Finding Financial Stability in America

I’m writing as someone who is the last of the millienals or the beginning of gen z, depending on who I talk to. I will discuss my own struggles with finical stability as well as others. Here in America, our value is only determined by how much work we put into industry jobs and how much money we have. There isn’t much out there for working moms, homesteaders, volunteers etc. The country I live in wants everyone to be part of industry and will try and make things harder for people who want something other than that. These jobs don’t nesscrily measure a employees productivity and compare how much they make to it. And sometimes there are people who work way more for less and people that do less for more. And it seems most of us aren’t aware that a little less than half the US makes less than 15 dollars an hour. And whether that’s really good or bad really depends on what state those jobs are in. If someone got paid less than 15 in Arkanas, they might still be finically stable. A home a about the size of a mansion there would cost maybe around 250,000.00. However, in states like Hawii, New York, California, and many east coast states. Less than 15 could mean living in a car or on the streets.

I lot of people see these types of jobs as ones meant for young people. And that had been the case for me personally, however I’ve also been working consistently for about fives years and for the jobs I’ve interviewed for, I would actually have to take a pay cut. And the people I’ve worked with at these jobs that have held the same positions as me are always young people going to college and only do the job templarily. I’ve worked with middle aged people that are single moms with three kids. I worked with the mentally disabled in the 30s. I even meet one lady who left who job to go to the company I was at, because her job had too many mentally disabled people. She was nice and she said she was patient with them and was glad that company offered them the opportunity to take care of theselves, but it was all just too much for her. I’ve even met a 60 year old woman that had never had a job in her life because she was a stay at home mom and her husband took care of her while she looked after her kids. She had to get a job because her social security didn’t pay her enough. And that story scared me the most, and its what keeps me working. The lady also had arthritis in her hands and had to do a manuel labor job, which ironically was at a retirement community.

What a lot of people don’t realize about these jobs is its not always young people. And for those jobs to continue during school hours just wouldn’t make any sense if it was only them that participated. Many of the people who take these jobs are women. And pretty much any job in daycare, retail, hotels, and automotive manufacturing workers make less than 15 an hour. We have found that also half of these workers that take these jobs are ages 35 and older as shown in the link above.

I heard many people say that if people want to find a better job all they have to do is look for one. And to those people I say that that’s unrealistic. If everyone making under 15 and hour right now decided they wanted better, that’s asking more accurately 42 percent of the entire employed US population to go on strike which could potiently leave the country in even more chaos than what’s happened in 2020.

The amount of money we make can also effect our self worth. Sometimes if we don’t get paid much and work a lot it can really hurt our mental health. I know it’s done that to me as well as many other people.

The difference though, between me now versus me then is that I’m tired of being exploited by other people. And if I have to be, I’d rather it give them the time to let me do things things I love and maybe even eventually get paid to do so. If I don’t get paid much to do what I love it doesn’t really matter since I didn’t get paid much to begin with. I don’t want to spend the rest of my days trying to claw my way up to something that I don’t really care about. I’m done being a kiss ass. If I do something, I want it to do what I want to do and not what other people want me to do.