Actually, people in my bubble have good jobs, and the primary concern has not been money. I’m actually one of the lucky ones to have lucked into a lucrative career and I have decent finances, but my net worth is not particularly high. Compared to my high school classmates, I live luxuriously. I started from basically zero and very aggressively exploited a favourable labour market in a particular region and sector combo that no longer exists. If I was 3 years younger, or if I’d had less luck, or if I’d had been less assertive with recruiters, I’d be fucked comparably. And I’m not even 30. I feel we don’t appreciate that the ladder is not only being pulled up in front of us, but also behind us. It’s getting worse. I try to help anyone I can, but I’m usually not enough.

As far as environmental awareness goes, I know that my kids will never get to skate on the lake I broke my arm learning to skate on, as it just doesn’t freeze anymore. If I wasn’t moving towards the North, my kids wouldn’t ever have a snowball fight. We all know that and take it as an unalterable truth in my group. We know it’s the corps, but corps own everything, and we either work for the corps or live in poverty. We know what living off less than 500 EUR a month looks like, so we work for the corps. We openly talk about how fucked up this is, but we feel powerless to change it. We feel alienated by our work, everyone tries to find meaning in life outside of it, and spend as little time “at work” as possible.

The big thing is that at least with us, the threat of the ecosystem collapsing is currently overshadowed by the threat of war and being drafted. I stand with Ukraine not just because I think it’s right, but because I saw guys from Ukraine my age get off the plane at AMS with parts missing, and those guys were lucky. They are bleeding and if they lose, I feel we might be next, either as soldiers or as war refugees.

TBH I still feel cautiously optimistic at least. The world is fucked up, and I can’t save everyone, but I feel I’m doing the right thing by having a family that I feel I can still make a good life for. I’d love to help build society, do my little part for it. My dream job would be a high school teacher. I just know I’d be throwing my life and my loved one’s prospects away for nothing.

If you want to get at the very tip, the tiniest start of where my social group comes from, we’re the people who get emotional listening to Rim Tim Tagi Dim. I feel I left so many “worlds”, my town, then my city, my country that I feel like I might as well be living on the moon. I miss it, but what I miss doesn’t exist anymore, and there is indeed no going back.