A house, two cars, a healthy relationship ,a career, livable wage, 2.5 kids, a dog. ya know, the expectation many children were told in school.
Everything I hear on social media says this is a myth.
I have this, and to be honest, it’s exhausting to maintain.
I think that’s why you see social media push back about it being a myth.
The idea of “normal” that we pretend is true started after WW2. The US was highly unionized, highly industrialized, and most other countries were either former colonies that had been gutted economically, or were European powers that were decimated by the war.
We stepped into the manufacturing void, and suddenly one income was adequate to provide for a family. That’s not the case anymore. If your family happens to have resources now, you can maintain the semblance of that lifestyle, but you will probably need two incomes and will always be at risk of losing it.
We absolutely must, as a society, change our conception of “normal” and stop penalizing people for trying something new. Going back to some old ways may have benefit as well.
For example, multigenerational housing would solve a huge number of my problems. I want a kid, but I don’t want to pay a second mortgage for daycare. I can keep myself clothed and fed, but cleaning the house suffers. If you have more people under one roof, then you have opportunities for economies of scale that just don’t work when we all live in our own cloistered enclosures. There’s more resilience in that sort of system, and we need to be engaging with ideas like this to land gracefully as the world continues to fall apart.
My brother and I live together. A lot of people think it’s weird but it’s been great for both of us. I worked part time while going to college while he footed most of the bills. Now he’s a full time student and I’m paying for everything. We get all the household benefits of a married couple (shared chores, lower food bill, cheaper housing per person, mixed finances, etc) without the risks.
Success in early adulthood heavily depends on having familial support, especially from your parents. We don’t have that, but together we can still pool resources and do better than if we were alone.
Exactly. I don’t think I’ve ever lived alone - I’ve always either had a roommate or lived with a romantic partner since leaving my parents’ house. I’d like an additional roommate or two, honestly, to cut down even further on costs.
Seems like a nice situation indeed.
This is not a question that anyone wants me to answer right now, when my wife (34) has just been transitioned to hospice with terminal cancer. We’ve been married for 3 years and she was diagnosed 4 months after we were married.
I wish the best for all of you.
That’s tragic. I’m sorry. Life is so inequitable in how suffering is handed out. I hope you are able to find some way to lessen the pain… Have you talked with anyone about it?
Thank you for your empathy and understanding.
It has been the hardest thing I’ve ever gone through. Thankfully, I’ve got a large support network of family and friends. Unfortunately, there’s nothing anyone can say or do to take the pain away.
So sad to hear…
Nope. Already tried to go for my dream and mostly failed, so now I’m just taking it day by day.
What was your dream?
I wanted to be a professional VO actor. I got to do a few things, but not enough for it to be fully sustaining. Once my daughter was born, I decided enough was enough and we moved out of L.A. and back to Indiana where we came from so my daughter could be around her grandparents and I could be with those same people in their last years.
So I do wish I was still doing it sometimes, but if I hadn’t given it up when I had, I wouldn’t have been able to be with my father and help him through his dementia for the last years of his life and my daughter doesn’t have to go to a shitty L.A. school (not that Indiana schools are a massive improvement, but still better than the school where we could afford to live).
And now AI is going to destroy that whole industry anyway, so…
I’m not dead or in jail, so I’m doing alright. When I think about it, a lot of the things we were fed as kids was never the whole story, nor was it all true.
I generally don’t use social media (outside of lemmy) because most of it is about trying to sell parts of your life to people that usually lacks context. It’s great for sharing ideas and information though.
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Couple of curveballs, but looks like you are living more true to yourself. I count that as a massive W.
That “ideal” life has changed and is no longer the norm. Trying to live up to some bullshit idea that we think society says we should live is a trap.
Don’t compare yourself or life to others or expect anybody’s approval. Everyone has their own journey and idea of happiness. Figure out what yours is and live it.
We’re supposed to have a plan‽
the venerable interrobang
That and the Ash need to make a comeback. Encyclopædia is the only word I still see use it occasionally
Edit: and Æon
Yes and no. The original plan was to just get by and “serve my time” essentially. Then I met my now-wife and decided I should aim a little higher for her sake.
At no point did I ever have a “plan”, and I’ve been through many highs and lows (mostly lows, with respect to finances and mental health), and several completely different careers, but I’ve finally stumbled on something that pays well enough to fix the financial side of things.
The only advice I’ve got is to take it one day at a time, and try to make today just a little bit better than yesterday. Compound interest applies to life, the longer you make these tiny adjustments, the more they add up over the years.
25, no friends, never had a romantic relationship, barely ever go outside the door, living with my parents, still drudging through the last year of uni and still dealing with the aftereffects 1 year of lockdown had on my brain. But hey, at least i have lots of free time to stare at the ceiling.
47 here… I suppose im at the tail end of the people who still had a chance. We have a house that is half paid off but that needs a new roof, windows, and flooring that we cannot afford to take care of due to inflation screwing everything up. We have 2 cars but they are both 30+ years old and keeping them on the road is taking up most of what free time I have. When we got the mortgage it felt like we had finally ‘made it’ and that future pay increades would allow us to remodel and modernize our ‘fixer upper’ but the intervening 15 years has been an escalating shitshow that has us barely able to maintain what we have in its current state. It is starting to look tempting to liquidate the house and extraneous posessions and buy an old RV and become modern day nomads for our remaining years. The only thing really preventing this is that our 2 adult children are living with us still because there are no jobs that pay enough for them to move out on their own and we are not going to just dump them on the curb and say ‘figure it out’ like my parents did to me…
I’m 5 years younger, give or take. Husband and I have been toying with that idea more and more. Liquidate it all, and buy an RV to travel in, and be happy checked out nomads.
We don’t own a house, the absolute lowest rent we can find (within a 20 mile radius of our business) is $2600 a month (1 bed/1 bath), and every year Greystar and their cronies raise the rent significantly. The apartment we are in now is currently listed for right around $3k. It was up around $3200 about a month ago. It’s a fucking 1 bedroom.
Food gets more and more expensive. Insurance for everything is easily $1k a month. All the “utilities” just keep going up and up, and being in San Diego, SDGE just keeps bending us over further and further. We pay more for electricity than anyone else in the country, last I heard. Fucking why?! Car payments, and petrol is hovering right around $5.50-$6 per gallon now. We never eat out because it’s inevitably over $50, and sucks.
When I graduated high school, a house was somewhere in the $250k to $300k range, in an ok area, but far from most stuff (yay urban sprawl) with interest rates being over 7%. Ok. cool, in todays money that would be solid, but back then, I made less than $9 an hour. Then we had how many “once in a lifetime” financial crisis in the span of what 10 years, right after I got out of school.
Owning a business gets harder and harder each year, and more and more expensive. City and county both keep making up new shit to charge a $300 fee here, a $400 fee there, another $250 fee there. Plus, hacking, banks, and the rest of the shit going wrong, we just had $4k stolen from our payment account, and Intuit (the fucking devil, only behind nestle) just shrug their shoulders, say they aren’t a bank, and to get fucked. I just don’t want to do any of it anymore.
I also don’t have family to help me, so I’ve always been on my own. Your kids are VERY, unbelievably lucky. I have asked my mother for help once in my adult lifetime, and I was told I didn’t deserve it, and I got myself in the position, so I needed to figure it out myself.
I didn’t mean for this to turn into a whine fest. But to answer the original question, no, I don’t. I did the right things, I started a business to better my life, and while I’d say we are squarely middle class, but what I was promised as a kid absolutely does NOT line up with reality.
I had zero plan beyond “live on my own, away from my parents, and try to sustain that.” The churches I went to as a kid emphasized getting married as soon as you’re old enough and having a ton of kids, so I did the opposite and was a feral stoner nerd/wook for a decade and a half. One day I was doing a hungover stumble from my apartment back to my car and saw a guy my own age playing with his small daughter at the playground. She’d fallen off the swing and he was hugging her until she stopped crying. I still can’t fully describe the feeling I had there, but I shrugged it off immediately as “that ship sailed. I’ll just dedicate myself to hobbies and non-serious relationships.”
Now I’m married, have a kid, and live in a house. Life’s weird.
A house that’s paid for, wife, two kids, dog, zero consumer debt, very stable job, but I’m pretty much the most miserable person you’ll ever meet. It goes to show that you can have everything but still not be happy.
You don’t have everything. You have certain things. Are they the things you wanted, or the things other people told you to want?
This is so true. It makes it hard to talk about too, because people look at your life and can’t understand why you would be unhappy. Mental health really is a totally separate thing.
Yeah… mid 30s, stable healthy friendships, been with my long term partner for ten years, we have a nice house and two dogs, my career is going great, we’re comfortable.
Mines taken a bit longer than planned but got married and bought a house with my wife. Then split up, got divorced, let her keep the house because it was near her family and nowhere near mine. Started again from scratch at 31rented for a few years and saved up on my own (covid lockdowns really helped me save). Bought a little home of my own at the end of 2021, quite small but big enough for me and it’s less than a 10 minute walk to woodland, my new low stress (but low paid) job, a gorgeous park, shops, gyms and the train station. It took a while and it wasn’t easy but this is the happiest I’ve ever been.
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I moved out at 20, but I was privileged enough to get help from my dad until my spouse and I got our shit together. I’m always amazed by people who seemingly did it themselves.
How did they have a career with a livable wage?
Ftfy :p
That’s what I did, but it was the late 1990s so things were a bit different. Married with a kid, single-income household on the salary of a high school dropout. Fortunately for me the software industry was easy to get into back then and housing was cheaper. Funds were tight for a decade or so, but it’s gone well.
My kids all moved out in the past 5 years, skipped college and are living on their own with livable wages from jobs they like, more or less, and homes they own; one with kids, one renting their own place with a life-partner. Not having student loans helps, as does living in the forsaken US midwest where housing costs aren’t terrible (the tradeoff being that entertainment options can be more limited than closer to the coasts. A decent one bedroom apartment in a safe area is like $900, mortgage on a somewhat crappy medium-sized house like $1200, provided you got in on those sweet 3% mortgages).
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Roommates. Lots of roommates.
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Definitely did 4 in a 2 bedroom and 5 in a 3. Not counting couch surfers.
Norwegian govt gave me enough money to pay rent at a boarding school when I was 17. I earned enough in my apprenticeship to rent an apartment and have a crappy car, in a small town, for two years when I was 20. Unemployment benefit (and eggs, rice, and tomato-beans) supported me for 3 months when renting in Oslo in a shared rundown apartment with 5 other people while I was looking for work, when I was 23. The job I found, 1&2 line tech support for a small software company, wasn’t well-paying but good enough to pay my share of the rent and eat a bit better, and eventually buy a car again. And my dad has occasionally helped me with a bit of money when I made a mistake. Only what he could afford, and I paid back most of it.
So thats how I did it. I’ve been lucky. With country, with parents, and with friends.
I don’t see how people in any country can do it without some kind of govt support if they don’t start out with rich parents.
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