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Im okay now – but that could all change with a cancer diagnosis or car accident.

Most Americans are in debt and living paycheck to paycheck, it’s nothing new and won’t change until people stop voting against their own interests.

This article is very well written and throws up some interesting points:

It seems impossible to me that anyone who is not already wealthy could be riding out this cycle of existential instability without at least a little white-knuckling through scarcity — but then I open Instagram. At some point over the last several summers, seemingly everyone I know started lounging along the Mediterranean (myself included). At home, at least according to my Explore page, they’re lounging on the same designer sofas. Silent luxury is out; power-shouldered, fur-coated Wall Street wealth is in. But are the boom-boom-aesthetic business boys comfortably absorbing the cost of all that Armani, or are the algorithms, having given us daily glimpses into the highly varnished lives of the megarich, pushing us all toward an unattainable lifestyle just as basics become unaffordable?

I suspect that it’s on purpose: Instagram is owned by oligarchs and they control the flow of news. If everybody you know and all the influencers overspend routinely, you start thinking “well, everybody’s doing it, so it must be ok”. That leads you to spend more, stimulating the economy.

Consider the following diagram:

The way i see it, “consumer spending” is actually a mechanism to slowly, continuously re-arrange wealth, from the people to the owning class. The more iterations of this process happen (the more often people spend the money that they earned through wages), the more wealth is shifted from the workers to the owners.

Also, the article serves up this gem of a sentence:

[…] friends and acquaintances keep serving up the same logic: When world governments seem content to let the planet nuke itself, what’s the point in saving for the future? Spend on big experiences while it’s still possible to have them! See Venice before it sinks! You may be living beyond your means, but at least you are living.

I have indeed got the impression that a lot of people around me do not think that they will have a future, or that “there is a future”. You can see this crystal clear in Germany’s “last generation” (Letzte Generation) movement where teenagers form a group to protest/say that “they are the last generation, after us there will come no more”. Also it is visible in a lot of other people that people in general don’t even seem to consider that there is a future in 100 years. Everybody gives me the vibe that they’re fully in line with “enjoy it as long as you can, because it won’t last forever”. This is certainly one of the defining thoughts of the generation today and nobody’s doing well. I seem to be one of the few (very few) people who actually believes in the future.

And this general sentiment also fits very well into the following paragraph:

Right now, chronically overspending seems to be the default mode for many people. The United States may be teetering on the brink of recession, which — were it to happen — could be as devastating as the 2008 crash that happened during Sarah’s college years (at least according to some experts). Even workers whose inflation-adjusted earnings have consistently grown over the past five years may feel squeezed, because the growth isn’t enough to account for the rising cost of pretty much everything else. “People tell me rent and housing costs eat up half or more of their paycheck,” says Dasha Kennedy, the financial educator and activist behind the Broke Black Girl. “Child care feels like a second rent. Health-care costs come out of nowhere and wipe out savings. It’s a never-ending cycle.”

Which states that the economy simply has no demand for the working people anymore, or they would pay them more properly. It’s really that inflation is under-reported, and if you took the actual inflation such as evident on food and housing prices, you’d see that people’s wages aren’t keeping up with inflation for multiple years now.

I carried my student loans for about a decade, and they were pretty small. I live in a civilized country, so any medical expenses were already covered by me and other taxpayers and not recouped hand-over-fist afterward by mercenaries.

Now I’m doing well, have savings, very small investments to supplement my union retirement if I make it that far, and we could afford the odd trip before CoViD. But we don’t live large, and my free-lance gig helps pay for some modest gear upgrades.

But this is 2025 so now we have our contingency route and nearly a go-bag just sitting there.

Now?

Living expands until just beyond means, then stops. If means shrinks, like lets say someone placed massive tariffs on our main supplier of goods, then living shrinks to meet the means.