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‘Will I ever retire?’: millennials wonder what’s on the other side of middle age (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 6 months ago by MicroWave to c/news

239 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Claire*, 42, was always told: “Follow your dreams and the money will follow.” So that’s what she did. At 24, she opened a retail store with a friend in downtown Ottawa, Canada. She’d managed to save enough from a part-time government job during university to start the business without taking out a loan.

For many years, the store did well – they even opened a second location. Claire started to feel financially secure. “A few years ago I was like, wow, I actually might be able to do this until I retire,” she told me. “I’ll never be rich, but I have a really wonderful work-life balance and I’ll have enough.”

But in midlife, she can’t afford to buy a house, and she’s increasingly worried about what retirement would look like, or if it would even be possible. “Was I foolish to think this could work?” she now wonders.

She’s one of many millennials who, in their 40s, are panicking about the realities of midlife: financial precarity, housing insecurity, job instability and difficulty saving for the future. It’s a different kind of midlife crisis – less impulsive sports car purchase and more “will I ever retire?” In fact, a new survey of 1,000 millennials showed that 81% feel they can’t afford to have a midlife crisis. Our generation is the first to be downwardly mobile, at least in the US, and do less well than our parents financially. What will the next 40 years will look like?

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[–] afraid_of_zombies 36 points 6 months ago (4 children)

try to keep an eye on neat, simple engineering projects from poor countries because we may need to rely on similar options soon enough ourselves.

I am just sitting here as a infrastructure guy trying not to have a mental break of crying and laughing. It's so fucking bad and getting so much worse. You know what was today's item? I am working on one small system for a replacement wastewater treatment plant for a town of about 3,000 people that the pieces of shit general contractor has dragged out for 8 fucking years. 8 years for a project that should have taken 6 months. They haven't done any work. Longer it goes on the more they get to bill. Oh and my favorite part? The general contractor is one of the bigger ones, they have a Wikipedia page.

Cost disease is going to break us. Entire country is going to be spending a trillion a year with the water supply of Flint.

Now if you excuse me I am going to drink now. Cause fuck it I can't save anyone.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Cause fuck it I can’t save anyone.

You've done your best. It's definitely not personally your job to save anyone anyway. If we can't figure out how to do it collectively, well, maybe we just suck as a species. Thanks for doing what you could and can and don't bemoan yourself for your inability to fight a broken system on your own. I don't expect engineers and scientists and doctors who have been telling us this shit needs to be done for years to have any fucking patience for it anymore. You've all done your bit.

Also, thanks because I've just been assuming as much has been going on behind the scenes for a long time. I've been saying for years the entire nation gave up on any idea of long-term maintenance of anything in the 90's. We've had failing infrastructure grades for bridges all over the country since at least 2010, if not earlier, and fuck-all has been done. I'm not even close to being an engineer, but I've helped some friends with some basic construction and I'm just floored at how many corners are cut on so many things in our country. It's prevalent everywhere, it's part of why there's so many data breaches in the tech sector. They don't want to pay to update old systems to bring them up to compliance. We've literally built workarounds in the form of Virtual Machines just so people can run outdated software on modern hardware so insecure outdated software can simply keep being used despite its age. So yeah, feeling vindicated that it's not all just in my head.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

We've literally built workarounds in the form of Virtual Machines just so people can run outdated software on modern hardware so insecure outdated software can simply keep being used despite its age. So yeah, feeling vindicated that it's not all just in my head.

Insecure outdated software AKA proprietary software. Fuck that shit.

Brought to you by Free Software Foundation.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

Are lawyers involved? You should sue to get it for free, not to pay more, because contracts like that usually put a penalty on the supplier if they break their promises

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I appreciate your efforts, but we as a nation were not guaranteed to make it. It was up to us to make it, and we failed ourselves by devolving into petty tribalism between two 1% owned political parties.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I at first I expected you to work in IT infrastructure specifically, but sewage? When sewage can't keep shit together - nothing in country can keep shit together. USSA is slowly turning from worse than Russia in some areas to worse than Russia in all areas.