I caught this the other day:
Blaming others for your life is a bad move on a number of levels. We don’t know anything about this woman other than she looks to be early 20s and appears to work at Walmart. She’s going on about having to work 40 hours a week (full time) and cannot afford to live on her own. With that she falls into a logical fallacy.
You really go off onto the wrong track when you declare that a person ought to be able to make a living doing x, y, or z. “A man ought to be able to make a living greeting people at Walmart”. “A woman ought to be able to make a living frying French fries at McD’s”.
These are jobs, not careers. I don’t know about Wally World, but I’d guess a lot of the jobs are shitty to start in order to weed out the lazy and weak.
What is it with these Gen-Z types that insist on living alone? Millennials did it a bit, but with this younger crowd, it’s endemic. When I’ve talked with those two generations, getting roommates is nowhere in their thought process. You know when I got a place of my own? When my wife divorced me at 60 years old. Up until then, I’d always had someone else living with me, be it a roommate or a wife.
When I finally got a job that I halfway liked, I moved in with my best friend and another dude I sort of knew – my friend’s brother’s friend from the neighborhood. We got a three bedroom apartment in Alexandria that was in a working class complex, more or less. If memory serves the rent was around $700/month with utilities included. That would be $2k today, give or take. The three bedroom house I’m living in now is $1900/month, and it wasn’t the cheapest by far. So even with inflation the numbers sort of work.
At the time, I was making around $7/hr. So my portion of the rent was around a weeks pay, give or take, leaving the rest for gas, beer, food that sort of thing. I had enough dough to buy a 2 year old, new in the box, Yamaha Virago 750.
A year later my friend and his brother bought a house, so the two of us left got a two bedroom place in a nicer area of the same complex. I don’t remember the rent, but I remember my share being like $350 or so. Since I was then working in telecom, that rent payment came to the equivalent of mice nuts to my paycheck.
My point here is that if she wants to find a place, find some friends to get a place or make more money.
We don’t know if she’s college educated or simply high school degreed, if that. That makes a difference. Regardless, this generation feels that if they went to school, they should be able to get a good, high paying, gig straight away. There was only one point in my whole lifetime that this was the case. And that would be the interweb boom starting in 1996 to 2001 or so. You could score a good gig if you merely had a heartbeat back then.
That’s not how it’s ever been in the history of ever in this country.
Unless you had a desireable degree, or your parents hook you up, when you get out of school you had to eat a few shit sammiches until you got your foot in the door someplace. I graduated in the fall of 1983. I got “a” gig right away, fixing studio gear, which is manifestly what I didn’t want to do. So I quit. It took me eight months to get another gig in my field, in a TV studio, which I found I hated too. In between, I worked at hardware store. It was at least another year or so before I got a gig where I could move out of my parent’s house.
I’ve seen this with millennial nieces and nephews. My niece, and my daughter, worked in coffee shops. It’s common to struggle a bit getting off the ground.
Here’s my advice:
- Gut it out at Wally World. They aren’t a bad employer. Prove some persistence, and they’ll invest in you. Maybe you get a career there.
- Find a trade or nursing school. Improve yourself so you get into a better field.
- Get a dude to wife you up. She’s not tough on the eyes. Women have that option. Us guys don’t.
- Enlist in the military. They’ll give you a place to live and food to eat. Maybe even career skills.
For now, real estate in any happening place is crazy. But even so, you can find places that are affordable. From what AI tells me the average hourly pay is reported to be $15.96, with a range from $12.62 to $22.96 per hour. Not great but doable. I see hair and makeup did. I see the interior of a decent car. She’s recording on a mobile device.
Maybe, priorities are in order.
Inspected By Pat 