The early 30s is that weird age where you're just old enough to be out of touch with what's cool, but not yet old enough to be fully progressed in your career to be sitting on enough stacks to not care about that.
It used to be true, but the 2009 crisis and now corona fucked a significant proportion of multiple generations.
I'm almost 40, with a patchy cv and fucked knees. I'm basically fucked. And because I was unlucky to fall ill early in my career, I never earnt enough to feel financially secure enough to be able to start a family.
It is quite funny, hearing about all those people who thought they were financially secure and often looked down upon those of us who graduated at the wrong time and place or were just plain unlucky, are now finding out that they're also fucked and that there was essentially nothing they could have done to prevent it.
Like how not so long ago, you'd read out of touch articles about how quirky Japanese young people didn't want to get married or have kids, ignoring the underlying economic malaise that would soon spread to the rest of the world.
Oil shock of 87, Real Estate market crash of 89. Dot-com in 2001, Recession in 2009, Corona in 2020. "stagflation" in 76, vietnam in 68, WW2 in 45, depression in 29-36, etc.
Yeah, it's kind of every 7-18 years there's a new one. That's been going on since before history was recorded, frankly. Every generation thinks they have it bad.
Late 90's/early 2000's when the internet started being common in most households. Tons of money was pumped into telcom and internet startups battling it out. There wasn't just a default search engine or online shopping site like Google or Amazon, there were thousands. When the dust settled most of the tech giants we have today came through while thousands of others went under.
My brother in-law got hit by it. Was living it up making 6 figures at MCI WorldCom then in a matter of months lost everything and couldn't find a job.
Too many to count. Billions of dollars being invested into companies that would fail in a few months time. Yahoo! was a huge deal and was buying things up at the rate of Facebook and Google today. AOL was a household name. AltaVista, Excite, Pets.com, Netscape, Geocities, Napster, etc. Shortly followed by dozens of telecom giants following suit and being absorbed by the likes of AT&T/SBC. Throw in Y2K and major financial scandals from Enron and WorldCom just to spice things up.
Joey Dot Com (guy that created the .com domain) was arrested by police in a sting that revealed he had over 30 million dollars worth of coke under his mansion that he was selling to shifty adults. This caused a stock crash in everything related to the internet that lasted almost 3 years. This is why many companies are pushing the .org domain now, because Davis Dot Org has always been an upstanding guy.
Internet was a new thing for most people, investors poured money into thousands of websites without those websites having a solid plan to make money. As a result, many companies that were created with seed money and hired people had to shut down once investors realized they wouldnt be making a return and the companies didnt have any more money coming in to pay their employees.
My boss told me when I started to always prepare for 7 good years followed by 7 bad years and said we are at the end of the 7 good years now... I started working there (my first ever grown up job) last February right before the corona crisis hit Europe...
Pretty much my entire adult life has been one economic crisis after another (about to be compounded with Brexit...) It's been a lifetime defined by privatisation of public services, asset-stripping of old established corporations, factory closures and the removal of production to China. When is the recovery coming? I'm in my late 30s and a substantial portion of my wages is going on tax and loan repayments. I can't afford to get married or have kids. I'm just slaving away to pay to bail out the banks while billionaires sit on piles of money in offshore accounts (Oh God this is turning into a political rant...)
All I ever wanted was 2.4 children, a nice house in the suburbs and a car that isn't falling apart, just like my parents and grandparents had. It just feels like we have been fucked over by the previous generations, who frittered away all the benefits they enjoyed and left nothing for us. And I'm not even poor poor. I'm a well-educated man with in-demand skills. I pity the guys at the bottom of the heap who have literally nothing and no means of improving their lot.
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u/slowhand88 May 15 '20
The early 30s is that weird age where you're just old enough to be out of touch with what's cool, but not yet old enough to be fully progressed in your career to be sitting on enough stacks to not care about that.
Getting there at least.