A new NBER Working Paper, Countries For Old Men: An Analysis Of The Age Pay Gap by Nicola Bianchi and Matteo Paradisi, reveals, reveals that the pay gap between older and younger workers has been widening for decades across high-income countries, with wages of older workers growing much faster than those of their younger counterparts. The paper uses administrative and survey data to investigate this growing wage disparity.
Perfectly said. You speak my experience, here in the US.
I feel like we’ve been taken hostage, forced to watch atrocities, and made powerless to stop them. I remember being outright mocked by my adults when I tried to do the least thing to change it all. I thought by the time I was an adult, I could do something… but those same adults are still alive. They’re still mocking me.
A snapshot; when I was in high school, I watched No Child Left Behind pass. I wasn’t old enough to vote. I knew how fucked every single student would be who came after me. I talked about it with my classmates! Not one had anything positive to say about it! I called my representatives. No one listened. They told me to grow up and change it myself, then stood in my way when I tried.
I hate knowing that the dread over it all and the soul-crushing inability to change anything is still going to be preferable to trying to survive what’s coming. It only makes me feel more guilty.
Thanks for the reply, yeah, a lot of the negative emotions stem from grief, and I think that grief is actually perfectly rational when we consider grief as an emotion that can interface with modalities other than individual relations.
The biosphere of this planet is being obliterated and sea surface temperatures are off the charts, it makes sense that we grieve for these things as we do other forms of more individual death, but we rarely extend the grace to ourselves to let us just feel those emotions without contorting them into guilt about “feeling bad for no reason about things we can’t control”.
CBT is like “you can’t control this thing, there for it is a waste of time investing negative energy in thinking about it” and it is great advice if the thing you are worrying about is an asteroid randomly coming out of the sky and crushing you, or what someone else’s opinion of you is.
It becomes harder to apply when the situation is rather that you are having trouble enjoying the riverboat ride when you know you are headed over a waterfall (but the river is lazy and calm here, sit down have a drink!).