Hear me out: what if we reversed the various societal changes made since the Reagan era so people make enough money to afford the things they need and want like every generation before mine did, instead of just normalizing this notion that you need to eat shit for years on end so you can have the privilege of nice things?
And that would have knock on effects for huge societal issues like climate change. Imagine how much cheap shit wouldn't need to be made if so many people weren't deliberately kept on the edge of poverty so as to foster consumption practices that make stock prices go up?
I'd argue that reversing those changes would require a grass-roots effort to stop consuming so much cheap garbage. If people bought American and demanded high quality products, American manufacturing would benefit.
But also - I think the 1950s-80s were a complete abberation in which working middle class people could afford a better lifestyle every year. Not "every generation before" ours could afford a house and two cars on a factory income with a pension. Really only one generation got that, and it was mostly due to winning a world war that left us the world's only major supplier of everything, able to project military power and gobble up all the cheap oil and raw materials. Previous generations had no such thing. My grandfather grew up without indoor plumbing. He also worked 12 hours a day. He couldn't afford a modest house until his late 30s, which was after the war. Go further back and look at the stock bubbles and robber barons of the 19th Century. The wealth and pay distribution we have now is closer to historical norms than anything in the 1960s was. The major difference is our baseline quality of life is higher in the sense that everyone can afford a cheap couch (if they want one). I have to think economically like my grandparents, not like my parents.
People like my grandparents built this country by saving and sacrificing their comforts. People like my parents, boomers, got an incredibly easy ride. Now their kids expect it to be that easy. But cheap money can't go on forever, and it's cheap money and a two-car suburban family lifestyle that did all the environmental damage of the mid 20th Century that we're still trying to slow down or reverse.
tl;dr saving and buying the better couch is a more effective means of changing the status quo than complaining that everything is harder for our generation.
> People like my grandparents built this country by saving and sacrificing their comforts.
I don't mind saving and sacrificing, that sounds awesome. The problem is that I'm not saving, sacrificing, working hard, etc. for any meaningful purpose, it's exclusively to subsidize some greedy CEOs/oligarchs luxurious lifestyles.
It doesn't matter if the work itself is meaningful, the meaning is the saving/sacrifice. How many people earn without someone else earning off their back? Very few. My grandfather was a door to door salesman, worked in a clothing factory cutting fabric, bartended, bussed tables, worked in kitchens. My grandmother worked at a candy factory.
There's this funny notion now that work needs to be personally fulfilling or important to humanity or else it's not worth it. It's worth it if you can save money, afford a better life, educate your kids.
Getting fixated on the inherent unfairness of the world, where some people who have wealth and things you can't afford, seems to be a frequent cop out. If you want to be a union organizer and do things to change the inequality of the system, great. That doesn't mean that working to improve your own existence is a waste of time.
Focusing on some of the largest man-made social problems that trickles down to all aspects of one's daily life and materially effects the largest number of people world-wide, often hurting them orders of magnitudes more than it's hurting me, is a strange thing to call a "cop out".
And that would have knock on effects for huge societal issues like climate change. Imagine how much cheap shit wouldn't need to be made if so many people weren't deliberately kept on the edge of poverty so as to foster consumption practices that make stock prices go up?