After watching this from Vice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6eujSJ0-RU one of my takeaways is that it can be incredibly isolating and egodestroying to be a suburban stay-at-home parent.

What came up time and time again in the Vice video to me was that these women were often financially okay, but life in suburbia had left them socially isolated. The need for a social network that provided them with positive affirmation, even one that is as fake as a pyramid scheme's drove it. Some of the women in the video had even taken out rent on storefronts, or dedicated large portions of their homes as showrooms or for inventory, which has massive hidden (or not so hidden) costs associated with it.

I think this article adds some more color to the phenomenon. It describes people who again, aren't necessarily over extended, but are living pretty close to the line. Who don't want to give up suburban life and all the activities they want to provide their kids + bored housemoms during the day who can maybe make a few extra dollars putting their expensive SUVs to work doing menial tasks for other people instead of their own family.

I would be if all the costs and earning were added up, these women would be making less than minimum wage. Sitting around in an expensive car all day looking for gigs that pay $.60/mi + tip is terrible income. Her cost per hour for having the vehicle "employed" probably annihilates most of the "earnings" anyways, but she's not thinking of the deferred costs that will come later with higher maintenance. They describe a day as making $133 in 10 hours ($13.30/hr), but that includes the payment per delivery mile.

The real question to me is why aren't these women going to work in local businesses? If they're satisfied working gig jobs, why not go work at a local restaurant or as a bookkeeper or secretary at some local business? A quick side story, my brother works lots of odd jobs. He works these jobs because at some point those jobs, during certain conditions, offered some crazy payout per day (think thousands of dollars per day). He thinks (and there's no dissuading him from this) that if he can just get things lines up just right, he can tap into a mythical gravy train where this money is the normal payout for him. For example, he owns and stores a large snowplow and a very large expensive truck so that when it snows in the winter, he can grab a road clearing contract. In his mind, a few good snows and he's made his normal income for the year. He rarely gets on those contracts and his expenses far outweigh his earnings in terms of storage and maintenance costs on tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment.

However, it's these prospective earnings that absolutely dominate his thinking, but his other earnings are so generally small.

I think it's the prospect of days like the best one described, where she made $21.25/hr which is around $44,200 year which, if the other person in the household is working for around $20k/yr puts them above median for the U.S. ($61,372/yr/household) which ain't terrible (I know the tech workers here are gasping at so little!) It's just too bad that these gig workers will probably make much less than that.