Two economic musings:

1) What with the discussion of home prices starting to make its way into presidential campaign talk, I was thinking back to a number of friends around my age who've gotten recently screwed or have just gotten by by the skin of their teeth, with home ownership.

Like, they had a post-pandemic divorce and were forced to split with their spouse and look for a home but prices have now forced them to rent instead -- though, admittedly, one of those people did find an affordable house, because someone had committed suicide in it -- or, like how someone I know picked up stakes and sold their house and moved to North Carolina and then when that area didn't work out professionally like they had thought they moved back to my homestate, only for them to find out that the general rise in housing prices combined with AirBNB tourist area buy-ups had excluded them from the very market where they'd just owned before!

It really is something, to know like 3-5 people like this, just from my narrow social circle.

2) Overall, it's astonishing to me how it's been "always something" generationally, where it's just blow after blow after blow that you can't foresee economically, like (in roughly chronological order):

- the brewing student debt millstone;

- the 2008-9 economic crisis;

- the internet really coming into its prime and hastening deprofessionalization and precarious work;

- the internet really coming into its prime and increasing the amount of job applications and the intensity with which you have to detail them, including to circumvent resume-screening software;

- wage compression;

- lost years to the chaos of the pandemic; and

- rise in housing prices.

Conversely, there are some bright spots, like the Affordable Care Act, and the current strong market and higher wage floor for everyday jobs, currently.

Overall, though, you really do look back, and it's been like 15 years-ish of the ground shifting beneath your feet in ways that are very hard to anticipate and that are hard to cumulatively compensate for, if you've experienced multiple setbacks.  Like, one or maybe two would be doable, but multiple multiple ones?

I really do feel like the vibes are shifting and the way to go nowadays for a certain type of person who's had a certain type of trajectory is to "check out" and just not deal with the bullsh*t anymore.

Too much lost time and too little to gain with any decent chance of certainty -- why bother putting the effort in?

There's more to life than sinking ungodly amounts of time and energy into the mere hope of indefinite rewards.