Claire*, 42, was always told: “Follow your dreams and the money will follow.” So that’s what she did. At 24, she opened a retail store with a friend in downtown Ottawa, Canada. She’d managed to save enough from a part-time government job during university to start the business without taking out a loan.
For many years, the store did well – they even opened a second location. Claire started to feel financially secure. “A few years ago I was like, wow, I actually might be able to do this until I retire,” she told me. “I’ll never be rich, but I have a really wonderful work-life balance and I’ll have enough.”
But in midlife, she can’t afford to buy a house, and she’s increasingly worried about what retirement would look like, or if it would even be possible. “Was I foolish to think this could work?” she now wonders.
She’s one of many millennials who, in their 40s, are panicking about the realities of midlife: financial precarity, housing insecurity, job instability and difficulty saving for the future. It’s a different kind of midlife crisis – less impulsive sports car purchase and more “will I ever retire?” In fact, a new survey of 1,000 millennials showed that 81% feel they can’t afford to have a midlife crisis. Our generation is the first to be downwardly mobile, at least in the US, and do less well than our parents financially. What will the next 40 years will look like?
Someone else could write news then? People started doing that on YouTube - e.g. CPG Grey, Ian Danskin/Innuendo Studios, Hank & John Green, Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, Kurzgesagt, etc. It did not work out well I think, especially since people seek more immediate gratification i.e. Twitch dances or whatever rather than fully college-level subject matter provided entirely for free, oh except having to watch ads for the corporate overlords.
If we do not value i.e. take care of things, we will lose them. In this case - and here I will use a generational term, b/c it refers to the only people in charge at the time it occurred - the Boomer (+ Great) generations chose this for the legacy of everyone who came after. Which is only the history of how we came to be here, but it is our choice to continue forward this way.
Well exactly, it’s an uphill battle, sadly. I’ve been upset at how weak our media has been since the Bush years, when I was working in local television for an NBC affiliate. I got to see all the behind the scenes of the beginnings of the War on Terror and how much our media purposefully pumped up both the war in Afghanistan and in Iraq and how they helped promote the outright lies of the Bush administration. It was eye opening as a twenty-something to say the least and made me incredibly distrustful of government overreach that was being exhorted by patriotism and nationalism. “Spy and snitch on your fellow Americans to prove how patriotic you are!” It was also part of the beginning of dropping the facade of “racism being over” because holy fuck did brown skinned immigrants all get put in the “dangerous radical Islamist” basket, no matter their real nationality or religion. It deeply colored my view of mainstream media as consistently right-wing, even back then, because of how often they would capitulate to Republican lies to support wars intended to enrich a small elite.
I’ve been wanting to see more independently successful media organizations most of my life, but most of what I have seen is media consolidation, and it’s certainly not like I have the capital to get into the business myself. It’s brutal.
Finally, just as you said, we’re competing with Twitch and TikTok and a lot of these issues really require text documents and references that can be checked more easily than needing to sift through a three-hour-Youtube-video of the issue. The problem is we’ve raised a generation that really doesn’t want to read much at all if it isn’t a subtitle for a video. That’s… distressing. (But not to act like it was much better in my generation, it’s not, it’s part of why we have so many shitty kids: their shitty millennial parents who shove a phone into their hand like Boomers shoved us in front of TVs.)
I wouldn’t even know where to start on how to fix it. I’m with Marshall McLuhan, we’re spitting out new communications mediums before we’ve even really understood the social impacts of the previous mediums. He argued we still didn’t understand writing and we had already jumped headlong into radio and television… Well, look at us now baybeee, shit’s spiraling with the internet, McLuhan. Maybe he’s spinning in his grave to match.
CGP Grey right?
Seriously the best content creator I’ve ever witnessed. His video on First Past the Post voting should be mandatory to watch.
So tired of people thinking inside the world’s smallest box, the two party system.
he doesn’t actually state in that video what should be the biggest takeaway: strategic voting is what leads to consolidation of parties, so your best interest longterm is to vote your values, even if doing so has a likelihood of losing short term.
I can’t completely agree with it. There are a lot of college-level-only channels. From English youtube I know only The Efficient Engieneer(engieneering), Thought Emporium(molecular biology, close to popsci), Marco Reps(engieneering), Breaking Taps(engieneering, close to popsci). From popsci Veritasium(mix), Practical Engieneering(engieneering), numberphile(math), computerphile(applied math).
From Russian youtube I can only think of popsci mixed with college-level: Ekaterina Shulman(politology, mix), Chemistry - Easy(chemistry, mostly college-level). From popsci: Physics with Pobedinsky(physics), SciOne(multiple hosts), QWERTY(multiple hosts, originally was about astronomy), Alexandr Panchin(biology), Vert Dider(mix, only translated from english), Artur Sharifov(mix).
Perhaps I am being unfair with my language, so here’s an example if it helps clarify: this is a video combating vaccine disinformation campaigns. It is cute, slow paced enough, but also keeps moving fast enough, it aims low but at the same time it contains high levels of content, and basically answers anyone’s questions about the situation. It is as perfect a video as I think can possibly exist - extremely bold words, but… accurate imho? Edit: oops, this is the one I meant, but notably the fact that there are multiple that fit this criteria also serves a different point as well!?:-)
However, instead of watching this, more people died in the USA from the pandemic than from all wars combined, and like so many other scenarios (e.g. gun violence) we will forever be ignorant of the true numbers because we are actively prevented from counting them.
This is literally, actually, full-on life vs. death, but people cannot be bothered to watch even so much as a 10-minute video to save their life, or the life of everyone around them including their entire family. And the nation that they claim to love and be patriotic for.
Knowledge can easily cure ignorance, but not much if anything can be done about obstinacy. Maybe if they suffer enough pain they may finally start to care enough to open up to listen a real answer, but brainwashing is so tough to attempt to break through.
That channel also deals with climate change, technology, etc. But to switch to a very different example, another one is the rise of fascism all around the world. Ian Danskin’s Innuendo Studios has a playlist for his series on The Alt Right Playbook that is as comprehensive and deep a collection on that topic as I have ever seen. One example of the series is I hate Mondays and another is There’s always a bigger fish. These in some ways are more important than knowledge about climate change or vaccines or gun control or whatever, bc it discusses what we as a society will do about those matters. But instead of watching such, and/or even reading the Constitution that they claim to love, people instead show up at the White House with the idea to literally behead people (January 6), and on the other side liberals always seem shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED!?! at the actions of conservatives, despite how remarkably consistent they are.
With so much free, virtually instant knowledge (okay so less than an hour?) available to us all, and with an ad blocker needs nothing at all in return but even without one having to watch a handful of ads is nothing in the grand scheme of things - with all that is available, I can only conclude that people do not want that knowledge. i.e. people in both sides - liberal and conservative - remain in their ignorance by choice, bc it’s easier to watch something akin to a TikTok dance.
That I call Kurzgesagt popsci, not college-level. Not that their video lacks research, just I think such format is not collage level. I consider even this(has autotranslated subtitles, I recommend watching) to be popsci.
Examples of scientific videos: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Examples of engieneering videos: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5(closer to popsci).
Examples of popsci: 1, 2(well, scientific journalism, but close enough), 3, 4.
“Knowledge is the light in the darkness of ignorance”.
Sometimes clip formats bring up discussions about society and culture too.
Yes the purpose of Kurzgesagt is pop-sci. Hank and John Green are more college level (remember: American college is often equivalent to high school elsewhere in the world) and the likes of Innuendo Studios and CGP Grey can get fairly far away from dancing and deeper into philosophy.
The reason I brought up Kurzgesagt was that even that level is beyond what people want to see.
Really? Are there any examples? I like laughing at America for not having healthcare, but I don’t think education can be that bad.
This is very saddening.
First note that it’s enormously variable, with some college preparatory high schools being better than some colleges. The main thing is that education is a for-profit exercise, and now even government-funded ones behave like that too after No Child Left Behind. So like anything else, it’s whatever they can get away with selling their product with minimal input into in order to maximize the margin:-(.
Then above and beyond that, schools are partly paid for by the government, but also by the local district they are in, so schools in richer areas are going to be 1000x better than those in poorer ones. See e.g. this older John Oliver (Last Week Tonight) special: https://youtu.be/o8yiYCHMAlM.