• Beefalo@midwest.social
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    9 months ago

    Knock that shit off. Millennials wrote the story, for starters. That journalism degree had to go somewhere.

    They probably wrote a perfectly reasonable story about people not buying homes for obvious reasons, and then, like always, some editor with a Master’s Degree in Being A Cunt put a clickbait title on it so we’d end up talking about the stupid thing and oh look is that the CNBC brand all over the place? It is. OP even typed it into the title, how helpful.

    The last time I chased down one of these shitty meme stories, you know, the ones about too many avocado is why you can’t pay rent, I came to the sort of realization you don’t have because you just jump in here and have an emotional squirt about the meme.

    Namely, the reason so many of these stories seem so fucking absurd is because the “young people” in the news story are specifically the adult children of the wealthy, the actual 1%. So yes, those assholes, all spending daddy’s money, are real bad at holding onto a buck and legitimately need scolding.

    The target audience for ALL these articles is “daddy”, the holder of 1% wealth. Everyone else is too poor and the ad rates are abysmal for that demo.

    If the article is in Forbes, WSJ, or Bloomberg then this is absolutely the case. They are talking to genuinely wealthy people about their own wasteful children and THAT is why they always seem to have absurd ideas about how much money the “millennials” have to spend. Their children really do have a lot of money to waste, that’s why they can’t stop paying $8 for a coffee. I guess CNBC wants a piece of the action, too.

    And that’s the thing. None of this is about you. None of this is about most of the people reading the article or making stupid Tweets about it.

    The typical millennial online has a fairly middle-class upbringing with a college degree for better or worse. Many of them have boss jobs, either holding positions of authority, or just working in the office, and not in the factory, which is a boss job enough.

    So they get delusional. The floor monkeys at the factory know that they’re “the help”, but the college-educated types? They struggle. They delude themselves into thinking this is about them, that they are part of the conversation.

    Nope. You’re “the help”. You may as well be one of the Filipinos in the sweatshop making underwear, you basically do not exist in this conversation, at all. It’s a tough pill to swallow as a Westerner with a degree.

    So that’s why the articles are so “clueless”. The people writing them, for the intended audience of wealthy old people, mostly men still, are ignoring you as completely as you ignore the janitor at the mall. You might as well be a water cooler or some furniture to them.

    They know why you’re poor. They employ you and control your access to money. They have all the records and it was them who made you poor. That’s not news. They know why you can’t buy a house because they made sure you wouldn’t have the funds. Instead, they bought 12 properties to rent this year and decided to lay off 500 people to tighten up the ship. They know why you’re fucked, because they’re fucking you.

    But why their own kids, the wealthy babies of the 1%, are acting all stupid? That is a mystery to them, so they’re liable to read news articles about it. They don’t think of you as a child of concern, any more than you think of the eggs a housefly lays. You? You just come with the building. You’re the help.

    Once you grasp that these news articles are aimed way, way, way over even your college-educated, “knowledge worker” head, then a lot of stupidity suddenly makes more sense.