I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
“Nothing new under the sun” I suppose!
I agree. But I also am old enough and have also seen enough to know I have it a lot worse than a lot of people from the present and past. I have known this at 27, at 22, and at 20. These are actually not contradictory statements.
This is a pretty odd assumption. A middle class person to me would be someone who doesn’t struggle to pay rent/bills, and is saving up for a property or is already paying a mortgage without extreme sacrifices. They own property, or in (nowadays) rare circumstances a productive business and at least some of their income thus isn’t generated from wage labour.
This is of course a very conservative definition, but let’s go with that:
An extremely lavish internet connection of half a gigabit down with no caps or limits here in the UK costs about £30 or less a month and a phone or basic PC costs less than £100 even for both, easily.
The council tax alone, before things like electricity, water exceeds that. My rent is 11 times that and is extremely cheap compared to living in the city, which I can only do because I WFH - a rarity.
A median downpayment on a house costs £75,000 for a 30 years long mortgage, this is approximately twice the median, pre-tax income for full-time employees in the UK of £37,430.
Housing price rises, and even rent/bill/cost of living rises have also outpaced both wage growth and even in many cases inflation. Purchasing power is on the whole - down.
Focusing on the only things that have gotten enormously cheap very much contrary to the general trend - like access to social media, internet and electronics is like looking at a really nice tree when the forest is on fire.
Housing prices? That’s your argument? That’s your bleak outlook? Dude, up until relatively recently you couldn’t have a baby without it dying or dying yourself. Common cold? Deceased. There are people alive today who are being murdered because their existence maddens someone and your argument is that your housing costs have gone up.
Get some perspective. Your life isn’t that bad.
Housing prices are everything. We all die. Now or in 50 years barely makes a difference in the grand scheme of things. But imagine dying and your family can’t even grieve because your dead carcass fell behind on rent and was tossed out in the trash by your slumlord to get in an Indian family of 6 for twice the rent in your tiny attic. That’s life.
I am trans and people have threatened to murder me for my existence before I started passing. In both my country of origin and my current country of residence there’s a concentrated institutional effort to effectively extinct people like me from public existence by various forms of lawfare and propagandistic fearmongering.
Don’t get me wrong, the rightoids will come for me, and after that, they will come for you, too, that’s just conservatism for ya, but when they do come, I’d rather meet them in my owned house, filled with guns and ammo, and maybe a nice pet dog by my side that I’d look after and let escape before shit hits the fan, rather than a rented flat I can’t even hang a poster up in without incurring some fine or fee.
And if they don’t come, a house is an asset, the asset, the only productive one in reach now that businesses aren’t viable anymore thanks to landlord and digital feudal lord wealth extraction - it’s retirement and it’s everything, pensions wont be a thing by when I retire, and trust me being a minority with money is much better than being a minority without.
Can’t afford a home? That means you’re homeless. That’s a crime now. To the prison work camp you go, chop chop.
Still can’t in a lot of places. Not to mention, in America, assuming you both survive you’re now $50k in medical debt for the privelege of reproducing.
People still die from pneumonia daily.
Two problems can exist at once.
My friends and family and coworkers are the ones being threatened with murder because their existence maddens someone. Get some perspective.
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You know nothing about my life. Nor, apparently, the lives of your neighbors who suffer beside you. To be this ignorant is a great privelege. I hope for your sake you never need to learn about the reality of the world around you, because when it comes knocking, it will not come quietly.
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That’s what I’m saying. Dude, you are dense.