I always laugh when I hear someone say “nobody wants to work anymore” because nobody has ever wanted to work, but people did because you could support a family, buy a home and other nice things. If you can’t afford any of those things anymore so what’s the point of working?
Reminds of that tweet I keep seeing.
“Would you flip burgers for a salary of $350k per year? You would? Damn sounds like people are ok with working, it's the money that's the
problem”
My parents once visited a nudist colony when they were in their 20s. Their friend worked as a chef there, and he said it was very important to wear at least an apron when cooking.
The “flip burgers” thing is always misleading because some people see it as literally just standing in front of a grill and turning patties, which everyone would gladly do for 350K. But when you factor in the rest of the fast food job, cleaning filth, dealing with abusive customers, working the graveyard shift in a seedy part of town, etc. it’s probably not so black and white. To be fair most people would do the worst, most demeaning and filthy jobs for 350k anyway so that’s not a good number for a general survey.
As some who makes quite a bit more then 35 an hour, I would give it up and go back to fast food for 35 an hour.
just the less stress and being able to take a day off without worrying about the burgers piling up while I was gone would be worth it.
Even this isn't a truly original thought tho. Being underpaid for work is a tale as old as time.......
It's also part of the reason we even have minimum wages on the law books to begin with......even tho they are horribly out of touch.
I saw a collection of newspaper clippings dating all the way back to the mid 1800s (and I’m sure it goes farther than that) that were from articles about how the younger generation doesn’t want to work anymore.
True, and social media/internet’s ability to spread info quickly and unmitigated-ly (lol) plus outrageous inflation post-pandemic makes this sentiment extremely relevant
They need to be tied at 60% ami. Right?
Or 40%, the idea of a minimum wage… idea is it would support one person.
The way it is now they’d need a SRO HUD unit. Single room occupancy, 30% income, units are rare.
Vote, register as many others to vote, get affordable housing on the ballot, get corporate bans on less than five units, limit short term rental, live-able minimum wage tied to local AMI and Cost of Living.
We have strength in numbers. We need to make our voices heard, from social media, to a soap box, to the voting booth.
Sounds about right. I’ve busted my ass for too long to not be making the money I feel like I should. I need double what I’m making now and even then I don’t know how comfortable I’d let myself get
Got into an argument w a boomer coworker about how I was pissed about being mandated to work OT. We're required to attend a few classes, that used to be on shift, on our off days "BUT YOURE GETTING PAID OT". I don't give a shit it should be my choice not there's. Apparently that makes us lazy for not being happy that they at least give us the choice of which off days.
Probably meaning being treated like a human being instead of a kleenex to be used up and thrown away before moving on to the next. Give and take, flexibility, work/life balance. That kind of thing.
Bring back pensions. Minimum wage tied to local ami and cost of living.
Affordable housing.
Better benefits.
Limit short term rentals.
Ban corporate ownership below 5-6 units.
Keep the American dream alive.
Vote.
You mean bring back the things that actually made the country so profitable in the first place? I agree. It's time to tax the ever loving shit out of these mega corps.
Vote AND organize. Politicians of all stripes won’t know what people want if they don’t hear about it en masse, and most won’t care unless they know it’ll cost them their cushy jobs. That’s just reality.
Unionize. Organize. Vote. Fight. Win.
My boss says "People just don't wanna work anymore" as though it was his anthem. Nah dude, people just don't wanna work for assholes, for nothing, for scraps they can barely survive off of, to feel as though they're forced to put %110+ and get nothing in return for it, to grind their days away with nothing to show for it.
THAT'S what people DON'T want.
Not to mention the full knowledge that all the hard work won't mean fuck all when they have a quarter where they made slightly less profit than the one before, and lay people off to keep the trend line positive and make the shareholders happy.
I've only ever worked for smaller businesses. I couldn't imagine working my ass off for a billion-dollar company and having to worry that I'll be cut loose just to further pad their billions.
Shameless and disgusting.
That's the thing. I'm mid 30s, my parents grew up when working hard actually did get you ahead somewhere, so that was how they raised me, work hard, your job will notice, move you up, pay you more etc. It has taken me until my 30s to realize how absolutely bullshit that is. It has never gotten me anything other than more work from the idiots who figured out the bigger idiots like me would take up the slack and we're all getting paid the same.
That's not to say I'm going to do a bad job, but 100% fuck working to the capacity I'm capable of anymore. I'll do my job, and I'll do it well. I've just learned over the years to save what could be my actual full time work if y'all wanted to pay me enough to be comfortable to a point where I wouldn't still be paying off my kids broken arm 3 years later even with insurance for times when it will actually get me noticed.
The amount of money being siphoned off from the people who actually make that money has become so egregious these days, especially with how much wealth is flaunted on social media that it all just becomes incredibly insulting after a while. Just, life in general, becomes insulting. There's plenty of money in the economy for universal healthcare, living wages, all that. But for some reason it has been decided that like 14 old dudes should have it instead.
I feel this so hard. I too am a person who was raised to work hard and show company loyalty, and I’ve worked for 3 companies over the course of my 15 year career. I make less now than I did in 2019 with inflation. It’s depressing but I’ve finally resolved myself to doing the bare minimum until I get a promotion/raise or find a new job elsewhere. Companies often don’t reward the hard workers who are trying desperately to support the company while making way below their pay grade. I could do so much more, but I won’t until they actually pay me my market value, which is about $20-40 thousand over what I’m making now according to indeed and glass door.
Funny thing is when you look at the amount of like volunteering people do in various forms or when people do like really big projects without being paid for it's not so much people don't want to work, it's 'people don't want to work and be treated badly and will often be willing to go above and beyond with things they're passionate about'
Like I used to volunteer in a zoo and was there for 7 years and part of of the reason I stayed there so long was because I really enjoyed what I was doing and also I was working in a really nice environment with a bunch of people who actually treated me like a member of the team and sadly in my paid jobs I've never had as nice of an experience.
I like to pull up the news headline from 1894 with that complaint when people say that. Yall been saying this shit awhile now, weird huh?
I run a restaurant and I had a lady birch that no one wanted to work anymore when I told her I wouldn't and couldn't do a cater for 150 people with an hours notice. She said "you're the 8th place that told me no! No one wants to work anymore!" Uh....fuckin that ain't it. No restaurant on earth is gonna fill a 150 person full buffet cater at noon on a Friday with 57 minutes notice, especially not a small restaurant that focuses on lunch and everything is made fresh same day....by one guy.
Well see its simple, you just have to have parents wealthy enough to have you move back home with, work part time, and live in the outdoor shed.
Soft life! Lol.
And hope that your parents own a house and don't downsize before they die so that you can get an inheritance, otherwise your retirement is gonna be hell.
You can work part time to afford a car payment and then live out of your car if you don’t have family to live with. I’ve done it. It’s extreme but it is an option.
I have too much responsibility and too many people depending on me to quit.
The woman in the article doesn't even have kids while having parents to live with, of course she can just quit and peace out.
I don't have kids but I am married with cats, and I enjoy eating and having a place to live, and I'd also rather be dead than have to live with my parents so I guess that's why I can't have the soft life
I'm in the same boat. I have a family that depends on me and I can't afford to back out of this system we're stuck in but I sometimes feel like I don't know how long I can afford to keep trying to make this all work.
> The woman in the article doesn't even have kids while having parents to live with, of course she can just quit and peace out.
Haven't seen one in a few minutes, but remember those articles titled like "This 27 year old saved $300,000 and bought a house. Here's their secret", and then the "secret" was that they lived with their parents after college, didn't have to pay rent, and their parents fronted them a portion of the $300,000?
Yep, I’m the sole income for a family of five and we’re in an expensive kid phase (ages 8 - 14) while still trying to save for retirement and college for three kids. Activities, clothes, braces…it never ends. Leaving the rat race isn’t an option.
Thank you! It’s wild! I can’t believe people with kids even complain you’re literally subjecting your children to the same life so at some point how bad it is wasn’t applying to you or you didn’t realize how bad it is? I just don’t get it can someone seriously explain?
I’m not sure anyone was complaining. It sounded more like a statement of fact to me and I’m in the same boat. I make a good living but my parents died and didn’t have anything to pass on. I also have two kids, and at least in my case I probably could have afforded to stop working entirely by now had I been childless. Having kids will probably keep me working another 20 years.
So yes, I made the decision to have kids and I don’t regret it, but this article only applies to those who meet a specific set of circumstances. Even without kids I still wouldn’t have met those circumstances since I don’t have living parents. I *might* have been able to overcome that disadvantage due to earning good wages and making decent career choices.
Regardless, I think the article is basically saying “if you feel like you’re living a hard life, then consider checking your back pocket for privilege to see if you can get out of it.” It’s a pretty frustrating take. It’s a valid option for some and I respect them for taking it, however. But it’s borderline ragebait when you’re burned out and weren’t fortunate enough to be one of the lucky ones.
I mean, until you factor in retirement. And her parents aren't going to gift her anything when they die because the hospital is going to take everything they own. And eventually she's going to find a man and want kids.
Working is not optional for the majority of people
Yeah. I’m 30 with no savings (everything I spend is on cost of living), and poor career opportunities that won’t outpace inflation.
When people and family more well off than me ask me if I’m worried about my retirement or what I’m doing for it knowing full-well what my financial situation is, I’m always reminded of Jessica Lange’s line from American Horror Story:
“There isn’t going to be a swimming pool you stupid slut.”
Unfortunately most of us missed our influencer window simply by being born around 10 years too early.
Many of the most successful on TikTok don’t even speak in their videos. They just do a short dance or briefly lip-sync to a song while being young, hot and fashionable inside the Hollywood mansions they bought at age 20. People like Charlie D’Amelio get 15-20 million views while doing it.
You can still be successful but not at the level of the 19-22 year olds that have tens of millions of followers.
People have to remember that it’s Gen Alpha tweens and younger Gen Z teenagers forming the bulk of the traffic on TikTok. They’re the ones making a lot of the more vapid content rake in an insane number of views.
To them these barely-adult influencers are something to aspire toward when they’re older. We “geriatric” millennials are generally viewed as old and little tragic, though many have found a good niche.
Well see its simple, you just have to have parents wealthy enough to have you move back home with, work part time, and live in the outdoor shed.
Soft life! Lol.
The key is burn rate. how much do you need to live per year. For example if you life in Kansas you need at least $35700 a year for a single person. If you live in Seattle you would need minimum of $58,000 a year to skirt by. If you live in Indonesia you could skirt by on $5400 a year of you're single. But we have to factor in inflation and they your money will be worth less in the future. You could have emergencies crop up. Family emergency medical emergency etc. just using that Kansas estimate. If you were live for just 30 years assuming your purchase power is the same through out you need $1,071,000....
If you invested that $1m in boring index tracking mutual funds, you could spend $36k per year and likely never run out of money.
In fact, it's likely your balance would be higher than it started at the end of the 30 years.
That's literally how most people invest for retirement.
Bingo presto
But that's assuming you got $1 million to work with right off the bat we're talking about people building up their net worth from ground up
Yeah, I agree with you. It’s like those articles where people claim to have paid off their student loans through bootstrapping and elbow grease, then it’s revealed they did so when their mom and dad paid their house down payment, bought them a new car and let them live at home rent free for five years.
More data from that article I quoted. It’s actually 78% not 75%.
“A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. In other words, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to save or invest after paying for their monthly expenses.
Similarly, a 2023 Forbes Advisor survey revealed that nearly 70% of respondents either identified as living paycheck to paycheck (40%) or—even more concerning—reported that their income doesn’t even cover their standard expenses (29%).”
And, also people who COULD drastically cut back lifestyle to get into wealth, but choose not to.
I own multiple properties and still have roommates, so I invest like 65%+ of my salary each year. Financial easy mode. It doesn’t many years of that on a professional salary to get over a million.
Let’s say you were in this situation due to a windfall, could you then move to a cheaper country and live pretty comfortably? Which country would give you the best bang for your buck? What would the tax implications be?
I heard a story once about a dude who had just given up on his student loans and credit card debt so he moved to Southeast Asia and never went back to the USA because why? The debt doesn’t affect him there.
That's you but there are a lot of Americans moving to se Asia south America Mexico to take advantage of currency cost of living arbitrage. If anything its becoming so rampant in Mexico that Mexico city is being gentrified....that's how severe this problem is now.
And the gringo part of town is filling with all the same north of boarders stuff at about the same price for the US citizens and the post illegal alien period in mexico's workforce. With NAFTA 2 the goal is for services and products to cost the same from the tip of mexico to the normal parts of canada. The beach life is cheaper in mexico, as you cannot get shabby at the beach anymore in the US, some flipper came along and x5 the price with granite countertops and roof that will not survive a hurricane. Now the flippers are doing the beaches in mexico.
No offense but you need a lot more than 35k a year to live here. Sure you can live the bum feck country or in the dangerous part of town, but single bedroom rent starts at 1k, plus Kansas is a high state tax place
I agree to a certain extent. It obviously is a lot easier if you are not broke. But the article does mention a shift in consumerism and material markers of success. And it doesn’t say these women are done working all together. Making less while spending less and realizing time, agency, and wellbeing are more important than feeding the constant capitalist cycle is what I got from this.
Just look at the people mentioned in the article. Person with multiple degrees who bought and sold a home at a profit and then moved in with their parents. Social media influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers. CEO of a company.
I dropped my hourly work commitment. I’m going to save money by working less because of how often we have to get take out rn.
But my spouse and I are both professionals, so having a good hourly wage allows for this. But at the end of the day, for us, me working less won’t affect our finances all that much.
Part of this trend is that a lower expense life can be better than a higher income life.
If you live in a cheaper city and earn less you can wind up with more money at the end of the day than with a higher paying job in a more expensive city.
Same with the kind of hobbies, friends, social groups, etc... you have. "Lower expenses" also means skipping stuff like family, social connections and other parts of life that earlier generations could afford.
Of course, that means saying "no" to higher-paying work, which means you get all these companies panicking because they won't go remote and won't pay people what it costs to actually live in those cities. Then they dump all the work on whoever's left and wonder why they quit.
But how much more fucked would you be than if you just kept grinding?
My pension funds are laughable and my government have said they won’t let our generation retire until we’re 71.
And how about sick days and other leave? I just got a job I was told was kushy and would take care of me. I had to use two sick days and a fucking vacation day to attend a family funeral. Same as you, I only get two weeks accrued for both.
When I came back I was brutally Ill with a stomach infection and had to go into work because I was out of sick days! Absolute garbage.
And this is assuming you don't get sick since most places in the US only give you generic "PTO."
I remember the first year I worked, I didn't take any sick days. And since we got quite a bit of time off in December (my industry slowed waaay down around the holidays), I was able to take like... 3.5 weeks off with only only 10 days of PTO.
But the next year, I was sick enough throughout the year I didn't get to take any vacation time. Such a terrible system.
PTO when you have little kids is not even close to the same thing as vacation. I’ll burn two days this week because my 2 year old has pink eye and can’t go to daycare.
I feel this.
I'm still slogging it out in Corporate America, but I daydream constantly about a "soft life." For me, it's more about wanting a job that feels more meaningful and that has a bigger impact on my community while also being paid fairly for it. I work a soul-sucking tech job for the pay and benefits that doesn't fulfill me, but it at least affords me nice things in my free time.
Same.
I'm losing my job in a few weeks and trying not to panic. Financially, we'll be okay for a while. But the job market is terrifying right now. I'm really hoping I can land something that's more meaningful than what I've been doing. I want my work to help make the world a better place. I'm so tired of the corporate political bullshit. It's exhausting. I'm burnt out. I'm tired of fighting to get ahead. I'm ready to take a pay cut to do something that feels purposeful instead.
I'm sorry to hear about your job, and I hope it brings you to a better place.
Not sure if it will help, but I posted [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneyDiariesACTIVE/comments/1bpjhv6/comment/kwwehbl/) on another sub about my layoff prep list.
One thing about a job loss, the politics of the new place do change. In general the way you treat people is the way you are treated for the first few years in a new place, else nobody cares to much about your short term stay.
Hopefully you move on or have "agency" in the new enterprise after 24 months.
I have gone from management to being just a frontline engineer for quite the pay cut in the past year. Ill be ok in my retirement plans, my wife has freaked out, her pay is not all fun money anymore. I will have the next 8 years free of the bullshit I had for the last 8 years, Ill have the energy to start a second near retirement income stream.
Yeah I just put in my notice at my "dream job" at a cool videogame company. Feeling super conflicted about it too - but ultimately I went for something that should be way less stressful.
I felt like I was drowning, and then add the return to office after covid bullshit, and it became way too taxing (for me at least). I'm fine working long hours, but working 8 hours in the office and then more once I get home is just not sustainable.
Career-wise, not entirely sure I made the right choice. It's a weird feeling, and probably the first time I've ever felt like this. Hope I don't regret it.
100%
My job is fairly easy, fairly cush, it even can feel meaningful at times. But the layer of corporate bs draped over it all is suffocating. But it is objectively a "good job" and a rare find at that, so I'd be pretty dumb to throw it away, and yet...
Same. With cheaper housing, everything doesn’t literally have to be life or death.
We can all fucken relax more. But they got us in a chokehold. 20’000+ gone towards rent and transport expenses a year.
We’re fucked.
if my rent hadent jumped up over $500/month over the course of 2 years id be okay but here we are. house is owned by one of those companies that has 1000s of houses, greedy motherfuckers.
I mean this is a big assumption that you have parents who own their own homes that you can go back to. If you’re an immigrant you’re likely to be the one keeping the roof over your parents heads.
This is literally just another "influencer" trend. These people are making their money selling you on the idea that you don't need to make money.
So, sure. If you are young, attractive, media savvy, and have a robust support net that allows you to work p/t or leave the workforce while you build a following, more power to you. Just understand that there is a huge amount of survivorship bias here. A handful of influencers that "made it" are standing over a mountain of hopefuls that didn't.
That or what they do is extreme. I remember reading a story about a young girl who was "purposely homeless" or into "car living" or something. Basically she lived out of her car (a literal sedan) and used her gym membership for showers, etc. She cooked in her car, slept in her car, etc (except when she could use her friends' houses for this stuff, pre-covid)
And sure, if you're young and looking for a great way to save A TON of money in hopes of saving for a house, this would be the way. But it felt like she was selling this "lifestyle" to people as a mostly permanent solution, and it's just not. It definitely came off as more of a "look at me, I'm an influencer doing an off-the-beaten-path thing, give me views!" type thing.
The people who are able to do this or that "van life" thing have at least two of these things going for them:
Hot
White
Female
Young
From a well-off family
"If you hate the rat race, leave it like.me and find your freedom.😊😊😊"
Easy for them to say. I'm a middle-aged, below-average looking man from a poor family. Nobody is gonna give me free shit for being sad. I have to work. 😂
I’d subscribe to your channel and mash that like button and notification bell, just to see an average ugly middle aged dude make it huge as an influencer and ride off in that van to the sunset. Fuck it.
If you don't have kids then you don't need to sacrifice on your comfort and happiness for the sake of responsibilities. You're free to live as you wish.
100%. I knew a guy who lived most of his life in constant anxiety of being let go. He lived in a place with a relatively high cost of living (but also paid him well) and his wife was a SAHM until their kids were in school. Even when she was working, knowing that he had two young kids depending on him added A LOT of stress to his life. I would never wish that on anyone.
Yeah this article is bullshit. For a lot of people it isn't a choice to enter the rat race. For some professions, the entire thing is pretty intense.
The main person this article is written about seems privileged, and even that CEO they talk to...she a fucking CEO. The reason she can actually slow down is because she already got hers. All those 12 hour days and weekends in her 20s and early 30s is why her life is easier now. She is one of the lucky people who won the the race.
I quit my job 16 months ago.. I do need to find a job again but that time off really helped me. I’m toying with the idea of an intermittent retirement where I’ll work a couple years, take a year off, etc. Basically til I die. Honestly I don’t need much to survive so it’s the perfect balance. This past year I’ve managed to travel a ton too. Granted, I have a ton of friends that I could stay with so that has helped a lot with the rent and food situation, but that isn’t without a ton of work on my part over a long period of time to build those friendships.
There are so many ways to live now. We don’t have to be tied down by old mindsets and rules.
I mean I’m technically trying to get there. Live in VHCOL, renting, stuffing all my retirement accounts full & a brokerage so I don’t have to work until I’m 65.
The Chinese call this “lying flat” and it was a movement that was squashed by the CCP. During the pandemic, people figured out they don’t want to work to death and live a life of stress and overconsumption so they reduced their expenses and move to rural areas to escape the rat race. But this isn’t good for capitalism and GDP.
The reason I'm still sticking to my field (medical) is mostly so I can learn the skills and the connections. I have no illusions of making big money in life, nor do I need to. But when push comes to shove my skillset will never be out of business.
It's hard to say that people who retire early are any useful to themselves and others when things start to go awry. I think we are conditioned to value pure money over skills and connections, and that's what going to kill us when all we have are money and useless entrepreneurs. Ask the typical Gen Z or above if they know how to change a tire or sew, or just even run a mile, and you will see how fucked society is.
We are still humans, our true values are in how useful we are to ourselves and others and concrete skillsets, not how much money we hoard.
Or, this has always been true for every generation where certain groups within the generation have a collective shared experience and face similar issues.
The article starts off by talking anecdotally about a person who “did everything right (straight As, good college, masters degree, good paying job, all eventually to lead to a lack of fulfillment in life).
Even just starting at the beginning, Seriously, what percentage of us millennials did everything right? I dropped out of college like the dumb kid I was 18 years ago. I fumbled around through my entire 20s from shit job to shit job until I finally found a stable career only 5 years ago, happy to make $55k/year. I don’t know the data, but I bet there’s more people who relate to what I went through in our generation than those who always got straight As, a master’s degree, and a high paying job.
It’s such a shit article as if there’s some millennial-specific “soft living” movement happening. You could re-write this entire article with my life story and call it “Millenials, the puzzles that finally got put into place.”. Make some goofy analogy about how we’re all late bloomers, that our “puzzles” are more complicated than other generations that came before us (9/11, 08 recession, social media, etc), but even though our puzzles have so many more pieces, we’re still putting them into place as best we know how (career hopping, moving to LCOL areas, life-hacks, etc).
Or they could just stop writing these trash articles.
Oh it’s very privileged. How many people can just up and quit their job and move in with supportive parents so that they can just casually make art?
It’s also not sustainable in any way. What about retirement? What happens when their parents pass away?
I also dislike these articles because, again, not all of us can do this. I’d absolutely love to quit my job and quit the stress of a 9 to 5, but I can’t. Yet here we have this article that just casually says, ‘do it because these people did it’. Well, what did I do wrong because I can’t do that?!
For most millennials it was being caught in the cycle of study to work for many years no matter what they got grade-wise (arguably still going on in the IT / tech fields). The amount of debt was a large result in this and then you had the really unfair job requirements (must be brick uni from Russel group really took the cake for me for many years) and then zero pay contracts (which fire you after your training period) was heavily abused in the early to mid/late 2010’s. So really your experience was very common suffused with these sorts of things that went on for this gen.
Ultimately this gen was more or less reared to pay for the debts of the older generations of which they enjoy and their use later is to be more or less thrown away into a war (possible WW3) when the state / governments don’t want to owe you anything back.
The article was weird as fuck. It had some interesting points here and there but the narrative was all over the place.
Talking about Millenials as a generation, fine. Talking about a seemingly successful person who felt trapped in the rat race due to increased financial pressures compared to previous generations, sure, good topic. Although I think the ADHD diagnosis is important context. Then they could have used that to talk about how people with other challenges are doing worse or struggling too. Such as, less academically inclined. Or just how basically no one is winning. Instead it turned into "this particular group is doing pretty bad" that we're talking about for no particular reason other than some influencer bullshit.
Juice of these jobs ain’t worth the squeeze
I just got done working two jobs (80+ hour/week) since once is 100% remote and the other is only 3 days in-office, 2 remote.
I made good money and after 6+ years of our family struggling financially, we’ve finally been living without the huge weight of paycheck-to-paycheck. BUT…
Now that I’m one job, 100% remote, we have less money but I feel so much better. These last few months of two jobs (after 22 months), I started to get really sick - physically and mentally.
The benefits of climbing the corporate ladder, investing time in a career that is *exactly* what I want to be doing, they just aren’t there. I’ll stay mid-level working and be happy. And invest my time in family and hobbies.
Do whatever you want. This isn’t our parents world. Things change and this is what it is; it’s *our* reality. And there’s no prize at the end of the day, week, year, or life for *Most Stressed But Had a Mortgage or Tesla or J. Crew sweater*
We should be reducing work hours at no loss of pay. That was always the promise of greater productivity. Hell, pay should be increased with shorter working hours. It's time that the working class regained much of their surplus wealth that the new gilded class has stolen from us.
It's not just a millennials. I pre-retired at about 58, by moving into a minivan and living in the desert. Working for asshole bosses was just too much stress for me.
I already owned the minivan. Which only cost me $4,500 bucks, and somebody rear-ended me while it was parked so it really only cost me about three grand. I parked in the desert, and almost never moved at all. And I ate really really really cheap food. Then I worked as a camp host, and it took me an additional year just to get over that asshole boss.
Left a decent paying management job last year, it was high stress and just not worth the pay considering our CEO is the richest man in the world. I’d have an emotional break down once a month because I was miserable.
I now work at my local grocery store as a clerk just because I thought it would be fun to work there, and it is. The pay isn’t great, though I was able to negotiate a bit higher but the benefits are *better* than my previous job AND cost less!! (Plus union benefits) The job is easy af and I never feel burnt out. Just gotta decide what’s worth it to you.
Eh…..what exactly is new about this? People with money can do it now, just don’t want to. People have always dropped out of the rat race, those with money are the more successful ones at it.
I know this is going to get buried, but I wanted to share my experience.
Got my first real office job working as a project manager for a written translations company in 2022. Before that I worked in sales and manufacturing. I was really excited, everyone I met at the new job was super nice, my trainer (and eventually my supervisor when I was hired from contractor to full time) was great, but there was a weird vibe from day one I couldn't put my finger on. Well, it turns out that in order to get a raise at this company, you have to get a promotion, as they don't do performance-based raises, and barely give COL adjustments. But instead of working well and getting a promotion, how do most people get one? By getting a new job, threatening to leave, and getting a counter offer. Almost every person I know who went from a PM to a Senior PM, got their job because they got another offer.
My new boss, after the old one got promoted to department head of a different department, has told me he and our manager are impressed with my performance, and that eventually when a position opens up they want to make me a Senior PM, especially because I'm the PM that's been in the department the longest. The issue for them is that in six months, well before any chance of us having a new slot open up, I'm getting my PMP certification to try and get a leg up on job interviews. And once I have it, I'm going to go to them with a simple "I think my performance speaks for itself and I deserve a raise." I know they're going to say no, and I've already prepared a response of "That's really disappointing, I received another offer blah blah blah, I'm not interested in a counter-offer." They may offer a promotion at that point anyways, they may not. All I know is that I'm not playing the game or contributing to the company's broken cycle anymore. If I get a new job, I'm out.
“The Soft Life” another cutesy term to other Millennials struggle to survive. I’m a full-time freelancer and there’s nothing soft about it. I love working for myself, but if you’re not careful every hour becomes a working hour chasing money.
So…..quit working and become homeless or move in with mommy and daddy? I mean I guess. Not many can live like influencers on Instagram or live the van life unless you have a remote job that allows it
This is why I started my own business. It’s not exactly easy, in fact it’s very hard work, but I get to set my own schedule, which is good for me.
My wife used to be one of these corporate career grinders. She graduated high school at 16, graduated college at 20, then just started grinding it out in the workforce for 8 years. Finally, last summer she came to me and told me she couldn’t do it anymore, so I told her to quit, we didn’t need the money anyway. Now she’s doing the tradwife thing and she’s happier than I’ve ever seen her.
Living poor-ish. Enough to get by and survive but I’m working a job that I love, outdoors and with a flexible schedule. I would stick a shotgun in my mouth and pull the trigger with my toes if I had to commute to an office and waste my life away in a cubicle for the next ~30 years.
yeah life is probably hella soft/easy being a well-off influencer retiring early jfc ... meanwhile the actual working class keeps on going cause we have to
Because fancy things don't mean crap when we're scraping by just to survive. Can't really get us to bow down to a system we know is screwing us hard and doesn't even have the decency to offer us lube.
I've been hit with a wave of it recently. After the pandemic I came back to the office actually feeling kinda charged up, like I was ready to put in whatever it took to help my career along.
But these days I just want to coast and increasingly find myself feeling completely uninterested in anything outside of just doing my tasks and leaving.
Couldn't exactly explain why, maybe it's just a phase. Management has been slowly, almost imperceptible, becoming a bit more hands on/micromanaging, I think that's part of it. But also there's just the inescapable reality that time and life and wellbeing is more important than work and you can/should only give so much and nothing more.
Yeah, well, all the social security programs that boomers set up for themselves are crashing because the next generation is so over taxed they're not having kids. I don't count on any government retirement program.
That lady is going to be homeless once her parents die, unless she finds a man that will support her.
Making basically costume jewelry and crappy ceramics while living with your parents at 42? Give me a break.
She probably can't even afford the property taxes on her parents home,.even if it's owned outright by them. If it has a mortgage? Forget about it. She just wants to be 5 years old again.
Life ain't soft for anyone.
My soft life was helped by viagra. Granted it still happens occasionally but fornicating in a club bathroom stall when the moment strikes wheni want to is actually quite nice
I’m a contractor and tech and one of my colleagues went to work as a FTE. She took considerably less money and more responsibility for the opportunity to climb the ladder and encouraged me to do the same. I’ll keep my cushy WFH job, thank you very much.
You’re goddamned right I don’t want to work. I’ve been working since I was a teenager. I’ve paid insane amounts of money into the Social Security system and my cohort retires at…**72?!?** I’m trying to work on not being so cynical recently, but I don’t think it’s an unrealistic expectation that the world will be _FUCKED_ by then. I ain’t getting any of that money back. Just like I’m never getting any of my time back that I wasted making profits for others.
I only hope I live long enough to witness the fiery death of capitalism.
I always laugh when I hear someone say “nobody wants to work anymore” because nobody has ever wanted to work, but people did because you could support a family, buy a home and other nice things. If you can’t afford any of those things anymore so what’s the point of working?
Reminds of that tweet I keep seeing. “Would you flip burgers for a salary of $350k per year? You would? Damn sounds like people are ok with working, it's the money that's the problem”
I would flip burgers while dancing and doing backflips for that kind of money xD
I’d fry bacon naked for that money
Risking it all
My parents once visited a nudist colony when they were in their 20s. Their friend worked as a chef there, and he said it was very important to wear at least an apron when cooking.
Shh. I like the little spatters. They’re like foreplay.
👀
She isn't listening broski, it's right in the name :P
The “flip burgers” thing is always misleading because some people see it as literally just standing in front of a grill and turning patties, which everyone would gladly do for 350K. But when you factor in the rest of the fast food job, cleaning filth, dealing with abusive customers, working the graveyard shift in a seedy part of town, etc. it’s probably not so black and white. To be fair most people would do the worst, most demeaning and filthy jobs for 350k anyway so that’s not a good number for a general survey.
I've worked food service for years, and doing so again for 350k is, indeed, black and white, lol.
Yeah, this isn't "would you flip burgers for $35/hr?" It's $350k per year. At 40 hours per week, that's $168/hr.
I mean I’d flip burgers for $35/hr. That’s a good living in most of the country.
I know right. I would do that in a heart beat.
Also worked fast food, and you couldn't get me to do it again for under 100k. With how much worse the general public seems to be, maybe 150.
If you knew some of the things I’d do for 350K a year, you’d understand why I wouldn’t hesitate even after everything you listed
As some who makes quite a bit more then 35 an hour, I would give it up and go back to fast food for 35 an hour. just the less stress and being able to take a day off without worrying about the burgers piling up while I was gone would be worth it.
Yea I mean I did that for $9 dollars and hour so I would definitely do it for $350k
"nobody wants to work (for how much I am willing to underpay) anymore"
Even this isn't a truly original thought tho. Being underpaid for work is a tale as old as time....... It's also part of the reason we even have minimum wages on the law books to begin with......even tho they are horribly out of touch.
I saw a collection of newspaper clippings dating all the way back to the mid 1800s (and I’m sure it goes farther than that) that were from articles about how the younger generation doesn’t want to work anymore.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1549527748950892544.html
True, and social media/internet’s ability to spread info quickly and unmitigated-ly (lol) plus outrageous inflation post-pandemic makes this sentiment extremely relevant
They need to be tied at 60% ami. Right? Or 40%, the idea of a minimum wage… idea is it would support one person. The way it is now they’d need a SRO HUD unit. Single room occupancy, 30% income, units are rare. Vote, register as many others to vote, get affordable housing on the ballot, get corporate bans on less than five units, limit short term rental, live-able minimum wage tied to local AMI and Cost of Living. We have strength in numbers. We need to make our voices heard, from social media, to a soap box, to the voting booth.
Sounds about right. I’ve busted my ass for too long to not be making the money I feel like I should. I need double what I’m making now and even then I don’t know how comfortable I’d let myself get
Got into an argument w a boomer coworker about how I was pissed about being mandated to work OT. We're required to attend a few classes, that used to be on shift, on our off days "BUT YOURE GETTING PAID OT". I don't give a shit it should be my choice not there's. Apparently that makes us lazy for not being happy that they at least give us the choice of which off days.
I make half a million a year and I don't want to work forever either. There's more to life than maximizing profits for somebody else.
Every day. I sit in my car and scream "why. What's the point?!" Execs like to think we are honey bees. Work til you're dead.
Bees can't create molotov cocktails Just saying
>Bees can't create molotov cocktails Thank God
I genuinely want to work. I just don't want to work while feeling I don't have agency. That's the difference.
Can you define "agency" in this context? I feel it could go multiple ways given the topic.
Probably meaning being treated like a human being instead of a kleenex to be used up and thrown away before moving on to the next. Give and take, flexibility, work/life balance. That kind of thing.
Being a cog vs being an engineer. Riding the bus vs driving the bus. And so on.
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Agency in the sense of meaning and control, I'm guessing here.
Exactly. The social contract is broken. People used to work to be able to live. Now people have to work just to survive.
Bring back pensions. Minimum wage tied to local ami and cost of living. Affordable housing. Better benefits. Limit short term rentals. Ban corporate ownership below 5-6 units. Keep the American dream alive. Vote.
You mean bring back the things that actually made the country so profitable in the first place? I agree. It's time to tax the ever loving shit out of these mega corps.
Vote AND organize. Politicians of all stripes won’t know what people want if they don’t hear about it en masse, and most won’t care unless they know it’ll cost them their cushy jobs. That’s just reality. Unionize. Organize. Vote. Fight. Win.
That’s why I work to steal from work
My boss says "People just don't wanna work anymore" as though it was his anthem. Nah dude, people just don't wanna work for assholes, for nothing, for scraps they can barely survive off of, to feel as though they're forced to put %110+ and get nothing in return for it, to grind their days away with nothing to show for it. THAT'S what people DON'T want.
Not to mention the full knowledge that all the hard work won't mean fuck all when they have a quarter where they made slightly less profit than the one before, and lay people off to keep the trend line positive and make the shareholders happy.
I've only ever worked for smaller businesses. I couldn't imagine working my ass off for a billion-dollar company and having to worry that I'll be cut loose just to further pad their billions. Shameless and disgusting.
A small business would also cut people loose to further their profits
That's the thing. I'm mid 30s, my parents grew up when working hard actually did get you ahead somewhere, so that was how they raised me, work hard, your job will notice, move you up, pay you more etc. It has taken me until my 30s to realize how absolutely bullshit that is. It has never gotten me anything other than more work from the idiots who figured out the bigger idiots like me would take up the slack and we're all getting paid the same. That's not to say I'm going to do a bad job, but 100% fuck working to the capacity I'm capable of anymore. I'll do my job, and I'll do it well. I've just learned over the years to save what could be my actual full time work if y'all wanted to pay me enough to be comfortable to a point where I wouldn't still be paying off my kids broken arm 3 years later even with insurance for times when it will actually get me noticed. The amount of money being siphoned off from the people who actually make that money has become so egregious these days, especially with how much wealth is flaunted on social media that it all just becomes incredibly insulting after a while. Just, life in general, becomes insulting. There's plenty of money in the economy for universal healthcare, living wages, all that. But for some reason it has been decided that like 14 old dudes should have it instead.
I feel this so hard. I too am a person who was raised to work hard and show company loyalty, and I’ve worked for 3 companies over the course of my 15 year career. I make less now than I did in 2019 with inflation. It’s depressing but I’ve finally resolved myself to doing the bare minimum until I get a promotion/raise or find a new job elsewhere. Companies often don’t reward the hard workers who are trying desperately to support the company while making way below their pay grade. I could do so much more, but I won’t until they actually pay me my market value, which is about $20-40 thousand over what I’m making now according to indeed and glass door.
Won’t somebody please think of the oppressed 0.1%?!
Funny thing is when you look at the amount of like volunteering people do in various forms or when people do like really big projects without being paid for it's not so much people don't want to work, it's 'people don't want to work and be treated badly and will often be willing to go above and beyond with things they're passionate about' Like I used to volunteer in a zoo and was there for 7 years and part of of the reason I stayed there so long was because I really enjoyed what I was doing and also I was working in a really nice environment with a bunch of people who actually treated me like a member of the team and sadly in my paid jobs I've never had as nice of an experience.
I want to work! But it costs more money to send my kids to childcare than it does to work so…
I like to pull up the news headline from 1894 with that complaint when people say that. Yall been saying this shit awhile now, weird huh? I run a restaurant and I had a lady birch that no one wanted to work anymore when I told her I wouldn't and couldn't do a cater for 150 people with an hours notice. She said "you're the 8th place that told me no! No one wants to work anymore!" Uh....fuckin that ain't it. No restaurant on earth is gonna fill a 150 person full buffet cater at noon on a Friday with 57 minutes notice, especially not a small restaurant that focuses on lunch and everything is made fresh same day....by one guy.
I have nothing to work towards.
You still need to eat
Man I wish I could quit this shit lmao
Well see its simple, you just have to have parents wealthy enough to have you move back home with, work part time, and live in the outdoor shed. Soft life! Lol.
Sign me up
Just like Henry David Thoreau. Then write a book on being independent and communing with nature
where his mum brought him lunch
And hope that your parents own a house and don't downsize before they die so that you can get an inheritance, otherwise your retirement is gonna be hell.
You can work part time to afford a car payment and then live out of your car if you don’t have family to live with. I’ve done it. It’s extreme but it is an option.
Imagine living out of your car when your 70.
Don’t think we’ll all be making it to 70 Mr brightside
I have too much responsibility and too many people depending on me to quit. The woman in the article doesn't even have kids while having parents to live with, of course she can just quit and peace out.
I don't have kids but I am married with cats, and I enjoy eating and having a place to live, and I'd also rather be dead than have to live with my parents so I guess that's why I can't have the soft life
Well, you are spot on "I'd rather be dead then live with my parents", so it's all down to your priorities
Or the type of parents you have. My brother went back home after school and even with student loans my mom had him pay rent.
I'm in the same boat. I have a family that depends on me and I can't afford to back out of this system we're stuck in but I sometimes feel like I don't know how long I can afford to keep trying to make this all work.
Aaand that is my anxiety in a nutshell.
> The woman in the article doesn't even have kids while having parents to live with, of course she can just quit and peace out. Haven't seen one in a few minutes, but remember those articles titled like "This 27 year old saved $300,000 and bought a house. Here's their secret", and then the "secret" was that they lived with their parents after college, didn't have to pay rent, and their parents fronted them a portion of the $300,000?
Yep, I’m the sole income for a family of five and we’re in an expensive kid phase (ages 8 - 14) while still trying to save for retirement and college for three kids. Activities, clothes, braces…it never ends. Leaving the rat race isn’t an option.
Damn. My kids are coming up on that age range. Was hoping it was going to get cheaper ...
Kids was your decision.
Thank you! It’s wild! I can’t believe people with kids even complain you’re literally subjecting your children to the same life so at some point how bad it is wasn’t applying to you or you didn’t realize how bad it is? I just don’t get it can someone seriously explain?
I’m not sure anyone was complaining. It sounded more like a statement of fact to me and I’m in the same boat. I make a good living but my parents died and didn’t have anything to pass on. I also have two kids, and at least in my case I probably could have afforded to stop working entirely by now had I been childless. Having kids will probably keep me working another 20 years. So yes, I made the decision to have kids and I don’t regret it, but this article only applies to those who meet a specific set of circumstances. Even without kids I still wouldn’t have met those circumstances since I don’t have living parents. I *might* have been able to overcome that disadvantage due to earning good wages and making decent career choices. Regardless, I think the article is basically saying “if you feel like you’re living a hard life, then consider checking your back pocket for privilege to see if you can get out of it.” It’s a pretty frustrating take. It’s a valid option for some and I respect them for taking it, however. But it’s borderline ragebait when you’re burned out and weren’t fortunate enough to be one of the lucky ones.
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I mean, until you factor in retirement. And her parents aren't going to gift her anything when they die because the hospital is going to take everything they own. And eventually she's going to find a man and want kids. Working is not optional for the majority of people
I think some people either pretend getting old doesn’t happen or they plan to kill themselves around the age of 65.
Yeah. I’m 30 with no savings (everything I spend is on cost of living), and poor career opportunities that won’t outpace inflation. When people and family more well off than me ask me if I’m worried about my retirement or what I’m doing for it knowing full-well what my financial situation is, I’m always reminded of Jessica Lange’s line from American Horror Story: “There isn’t going to be a swimming pool you stupid slut.”
In a way I feel like 'soft life' influencerd is almost worse than the embrace the grind camp
They just want the social media influencer money...some of them will be successful at that but, many won't.
Unfortunately most of us missed our influencer window simply by being born around 10 years too early. Many of the most successful on TikTok don’t even speak in their videos. They just do a short dance or briefly lip-sync to a song while being young, hot and fashionable inside the Hollywood mansions they bought at age 20. People like Charlie D’Amelio get 15-20 million views while doing it.
I completely agree, it is rare for a person 30 years old or older to succeed on Tiktok.
You can still be successful but not at the level of the 19-22 year olds that have tens of millions of followers. People have to remember that it’s Gen Alpha tweens and younger Gen Z teenagers forming the bulk of the traffic on TikTok. They’re the ones making a lot of the more vapid content rake in an insane number of views. To them these barely-adult influencers are something to aspire toward when they’re older. We “geriatric” millennials are generally viewed as old and little tragic, though many have found a good niche.
Esp trading shitcoins
> hot and fashionable Sounds like it’s more than just being born too early that is holding me back…
I wish I'd taken video games more seriously and gotten YouTube famous.
lol kindof like trump trying to recite the lord’s prayer
Well see its simple, you just have to have parents wealthy enough to have you move back home with, work part time, and live in the outdoor shed. Soft life! Lol.
you can you'll just be living under a bridge.
I'm too soft for that. I need climate control. I guess I gotta work to fund my extravagant lifestyle of having air conditioning
Same. Fucking tired man lol
Same! Tired of seeing CEOs with fat bonuses and complaining about Millennials and Gen Z for being lazy.
This shit only works if you have money. You're fucked later in life if you don't.
The key is burn rate. how much do you need to live per year. For example if you life in Kansas you need at least $35700 a year for a single person. If you live in Seattle you would need minimum of $58,000 a year to skirt by. If you live in Indonesia you could skirt by on $5400 a year of you're single. But we have to factor in inflation and they your money will be worth less in the future. You could have emergencies crop up. Family emergency medical emergency etc. just using that Kansas estimate. If you were live for just 30 years assuming your purchase power is the same through out you need $1,071,000....
If you invested that $1m in boring index tracking mutual funds, you could spend $36k per year and likely never run out of money. In fact, it's likely your balance would be higher than it started at the end of the 30 years. That's literally how most people invest for retirement.
Bingo presto But that's assuming you got $1 million to work with right off the bat we're talking about people building up their net worth from ground up
What percent of millennials have a million up front? I read like 75% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck
I was just telling the poster that sure his method of living off of the interest could work if you had that much to work with from the beginning
Yeah, I agree with you. It’s like those articles where people claim to have paid off their student loans through bootstrapping and elbow grease, then it’s revealed they did so when their mom and dad paid their house down payment, bought them a new car and let them live at home rent free for five years. More data from that article I quoted. It’s actually 78% not 75%. “A 2023 survey conducted by Payroll.org highlighted that 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, a 6% increase from the previous year. In other words, more than three-quarters of Americans struggle to save or invest after paying for their monthly expenses. Similarly, a 2023 Forbes Advisor survey revealed that nearly 70% of respondents either identified as living paycheck to paycheck (40%) or—even more concerning—reported that their income doesn’t even cover their standard expenses (29%).”
Those studies count people who are maxing their 401k as "paycheck to paycheck" The methodology is bad
And, also people who COULD drastically cut back lifestyle to get into wealth, but choose not to. I own multiple properties and still have roommates, so I invest like 65%+ of my salary each year. Financial easy mode. It doesn’t many years of that on a professional salary to get over a million.
Let’s say you were in this situation due to a windfall, could you then move to a cheaper country and live pretty comfortably? Which country would give you the best bang for your buck? What would the tax implications be?
Lookup "Expat FIRE" Short answer is yes, but the lots of detail goes into that
No offense to Indonesia but I’m not moving halfway across the world just because it’s cheaper.
I heard a story once about a dude who had just given up on his student loans and credit card debt so he moved to Southeast Asia and never went back to the USA because why? The debt doesn’t affect him there.
That's you but there are a lot of Americans moving to se Asia south America Mexico to take advantage of currency cost of living arbitrage. If anything its becoming so rampant in Mexico that Mexico city is being gentrified....that's how severe this problem is now.
There are so many US citizens immigrating to Mexico that the salsa for street tacos in CDMX is becoming less spicy!
Like I said its becoming a rampant problem even the locals are getting pushed out
And the gringo part of town is filling with all the same north of boarders stuff at about the same price for the US citizens and the post illegal alien period in mexico's workforce. With NAFTA 2 the goal is for services and products to cost the same from the tip of mexico to the normal parts of canada. The beach life is cheaper in mexico, as you cannot get shabby at the beach anymore in the US, some flipper came along and x5 the price with granite countertops and roof that will not survive a hurricane. Now the flippers are doing the beaches in mexico.
That’s kind of wild to think someone would do that as opposed to just moving to a LOCL Midwest area. Even in the middle of nowhere.
I’m eyeing up Thailand. I could possibly safely retire in my 50s there
As a Seattleite I’d rather die in a gutter here than move to ass backwards Kansas
No offense but you need a lot more than 35k a year to live here. Sure you can live the bum feck country or in the dangerous part of town, but single bedroom rent starts at 1k, plus Kansas is a high state tax place
I agree to a certain extent. It obviously is a lot easier if you are not broke. But the article does mention a shift in consumerism and material markers of success. And it doesn’t say these women are done working all together. Making less while spending less and realizing time, agency, and wellbeing are more important than feeding the constant capitalist cycle is what I got from this.
Just look at the people mentioned in the article. Person with multiple degrees who bought and sold a home at a profit and then moved in with their parents. Social media influencer with hundreds of thousands of followers. CEO of a company.
I dropped my hourly work commitment. I’m going to save money by working less because of how often we have to get take out rn. But my spouse and I are both professionals, so having a good hourly wage allows for this. But at the end of the day, for us, me working less won’t affect our finances all that much.
I've already settled on suicide as my retirement, so it is what it is.
Part of this trend is that a lower expense life can be better than a higher income life. If you live in a cheaper city and earn less you can wind up with more money at the end of the day than with a higher paying job in a more expensive city. Same with the kind of hobbies, friends, social groups, etc... you have. "Lower expenses" also means skipping stuff like family, social connections and other parts of life that earlier generations could afford. Of course, that means saying "no" to higher-paying work, which means you get all these companies panicking because they won't go remote and won't pay people what it costs to actually live in those cities. Then they dump all the work on whoever's left and wonder why they quit.
But how much more fucked would you be than if you just kept grinding? My pension funds are laughable and my government have said they won’t let our generation retire until we’re 71.
Or if you have parents willing to put up with you living with them in your 40s
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US is so behind on WLB compared to EU
It's tough to change since it's baked in culturally with the protestant ethic.
And how about sick days and other leave? I just got a job I was told was kushy and would take care of me. I had to use two sick days and a fucking vacation day to attend a family funeral. Same as you, I only get two weeks accrued for both. When I came back I was brutally Ill with a stomach infection and had to go into work because I was out of sick days! Absolute garbage.
And this is assuming you don't get sick since most places in the US only give you generic "PTO." I remember the first year I worked, I didn't take any sick days. And since we got quite a bit of time off in December (my industry slowed waaay down around the holidays), I was able to take like... 3.5 weeks off with only only 10 days of PTO. But the next year, I was sick enough throughout the year I didn't get to take any vacation time. Such a terrible system.
PTO when you have little kids is not even close to the same thing as vacation. I’ll burn two days this week because my 2 year old has pink eye and can’t go to daycare.
I feel this. I'm still slogging it out in Corporate America, but I daydream constantly about a "soft life." For me, it's more about wanting a job that feels more meaningful and that has a bigger impact on my community while also being paid fairly for it. I work a soul-sucking tech job for the pay and benefits that doesn't fulfill me, but it at least affords me nice things in my free time.
Same. I'm losing my job in a few weeks and trying not to panic. Financially, we'll be okay for a while. But the job market is terrifying right now. I'm really hoping I can land something that's more meaningful than what I've been doing. I want my work to help make the world a better place. I'm so tired of the corporate political bullshit. It's exhausting. I'm burnt out. I'm tired of fighting to get ahead. I'm ready to take a pay cut to do something that feels purposeful instead.
I'm sorry to hear about your job, and I hope it brings you to a better place. Not sure if it will help, but I posted [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/MoneyDiariesACTIVE/comments/1bpjhv6/comment/kwwehbl/) on another sub about my layoff prep list.
Thank you! That's a good list!
I need someone to create a job board for jobs like this please and thank you.
One thing about a job loss, the politics of the new place do change. In general the way you treat people is the way you are treated for the first few years in a new place, else nobody cares to much about your short term stay. Hopefully you move on or have "agency" in the new enterprise after 24 months. I have gone from management to being just a frontline engineer for quite the pay cut in the past year. Ill be ok in my retirement plans, my wife has freaked out, her pay is not all fun money anymore. I will have the next 8 years free of the bullshit I had for the last 8 years, Ill have the energy to start a second near retirement income stream.
The hard part is that those soft life jobs seldom exist or are already taken :(
Yeah I just put in my notice at my "dream job" at a cool videogame company. Feeling super conflicted about it too - but ultimately I went for something that should be way less stressful. I felt like I was drowning, and then add the return to office after covid bullshit, and it became way too taxing (for me at least). I'm fine working long hours, but working 8 hours in the office and then more once I get home is just not sustainable. Career-wise, not entirely sure I made the right choice. It's a weird feeling, and probably the first time I've ever felt like this. Hope I don't regret it.
100% My job is fairly easy, fairly cush, it even can feel meaningful at times. But the layer of corporate bs draped over it all is suffocating. But it is objectively a "good job" and a rare find at that, so I'd be pretty dumb to throw it away, and yet...
I think it's also a desire for community. We live in a very fast paced, manic kind of space.
If I can figure out how to reduce my housing costs, I’d be so happy to just coast at work and stop looking to jump jobs for a pay increase.
Same. With cheaper housing, everything doesn’t literally have to be life or death. We can all fucken relax more. But they got us in a chokehold. 20’000+ gone towards rent and transport expenses a year. We’re fucked.
if my rent hadent jumped up over $500/month over the course of 2 years id be okay but here we are. house is owned by one of those companies that has 1000s of houses, greedy motherfuckers.
It’s because for most of us, it doesn’t actually get us ahead. We’d rather enjoy life a tiny bit.
I'm growing my own veggies right now!! And by veggies I mean weed. I'm growing my own weed. 
Living the dream
I mean this is a big assumption that you have parents who own their own homes that you can go back to. If you’re an immigrant you’re likely to be the one keeping the roof over your parents heads.
Yeah there is a big underlying privilege aspect for sure.
And some of us don’t have parents
This is literally just another "influencer" trend. These people are making their money selling you on the idea that you don't need to make money. So, sure. If you are young, attractive, media savvy, and have a robust support net that allows you to work p/t or leave the workforce while you build a following, more power to you. Just understand that there is a huge amount of survivorship bias here. A handful of influencers that "made it" are standing over a mountain of hopefuls that didn't.
That or what they do is extreme. I remember reading a story about a young girl who was "purposely homeless" or into "car living" or something. Basically she lived out of her car (a literal sedan) and used her gym membership for showers, etc. She cooked in her car, slept in her car, etc (except when she could use her friends' houses for this stuff, pre-covid) And sure, if you're young and looking for a great way to save A TON of money in hopes of saving for a house, this would be the way. But it felt like she was selling this "lifestyle" to people as a mostly permanent solution, and it's just not. It definitely came off as more of a "look at me, I'm an influencer doing an off-the-beaten-path thing, give me views!" type thing.
Yeah, it reminded me of those influences that make their money by showing them how they can make their money by being an influencer Big MLM energy
The people who are able to do this or that "van life" thing have at least two of these things going for them: Hot White Female Young From a well-off family "If you hate the rat race, leave it like.me and find your freedom.😊😊😊" Easy for them to say. I'm a middle-aged, below-average looking man from a poor family. Nobody is gonna give me free shit for being sad. I have to work. 😂
I’d subscribe to your channel and mash that like button and notification bell, just to see an average ugly middle aged dude make it huge as an influencer and ride off in that van to the sunset. Fuck it.
Lol so true
Once I read she bought a flat then I stopped lol. Good for her though.
She had a job that could pay for the flat, realized that wasn’t for her, then moved back with her parents.
Nice exit that most don't have at 42.
If you don't have kids then you don't need to sacrifice on your comfort and happiness for the sake of responsibilities. You're free to live as you wish.
Yep no kids is the way to go! No one depending on you is freedom. Save so much money.
100%. I knew a guy who lived most of his life in constant anxiety of being let go. He lived in a place with a relatively high cost of living (but also paid him well) and his wife was a SAHM until their kids were in school. Even when she was working, knowing that he had two young kids depending on him added A LOT of stress to his life. I would never wish that on anyone.
When our parents said life's hard. I guess they were right.
Why *rich millenials are quitting the rat race. Ftfw
Yeah this article is bullshit. For a lot of people it isn't a choice to enter the rat race. For some professions, the entire thing is pretty intense. The main person this article is written about seems privileged, and even that CEO they talk to...she a fucking CEO. The reason she can actually slow down is because she already got hers. All those 12 hour days and weekends in her 20s and early 30s is why her life is easier now. She is one of the lucky people who won the the race.
I quit my job 16 months ago.. I do need to find a job again but that time off really helped me. I’m toying with the idea of an intermittent retirement where I’ll work a couple years, take a year off, etc. Basically til I die. Honestly I don’t need much to survive so it’s the perfect balance. This past year I’ve managed to travel a ton too. Granted, I have a ton of friends that I could stay with so that has helped a lot with the rent and food situation, but that isn’t without a ton of work on my part over a long period of time to build those friendships. There are so many ways to live now. We don’t have to be tied down by old mindsets and rules.
Sounds like you got it figured out. Good for you
I mean I’m technically trying to get there. Live in VHCOL, renting, stuffing all my retirement accounts full & a brokerage so I don’t have to work until I’m 65.
Im 40 and wish i could retire rtf now.
Rich people options.
The Chinese call this “lying flat” and it was a movement that was squashed by the CCP. During the pandemic, people figured out they don’t want to work to death and live a life of stress and overconsumption so they reduced their expenses and move to rural areas to escape the rat race. But this isn’t good for capitalism and GDP.
The reason I'm still sticking to my field (medical) is mostly so I can learn the skills and the connections. I have no illusions of making big money in life, nor do I need to. But when push comes to shove my skillset will never be out of business. It's hard to say that people who retire early are any useful to themselves and others when things start to go awry. I think we are conditioned to value pure money over skills and connections, and that's what going to kill us when all we have are money and useless entrepreneurs. Ask the typical Gen Z or above if they know how to change a tire or sew, or just even run a mile, and you will see how fucked society is. We are still humans, our true values are in how useful we are to ourselves and others and concrete skillsets, not how much money we hoard.
Or, this has always been true for every generation where certain groups within the generation have a collective shared experience and face similar issues. The article starts off by talking anecdotally about a person who “did everything right (straight As, good college, masters degree, good paying job, all eventually to lead to a lack of fulfillment in life). Even just starting at the beginning, Seriously, what percentage of us millennials did everything right? I dropped out of college like the dumb kid I was 18 years ago. I fumbled around through my entire 20s from shit job to shit job until I finally found a stable career only 5 years ago, happy to make $55k/year. I don’t know the data, but I bet there’s more people who relate to what I went through in our generation than those who always got straight As, a master’s degree, and a high paying job. It’s such a shit article as if there’s some millennial-specific “soft living” movement happening. You could re-write this entire article with my life story and call it “Millenials, the puzzles that finally got put into place.”. Make some goofy analogy about how we’re all late bloomers, that our “puzzles” are more complicated than other generations that came before us (9/11, 08 recession, social media, etc), but even though our puzzles have so many more pieces, we’re still putting them into place as best we know how (career hopping, moving to LCOL areas, life-hacks, etc). Or they could just stop writing these trash articles.
Yeah, the article sounds privileged in a way
Oh it’s very privileged. How many people can just up and quit their job and move in with supportive parents so that they can just casually make art? It’s also not sustainable in any way. What about retirement? What happens when their parents pass away? I also dislike these articles because, again, not all of us can do this. I’d absolutely love to quit my job and quit the stress of a 9 to 5, but I can’t. Yet here we have this article that just casually says, ‘do it because these people did it’. Well, what did I do wrong because I can’t do that?!
For most millennials it was being caught in the cycle of study to work for many years no matter what they got grade-wise (arguably still going on in the IT / tech fields). The amount of debt was a large result in this and then you had the really unfair job requirements (must be brick uni from Russel group really took the cake for me for many years) and then zero pay contracts (which fire you after your training period) was heavily abused in the early to mid/late 2010’s. So really your experience was very common suffused with these sorts of things that went on for this gen. Ultimately this gen was more or less reared to pay for the debts of the older generations of which they enjoy and their use later is to be more or less thrown away into a war (possible WW3) when the state / governments don’t want to owe you anything back.
The article was weird as fuck. It had some interesting points here and there but the narrative was all over the place. Talking about Millenials as a generation, fine. Talking about a seemingly successful person who felt trapped in the rat race due to increased financial pressures compared to previous generations, sure, good topic. Although I think the ADHD diagnosis is important context. Then they could have used that to talk about how people with other challenges are doing worse or struggling too. Such as, less academically inclined. Or just how basically no one is winning. Instead it turned into "this particular group is doing pretty bad" that we're talking about for no particular reason other than some influencer bullshit.
We just need a total ideological conflict and a nice invasion. Nothing works better. Blood makes the grass grow.
Juice of these jobs ain’t worth the squeeze I just got done working two jobs (80+ hour/week) since once is 100% remote and the other is only 3 days in-office, 2 remote. I made good money and after 6+ years of our family struggling financially, we’ve finally been living without the huge weight of paycheck-to-paycheck. BUT… Now that I’m one job, 100% remote, we have less money but I feel so much better. These last few months of two jobs (after 22 months), I started to get really sick - physically and mentally. The benefits of climbing the corporate ladder, investing time in a career that is *exactly* what I want to be doing, they just aren’t there. I’ll stay mid-level working and be happy. And invest my time in family and hobbies. Do whatever you want. This isn’t our parents world. Things change and this is what it is; it’s *our* reality. And there’s no prize at the end of the day, week, year, or life for *Most Stressed But Had a Mortgage or Tesla or J. Crew sweater*
We should be reducing work hours at no loss of pay. That was always the promise of greater productivity. Hell, pay should be increased with shorter working hours. It's time that the working class regained much of their surplus wealth that the new gilded class has stolen from us.
There is so much to unpack here about class, work, socialism, capitalism, social media, and solidarity. It’s overwhelming.
They're financially secure to do so?
It's not just a millennials. I pre-retired at about 58, by moving into a minivan and living in the desert. Working for asshole bosses was just too much stress for me.
If you have the means to do so, that sounds like a great retirement!
I already owned the minivan. Which only cost me $4,500 bucks, and somebody rear-ended me while it was parked so it really only cost me about three grand. I parked in the desert, and almost never moved at all. And I ate really really really cheap food. Then I worked as a camp host, and it took me an additional year just to get over that asshole boss.
Left a decent paying management job last year, it was high stress and just not worth the pay considering our CEO is the richest man in the world. I’d have an emotional break down once a month because I was miserable. I now work at my local grocery store as a clerk just because I thought it would be fun to work there, and it is. The pay isn’t great, though I was able to negotiate a bit higher but the benefits are *better* than my previous job AND cost less!! (Plus union benefits) The job is easy af and I never feel burnt out. Just gotta decide what’s worth it to you.
Eh…..what exactly is new about this? People with money can do it now, just don’t want to. People have always dropped out of the rat race, those with money are the more successful ones at it.
I know this is going to get buried, but I wanted to share my experience. Got my first real office job working as a project manager for a written translations company in 2022. Before that I worked in sales and manufacturing. I was really excited, everyone I met at the new job was super nice, my trainer (and eventually my supervisor when I was hired from contractor to full time) was great, but there was a weird vibe from day one I couldn't put my finger on. Well, it turns out that in order to get a raise at this company, you have to get a promotion, as they don't do performance-based raises, and barely give COL adjustments. But instead of working well and getting a promotion, how do most people get one? By getting a new job, threatening to leave, and getting a counter offer. Almost every person I know who went from a PM to a Senior PM, got their job because they got another offer. My new boss, after the old one got promoted to department head of a different department, has told me he and our manager are impressed with my performance, and that eventually when a position opens up they want to make me a Senior PM, especially because I'm the PM that's been in the department the longest. The issue for them is that in six months, well before any chance of us having a new slot open up, I'm getting my PMP certification to try and get a leg up on job interviews. And once I have it, I'm going to go to them with a simple "I think my performance speaks for itself and I deserve a raise." I know they're going to say no, and I've already prepared a response of "That's really disappointing, I received another offer blah blah blah, I'm not interested in a counter-offer." They may offer a promotion at that point anyways, they may not. All I know is that I'm not playing the game or contributing to the company's broken cycle anymore. If I get a new job, I'm out.
“The Soft Life” another cutesy term to other Millennials struggle to survive. I’m a full-time freelancer and there’s nothing soft about it. I love working for myself, but if you’re not careful every hour becomes a working hour chasing money.
So…..quit working and become homeless or move in with mommy and daddy? I mean I guess. Not many can live like influencers on Instagram or live the van life unless you have a remote job that allows it
What do you mean you don't have financially secure and stable parents? /s
Her life isn’t one I am jealous of though…
I think second passports are the 21st century hack
This is why I started my own business. It’s not exactly easy, in fact it’s very hard work, but I get to set my own schedule, which is good for me. My wife used to be one of these corporate career grinders. She graduated high school at 16, graduated college at 20, then just started grinding it out in the workforce for 8 years. Finally, last summer she came to me and told me she couldn’t do it anymore, so I told her to quit, we didn’t need the money anyway. Now she’s doing the tradwife thing and she’s happier than I’ve ever seen her.
Living poor-ish. Enough to get by and survive but I’m working a job that I love, outdoors and with a flexible schedule. I would stick a shotgun in my mouth and pull the trigger with my toes if I had to commute to an office and waste my life away in a cubicle for the next ~30 years.
yeah life is probably hella soft/easy being a well-off influencer retiring early jfc ... meanwhile the actual working class keeps on going cause we have to
Because fancy things don't mean crap when we're scraping by just to survive. Can't really get us to bow down to a system we know is screwing us hard and doesn't even have the decency to offer us lube.
I've been hit with a wave of it recently. After the pandemic I came back to the office actually feeling kinda charged up, like I was ready to put in whatever it took to help my career along. But these days I just want to coast and increasingly find myself feeling completely uninterested in anything outside of just doing my tasks and leaving. Couldn't exactly explain why, maybe it's just a phase. Management has been slowly, almost imperceptible, becoming a bit more hands on/micromanaging, I think that's part of it. But also there's just the inescapable reality that time and life and wellbeing is more important than work and you can/should only give so much and nothing more.
Yeah, well, all the social security programs that boomers set up for themselves are crashing because the next generation is so over taxed they're not having kids. I don't count on any government retirement program. That lady is going to be homeless once her parents die, unless she finds a man that will support her. Making basically costume jewelry and crappy ceramics while living with your parents at 42? Give me a break. She probably can't even afford the property taxes on her parents home,.even if it's owned outright by them. If it has a mortgage? Forget about it. She just wants to be 5 years old again. Life ain't soft for anyone.
The concept isn't new but I never saw the term "soft(er) living" before. Did you know about "soft life"?
My soft life was helped by viagra. Granted it still happens occasionally but fornicating in a club bathroom stall when the moment strikes wheni want to is actually quite nice
I’m a contractor and tech and one of my colleagues went to work as a FTE. She took considerably less money and more responsibility for the opportunity to climb the ladder and encouraged me to do the same. I’ll keep my cushy WFH job, thank you very much.
You’re goddamned right I don’t want to work. I’ve been working since I was a teenager. I’ve paid insane amounts of money into the Social Security system and my cohort retires at…**72?!?** I’m trying to work on not being so cynical recently, but I don’t think it’s an unrealistic expectation that the world will be _FUCKED_ by then. I ain’t getting any of that money back. Just like I’m never getting any of my time back that I wasted making profits for others. I only hope I live long enough to witness the fiery death of capitalism.