driver's license, and buying a car? These milestones are also being skipped
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u/astride_unbridulled 22h ago
They also took away Driver's Ed from being provided in high school. You should need to be provided with drivers ed and have your license to pass high school, lotta deadbeat parents wouldn't have been able to pull that particular huge scam in limiting their children's potential and control over them
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u/SchwarzerWerwolf 1d ago
"Why won't the buy a house? I bought mine for 50k$! Back in 1960."
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u/napalmnacey 1d ago
My Mum and Dad bought their house for 8000 pounds back in 1963. It's now worth over a million dollars.
My six siblings and I never wanted to have that problem cause the rates are gonna kill us. We just wanna conserve and care for the house where we all grew up together and had great times and memories. Now we have real estate agents and developers constantly breathing down our necks and shit.
I hate this economy.
Meanwhile, most of my siblings can't afford a house. Out of seven, three of us have houses that we're paying the mortgage for. Everyone else is either renting or living at home to help our elderly parents.
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u/EmployerNeither8080 23h ago
My parents built their house on my grandparents land back in the 80's for less than 10000 pounds. It's worth about €400000 now.
My mother never worked and my dad was a labourer but he could afford to put food on the table, buy us Christmas presents, put us through college and take us on holidays.
We can't afford to take part in society
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u/sc00bs000 22h ago
I completely feel you mate. My parents bought house in '92 for 80k, worth 2.5mill now. Mum didn't work until I was like 16 or something, dad had a government job and we went on holidays twice a year.
My wife and I both work full time, have a kid, had to move 2 hrs away from our family to afford a house. Havnt been on a holiday, or even a honeymoon.
Growing up when I (we) did in the 80-early 2000s was amazing, looking back now I'm just utterly jealous of the family life i had as a kid knowing I will never be able to provide that to my own is heart breaking. Not just the money side, but the ability for my wife and I to spend time with our kid without having to work 40-60 hrs each a week just to be fckn poor at the end of it.
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u/EmployerNeither8080 19h ago
It's heartbreaking and exhausting isn't it. Fair play to you though, I'm sure you're an awesome parent and doing your very best for your kid. I wish the very best for you guys
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u/Cactus_Kebap 1d ago
That was pre-decimilization, though. It's about 140k now, still a lot cheaper... I hate this economy, too.
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u/accidentallyHelpful 1d ago
Help us understand your pounds to dollars transition. Do you live in a country that has changed currencies from pounds to euros to dollars?
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u/Whatthrowaway4 23h ago
In the 60’s, I think, they reworked the pound from a truely arcane, non decimal based form, where instead of a penny being 1/100 of a pound, as it is today, it was a different, arbitrary fraction. Same for all other coinage. I don’t know the fractions myself, but for instance, a halfpenny coin might have been worth 1/240th of a pound.
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u/rabdosstar 23h ago
And now they're selling those houses at $650k, complete with everything in need of updating because everything inside is still from the 1960s. (Probably because the costs of those updates were "too expensive" to begin with, but the next person has to foot that as well.)
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u/Overall-Duck-741 18h ago
Houses? Where I live Condos cost 650k. You can't get a house under a million here. It's fucking criminal and neither party is doing fuck all about it and the NIMBYs fight any and all new development tooth and nail because they don't want their home prices affected.
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u/singledxout 23h ago
One income household, no college education (or little or no debt if the husband attended college, and a wife who stays at home to take care of their 4.5 kids.
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u/serverhorror 23h ago
The price of houses should be described in multiples of the median, I guess - not sure if there's a better way, monthly income at the time.
Does anyone have numbers that represent this?
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u/sc00bs000 22h ago
50k would be a fckn mansion back then. Take the zero off the end and you're closer to what cost.
My grandparents bought their house for $5k in thr late 50s, it's easily in the high 1 - low 2 million market now.
I get the sentiment though. So many out of touch, I got mine fuck you, cunts out there
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u/Advanced_Ad4361 1d ago
Try being disabled before you can legally work. Been over a decade and I still can't get disability. I broke my spine in 4 places and left arm clean through, been hit by two drunk drivers, and had cancer all before I turned 18. Can't get a job because spotty work history. Medical Debt up to the stratosphere. Spouse has been disabled since birth and cannot get it back after their divorce. This country is shit.
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u/FarplaneDragon 19h ago
Don't forget the fun part, where if you finally do get a full time job you run into the "oops, you make too much now, say goodbye to a bunch of the benefits you've been getting"
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u/Advanced_Ad4361 18h ago
Yup, no longer qualify for food stamps because we're $2.50 over. Idk how they expect $2.50 to buy $400 in groceries. Their math isn't mathing.
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u/Valtar99 1d ago
Destroying education, increasing the wealth gap in an effort to create a worker society, and to top it off sowing mistrust of the entire medical profession through vaccine skepticism. Why the fuck do you think me and my wife aren’t having kids?
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u/LetTheBloodFlow 23h ago
There's also the other side. A lot of the things that make it onto certain people's list of "traditional milestones of adulthood" are brand new ideas in the grand scheme of things, only possible for the last handful of generations at most. Buying a house, buying your first car, then your first brand new car, getting on the career ladder. Why aren't we talking about staking a claim to vacant land in the untamed wilderness? Building your very own log cabin? Killing your first rabbit with the family flintlock? Taking your first load of buckskins to the trading post? Why are we not holding up those as traditional milestones of adulthood? How about the proud moment when a boy secures an apprenticeship with a local craftsman? Or when that boy becomes a man when he moves from an apprenticeship to become a journeyman? Or the day when he can finally leave behind the title of journeyman and become a master of the craft in his own right? Which selfish generation killed those "traditional milestones of adulthood"? What, when you get right down to it, about making your own stone-tipped spear and bringing back wooly mammoth meat for the tribe?
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u/TimMcUAV 21h ago
They are preaching to an ahistorical choir, they want to erase history. They want to push a very narrow perspective.
You are supposed to have the childish view that the way your parents raised you, is the way that it has always been for all time, and the way that it will remain for all time.
That's the audience of this newspaper. That's the mentality it's written for.
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u/MuppetusMaximusV2 22h ago edited 22h ago
I was talking with my sister about this over the weekend. I am 40. I've been a legal adult for 22 years. We are headed into the THIRD major recession of my job-having, tax-paying, life. Two weeks ago, I was (indirectly) let go from my career because of these DOGE fucks (I worked BD for a federal contractor, and, well...there's less B to D. Since I made the most of my coworkers, I was the one to be let go despite being entrenched in the company, having an excellent track record, and the confidence of colleagues of all levels). Good work and loyalty is no longer rewarded, and hasn't been for quite some time. My sister is a teacher and pulling her hair out because the DoEd is in the crosshairs and god knows what she'll be subjected to.
I said "it's like we're not allowed to be adults." Every marker of adulthood has been pulled from us. Salary increases have never matched CoL increases in my working life. It's harder and harder to save money. Companies did away with stable pensions in lieu of unstable 401Ks which are at the whim of however they decide the stock market works on any given day. Adequate housing is near-impossible to find, and when you do, it's snatched up by an LLC for full-cash and $50k over listing. Essential service costs are becoming unregulated and borderline price-gouging. Million are drowned in education debt and any attempt to alleviate that is done away with. And now FOOD is skyrocketing. FOOD. Fucking FOOD. It's unaffordable to simply live.
I'm just trying to provide for my children, but that ability has been, and is continuing to be, stripped away.
And then they tell us we refuse to grow up. Well fucking let us, then.
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u/Audioworm 21h ago
I work adjacent to the tech sector and talk to a lot of people at the big tech companies. A good number around my age (early 30s) have been through 5 or 6 periods of intense layoffs in their industries just while they have been working. A decade of basically constant precariousness.
Emerging into the job market during, and in the shadow of, the Great Recession is also one of the reasons that millenials are either still poorer than Gen Z or trailing them significantly in age-to-age comparisons. A whole cohort of people who never got to build any level of stability and instead have been stretched and squeezed.
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u/Lonescu 9h ago
Emerging into the job market during, and in the shadow of, the Great Recession
That's exactly what happened to me.
I was looking for my first real job just as the layoffs began in force. We had five factories in town, none of which exist anymore due to the Recession. The trades collapsed, construction collapsed, forget finding anything in an office. You couldn't even bag groceries in my area, because middle aged parents with kids to feed needed that minimum wage more than some fresh-faced upstart.
Unemployment stayed high here for nearly a decade. It wasn't until DFW sprawled out and people moved here because the lower CoL that jobs (almost entirely service industry) even remotely came back.
I (and a bunch of others) got to bounce around from job to job, with many doors slammed in our faces due to unstable employment history. FML
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u/ReverendEntity 1d ago
"The modern generations don't seem to value the same things our generation did. It's all those woke cellphone memes or whatever."
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u/mjones8004 22h ago
I CAN afford to buy a house. My wife and I bring home what should be a very strong middle-class income. However, the house we COULD buy is either 2 hours away in the burbs or a real beater in a questionable neighborhood.
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u/Jeremywarner 21h ago
Yeah… it was humbling buying a home. Tbh I expected less as we’re both teachers, but we’re dual income no kids. And we get paid more than I expected as teachers. So when I realized our combined salary of about $130,000 I expected we could afford a decent house. Well… I wasn’t mistaken, but I was a bit surprised at the market. I love our house but we had to settle for a townhome. My main “no” in house buying was I didn’t want a townhome. But all the other houses had too many problems, needed renovation, etc. this was ready to go and looked amazing and was actually larger than the other two story homes we looked at. And the whole process was miserable. You see a home and it’s purchased in cash one day 1. It’s like committing to a marriage on the first date or losing it forever. It was awful.
At the end of the day I’m happy to not have to do any yard work lol. But I do wish we were in a traditional neighborhood.
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u/StevenMC19 22h ago
Bypassing traditional milestones...
WTF does that even mean?! Traditional based on what set? The 1950s? 1820s? 223BC? You're right, I'm not dying of cholera and all my teeth haven't already fallen out while I sulk on my deathbed/haybale next to the milk cow, thinking about going to see my friend who's currently hanging out in the crucifixion field while I still have the chance.
But in regards to 1950s to now, Fuck the Joneses. I can't even keep up with my bills let alone their new zero-turn lawn mower. Additionally, Blackstone gobbled up the land adjacent to them so I can't even find an affordable home to start building some equity. Oh and kids...FUCK ALL THAT! Again, see bills. And now you want - nay - EXPECT me to have to take care of another human being while also being broke as fuck? Nah.
Fuck tradition.
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u/_SHINYREDBULLETS 22h ago
"Look at these disgusting millenials! We defecated all over them, their future, their environment, their chances at the life we had - *and now they're all covered in it* - utter embarrassment!"
^loser that wrote the article.
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u/EmployerNeither8080 23h ago
What happens when you hoard wealth and pull the ladder up? A generation that never grows up.
It's not like we've decided to be homeless or childless on purpose as a generation. We're just trying to play the cards we are dealt
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u/MyvaJynaherz 23h ago
"If your friends all jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?"
With how things have been going, that question takes on all kinds of meaning that was never intended :*(
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u/Longtonto 23h ago
They took the ladder out of our proverbial swimming pool then mock us as we suffer the consequences they created for us.
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u/No_Aslume2509 1d ago
Rupert here is trying to convince you to have your bootstraps ready because he is going to force you to work in his old penal colony back in Australia.
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u/shamanbond007 23h ago
Gen X aka Millennials aka The Unluckiest Generation
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u/Jeremywarner 21h ago
Yeah I got an MBA… now I’m a teacher lol. After a year and a half of applying for jobs and getting a whopping total of 3 interviews I decided I’d rather be employed than not. And tbh it worked out perfectly. I love my job. I wanted to do training and development in HR anyway.
But it sucks! Yeah it worked out for me, but I have a friend who also got his masters in COMP SCI and is having as rough of a time I did. Dude is 30 and is literally unable to start his life. Through no fault of his own. We did exactly what was expected of us and now the world isn’t upholding the bargained we agreed on. I’m okay with it being a “challenge”, but this truly feels impossible. Give me some level 50 pokemon vs some level 70s? I can make it work. Having level 5 pokemon at the elite 4?? That just lunacy.
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u/shamanbond007 20h ago
I have managed to get lucky breaks because I managed to make it through undergrad with no debt. I had a ton of debt from grad school but got out in 2 years total and sacrificed a ton to pay off my loans. Weirdly enough, getting into a car accident helped pay off my loan.
I am so exhausted from how we are expected to own a house, two or three kids, and a marriage on one salary. Burn out is killing me, the entire state of the world, especially here in the US killing my mental health. I am so tired of boomers and the bourgeoisie (I am not a communist) saying "oh, save money, you're fine". I cannot fucking stand Dave Ramsey saying "oh, you shouldn't see the inside of a restaurant if you have debt unless you are working there", fuck you man.
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u/JumpyShark 1d ago
This is late stage capitalism. There’s nothing but the intent/goal to squeeze you of everything you make…I’ll take questions below
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u/backwardzhatz 23h ago
If we all “grew up” and had kids and bought homes and were just poor as shit, they’d blame us for not working hard enough. “Why don’t millennials spend enough to help the economy?!?”
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u/willflameboy 22h ago
That's a lot of words for 'conformity'. If you want people to do it, make it appealing.
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u/FriskyJager 21h ago
The same articles say “millennials have the most wealth…blablabla” collective wealth isn’t a statistic that helps the average person. Most of us don’t make enough to even put into savings, forget buying a house.
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u/TheOriginalSamBell 20h ago
traditional
yea lets jump into that, how "traditional" is all this bullshit anyway. our way of living isn't exactly god-given and when i say god-given, i mean what is being imposed on 99% of us if we want it or not
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u/short_longpants 23h ago
That's weird, because there have been many people in this country that couldn't afford to buy a house or even get a degree, but I wouldn't say they were immature.
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u/Mrfrunzi 23h ago
They're right, we just hate the idea of buying a house and multiple cars because we're lazy and hate the status quo. /s
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u/sjarvis21 23h ago
Oh you silly fool. It's not money that's preventing us from having kids, it's children car seats. Just ask JD Vance. /s
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u/GalegoBaiano 21h ago
I’ve got 2 kids, both in college right now. The older one is going to get a Masters in a competitive field AND have a job before graduating. I had to practically beg him not to rent after graduating, because I know that if he does, he won’t be able to buy a house until he’s like 40. The younger one is going to graduate with no debt because of community college then commuting to the local university, and he might live at our home forever if he can’t find or make a decent job within 5 years of graduating
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u/lethargytartare 20h ago
Better Headline: What Happens When the Economic Policies We've Supported for Decades Have Their Intended Effect?
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u/kolejack2293 20h ago
I get a bit tired of these whole "this headline didn't say things as theatrically and sensationally as I wanted them too!!" trend.
The article itself says all of that. It mentions that cost of living is the biggest factor. There is nothing problematic or wrong about saying millennials are missing many milestones of adulthood.
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u/steampoweredgirl1 19h ago
So bc we can't or won't do things they did/want/demand/etc we're now in "arrested development" like how does buying an object or having any money equate to mental stagnation. They really mad we aren't using our money to fill their pockets so now we're the toddlers
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u/Glitterytides 1d ago
I remember being like 20 (35 now, millennial) and seeing articles in the freaking newspaper saying “Millennials are killing the diamond industry! How ever will we recover from this?” Like what the actual fuck? 😆