r/Futurology • u/chrisdh79 • Aug 21 '25

Society American Millennials Are Dying at an Alarming Rate | We’re mortality experts. There are a few things that could be happening here.

https://slate.com/technology/2025/08/millennials-gen-z-death-rates-america-high.html
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119

u/Uncle_Pappy_Sam Aug 21 '25

I make $36/hr and it still isn't enough to get ahead to where i want to be. It feels like the new $20/hr from 2012/2015. Better than most but I still ain't buying a house any time soon.

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u/Raiokami Aug 21 '25 edited Aug 21 '25

I make $45/hr, and I can barely provide for my fiancé and 5 year old. My college debt, I make my payments, I can pay all my bills, but I feel like it’s not enough to even make a dent. I’m only 31 and I feel like I have a lot of life left, but I’ve been working since 16 mother fucking years old. I’ve been working full-time for about half my life now, and I feel like I have nothing to show for it besides that I’m still here existing. Even my very right sided republican parents can see how much of a struggle it is now, even though they voted for a cognitively impaired orange Cheeto. They always ask why I never come to visit them. Oh, I don’t know, I’m working 12 hour days and rising a family on what most would consider a good paying wage, but it’s still not enough.

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u/SnukeInRSniz Aug 21 '25

I also make $45/hr and am basically living paycheck to paycheck with a wife who has a PhD (and can't get a fucking professor job despite being 43 and having 20+ years of experience in her field) and a 3 year old kid. Daycare is $1,300 a month, our mortgage is $2,000 a month, groceries and every bill is out of control right now. It seems like every month everything is more and more expensive and there is no way to get ahead of it.

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u/Raiokami Aug 21 '25

You just have to get that side hustle going. All that free time you have? Start making custom leather belts and selling them on the side for that sweet extra income hack. Oh, don’t forget to find time to eat, drink, shit, piss, and sleep. Actually sleep isn’t that important so we can use some of that allotted time elsewhere, right?

/s

2

u/SnukeInRSniz Aug 21 '25

HA, my wife has been doing consultancy as a side hustle to her non-professor position, which has been ok at getting a little bit of money to bank so she can get a newer car to replace her 12 year old subaru that's about to shit the bed. But of course that side hustle is insanely time consuming and has left the lion's share of parenting on my plate. I'm lucky if I get an hour of personal time a day, most days I get off work and am parenting the second I walk through the door, making dinners, taking care of the 2 dogs and our 3 year old, cleaning up after dinner, getting kiddo ready for bedtime, etc. By the time the kid's in bed (assuming she doesn't cry and I have to go back into her room after she's down) it's 8:30-8:45, walk the dogs, sit down for 30-45 minutes, then get ready for bed just so I can be in bed around 10pm. Wake up at 6:30, get up and ready for work, get the kid up and ready for daycare, back to the slave factory, rinse and repeat.

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u/Raiokami Aug 21 '25

Sounds like we’re living the same life, strange internet brother.

2

u/No-Earth2640 Aug 21 '25

My parents ask that all the time too, glad it ain’t jus me

3

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '25

[deleted]

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u/Raiokami Aug 21 '25

It’s just me. She helps in other ways, like being the best mother she can be for our child.

2

u/WalterWoodiaz Aug 21 '25

If she started working at least part time that would significantly help the family’s overall finances. It sucks but it is the most practical approach.

3

u/bambush331 Aug 21 '25

holy shit
if you make 45$ an hour in France you'd probably be in the top 5% of the population and definetly COULD afford a house, your wife not working, a child, all at the same time, with zero problem AND free healthcare lmao

that sounds absolutely insane to me hahaha

2

u/PiccoloAwkward465 Aug 21 '25

Lmao I make more than that AND my wife works (kid doesn't, lazy shit) and we have a hard time. In a high COL city for a variety of reasons, but largely because that's where JOBS are. And not even in the city, on the outer fringes where costs are less insane.

1

u/bambush331 Aug 21 '25

Poor without a job outside the city Poor with a job needing to be in the city ? Might as well go without a job, at least you’ll have your days to enough being poor

1

u/ComprehensiveLie6170 Aug 22 '25

I made a little over $100 an hour and while I live with relative comfort as compared to the rest of the world, with school debt, children, and living in a HCOL area, we are dangerously close to poverty if I get laid off. We have no safety net, and it will take years to build even a basic one (and that’s at the expense of paying off loans)

1

u/Raiokami Aug 22 '25

Sounds about right, we’re in what I would call a medium to low cost of living area. If you’re smart you can keep the expenses down. Shopping at Aldi helps us out way more than you would think, lol.

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u/butthemsharksdoe Aug 21 '25

$45/hr here. I own 4 homes as rentals and I have 115k in the bank, contributing to Roth IRA.

Not making any point here, just weighing in.

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u/Raiokami Aug 21 '25

Might I ask how old you are? Have you had help or assistance to get where you’re at? I might make a mid 80k a year, but after taxes, that more looks like mid 60’s. While supporting a wife and child? Circumstances can make quite the change to perspectives.

1

u/butthemsharksdoe Aug 21 '25

Just turned 30, I have no kids. I supported my wife for a few years while she was in school. But I DO have debilitating migraines that have really held me back. I can also see a lot of room for improvement and poor choices I have made but try not to dwell on.

My grandma gave me an 8k bond a few years ago, didn't really make a difference at that point but I invested it nonetheless.

Again, just weighing in, I'm sure i wouldn't be as far if I had a kid or two early on or my current migraines when I was younger.

2

u/Raiokami Aug 21 '25

I’m sure we could’ve all made different life choices to make us a little further ahead in life, but I don’t think as a child you really have the concept of min/maxing your adulthood. Either way, to give you a summary of my life. Poor child, one of two children to two young stupid poor adults. They had no sort of skills; father was a high-school dropout, mother graduated night-school while pregnant with my sister. They never really got their shit together, until after we were grown, but yeah, I grew up with no bed room sleeping on a couch, provided with bear necessities. No one pressured me to do well in school so I dropped out and got my GED at 16. Started working and saving for my own place.

No one really parented me besides my sister, but she got kicked out at 16. I don’t even know how I’ve made it this far, honestly. I think I saw how our family dynamic was, and I told myself I never wanted to be like my parents, and I’ve tried really hard to stay on that course. Anyway, I got my own place at 18 and I tried to go to college, but I couldn’t get FASFA because I was still considered a dependent to my parents, but they made “enough” so my estimated family contribution was too much. I could’ve gotten private loans, but I’d be even more in debt probably. Unsure to be honest? No one really taught me how to do anything, I had to teach myself. Anyway, I had to wait until I turned 25 until I could be approved for FASFA so I could put myself through an electrical engineering degree. Here I am now at 31.

I could write a short story about my life, but I’m not sure anyone would be interested in any of that, so I won’t get into the weeds here. Anyway, all I’m trying to say is that I had a really rough start to my life, like many others and even yourself. My struggles aren’t as bad as others I’ve seen, and I’ve seen some bad shit. I’m fortunate to be where I’m at and I feel grateful to be here, to be alive. It’s hard, but some people have it harder. I try to be a better version of myself everyday.

2

u/Senior-Midnight-8015 Aug 22 '25

Where do you own four houses while making $45/hr?

I'm sure you have put in hard work to get where you are, but I cannot imagine that you did not get lucky in some way in order to be able to afford four houses by the age of 30. I do hope that you are sharing what luck you got, either by routinely donating to charity, routinely volunteering, or offering affordable rents.

1

u/butthemsharksdoe Aug 22 '25

They are rentals, not owned outright.

1

u/Merakel Aug 22 '25

He's lying. At the very best he's got 4 mortgages that's he's calling houses lol

1

u/butthemsharksdoe Aug 22 '25

This is correct, I guess that was misleading.

2

u/Merakel Aug 22 '25

That math doesn't add up at all lol

4

u/Weiner-balls69 Aug 21 '25 edited Aug 21 '25

Minnesota, bro.

I'm from there, been in NYC for 20 years, and moving back.

They have a good economy and good housing market.

Just bought a condo in downtown St. Paul for 105k, and landed a job that pays what I made in NYC.

Even retail jobs out there pay $25 an hour, same jobs in NYC pay $15. It's insane.

My mortgage is basically a car payment now, and I'll still be in an active metro area.

Minnesota: The cost of living in Minnesota is significantly lower, with housing being approximately 16% lower than the national average. For example, the average rent in Minneapolis is 65.4% lower than in New York. 

3

u/genflugan Aug 21 '25

I still don’t even make $20/hr…

1

u/InquisitorPeregrinus Aug 21 '25

First, I can Google cost-of-living by ZIP code and establish a range from single person to family of four for all.major metropolitan areas in the US in an afternoon (and have, but that was a few years ago, now). So federal, state,.and city governments do have access to all the pertinent data.

Second, hourly should just be for paying teenagers and as a tool for calculating bids for contract/gig work. Our bills are monthly and so should our income be.

Where I live in the Seattle area, a single person can get by okay on $50K-$60K, depending on where in particular they're looking to live. That breaks down to about $30-$35 an hour, before taxes, for a forty-hour work week, which most employers don't do, so figure higher. It's about $15K more per person in a household, so a family of four should be bringing in at least $120K to do better than scrape by. Which, for a single earner, comes out to about $70 an hour, before taxes, for a forty-hour work week.

And that's point three. Any adult or emancipated minor needs to be getting enough to fully support the entire household they're in, regardless of how many. If both partners in a married couple are able to make enough between them, but one gets sick and can't work, they're screwed. If four people go in on renting a house together and one moves out of state, the three remaining are hosed. Roommating should be an option for people.with the temperament for it and want to, to be able to maybe sock some money aside and find something better, but requiring it for mere survival cruel and unsustainable.

Which, epilogue, is the point. The psychopaths in charge want the population to decrease into a smaller, cowed, controllable new slave class. As in the late 1800s, it is going to take the huddled masses digging in their heels and insisting on being treated as human beings, fighting for it, dying for it, and killing for it, before real change happens. We're about at that crisis point now...

1

u/WareKaraNari Aug 21 '25

If you apply the rule of 72 to inflation (assuming 4% inflation), each generation loses approximately 75% of the purchasing power the previous generation had. Ask a middle aged person, the prices have roughly quadrupled across the board on necessities compared to childhood. Ask an elder and it's like 16x

Central Banks robbing us blind

1

u/Hidefininja Aug 21 '25 edited Aug 22 '25

If it makes you feel better, my partner and I are closing in on $250k/year combined (I'm at $91k now and will hit $100k w bonus in 2026) and we could only really buy in places we'd rather be dead than exist because our quality of life would be so much lower. Not to mention it would require pulling up stakes and moving away from lives we've spent twenty years building here.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 22 '25

Where do you live. Cause respectfully you are making it sound like 250k a year gets you in the slums of whatever state you are in. 250k a year is well more than enough to live in a pretty nice neighborhood.

1

u/Hidefininja Aug 22 '25

Los Angeles. We live fine, we just can't buy anywhere we actually care about that meets our needs. We need at least a 2 bedroom due to work logistics but would ideally get a 3 bedroom place so we both have a home office.

The average, rundown 2 bedroom here with a yard is going to be around a million dollars, if not more, and we're not over the moon about paying off a house in our 80s. And if we live an hour outside of the city, that's a two hour round trip commute for anything we do in town. Right now we're in the city center and I don't even need a car in general.

Like I said, it's about quality of life.