62% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, as holiday spending, credit card debt rise
62% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, as holiday spending, credit card debt rise
As the holiday season kicks into high gear, 62% of adults say they are living paycheck to paycheck, according to a recent report.
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damn i wonder why, ads are being driven into your brain at every second, buying things is designed to feel good, now it costs more and jobs are even more precarious
i wish we could stop shaming people for having debt. if you see people like, with receipts and a teller's hat in a film the tone is practically like they're alcoholics. ridiculous. everyone lives above their means sometimes -- a loud minority love to smugly brag about how careful and controlled and perfect they are. simply follow this budget. simply install this app. simply deny yourself any pleasures for 50 years and get hit by a bus the day before retirement. that easy. christ.
As the father of two kids, I can’t imagine how much money I saved by not exposing my kids to ads at a young age.
However, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend.
Normalizing (the opposite of shaming) people living in debt all the time is not necessarily a good thing either. Whether you actually end up able to retire or not, it is a good practice to live within your means. It's like all Zen and shit - seriously, it lowers stress, saves marriages, and eats babies, or like two of those three I can't quite recall which...
It doesn't have to be all prim & proper - things like just eating at home more than eating out, or the REALLY big one living in a cheaper place, can make such a difference.
Hating the system is okay tho. Like with a lactose intolerance, some people just struggle to make sound financial decisions and are vulnerable to get indebted for life, and it gets abused. Some people are born into poverty, and they can't meet these standards of life we have without another loan, and it gets abused. Finance is all about abuse. We can put another joke at expense of the person who are, like a gambling addict, put it onto themselves for having an expensive thing they don't even need, but in the end we know that there are long-living businesses that survive by inventing new kinds of how to abuse and gaslight a person into thinking it's nothing. It's like shaming someone for drug abuse being in a crack neighborhood. Personal agency is under the question, when it's constantly challenged by showering ads and unrealistic lifestyle models.
It's better to propose celebrating one's financial freedom and independence, starting to value it on it's own, knowing you'd lose it in an exchange. Not punching down, nor normalizing being in debt. More like treating it like a drinking binge - we can all understand if a person shows up hungover after a tragedy, we can show empathy to cheer them up, but nevertheless it progressively ruins their lives and should be taken care of for their own happiness and health. Just like alcohol denies you whole hours of your day, debt denies you wage you works hard for every day, it's just like you slave yourself off here for nothing, like there's a hole in your pocket that Mr Piggy knows how to reach, like you work not for yourself but for them and their wealth.
It should be normal to be vocal about how it's fucking great you can move places, change things without that anchor staying in your back and dragging you down. Be proud to be free. And having a party over finally paying them down.
It's like no one felt fancy having their first-ever paycheck. All these opportunities you can have for some dead presidents, mmm. Having them all for yourself once more, even minus bills, should feel like a second birthday.
Another big one is obesity - most people in the Western world are affected by it, and therefore we all are indirectly; and even skinny people can be full of saturated fats at the biochemical level. And yet we are pumped full of ads for it 24/7. You can stop watching TV or reading things where those show up... but nevertheless it surroundeds you still.
Some people fall prey to all of the things - alcoholism, obesity, overspending, and more besides - while some may be immune to some of them, but nobody among us is perfectly capable of avoiding all of them. So as you said, perfection isn't a goal that we can reach so much as something to strive for, but it is so very much worth striving for!
I agree with you, and it's damning that dietary disorders are so overlooked, including anorexia I have myself ): Another part of the medal, still shitty.
I find that schools should be a place to somehow form that first layer of defence against these patterns, and they aren't that good at that currently, nor many of them have a proper psychological counseling or even understanding how kids work. If all these shitty marketing practices would take to time to being shut off, let's at least patch the youth to ignore them.
Bolsheviks, with all their failings, did exactly that by starting with literacy campaigns and providing their thoughts as a learning material to deprogram people from tsarism (and program them into bolshevism, yes), and it worked. The fight we'd have in eleven years already started with children entering their first grade. There's no such angle, imho, to combat these problems, but making them immune here from the very start.
The same with climate change and political populism: a decade-long investment to really affect things in the future with much smaller efforts than reprogramming an adult who already formed their habits. By educating them and kicking off grifters at that level, we'd ensure they are much safer than us, that they don't need to learn it on their own.
If there's a slight chance you can do so with small things like voting, talking about how it's important, arguing with other parents at regular school meetings, do it. I do it too.
I am not sure how democracy can survive, globally. It takes so very much effort, but people are so extremely lazy, yet those two factors seem like they work against one another? Many parents just want to use schools as daycare centers, and I've even heard of some schools having to potty train the youngest ones, who somehow never did learn that at home.
While at the same time, globalization and mechanization make schooling irrelevant for so many, who will earn less in service jobs that don't need it, but still are told to vote, as if they are capable of properly understanding political discourse, and especially how to spot misinformation. Places like Russia heavily push misinformation, and many of the dumbest Western societies seem to lack any defense against it, by people who kinda don't even care which message they send so long as it lines their personal pocketbooks.
In this time period we live in where technology is at a higher level than it's ever been, so very many people fall through the cracks and cannot access the most basic tenants of previous eras - like the ability to work hard and thus buy a home, or at least be able to afford rent so as to avoid becoming homeless.
In the face of all that, schooling seems to be not a priority for people just trying to hold on for dear life through these economic upsets. It's like in chess, in order to perform a really cool end-game move, you have to survive the next few rounds first, and then the next several after that, and so on. So even if schooling would have been "the solution to all (many) of our problems", it nevertheless may get ignored, especially as several Western nations go through major constitutional crises in the next decade.