Why is it so hard for our kids to just LIVE these days?

[FirstLight]

Not sure where to post this, but it seems like a current issue and maybe there's an answer. Maybe it has to get worse before it gets better.

Both my kids are Gen Z. Both have their own issues and life choices to deal with...but why does it have to be so damned difficult for them to just get a foothold in this life?
I swear, whether its the car breaking cuz they couldn't afford something viable and that snowballs into a rent crisis, or a health issue that puts one of their partners out of commission so they cant buy groceries....
These poor kids just can't seem to cut a fuckin break!
My heart hurts because I can't even begin to figure out how to help, much less take any of them back into the house...

With the horrific things we're expecting coming down the pike with the economy, I am so freaking worried about them...

How do we get ahead? How can they even start a life?
Im sorry but I just heard from my youngest and they're down to living in an rv with no water and a heater that broke... Im beside myself ... So excuse my emotions 😭

[walkingman]

1. Because we are a nation run by billionaires would could care less about the children.

[FirstLight]

2. Well, yeah that's the short answer I guess

It's just so frustrating. I'm racking my brain trying to figure out ways to move them closer to me so that I can at least be here if they need me.

[Initech]

6. Yup, it's their world. We're just living in it.

Fuck all of America's billionaires, and they can go shove their precious money where it doesn't shine.

[RockRaven]

3. Median wages have stagnated since Carter, most of the gains in worker productivity

since then have been siphoned off by management/capitalists, meanwhile the cost of living has not stagnated by a long shot.

[FirstLight]

4. I know... There's nothing else we can do

But try and hold on and help each other. I just wish this was a different timeline we were living in... 🥺

[Basso8vb]

5. Because our society has collapsed and broken the social contract.

[RhapsodyFav]

7. Some of the old ways need to be brought back

Many reasons. Corporate greed. Political corruption. I think a small portion is due to the way people do things. It's a consumer/credit society now. I'm 62 and both my parents families came from farming stock. They knew how to cook from scratch and not buy anything unless they could pay cash. Eating out was only for extra special occasions, maybe once or twice a year. Can't afford meat. Eat beans and cornbread. New clothes were only bought for the new school year and maybe something for Christmas. Torn clothes were mended. Clothes were hung on a line if you couldn't afford a dryer and things that broke were fixed. Etc. etc.

[FirstLight]

11. Yes!

...and I hope that we can support each other and re learn some of those skills. I've got a nagging feeling we're going to need more of them as things unfold over the next years...

[Karasu]

8. The normalization of fascism.

[Kali]

9. sounds like my life back 40 years ago

not sure it is that new. maybe what is new is our not being able to help them as much as our ancestors helped us? I don't know, but your description of the cascading crap that happens when you are poor took me back in time...

[FirstLight]

10. I relate for sure..

I was a single mom on welfare for the better part of the kids lives...but my parents were definitely better equipped to help.

[meadowlander]

15. 40 years ago you were competing with 225 million other Americans for jobs and kids now are competing with 8.2 billion

globally and also all the jobs about to disappear because of AI.

We need to rethink work and human dignity in an age where we can meet all of our needs without all of us working 40 hours a week but for some reason we still do so the top 1% can reap all the benefits of increased productivity.

[Hekate]

13. That's a very ill-informed statement, Forum132. You are declaring pot is the worst drug there is...

So, worse than opioids? Worse than fentanyl?
No. Not even.

[Aristus]

30. Sounds like a perception of cannabis that's stuck in the 1970's.

I remember newspaper articles about drug busts or a traffic stop, and reading phrases like “…The suspect, crazed on marijuana…”

People don’t get ‘crazed’ on marijuana. But try telling that to some disapproving Nixon-esque newspaper editor. 🙄

[Hekate]

32. The troll sounded like someone whose native language was other than English

Possibly using an AI translation, but that’s just a guess. A shaky command of English, anyway

[kerry-is-my-prez]

14. So many of them have student loans that they'll have to start paying.

Being $30,000 to $100,000 in debt really gives a lot of younger adults a pretty poor start in life. How are they going to buy a house or even pay rent?

[FirstLight]

17. Mine didn't even make it to college...

The one that got her AA is still just struggling to survive enough to get back into school, and will take the loans to help with her income gap...so that sets her up for worse debt, but how else can she make it work? Nobody can work full time and go to school full time anymore, and pell grants are so small that it barely lasts a month, let alone a whole semester...

It's all a grift. Capitalism is not a sustainable or liveable system... especially now.

[in2herbs]

26. Capitalism cannot survive without slavery. Instead of addressing the financial side of

capitalism to right our ship perhaps we should be addressing the continuance of slavery. And, slavery is working at any job that does not provide the worker with a decent living, health care, and the ability to retire with dignity.

[Jit423]

16. It is the horrendous WEALTH GAP. Understanding why and how it is that way people willfully ignore because

they do not want to admit to themselves or others how they have been and continue to be snookered by the oligarch class about how they have been used to not only VOTE against their own interests but how to LIVE against their own interests. We are fed a breakfast of fear of others, a lunch of intolerance, and a dinner or hate by media that are owned by the oligarchs and all of it infiltrates our homes, our schools, our places of worship. So here we are. We live in a world where the wealth gap between those at the top and those at the bottom continues to widen. We live in a time where the oligarch all over the world have so much money they don't even know what to do with it so they end up just handing the money around to each other through politics and corporate agendas all meant to just fuck with the rest of us and fuck up the environment. Rather than raise wages by a small percentage of their overall profits and still be able to hand out hefty dividends to their invested base, they would rather lavish money on undeserving politicians instead of paying the same amount in taxes and uplifting the base of working men and women who actually enable their wealth.

I still highly recommend that DUers read DAVOS MAN by Peter S Goodman or, If your eyes are weak like mine, sign up for a short term account on Audible and listen to it. The book should be titled "When Having It All Is Not Enough."

A real eye-opener even for those of us who consider ourselves to be informed.

[Sympthsical]

18. Did they travel during Thanksgiving?

I cannot rate the difficulty of anyone's economic situation or future prospects unless I know whether or not they visited anyone on a holiday.

Just trying to stick with current economic modeling that is clearly in the running to win a Nobel in ten years.

[TheProle]

19. Bravo!

[FirstLight]

20. nope...

one kid worked thanksgiving, the other went to their partner's gramas house in the same small town.

I have not seen them in over a year... one is in KS and the other in NC. The only reason we all saw eachother was I flew one to a middle spot and the other one was closer to NV so I picked him up on the way. But it was literally all on my tab. Which I can't even do anymore because that savings is gone.

[Sympthsical]

21. In all seriousness, I hear you

We've been watching 10 nieces and nephews (4 we're more or less responsible for) navigate their lives. They range from 16-26 at present. The early 20s they're dealing with is so different from what I had to - and I'm only in my 40s.

The launchpad has changed. Yeah, I had student loans, but state schools weren't nearly as soul-crushing as they are right now. $16k a year just for a state university in tuition alone, not counting living and materials which can easily drive that to $25-30k. It's preposterous.

Let us not discuss rents. It's impossible. A nephew and his gf moved out on their own last year - and she is a nurse now - and they were back home after that lease was up. A lease we were helping them with. It was just too expensive to balance work, school, and the cost of living.

The fact of the matter is that we are increasingly sending our young people out into the world with their heads being held underwater. And then we complain they're too lazy to swim. It's insanity. And privileged. And cruel.

[FirstLight]

23. your last sentence is spot on...

My youngest is living in a broken RV with his GF and a 2 yr old... because they cant afford rent and her paernts are POS and abusive so they literally had nowhere to go...

I am scrambling to try and get them out here at least to Carson City so they can be closer to me. I sent my sone a list of apprenticeship programs sponsored by the labor board, he wants to go into electrical or carpentry. She is a CNA, but is only working on call, and if they call her to a place where they can't drive to, they're screwed.
He's only 22.

So many times I have seen this kid try and try and not be able to just GET STABLE so he can fucking breathe. The GF is the best thing that happened to him, because they both help eachother...she had the kid when they met (her ex was abusive)

Seems that not only is poverty (and generational poverty especially) not helping, but the ills that go with it like abuse and other generational ills. I admit I am just now working on healing my parents' contribution to my own issues. I've been sober for a year, but that didn't help me help them when they were teens or just starting out either. and there's just SO many broken families and people out there...

[Fish700]

22. Making it as a young adult these days isn't like it was even in the 90's when I was in my 20s. You can't goof around

...aimlessly in your 20s, start getting serious in your 30s and have a prosperous life. Things aren't as forgiving now. I joined the Army at 21, got out after one enlistment in the mid-90s and had to reinvent myself career-wise three times and still can't afford a house.

[FirstLight]

24. exactly...

I was 22 in 92. I've spent my life struggling to get on top of things. The ONLY reason I have a home now is because of my Dad, who was a depression kid and saved like scrooge...

[Dem4life1234]

25. Man, I wouldn't want to be a kid in this generation

Last edited Wed Dec 4, 2024, 02:38 PM - Edit history (2)

I won't reveal my age, but there was so much optimism when I was growing up.

Also, kids were not coddled by the school system.

[hunter]

28. "Coddled by the school system???!!!" WTF?

The only reason I survived high school, quite literally, is that I quit high school, as in "fuck that place, I'm not going back."

Some of my friends and classmates were not so lucky. They did not survive.

My nickname in middle and high school was "queerbait" and I was beaten bloody by classmates more times than I care to recall, and given bad advice by supposedly responsible adults that all my problems would go away if I'd just "be a man."

As a skinny squeaky highly reactive autistic spectrum kid of indeterminate sexuality, "being a man" by the social norms of the times wasn't in the cards, not even by faking it.

I was good at taking tests. That got me out of high school and into college. I was still a misfit in college but the physical abuse stopped. It took me nine years to graduate.

I've never known the optimism you speak of. I am a highly fractured human being.

My own children and their classmates, attending "woke" public schools where bullying by students or staff was not tolerated, thankfully missed out on those "good old days" and this has given them the strength to deal with a complex world that I could not have imagined at their ages.

[FirstLight]

29. yeah, no coddling here either...

both my kids had to leave HS and do home self study for different reasons...the older was the achiever who wanted to graduate early and the scholl said no. she said fuck that and got the homeschool... she graduated a year early, and was on track after her AA to go to UC Santa Cruz...then covid hit and she gave up on everything. Now she's trying to re-start in NC where she moved to be with her partner.

My youngest was the one who tried homeschool because he was a little teen angst criminal, LOL...he flunked out of that and we fought for a year to get him through it...he ended up getting his GED. Thank goodness he made it out ofthat phase alive!

[FirstLight]

31. Im so sorry you had to endure that

I cut most days once I got hold of a friend with wheels...or just hung out at their house till it was time to go home...I showed up for tests and to tunr stuff in one a week...hated HS in the 80s

[Dem4life1234]

33. You made some good points

I'm sorry, what I meant was academic coddling, not so much that other stuff.

I will say today's kids are more open and accepting to diversity compared to the previous generations. Though cyber bullying has taken off.

[hunter]

34. The academics weren't all that great either.

The school was over-crowded, under-funded, and the teachers overwhelmed.

We had biology classes that made no mention of evolution, health classes that made no mention of birth control, English classes that avoided adult themes, and history classes that didn't teach any actual history -- same as it ever was in many parts of the U.S.A..

Our Biology, History, and English teachers had actual bachelor degrees in the subjects they taught but were wary of arguing with Conservative Christian parents, or maybe just weary of it.

My last high school math teacher was a football coach.

[GPV]

27. I'm so sorry. Another worried mom here.