No Stupid Questions

Humans have a great capacity to adapt. Consider people around the world who have adapted to even worse circumstances.

Many of us will not.

This is a circumstance born, in no small part, of the idea that manual labor and menial labor is meaningless and has no real value.

Our economy has been sold from beneath us, and the overall cultural ideologies result in most people avoiding these things. But it is the only thing that is actual production - the rest of the economy is all efficiencies or expenditure.

Slowly, the wealth has slipped away, and now it's becoming apparent to people, and they don't know who to blame.

Find or make an enclave and survive together.

First you look at other countries around the world. Then you see that lots of people somehow eke out OK livings despite horrible shit in government. So maybe you can too.

That's not to say the horrible things to come are acceptable. Rather, you're probably more capable than you believe. Believe in examples of billions around the globe.

For the last 40 years through free trade we’ve had a large population join the market from countries like China, Russia, India etc.

Free trade with China has given us cheap consumer goods but at the cost of our own manufacturing which suppressed wage growth and inflation for a long time. We hit the peak of this just before Covid and we are now feeling the after affects.

China’s dramatically aging population along with geopolitical instability means that the logistics and manufacturing capacity that existed overseas for 20 years Is now failing. The US forced to reshore or nearshore (Mexico) much of its manufacturing capacity. Basically if we want to continue to have stuff we need to find somewhere else to make it besides China. This isn’t a cheap process and it won’t be as efficient as the old system.

Russia’s war with Ukraine has huge implications on resources and energy. Russia exports a lot of raw materials, fertilizer products, food, energy and aluminum. Taking them offline has affected international trade and has many many markets.

Our institutions that support labor have also withered over the last 40 years. Labor unions don’t have the sway they used too and politicians have ignored their needs for decades. Big business will not just give wage increases much like in the 20s and 30s Labor will need to grow and become more combative than it currently is to see any improvements.

In short the world order that we all grew up in is breaking down and changing. It will be at least a decade before these changes finish shaking out and we see solutions to the problems we are facing fully materialize.

You'll realise just how little people will make do with. And how much lower what you considered a terrible standard of living can be.

and it'd* better be a* nearly six-figure dual income

Is not about politics

It’s all about politics. Just not about the 24/7 clown show that passes for politics in the US.

It’s about who gets what, how the spoils are divided. It’s obvious how the deck is stacked against ordinary people: the middle class is being bled dry and the hoarder class is taking off with all of it.

What’s extraordinary is that that somehow passes for ‘natural’ and ‘not about politics’.

It is about politics. You need to organise yourselves better into unions. Then, you strike until you get what you deserve.

Why does Denmark and the rest of the Nordic countries have so high quality of living and happy people? Cause the people realized that you need to work together to get what you want. You need to have solidarity with your other workers to push for better compensation and work environments.

Do this, or you're doomed.

Learn how to live in poverty and go unnoticed, because no grand and noble revolution is coming

Honestly, the ones who survive well are the ones who build communities that take care of each other: Sharing meals, sharing gardens, sharing skills and labor, sharing rides, sharing emotions and stories, etc.

Capitalism was always pushing the US towards a gigantic class divide, and Boomers and Gen X carried that torch at the expense of their descendants' future. Communities of support are something that will have helped regardless of who is carrying what ideology and regardless of who is in charge, and they thrive in adversity.

So if you're looking for advice, build your local communities. Strengthen your bonds with your neighbors. Participate in local governance.

You get milked by the big corpos. Money flows from the poor to the rich.

And as long as you have only these two extreme right wing parties, there is nobody who would change it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine

You can survive on very little, it just will be a lower quality of life than previous generations which feels bad, but you do what you need to in order to get by.

The simplest way to deal with all of this is to actually perform the financial calculations to see what's the best situation for you.

A $80,000 a year job in a city may actually leave you with a lower quality of life than a $40,000 a year job in the middle of nowhere if you're spending $4,500 a month on rent for a two bedroom apartment in the city, and it would only be $1000 for a two bedroom house the middle of nowhere.

Calculate some possible budgets for different areas and different lifestyles, and find out what works best for you. Being in a city is not as good as it used to be financially speaking.

If you're having trouble "surviving" either way, you need to figure out how to reduce your costs and/or up your income.

Common things like sharing a home (with a partner or roommate) can reduce your costs massively, trying to live alone is pretty stupid financially right now.

Learn how to cook things yourself, it's not hard with Youtube these days, you can massively slash your food budget by not eating out or buying pre-made food. One of the stupidest things I see is people picking up a second job, making very little per hour, and then spending 6 hours of their income on a dinner from a restaurant (eat in, eat out, doordash, etc.). You would have been better off just buying decent meal ingredients for 2 hours of your wage, and then spending 1 hour cooking and cleaning. Then you've got 3 hours worth of time back that you can either use to work for more money for other things, or just not bother working at all to have more time for you.

If you're stuck in a dead end low wage job, invest time in getting new skills that will enable you to get a better job. It's never too late to retrain for a better position unless you've already retired.

I’m leaving. I’m tired of fighting.

To be fair the USA seems to have the brightest future compared to basically any other country because you guys don't have this imminent demographic collapse like most other developed countries like Japan, Korea, China, Germany, Italy, etc. And because of your geography and size you are would only be mildly affected by a WW3.

Perhaps it helps to look at other parts of the world and see how comperativelly well you guys have it.

I guess the biggest challenge is to minimize the huge divide between the rich and the poor. Sadly you missed the opportunity to choose Berny Sanders as your leader a couple of times, that would have helped a lot.

The america empire is following in the exact same footsteps of the Roman empire. If you fail to learn from history then history will repeat itself. The great American empire will fall and there will be nothing u can do about it no matter how hard u try.

"Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

— Dylan Thomas

buying a house is simply out of reach unless you have dual income

Not in all areas of the United States. Houses routinely sell for under $200k in my city. There's also many for under $100k.