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

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Partially because our government isn’t taking serious action to do so. Partially because every environmental scientist, environmental engineer, biologist, ecologist, I know is extremely depressed or suicidal.

Look, this is lemmy. Everyone and their fucking dog is suicidal here. It's damn near a death cult.

it’s doable. Why? Because it’s been done before

That's not an issue. We have the science. Sure, there are efficiency gains from improved science, but it's not like we're fumbling in the dark here. We know exactly what we need to do and how to do it. And it's not a braindead simplistic soundbyte like "just do a revolution" or "everyone bike everywhere". It's complex, it's complicated, but it is known. Stop using fossil fuels. Start using renewables. Capture the carbon that has already been released. It's a super simple equation. It's like dieting, you can have all the fancy diets in the world but the absolute core of it is that you need to take in less calories than you burn in order to lose weight.

or we all literally die.

That's not true and I can tell you're smart enough to know it, so I won't dwell on it. But it dovetails into the next point

We also don’t have the time (like we are out of time)

It's not a binary. We have passed the threshold where we can prevent negative effects. In that sense, we are out of time, yes. Species have gone extinct and we can't get them back. Not like, "very soon this will happen", but like "this has already happened". It will keep getting worse. That's how you have to think of it. Not like a video game. Not like "fix the problem in x years or else we all immediately die, game over!" It's "the longer it takes to fix, the worse the world gets in the mean time."

I believe, as long as the US doesn't fall into a regressive fascist science-denying hellhole (which is a whole nother thing but bears mentioning), we will fix it. Possibly in my life time, or at least be on a trajectory to complete recovery (minus extinct species) within my lifetime. A lot of people are putting a lot of money and time and effort into it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Those professions are people I know irl.

Being carbon negative will take time, like years and years, and no we don't have the technology for it and how to stopgap the warming that's already happening.

I hope we fix it. I doubt we will. I mean we are out of time because the amount of carbon we've currently released is enough to destroy all human life, it just takes a few decades for that impact to really show up. However, due to optimistic research done by scientists, there are probably numerous cascading loops that will shorten that time significantly.

The US just passed a law automatically signing people up for the draft. Trump is a viable candidate. It very well may go fascist.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago

I mean if you're determined to be depressed in the face of all evidence, I can't stop you.

the amount of carbon we’ve currently released is enough to destroy all human life

That's not even close to true.

The US just passed a law automatically signing people up for the draft.

Every male is legally required to sign up for the draft at 18, it just hasn't ever really been enforced. This is a nothing.

Trump is a viable candidate.

This is actually a big fucking deal and the most important thing any of us can do for the climate is to prevent Trump from winning.