(water is wet and fire is hot).
Reporter: And how do you feel about this?
Me, A Gen Xer: Ehh… whatever
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Living with parents isn’t ideal, but a part-time barista job in a cosy market town, with not a single work email boring into my soul every hour of the day and night, feels much more conducive to my wellbeing.
Millennials have been handed an untenable position, with adversaries citing avocado toast and a poor work ethic as symptoms of a failing generation.
Twice I have been hidden homeless while working at full capacity; and my last landlord was legally allowed to raise rents from £600 a head to £900, with no maintenance or material changes to the property.
Charles Bukowski wrote his novel Post Office in 1971, which detailed his morning job as a mail carrier that allowed him the freedom to write, drink and bet on the horses for the rest of the day.
For those of us who didn’t have all the advantages listed in this article, the option of leaving a hated job and going back to live in mum and dad’s beautiful home was not there.
What saddens me about this account of millennials is that it appeared to present a choice between working hard for money and power or opting out to please yourself – and not so much about finding what was truly meaningful and making a worthwhile contribution to the community.
The original article contains 1,154 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Reading about rent increases boils my blood, the ultimate example of getting money because you had money to begin with. Not talent, or production, or anything like that, just had money, get money.
Do you regard other forms of investment as evil also?
Not at all. It’s rent seeking, wealth from wealth without the creation of wealth, that I have a problem with.
Some (perhaps most) renters do create wealth by providing resources and maintaining the property. That’s why they are paid for it.
Gonna disagree on that.
Rent seeking mindset I call it — too many people and companies seeking to press others to extract their money rather than providing tangible value to society, and it’s not generally millennials doing it. It’s the disgusting underbelly of the entrepreneurial mindset the many of the past used to frame capitalism.
I think there’s clearly some societal benefits to distributing the work of maintaining housing in this way. Is there a cartel making the prices go up more than they should in a working market or what is the reason for it?
Greed is the reason, because they can. People need housing. Same way grocery stores are getting away with charging so much, people need food. The working market theoretically should fix this in time, but so far it isn’t. New houses and competing grocery stores don’t appear overnight. I fully agree with you, rentals have their place and there can be many benefits, but without proper oversight and rent control this was always going to be the outcome - squeeze as much cash out of people until you literally can’t anymore. I don’t think there is some secret collusion going on between landlords (at least in most cases), there’s really no need. Just watch rental prices, then when the area average becomes higher than you charge for your unit, you raise yours slightly above that. By doing that you’ve now ever so slightly increased that area’s average, now other landlords will raise their prices slighy higher, causing other landlords to raise their prices slightly higher, rinse and repeat. Note that I might be completely off the mark here but this lines up with my experiences at least.
Rent-seeking is essentially the core goal of capitalism.
More like - EVERYONE is.
Everyone who isn’t well-off that is.
Everyone who isn’t well-off that is.
Which is practically everyone.
I don’t know about you but I’m in the top 49%. Just a couple more loot boxes and pay-to-win character enhancements and I’m probably gonna crack top 45%!
…and increasing, as regulatory capture (especially failure to enforce anti-trust law) allows big corporations to continue hollowing out the middle class.
It’s whether the fight is worth it. That’s what’s been getting me. Knowing that there will be battles. Bad days and bad years. Bad people you’ll have to manage or manoeuvre around. Just waiting and being on the scene or networking looking for the lucky break to drop. For what? Really? And what are the chances that it won’t go far and that you’ll know it’s not insignificantly attributable to that lucky break just not dropping for you. Which is fine, that’s the way of the world, as well as the difficulty of labour. But why the battles then and the tolerance of shitty people in positions of power and the sycophancy networking? What for?!
Call overtime be calculated above 32 hours a week?
Existence is exhausting
Not me, I love it.
You go get your side hustle on, player!
Advocate for the 32 hour work week with no drop in pay. Join unions, create unions, call your representatives (and I know most of them are shit).
Convince your peers to advocate for 32 hours as well. There’s no reason why most jobs couldn’t do that. You’d be astounded at the amount of time wasting that goes on in the defense industry work I do.
Yes. This. 32 hours
If less is being built, how will this help you to have less spending power?
Why would less be built?
Studies have shown that total productivity goes up if we work eight less hours. Those last eight hours lower economic output.
Its not just housing. In the last 20 years life has become much more expensive. Car insurance is 5x, house insurance is 3x, the $20/family house phone is now a $40/person cell phone, …
I get a little tired of the anti-landlord rants. People want for the to be no rentals?
It’s because of inflation and you can blame that squarely on your fucking corrupt governments all over the world.The only way to avoid this is to opt out of their fiat money printing system and buy gold or some sort of crypto.
I get a little tired of the anti-landlord rants. People want for the to be no rentals?
People aren’t generally mad at the concept of rental property. They just want things like rent control or more zoning for more cheap multifamily residential buildings. The reason why people are upset at landlords specifically is because they are the ones who vote these against these policies because it would theoretically lower their property value.
People want housing to be affordable, and not a profit scheme run by hedge funds to squeeze the last bit of dignity out of society by raising rents and purchase prices based on bullshit numbers they’ve made up with zero factual basis for cost as justification.
Pretty much nowhere in the US can you afford to be in an actual house as a renter even without making double minimum wage. 78% of the US is living paycheck to paycheck, so how in the hell are they going to afford deposits + rent, insurance, moving costs…etc. Get informed.
Profit scheme run by hedge funds? I’m not sure what that has to do with landlords.
If someone owns a home that they aren’t currently living in, what do you propose they do with it? They should take a loss and let you live there cheaply because your job doesn’t pay enough? I don’t remember any time when minimum wage (or even twice that) was enough to buy a home.
Again, I implore you get informed before you run off and start conversations about such things if you’re not even aware of what’s going on around you. You’re doing a disservice to society, and also yourself.
I thought we were done with the “Millennials xyz” headlines after 20 years of it.
