Whether it's lattes, I don't even drink caffeine, or avocado toast (I used to eat this frequently to spite this adage) narratives, it's all in the attempt to justify the perpetual consolidation of wealth in developed countries: I think the avocado toast was from a real estate guy in Australia doing his best to tell people about pulling up by the bootstraps.

The truth is that the lower rungs of the economy have been sacrificed in order to cater to the upper classes, and it has been this way since Reagan-Thatcher were in office. This has always existed before, but at no point in time has it been this blatant where failing up because of your social status has been this prevalent for the upper class, and whether it's University admission scams, white collar crime, to economic malfeasance... there is no limit to what length they will go to skew the game in their favour.

I think if people are being honest with their children in the developed Western World is that they should be optimizing them to either take over a family owned and operated business if it exists, or simply to teach them to have skills in which they can bypass the university debt trap and travel abroad and work remotely in order to maybe settle elsewhere, because this insanity has gone on for far too long.

Career building implies their is some integrity in the system but when it's built on nepotism and corruption one has to ask the very obvious question: why is this worth investing my child's life into? And who benefits the most for this?

As a millennial from the US that studied STEM and worked in my field, and eventual became an entrepreneur in fintech and hired both local and international talent: my country failed me every step of the way. It never failed to hinder or prevent my ability to excel in anything that didn't first serve the interests of multinational corporation(s) or the business interests of someone who 'played the game.'

Venturing out on my own and finding my own path in 2012 after paying off tons of student debt was not recreational, it was foreshadowing what I thought was happening in just the US but in most developed nations: self-cannibalization.

Politicians and the Boomers who elected them had access to cheap credit and stable careers that allowed for some savings were able to leverage that and have a glut of viable tenets pay not just for their mortgages by renting out rooms at inflated costs, but their very lifestyle.

It disgusted me to my core how brash and calloused people had become that they'd exploit education and housing to such a degree under the pretense of 'getting mine' when they were handed it on a silver platter all while simultaneously thinking this was achievable based on merit. The last landlord I had literately moved in his ex-wife unbeknownst to us and then subsidized her expenses based on increasing rent costs during COVID as we didn't chose to take advantage of the rent relief option.

I lost all respect for this class of individual and I now want to see them get economically ruined as I think it's the only chance for any level of reform at this point: mass homelessness and unemployment from 2008-COVID onward didn't change anything, a perpetual bondage based University debt system hasn't changed anything, lower standards of living and shorter life expediencies for Millenials and likely Gen Z hasn't either. I've come to the conclusion that nothing less than the significant die off, or in this case financial ruin, of the affluent boomer will lead to any significant reform.