Hanna Horvath joins Collapse Life to unpack the deeper story behind money trauma, collapsing trust, and the emotional consequences of life in an increasingly precarious economy.
20 years ago, the mainstream media (msm) blamed the Millennials’ financial problems on $8 avocado toast.
Today, the msm blames Gen Z’s financial problems on the $14 latte.
… I recall a Newsweek (or was it Time?) magazine cover from c. 1990 calling my Gen X whiners for complaining about the job market & COL.
… I’m arguing from a position of success, not bitterness. I’m one of the luckiest members of my Gen X because I started off way, way behind (e.g. student loan racket, health insurance racket, & housing bubbles, and the 2nd-wave “feminist” double-income job market & COL).
I started off way, way behind. I should have nothing, but I have it all: 5 kids, rental property, retirement plan, on just a single household income, real healthcare, safe neighborhoods, decent schooling.
I have it all - the American Dream! (even though I choose to live in Japan) - but no way, no how do I think today’s average Gen Z could achieve what I’ve achieved, **even if** he approached life, today, with a 50-year-old’s wisdom & a 20-year-old‘s bodily strength & energy.
So, compassion - I certainly do understand why the young are being seduced by communism nowadays.
I believe that the root cause is that people are comparing their circumstances to a completely fabricated fiction.
The biggest cause is media. Not "The Media" as a contrived effort at shaping people but as the actual way people see a fictionalized version of reality.
Everywhere you look, this media is a lens that we view the world through and it is like a funhouse mirror that warps and distorts reality to the point of it being like a person with Anorexia looking at the mirror and seeing themselves as overweight. What people see is completely different from what is actually in front of them.
Even the simplest things. You watch a TV show where the character has a home and lifestyle that is absolutely unattainable on the income level that their character would live on. Not that I watch television shows but I am familiar with a lot of them. It might be a character working as a policeman living in a multi-million dollar apartment. A waitress living in a huge apartment in a large city that would rent for $8K a month. Even the commercials showing 20-something couples moving into a huge new house or buying a car that costs as much as a house in most places. Those are just the "normal" incomes, not the "rich person takes a low level job that they believe in but still has all the wealth and doesn't need the money" plots. That is not even considering the small scale fictional lifestyles that are played out on social media where someone goes in and fakes it for a 30 second video clip.
This is made even worse by the fact that the credit system has made it where people can pretend that they can afford those lifestyles, for a while. Anyone with a credit card can run out on on a shopping spree. Easy credit makes it possible to go out and get a car that you cannot afford, book an expensive vacation, and make all kinds of other poor financial decisions that all add up to disaster.
Up until a short time ago, you could get a mortgage for a house that you cannot afford. It was encouraged. They said, "Yes, it would be tight but you are going to get raises and it will be easy to make the payments then." When I got pre-approved for my mortgage, they approved me for more than three times the price of the house I bought. I thought that they were out of their minds.
The standard path that people are being led though is, "Go and take out hundreds of thousands of dollars for college loans, it will enable you to make much more money!" Of course the reality doesn't hit until you start working and are receiving an entry level salary because you have absolutely zero experience and it will take years to reach the high salary range that is needed to make that comfortable. I can't even count the number of people I saw that graduated college, took a job in a new city, signed a lease on a new place to live, and bought a new car only to be devastated when the payments on their student loans came due to start repaying. Then the big blow came and the new job didn't work out.
As the role that this fictional media plays has increased in our lives over the past years, it only become worse. The good news is that we are about saturated. There just isn't enough time available to watch more of it. We are already at the point where people are consumed by it for their entire waking life....
20 years ago, the mainstream media (msm) blamed the Millennials’ financial problems on $8 avocado toast.
Today, the msm blames Gen Z’s financial problems on the $14 latte.
… I recall a Newsweek (or was it Time?) magazine cover from c. 1990 calling my Gen X whiners for complaining about the job market & COL.
… I’m arguing from a position of success, not bitterness. I’m one of the luckiest members of my Gen X because I started off way, way behind (e.g. student loan racket, health insurance racket, & housing bubbles, and the 2nd-wave “feminist” double-income job market & COL).
I started off way, way behind. I should have nothing, but I have it all: 5 kids, rental property, retirement plan, on just a single household income, real healthcare, safe neighborhoods, decent schooling.
I have it all - the American Dream! (even though I choose to live in Japan) - but no way, no how do I think today’s average Gen Z could achieve what I’ve achieved, **even if** he approached life, today, with a 50-year-old’s wisdom & a 20-year-old‘s bodily strength & energy.
So, compassion - I certainly do understand why the young are being seduced by communism nowadays.
Ms. Horvath raises some important points. However, she sites more social safety nets as a solution and where does she think that money will come from?
I believe that the root cause is that people are comparing their circumstances to a completely fabricated fiction.
The biggest cause is media. Not "The Media" as a contrived effort at shaping people but as the actual way people see a fictionalized version of reality.
Everywhere you look, this media is a lens that we view the world through and it is like a funhouse mirror that warps and distorts reality to the point of it being like a person with Anorexia looking at the mirror and seeing themselves as overweight. What people see is completely different from what is actually in front of them.
Even the simplest things. You watch a TV show where the character has a home and lifestyle that is absolutely unattainable on the income level that their character would live on. Not that I watch television shows but I am familiar with a lot of them. It might be a character working as a policeman living in a multi-million dollar apartment. A waitress living in a huge apartment in a large city that would rent for $8K a month. Even the commercials showing 20-something couples moving into a huge new house or buying a car that costs as much as a house in most places. Those are just the "normal" incomes, not the "rich person takes a low level job that they believe in but still has all the wealth and doesn't need the money" plots. That is not even considering the small scale fictional lifestyles that are played out on social media where someone goes in and fakes it for a 30 second video clip.
This is made even worse by the fact that the credit system has made it where people can pretend that they can afford those lifestyles, for a while. Anyone with a credit card can run out on on a shopping spree. Easy credit makes it possible to go out and get a car that you cannot afford, book an expensive vacation, and make all kinds of other poor financial decisions that all add up to disaster.
Up until a short time ago, you could get a mortgage for a house that you cannot afford. It was encouraged. They said, "Yes, it would be tight but you are going to get raises and it will be easy to make the payments then." When I got pre-approved for my mortgage, they approved me for more than three times the price of the house I bought. I thought that they were out of their minds.
The standard path that people are being led though is, "Go and take out hundreds of thousands of dollars for college loans, it will enable you to make much more money!" Of course the reality doesn't hit until you start working and are receiving an entry level salary because you have absolutely zero experience and it will take years to reach the high salary range that is needed to make that comfortable. I can't even count the number of people I saw that graduated college, took a job in a new city, signed a lease on a new place to live, and bought a new car only to be devastated when the payments on their student loans came due to start repaying. Then the big blow came and the new job didn't work out.
As the role that this fictional media plays has increased in our lives over the past years, it only become worse. The good news is that we are about saturated. There just isn't enough time available to watch more of it. We are already at the point where people are consumed by it for their entire waking life....