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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2951 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for June 12, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Does anyone have tips for dealing with feelings of anxiety/hopelessness?

I feel like my mental health is being negatively impacted by things outside of my control and that these things are going to get worse in the near the future.

  • Social media is doing a lot of damage to people’s mental health, attention spans, and ability to connect with people outside their bubbles. Over time social media continues to become more addicting and gets better at identifying people’s emotional buttons and how to push them. This results in anxiety, anger, conspiratorial thinking/paranoia, and other mental health problems. The people in power have no incentive to address any of these problems because they get money/power from the status quo.
  • Economic policies have exacerbated wealth inequality. If you don’t already have substantial wealth then it seems nearly impossible to build much wealth through selling your labor. Asset ownership seems to be a much more viable path toward wealth generation but young people that didn’t inherit wealth are at a huge disadvantage in this system.
  • AI is going to make it harder for people without wealth to build wealth because it devalues their labor.
  • The shift to online dating has made it harder for many heterosexual people to find meaningful long-term relationships because it selects for superficial traits. There are fewer places where it is acceptable to flirt in-person which makes it harder for men to attract women by demonstrating character/virtue over time. Additionally, the high ratio of men to women on dating apps makes many men feel invisible and many women feel overwhelmed.
  • Politicians are not addressing these problems in any meaningful way and are actively making things worse by distracting us with bullshit.

If you don’t already have substantial wealth then it seems nearly impossible to build much wealth through selling your labor.

What leads you to believe this and when do you perceive it as starting? I finished a postdoc a decade ago and had pretty close to zero net worth at the time, but I'm doing great now. I've seen a decent number of friends go from near zero or negative net worth at the time to quite wealthy since. All of us that have done well do have some sort of specialized skill but saying that making money is greatly helped by having a specialized skill is very different from claiming that labor can't build wealth.

In 2019 the us median numbers were around:

  • Salary for a new graduate: 51k
  • Rent payment: 1,100
  • House price: 258k

In 2023 the us median numbers were around:

  • Salary for a new graduate: 56k
  • Rent payment: 1,400
  • House price: 420k

Since 1/1/20 the S&P 500 has increased by at least 67%. If someone owned a house before March 2022 they were able to lock in a 30-year mortgage rate around 3% (vs. around 7% today). People with wealth had huge gains in the last 4 years and those gains will continue to generate more passive wealth in the future.

A new grad isn’t going to be able to save/invest much. Meanwhile, the people with extraordinary returns in the last 4 years are generating tons of passive wealth because they locked in a low mortgage expense and have more money to invest/save. They are also earning passive income faster now because they have a larger asset base.

When inflation is normal for long periods of time and mortgage rates are similar between new/existing homeowners this wealth disparity effect is much less of a problem.

For a new grad starting around $0 (or in debt) to build substantial wealth they need to be on a path to earn much more than the median salary and/or make sacrifices to greatly lower expenses (like living with their parents for a few years after college).

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