I related way too hard to your tags on that post about lowered expectations post 2008- I also graduated college in 2009 when all my friends did in 2002. They're married, have careers, kids, hell two of them have a house. Meanwhile I'm 40 and living like an 18 year old at best.
Man, I could go off. I could rant for an hour. I’m 38 and there’s so much I want to do with my life but just getting someone to hire me, let alone pay me the kind of money that would allow me to even pay my bills is just.... fuck, it makes me want to cry sometimes. I was dealing with things in 2000 and didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life; I took two years off after high school to work crap jobs, then a year to do some audit courses at UConn before going for a degree. I got so much pressure from adults to go to college so I could get a “real career,” and once college was done I had five figures of debt and nobody was hiring, not even McDonald’s (I wish I was kidding, but the town I grew up in, where I was forced to move back to to live with my parents for a bit, is a suburban Connecticut hellhole). The Nuclear Life Path got wiped out in 2008, there’s no way to rebuild it (it was based on lies, exploitation, and credit card debt anyway, so who wants that back?) and the people who got themselves sorted out before 2008 -- the types of people who write thinkpieces about Millennials killing industries and not having babies -- and the people who are well-off enough to be sheltered from the same misfortunes don’t understand (or care?) that everyone else has a completely different way of life.
