I’m unemployed for a entire year , it sucks and I’m sick of being unemployed
Not yet, once the local Meta datacenter fucks electricity even harder in Alberta we’ll see. Smith says lock in a fixed rate early, fuck you so I’m expecting it to be bad for a few years until their gigawatt natural gas power plant comes online to indoctrinate the plebs until the end of humans. Theist leaders seethe they’ve been outclassed. I digress.
I’m fortunate enough to be doing okay thanks for asking
Not at the moment no, I was unemployed for around 9mo last year after layoffs but I finally found a job and am doing pretty well for myself.
I’m trying to pay off debt from my mom at the moment but decided to splurge on myself for a few months first now that I’m employed again.
Shit was damn good, but now, I’m a frog boiling in water; it’s no longer easy, and I’m house poor, but I do still own a house and two cars that are getting old enough to vote.
Job got bought up by another company, they’re horrible, but the market is so bad I can’t find a good place to advance. No cost of living increases in 6 years, regular bonuses went to zero, and people who work hard are threatened with being fired every day.
Not everyone but a strong majority are. When roughly 2/3 of the citizens are paycheck to paycheck or one bad event away from insolvency, it becomes easy to find them amongst everyone.
The fediverse undoubedtly skews to the educated middle class; most of us are squeezed but not dry.
Two good jobs and digging out from each of us being single parents before we got together but no, we are ok. Can’t retire or anything like that but not one bad month from homeless anymore.
I was even in a position to help a friend with a (no interest) loan when she had a very bad month, it was tight for us but not impossible, and my husband did not get mad or worried at all that I did that, so I would say we are well off?
The overall economy is made up of a lot of data points - we are a little bit worse off than we were in terms of cash flow, but wealthier because we bought a house before (well at the start of) the bubble.
I’m not struggling personally. Most of my close peers are doing okay, but we’re much closer to the end of our working careers than the beginning. We’re established and at least had the chance to make our large purchases earlier in our lives (education, housing, cars, etc) when things were cheaper and a dollar went farther.
If we had to do the same with today’s financial environment we’d be in worse shape. Some of my peers didn’t make some of those big purchases back then and are staring down tougher choices.
For most of the those of working age today, I don’t see a workable path long term if this keeps up. Costs continue to spiral upward for the basic needs (food, housing, etc), and the job market is such a polluted game of cat and mouse jobs are incredibly hard to get (and keep for that matter).
I somehow continuously managed to live below my means. My wife has an indestructible career and I’m raking in now as I may not be able later. We’re well off, but buying a house in a good area would still be very lucky… but not impossible.
We’re by no means struggling relative to what many are going through right now, but we definitely already lost multiple safety-nets in a very brief amount of time under Trump’s 2nd term.
I have some friends that are doing okay but they were able to buy houses before everything went to shit. Those of us that didn’t are all pretty fucked.
I’ve been aggressively cutting my food bill and making do with the cheapest staple foods. Not ramen, but like the cheap vegetables, bulk rice and legumes, not much meat, no dairy. Making my own sweets, bread, ECT. Lots of soups, stews, vegetarian curries. Getting free fruit from neighbours trees. That’s the biggest expense I can cut right now. I’m increasingly frugal on just about everything else, and doing side gigs wherever I can. I even stopped buying books and started going to the library once a week.
I wouldn’t say I’m struggling, but I’m all out of things to cut.
We’re living in the worst K shaped economy in recent history. yeah. We are.
This admin is trying to convince people we are in a C shaped economy.
It’s all BS.
One thing I’ve noticed is that movies and TV shows don’t use exact amounts of money anymore.
‘The Rockford Files’ always talked about Jim’s $200.00 a day fee, and characters would say things like ‘Hey, this is a fifty dollar jacket’ or ‘That house must have cost $100,000.’
The $5.00 milkshake was a big plot point in ‘Pulp Fiction.’
Prices are going up so fast that what was unreasonably expensive when the script was written will be the norm by the time the show gets aired.
I noticed that when watching How I Met Your Mother as a teenager, they almost always avoid naming specific amounts of money. The narrator might replace an amount of money with “crapload” or the characters might show eachother a money offer on a piece of paper. Older shows like All In The Family, made in the 70s, frequently mention specific amounts of money but now, with inflation, those amounts of money sound laughably low. Bread for 11 cents? I always figured modern shows avoid mentioning specific amounts of money to try and keep it timeless so in the future people won’t laugh at what was considered a high or low amount of money at the time
To be fair, they’re trying to make “evergreen” content, meaning it stays funny/meaningful/believable/etc. no matter how far into the future that you watch it.
That wasn’t really a thing until the 90s though. Probably started with The Simpsons
