Claire*, 42, was always told: “Follow your dreams and the money will follow.” So that’s what she did. At 24, she opened a retail store with a friend in downtown Ottawa, Canada. She’d managed to save enough from a part-time government job during university to start the business without taking out a loan.
For many years, the store did well – they even opened a second location. Claire started to feel financially secure. “A few years ago I was like, wow, I actually might be able to do this until I retire,” she told me. “I’ll never be rich, but I have a really wonderful work-life balance and I’ll have enough.”
But in midlife, she can’t afford to buy a house, and she’s increasingly worried about what retirement would look like, or if it would even be possible. “Was I foolish to think this could work?” she now wonders.
She’s one of many millennials who, in their 40s, are panicking about the realities of midlife: financial precarity, housing insecurity, job instability and difficulty saving for the future. It’s a different kind of midlife crisis – less impulsive sports car purchase and more “will I ever retire?” In fact, a new survey of 1,000 millennials showed that 81% feel they can’t afford to have a midlife crisis. Our generation is the first to be downwardly mobile, at least in the US, and do less well than our parents financially. What will the next 40 years will look like?
Those professions are people I know irl.
Being carbon negative will take time, like years and years, and no we don’t have the technology for it and how to stopgap the warming that’s already happening.
I hope we fix it. I doubt we will. I mean we are out of time because the amount of carbon we’ve currently released is enough to destroy all human life, it just takes a few decades for that impact to really show up. However, due to optimistic research done by scientists, there are probably numerous cascading loops that will shorten that time significantly.
The US just passed a law automatically signing people up for the draft. Trump is a viable candidate. It very well may go fascist.
I mean if you’re determined to be depressed in the face of all evidence, I can’t stop you.
That’s not even close to true.
Every male is legally required to sign up for the draft at 18, it just hasn’t ever really been enforced. This is a nothing.
This is actually a big fucking deal and the most important thing any of us can do for the climate is to prevent Trump from winning.