This is the same generation that brags about biking around town as kids and nobody cared

Theres two sides to any transaction. The price/cost and having the money to pay for it. Everything has gone up in price but its CONSIDERED expensive because we dont have the money to afford it. Thats a direct result of shit wages and a job market that is all but dead. You think rich people find this economy to be bad? They think the economy is amazing. If the job market was doing well, and companies were able to afford to pay employees accordingly, the prices of everything would be manageable for more people. My opinion is that the job market is the real issue here.

School is only good with jobs waiting for you. The jobs aren’t there anymore.

I appreciate your struggles young man. my 2 cents move to a decent sized city where jobs are pretty available, Then get yourself into college and don't ever leave . Those with the highest level of education are those that have the lowest unemployment rate. There are plenty of funds available for education. If that doesn't appeal to you go ahead and join the military. They will take care of you for 20 years and while your there let the military pay for your education. Good luck young man.

Nobody cares, work harder

My girlfriend lives in Taiwan. That might be my ticket out of this shitshow

It's going to get much worse. Complaining won't help. Study the cycles of time when this happened - and do what the smart people did.

I was given a free car by an old friend who is dying of cancer. A 2001 kia, nothing luxurious. The state wants over $600 in taxes, fees, late fees, etc just to register the car in my name and get new tabs. Keep in mind this is for a car that's old enough to buy it's own beer. This is getting beyond ridiculous.

I wasn’t gonna comment but I’m given my insight as a current 13 year CDL A Driver. The money isn’t as good as it was 7-8 years ago. When the cost of groceries goes up it hits the Drivers as well. Our pay hasn’t increased depending on who you work for but most Companies don’t give pay increases for CDL Drivers they just give you garbage runs regardless of your seniority if it’s under the Teamsters Union. You need to be Union if you’re going consider being a CDL Driver stay away from mom n pop companies they will just discard you if they don’t like you.

Man I can relate so much with what you're describing. Life F'in sucks right now and everything keeps getting more expensive while our wages stay stagnant. Despite the struggles of 2020, life was going a hell of a lot better for me. I just had a huge salary bump, I had medicaid covering my medication and doctor visits, and everything was still reasonably priced. Life has gradually become crappier since 2023. They took away my medicaid in 2024 because I worked too much overtime the previous year, our salaries are frozen at work, and everything in the store keeps getting more expensive. Its very frustrating that a full time job that pays higher than minimum wage still wont give you a good living. I've considered changing my profession and becoming an electrician, because once you earn journeyman status, most of them can make a decent living. Like you, I don't necessarily care if I enjoy the job. I just want the money. I am not getting any younger and I have goals, that require a decent income, to fullfill. Its like they want the millennials and gen z to just give up.

I moved to Tijuana mx , 7 years ago , I pay 300 usd for a 1 bedroom apt have a mexican gf no kids and work in san diego as a part time local truck driver , mon thru wed , rest of days off life, is good right now , money saved up life is good !!!!!

I gave up going above and beyond at my work because i did that or 4 years and got nothing. On top of high turnover and short staffing makes me not give a fuck when its a new cast of people every month. Its too bad im a 6 foot 1 strong healthy ambitious young man who is willing to do lots of things if i know they are helping build a better world. But i have learned a long time ago that 99% of jobs are bullshit and they are simply done to make the richest 400 people even richer. Thats all the world is designed to do

I just started eating only ground beef american cheese and deer meat and salt. Keeps u full and its cheaper than eating lots of different foods. If u eat just meat u only eat once a day cuz ur so full and it saves u money

I can't believe we have lived the exact same lives , my mother did the same things , I'm genuinely in shock 😲

I felt every bit of what you’re saying ♥️🙏🏼. I’m struggling too but I don’t have anyone so I just have to keep going. You got this 🫶🏼

Narcissism, do you work for P&G?

I'm going to try my hardest this year. I really feel like if I still can't get hired, this will be it.

We're the richest country in the world as a nation. That doesn't mean we the people benefit from that wealth lol most of us live as if we're in the third-world

When I grocery shop I go to the meat section of every local grocery store and look for cheapest meat. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as its cheap. Sometimes you can find some good deals on pork and chicken as well as random custom packs that are like odd ends or left overs of cuts. Those ground beef and turkey packs are never sold at an affordable price. Sometimes I can also put together a decent meal from buying stuff at the Dollar Tree. They used to sell salmon fillets for $1 each but I haven't seen them in ours in awhile. They're small but 3 of them with something else from their frozen section can make a good healthy meal for cheap. Other than that, the only thing I can think of is if you're able to go fishing anywhere you live look into that, catch a lot of fish and freeze them.

Yah fuck the US. This country sucks. The US is great if you want to be a pawn or serf under Greed, Bad Government, and unmanaged, uncontrolled Capitalism. I almost think a dystopian society would be better. This horseshit is somewhere in between full on dystopia and some sort of weird middle ground. Can't even explain it anymore.

The powers-what-is in this country - the moneymakers, the oligarchs, who own the corporations and buy the politicians - want people like you to be terrified about the future. A fearful populace, divided against itself, and given convenient, powerless scapegoats to blame everything on, is easier to control than a well-educated, well-paid population with sufficient free time to start thinking about how to make their lives better, since this is often at the cost of the oligarchs. Thus, they want to ensure that effective government is a thing of the past, undermining departments that actually help regular people, buying politicians, and using them to rewrite all laws in their favor. They want to eliminate the Department of Education, to cut funding to public schools in favor of private education that propagandizes the young into happy workers (or happy leaders, if they are of the correct economic class). They want to continue to erode trust in unions, because unions (for all their faults) still allow workers to collectively stand up to the owner class for better pay and conditions. They want you to be scrabbling around for ever more money to buy ever less items you need to survive, or to face bankruptcy for a sudden life-threatening health issue, or to be inundated with long-term debt that cannot be discharged no matter how much your life must be ruined in order to pay it back. They want you to be so busy looking left or right that you never look up. The top 10% of this country owns 93% of the stocks - they are the shareholders that must be appeased by fiddling the stock price via mass layoffs, or stock buybacks, or via ever growing profits no matter what the cost to the consumer. They own the military industrial complex that ensures we have never-ending wars and thus a never-ending need for their products and product support, and therefore more people dying means more money in the bank. They increasingly own all the property, driving up rents and housing prices so that eventually only someone of their economic strata will even be able to afford to a monthly mortgage payment, and people who already own a house increasingly are unable to sell it, because they won't then be able to find somewhere else to live. The oligarchs own the media, who tells you who to like and who to hate, who to be terrified of while walking down the street, who to cheer on, and who to look away from - pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! The oligarchs bring in illegal immigrants so that work can be done for cheaper pay than you will accept, and those people are made even more desperate and precarious than you are by dint of being in the country illegally. The oligarchs bring in legal immigrants to replace the masses laid off because they cost too much, but again, the system ensures these immigrants are just as desperate and precarious as the others, since firing means deporting. Plus, they make sure that all good, _true_ citizens hate immigrants, to prevent any support for their citizenship in turn, which would eliminate the hold the powers-what-is have over all parties... they need the illegals here for low pay and low skill, they need the legals here for low pay and high skill, and thus, they need you to feel threatened by both in case you get replaced by them, so you can't therefore find any common cause with them to the shareholders' detriment. They own the food distribution networks, the car companies, the utilities, the oil companies, the banks, all of which you need to use in order to continue working for them, making them ever richer. It is a vast, international cross-border "company store" scheme designed to harvest your money while keeping you just enough above water for you not to be able to drown or to save yourself... you must always be in a position to give them more money and thus, spend all of your life to gather money up and give them still more, they can never have enough, there must be perpetual growth in profits - but when you die, and after all the remaining resources you had will have been spent on keeping you alive, then on getting rid of your body, there will be someone else to replace you, so long as you did your part bringing forth children into the machine. Eventually, however, they will have perfected AI and therefore can start to phase out the now superfluous members of humanity. And, so long as you keep voting for them - either side you like - then this will come to pass... or you can stop voting for them, and they won't be unhappy about that at all. You can check out, and they won't want you to check back in. You can find some drug or sex addiction, or video games, or any escapism you like that will distract you from the pointlessness of existing in order to make already rich people get more money... and meanwhile it's all made up, humans just made this stuff up. So what if a billionaire makes another million dollars tomorrow - he's not even going to notice a difference in life for himself with that rounding error, but he wants it anyway, so you better to give him everything he wants so he can have more: your money, your loyalty, your vote, your adulation, your first born child, your life, your death whatever it is that he needs to get more more more. Welcome to America, kid. ----- Part II - The Solution There is no solution to fixing this country. Everything that could have been tried has been entrained into our general populace as bad and unamerican. However, for ourselves, I only have one real recommendation... build community. This means get off your phone, get off your couch, get off your self, and go and talk to people - and not just via posting rants here on social media - but actually converse, interact: speak and listen in turn. Show respect, and show that you have listened by the way you act in the future. Talk to our friends, family, neighbors, people at the library, or in the park, or standing in line at the grocery store, and see what can be done to help each other, because trying to rely on only ourselves is just feeding into the madness that besets us all. Humans are a social species, and work better in groups. We are designed (or have evolved, if that's what you prefer) to work as a team. All this stuff propagated by people who both want to use us and to stay in control over us is designed to divide us up against each other, based on skin color, job, culture war nonsense, &c &c &c, all so we don't talk to each other - therefore, obviously, the way to counteract that is to do the opposite. Have a community picnic or neighborhood BBQ out on the street, invite people over, organize events that bring people together, and not just politically, but fun stuff that gets people active. If we want to fix this country, we have to start locally, and it's up to us - not any politician, not the government, certainly not the oligarchy. We have to do this work ourselves if we want to see results. Or don't, and see what happens. Your choice.

If you have any narcissistic individuals in your life, you should get away from them... because if there's a financial crisis, they won't cut back financially to balance budgets...

If you're serious about your quest then think about getting in the appliance repair business. Easy to get schooling in a matter of weeks you can be up and running. There's definitely a bright future with not enough qualified people out there and today's appliances don't last and keep breaking down. Working for someone else you'll probably have lots of O/T available. In about 1yr or two into it you can be working for yourself and make over $100k/year.

Lol, inflation is definitely the epicenter of all your problems. Corporate price gouging is just another problem compounding the inflation. Inlflation may be up just 2.6% but it was already up way too high ever since the past few years we've printed like 40% of all money that's EVER BEEN PRINTED.

Shit's fucked up for reasons you'll get banned from youtube for mentioning.

Hey bro. I was talking about the same topic today!!! I'm a single bi guy. No partner, no kids, no pets, I don't travel...and I'm still struggling to save money to move out of my mom's house. I dont even have a Netflix account...I just have a gym member ship and I feel like its going to take me a few months of working two jobs to have the amount of money in savings.

I'm just trying to make it next week here cali 😅

Trump's Tariffs.... Thank you very much MAGA!

I am from Argentina, i want to get out of this fucking eternal decadence, this country will never get ahead, and i allways wanted to go to the US, at least to work for a couple of years, but i have the oportunity to get my italian citizenship, and with that i can live in any country of the EU, and hearing people like you, so dissapointed with everything whats going on in the US... I think that go to the US could be the bigest mistake of my life, i want to do it, But when i put the positive and negative things in the balance, everything tells me that Italy is the right desition

Bro, you live in illinois. Of course its hard to live in a state that taxes everything they can top of that they hike prices and taxes on purpose.

Literally cannot get a job to save my life. I know I’m not the only one. Every job I apply to gives me an automatic ai denial within minutes after applying. Started door dashing since that’s the only thing that would accept me and now I get $2 orders with no tip that I have pass up. Yesterday I made $7 in 2 hours mostly just waiting for orders. This economy is an actual joke. All there seems to be now are ghost jobs and gig jobs paying less than minimum wage.

Dont give up..I started college and work during the inflationary 1970s early 80's...first mortgage in 1981 was 15.5 per cent and gasoline was rising by the HOUR at one point. My first job I had to put the sign on the last car who could get gas...people went nuts. And this was when the big 3 made cars that got 8-10 mpg. But things DID change...got a good job after college then worked 35 years. Dont give up cause then failure IS guaranteed. And hard as it is to accept...people GOTTA stop blaming everyone else . F everone else ....good luck...things will change when it seems the darkest....

(not you) but billions with a B spent on gambling in 2024...look it up...but people "cant afford milk for the kids"? But I have a 1600 dollar I phone, salon fingernails, tammy faye eyelashes, extensions..but I cant buy milk? Something doesnt mesh.

So where are people getting the billions they waste on gambling?

Yup. 💯% true

I think a lot of people buying food out there these days are actually using an EBT / Food Stamps account. Makes me mad but same with housing. Lots of people using voucher money or some other program.

Man I was agreeing with you 100% until you said Project 2025 lol. Dude... you need to give Trump a chance and have an open mind trust me!!! Everything you were saying about how it was good during the start of covid. That's because of Trump being President and now after 4 years of Democrats, EVERYTHING IS FUCKED!!!!! I mean every single thing dude. Hang in there a little longer and give Trump at least 6 months to start turning this shit show around. He's going to send people home to their country and that will free up housing for Americans and he has other tricks up his sleeve to lower costs for the people. Start listening to Timcast IRL each night at 8pm eastern time on KZbin and see what you think. That said, I definitely believe this country's best days are decades behind us and they are never, ever coming back. They can get better from here but nowhere near as good as it was during the late 1940's through the 1990's. So we need to rethink what it means to live our lives and that might not include a massive loan on a 3,000 sqft house that needs to be maintained. Personally, I'm 38 and I moved out into my own apartment when I turned 18, never had a roommate. I have my own business earning between $10k-$15k/month and I am fuckin homeless right now.. for the past 8 months. I live out of my van and hotels. Rent was $3,500/month where I was and I had a month or two I couldn't afford it and I was out on the street after 20 years of paying rent, now can't get another place. I'll be honest man this country fucking sucks now socially and economically but I am hopeful Trump can make it better, even if not as good as it once was. I hope that makes sense.

Eventually 2008 will happen again and force layoffs. Those will get unemployment benefits like before. Debt skyrockets again and inflation enters its next cycle. Many will go broke because they lived beyond their means and have to foreclose or file bankruptcy. Do whatever it takes to live below means and get out of as much debt you can. May seem impossible but it has to be done or else it will just get even harder to get by. A correction is looming, could be next month, year, 5 years who knows but don’t get caught surprised and have no means to survive financially.

To add salt to the wound, if you're a younger guy like me, even if you get a good degree in college for something like engineering, you're still going to be competing with guys twice your age with x4 the experience and then there's the new H1-B program they're working on which will import around 65,000 highly-skilled immigrants for work because corporations can pay them less. You know it's all fked when both republicans and Bernie Sanders are agreeing that these economic policies are bs. This country has turned into a cartel for the 1% and you'd have to be really lucky to achieve any long term financial freedom or security.

I'll never be happy. my dad let me live with a schizophrenic abusive mom my entire life and now he is narcissistic to me. I had a terrible childhood. In 1 month I will be 18, my life has amounted to only pain and misunderstanding. I have no reason to be here. I don't know why I am still here, I'm just too scared to go.

In my area houses start at 1.3 million and up and if you want a condo those go for 650K and up just for a 1 bedroom, rents on the other hand are also outta control

Bidenomics has been a disaster. Thank god Trump is back. There is some hope at least.

Invest or be a hermit. (Not saying it instantly happens). But hard work does not pay, and lazy people work their way up, usually. On the upside, they likely suck with money, could be in more debt than you. It's mostly about pretending to make it, for most. So don't get jelly. Find a way to spend less and invest. Find a better job? Great. But spend less, invest. Don't believe the hype.

It's called inflation! when your purchasing dollar is less than a year ago! That's what happens when country prints a bunch of new currency. $1 in 1990 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $2.41 today. If the government calculated inflation rate like 70's it'll be a lot higher published.

Get a skill that can't be replaced by robots or AI in your lifetime, or done remotely in another country. If you can work remotely then so can someone across the globe, for less $. Search KZbin for tips on frugal living. Lots of advice available.

This was painful to watch. Becoming an adult is always hard but I agree it's 1000x harder now. Does he have friends, or parents? Unfortunately, the economy is about to get MUCH worse. But all is not lost. You can't change the wind, but you can change your sails. Re-evaluate your expectations and lifestyle, and plan accordingly. Live your OWN dreams, snd nobody else's!

Also, you don’t want to live in your car; I’m in that bitch *RIGHT NOW.…* It’s not my first time being homeless, but eventually I’m getting tha fuck out of dodge, so grab your passport & #BOUNCE Son!!

*Ppl NEED TO STAND TF & REVOLT!!!* *That’s the only way shit will change!!!*

What's your hobby?

Those cows did not want to be grinded no matter the economy dude ..