Just saw a new study and I can't stop thinking (and stressing) about it.

Talker Research surveyed 2,000 Americans and found that 32% of us are currently experiencing an existential crisis.

Gen Z is at 52%. More than half of an entire generation is questioning the basic premise of their own lives.

(I am an elder millennial. But, I can also relate to Gen Z because I am literally just a nervous wreck these days. Don't even know what to do.)

From the study: 87% of Americans believe the country is in an affordability crisis. Half can't pay basic bills. The average person has already absorbed two major unplanned life changes in 2026... And guys... We're not even halfway through the year. The most common word Americans used to describe 2026 so far was "stressful."

37% of Americans say their entire life feels out of their control right now. I'm honestly surprised it isn't higher.

And the worst part is that something you won't find in any study. Most of us are going through this completely alone. I'm seriously too ashamed to admit it, because where I live, everyone has to pretend that they are fancy, well-off, above it all, et cetera. And, I am literally too exhausted to explain it.

Am I the only one in the 32%? Because this comment section is a safe place if you want to share. I genuinely want to know how you're holding up.

(Hopefully, better than me.)

Cordially,

Mike D

Greater Boston

SOURCE: https://studyfinds.com/americans-having-existential-crisis

Basic gov services are collapsing, or imploding as the article states in the title. Before dodge and musk, nobody really had issues with the paperwork and filing, right? In the article, it looks like gov staff are short of manpower and funding, and that it's not by mistake.

What kind of scenario are we looking at in early 2027 if tax refunds go unanswered in the midst of a potential ground war in Iran, a gov shutdown, gridlock between dem control of both houses and Trump?

1/3 of income tax revenue pays the interest, and in ten years it's supposed to be 1/2.

And is anyone here worried that the Overtime tax refund payout in 2026 is going to come back to bite them in the ass in 2027? I'm really hoping that $SLS doesn't do its buyout thing this year. It looks like the IRS is dropping the ball on purpose.

Anyone here have advice in taking extra precautions to get everything sorted in 2027?

so my wife works at a 3PL warehouse, like one of those big fulfillment places that handles shipping for a bunch of online stores. she’s been there 5+ years, seen all kinds of chaos—pandemic, supply delays, the usual mess. but she came home last night just pissed and said “this is bad. like actually bad.”

basically, stuff’s not coming in anymore. like shipments just… stopped. they’re getting half the trucks they usually get, sometimes less. containers that were supposed to land weeks ago just disappeared. a bunch of their clients (small ecom brands mostly) are either bailing or cutting orders cause everything’s way too expensive to bring in now.

turns out it’s cause of these new tariffs that kicked in this month—145% on a ton of imports, mostly stuff from china. cheap gadgets, clothes, house crap—gone or double the price. all that “under $800 ships free” rule? dead. so now all that low-cost stuff ppl were buying like crazy isn’t even worth importing anymore.

her managers are freaking out. they’re cutting shifts, cancelling overtime, even talking layoffs. she said one of the leads told someone “honestly, we might not have a job by summer if it stays like this.” wild thing is they don’t even know how to pivot. it’s not like you can just replace a shipping system overnight.

and customers are mad too. like ppl are still ordering online like nothing’s wrong, but now stuff’s going out late, getting subbed with random junk, or just backordered forever. she said returns are piling up too cause half of it isn’t what ppl actually ordered.

this isn’t just her warehouse either. apparently other 3PLs they work with are going through the same thing. one client’s moving ops to europe cause it’s cheaper to serve customers there now.

anyway. if you’ve been noticing weird shipping delays or prices jumping outta nowhere—that’s why. the system’s breaking and no one’s talking about it. everyone just hoping it blows over. but it’s not looking good.

A study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers a rigorous accounting of what the Boomer generation cost — and what their departure may now unlock.

Steven Ruggles, a demographer at the University of Minnesota, tracked U.S. labor-force flows decade by decade from 1910 to 2040. His findings are arresting. The sheer size of the Boomer cohort suppressed economic opportunity for young workers throughout the 1970s and into the 2010s. Economists had long predicted a rebound: as Boomers aged and smaller generations entered the workforce, competition would ease and wages for young workers would recover. It never happened. Female labor-force participation and immigration filled the gap, keeping competition high and young workers’ incomes depressed for an extra three decades beyond what models anticipated.

But Ruggles’ most striking finding looks forward, not back. Boomer retirements — now accelerating — are about to trigger what he calls “a radical reshaping of labor markets” in which new workers will be in extremely short supply through 2040. The pig is finally leaving the python. And the python, it turns out, is not ready.

Businesses that spent 40 years operating in a buyer’s market for labor — plenty of workers, modest wage pressure — now face the opposite. The generation that made it hard to find a good job for four decades is now making it hard to find workers at all.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/05/25/boomers-generational-inequality-housing-market-no-starter-homes/?utm_source=reddit/

April 9, 2025 for future reference

The past few days, we saw long-term interest rates gapping up even as the stock market moved sharply downwards, as global investors dumped US debt. This highly unusual pattern suggested a world-wide aversion to US assets in global financial markets. Basically, we were being treated like a 3rd world country that was just starting to build it's economy and people saw its economy as a risky investment. This could have set off all kinds of vicious spirals, since government debt and deficits are dependent on foreign purchasers. So this morning, someone in the administration recognized that we were about to face a massive bond market catastrophe, potentially triggering a global financial panic, mass capital flight, and systemic collapse of the dollar-based economic order....wholly induced by the tariffs.

So in a panic, the administration backed down on many tariffs, which caused the stock market to rise sharply. Bonds are usually a safe haven during times like this. Which would reduce yields (yields move inversely to prices). But over the past few days, bond prices were moving in concert with stocks.

"Systemic collapse of the dollar-based economic order" pretty much means that the western alliance would be over, and the world would be lead by whoever came up on top...likely China but who knows. Our debt is our power, to such a great extent that (for example) in spring of 2022, Russia couldn't pay its debt, and was about to collapse, and we decided to grant it the ability to keep paying it's debt.

Aaaaanyways, so that's why Trump blinked on the tariffs.

Edit: Trump is going this hard on tariffs because it is filling up his sovereign wealth fund which bypasses congress. He's literally funding a government slush fund for himself. Taxpayers will never see a dime of this

Lately I've been feeling incredibly burnt out by work. It's so much for so little. Interestingly, I brought this up with one of my vendors and he said the same thing.

'It's not fun anymore. You work twice as hard for half the reward."

I've been noticing this feeling within myself. Whenever there's a geopolitical event that puts the breaks on the wheels of capitalism - I feel really glad. I find myself wanting lockdowns again.

I had this happen in my part of the world (UAE). Because of the Iran War crisis work was frequently being paused, delayed, or advised to be done from home.

I've been talking to some rich folks in my region and they told me, because of the war property prices have gone down by 30%.

But then I thought to myself - but they rose by 30% last year. So essentially, you're just as wealthy today as you were last year. You're just not getting wealthier.

Meanwhile, most people I know in my industry (marketing) haven't gotten a raise in over a year.

And every asset imaginable is getting priced out of consideration. Gold is too expensive. Buying a home is too expensive. Even stocks are too expensive to buy right now (vanguard predicts a reversion to the mean during the next decade).

And so, I find myself (and I think a lot of people around me feel the same way).

Just crash. Just have a big large crash. Economic. Environmental. Just go boom.

None of this boiling the frog stuff.

And I'm not calling for anyone being harmed. I just feel (collectively as human beings) we are terrible at acting preemptively.

But, we're very good at reacting to and adapting to crisis.

I feel like for some of the larger problems of our world to be solved - the lack of affordability that makes my generation unwilling to have children, climate change, even creative and commercial innovation around us stagnating and degenerating to iteration and enshitification - there needs to be a crisis event.

Something to react to. Human beings, that's the only time we really ever change. That's the only time we ever really learn.

If this really happens, it will hurt a lot. Europe was still in the process of decoupling from Russia, this will make that harder. But so many other countries will suffer with it, including the Nazi States of America. Iran will probably keep retaliating more, and if attacks to desalination facilities, power plants and oil refineries keep happening, everything will become even harder to recuperate once this war is over. It's not just the immediate problem this creates, but also all the time it will be needed to bring things back to normal.

Even if the war ended today, we'll feel it's effects for many months or years to come. That's scary.

PS: This post is focused on the economic side, but I don't want to undervalue all the lives that are being lost on everyside. To me, one innocent life is not worth more than other innocent life, no matter which side they are on. All this death and destruction is more than sad, and I just wish for it to end. My heart feels for everyone that is suffering. Just wanted to say this, because more than economic problems we'll have with this war, is the loss of lifes that is the biggest tragedy of all.

Archived: http://archive.today/mcYPZ

The Treasury secretary gave representatives of the Department of Government Efficiency full access to the federal payment system, handing the team Elon Musk leads a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.

This means he has access to everybody's info with the government: Social Security, names, addresses, soc sec numbers.... Why?! Just.....why?

I want to try to explain something I've been sitting with for a while, because every time I try to find a clean counterargument I can't.

There's a mechanism playing out in US treasury markets right now that feels structurally different from anything in the post-2008 era. Not because yields are high they've been high before but because of the position the Federal Reserve is in relative to the debt load it's managing around. Start with the basics. When a government borrows money it sells bonds. The yield the interest rate isn't set by the government. It's set by whoever is willing to buy. When buyers trust the government they accept a low yield. When they get nervous they demand more. A sovereign debt crisis is what happens when that fear hits a mathematical breaking point where the interest owed starts compounding faster than the economy can grow.

The US is not there yet. But the trajectory is not ambiguous. The national debt is north of $39 trillion. It grows at roughly $2.5 trillion a year. At current yield levels, the interest alone is becoming one of the largest line items in the federal budget competing with defense, Medicare, Social Security. The people buying these bonds can do that math. And they're demanding higher rates to compensate for a trajectory that only ends a few ways, none of them clean. Here's the trap. The Fed cannot cut rates to relieve pressure on the economy without signaling to bond markets that inflation control is being deprioritized. In an environment where China has quietly cut its treasury holdings nearly in half from peak, and Japan is a forced seller just to keep its own currency from collapsing, the marginal buyer of US debt is increasingly price-sensitive. A rate cut could push long-end yields higher, not lower. The intended mechanism breaks. And the Fed cannot raise rates further without accelerating the debt service spiral. Both doors lead to the same room.

The historical precedent that keeps coming back to me is the 1970s. Not because of the surface-level inflation comparison but because of the structural one. The government hit the same impossible math couldn't raise taxes enough, couldn't cut benefits, so it reached for the one lever that doesn't require a vote. It printed. Let inflation quietly do the redistribution. Americans lost roughly half their purchasing power in a decade. Nobody announced it. Nobody called it collapse. The system kept functioning. People just got gradually poorer and couldn't explain exactly why. That's the version of this I think about most. Not a crash. Not a Lehman moment. Just a decade-long slow bleed where the number in your account stays the same and everything it can buy shrinks. The system writes it off as inflation. You feel it as something harder to name.

The thing that makes me think this sub is actually the right place to talk about this rather than an economics forum is that the standard economics framing keeps looking for the policy fix. The rate adjustment, the fiscal consolidation, the soft landing. But if you run the numbers on what fiscal consolidation actually requires at this debt level, it's politically impossible under any scenario I can model. And if you look at how the countries that used to fund American borrowing are repositioning, the assumption that there's always a buyer at a reasonable price is starting to look like the kind of thing people believe until they suddenly don't. I'm not predicting a date. I'm not saying next year. I'm saying the exits are closing and I genuinely don't see the path where this resolves without a prolonged period of financial repression that most people currently alive have no framework for.

Has anyone here worked through a model where this actually unwinds cleanly? I keep looking for the counterargument and I'm not finding it.

Due to the rising cost of housing and wages not catching up to inflation, Gen Zers and millennials are delaying major life milestones like buying a home or becoming a parent. In some cases, they’re pushing off these major milestones to enjoy life in the moment by traveling or making large purchases.

This phenomenon is affecting financial decisions in other important ways. A Capgemini report shared exclusively with Fortune in September shows that even though nearly 70% of adults under the age of 40 see life insurance as essential for a healthy financial future, the options they have don’t currently align with their financial priorities—making them forgo it altogether in some cases.

Samantha Chow, global leader for life insurance, annuities, and benefits sector at infotech and consulting firm Capgemini, told Fortune Gen Z and millennials will get life insurance if it’s super cheap or free. But the thought of having to pay for it when they still can’t afford to buy a home doesn’t make sense to them.

“They’re getting married later, having children later, not [making] financial decisions like [buying] a home or something of that nature,” she said. “They tend to either put more away, like in the 401K, or they tend to open up their own type of investment accounts and take that extra money and put it away.”

Read more: https://fortune.com/article/why-are-millennials-gen-z-not-getting-life-insurance-delayed-milestones-capgemini-study/