It's amazing how anxiety can cause you to be completely unproductive. I've been battling with anxiety about my future for years because of the fiscal and socioeconomic politices of the Age of Entropy and Dissonance, and beyond that, an entire gauntlet of crony-anarchocapitalists, Randian Darwinists, or seat-moisteners that dominate our politics in this country that perpetuate terrible policies that minimize the purchasing power and speech of anyone that doesn't have several tens of millions of dollars to their name.
It's a lot to unpack just starting off in this journal, I know, and it says a lot that my only hope, as well as that of several tens of millions of others out there, possibly as much as over 70% of the country, is that the economy and the country come off the dissonant opiate high and crashes again, and that it happens soon rather than later. Which it inevitably will because of the legendarily horrific economic policies the Entropy put in place.
The nature of the economy right now is not unlike a program with a fuckton of memory leaks. Firefox, for example. It has become clumsy, bloated, slow, and it's not doing its job right, and it needs to reset or crash as a wake-up call, and patched extensively all the while to start functioning properly again, and not in such a way that it benefits an infinitesimally small fraction of the entire body. And you can't just look at broad and shallow things like unemployment rates or the stock market to gauge the health of the economy and the everyman's economic status and health any more than you can gauge a person's bloodwork by just checking their pulse.
In this analogy, the economy is a stage 3 leukemia patient, and we're stuck constantly using leeches to solve the problem and thinking all the while that the blood doesn't want to get better and is intentionally being sick for its own sake.
This is something I will reiterate time and again until we fix this broken system. Wages have stagnated in this country for almost half a century; just because a person is employed doesn't mean they are employed gainfully so, and if they work two jobs and can't even afford the cheapest rent (like there is even such a thing), there's a problem. And that's if they are employed at all, and we've made it difficult if not outright impossible for someone who is unemployed to find work; hell, we had to pass laws in several states to make it illegal to deny work to someone because they are unemployed, as dumb as a law that is to even have to consider. How are you supposed to pull yourself up by the bootstraps (an act that is as impossible as picking up a bucket you are standing in, because our entire society is built on pernicious logic like this) if you are forbidden from the bootstraps?
Bear in mind that I'm not entirely sure how that law is even supposed to be enforced, so for all I know, the law does jack shit.
The application systems that we rely on are also ironically designed to prevent people from getting jobs, and are so bloated with HR spam and retrofitted to do the thinking for humans that it can take upwards of three hours just to fill out ONE application that nobody will read, and even for the most perfect, ideal applicant for the job (which accounts for less than 0.001% of all applications, and that's if the system is having a good day and it isn't shitting itself due to Bethesda-grade bugs), your chance of just getting your foot in the door is less than three percent. And getting denied potentially blacklists you from other companies' versions of that exact same ATS for a period of either months or even forever. There's a reason why Taleo and Brassring have entire hategroups dedicated to each of them.
I've mentioned all of this in previous journals, and this rant journal will be long enough as it is without retreading old gripes.
Right now, the economy is on an opiate high, even though we are on the precipice of disaster; literal "fury of the stars" disaster. I call it an opiate high because despite the continued problems with income inequality, stagnant wages, lack of gainful employment, lack of affordable college or healthcare, collapsing infrastructure, the rising number of bankruptcies among farmers due to the idiotic trade war (soybean farmers were the first line of casualties, and this will have a domino effect), and a stagnant unemployment rate that insists on hovering around 5% (about sixteen million people, based on the country's population census, and this number will vary depending on city and state, and that number will go up substantially as more companies continue to automate), talking heads on news shows will continue to just point to the "low" unemployment rate (that it exists at all while people are struggling to find work should tell you something) and how "good" the stock market is currently doing (even though it has had multiple drops in the past few weeks that dwarf the one-day losses that heralded the Great Recession).
To add insult to injury, while regular people are struggling to pay rent or buy food, the richest of the rich act like they are struggling financially even more than the poor are, even after they got the $2 trillion tax cut. Amazon was getting the VIP treatment when it was looking to set up a new building somewhere, and entire cities were tripping over themselves to pay out billions to erect the building for them, a company whose net worth is half that of the tax cut, and is not guaranteed to be as big a boon to the local economy as the government thinks it will be.
As if all of that wasn't enough, the FTC is currently trying to stamp down on cryptocurrency scams and bubbles performed by companies like Long Island Iced Tea that briefly change their names to incorporate cryptocurrency buzzwords like blockchain in order to make their stock prices balloon by an order of magnitudes. This is on top of the pyramid scheme that is almost all cryptocurrencies, and I say almost only because I'm giving a vague few a possibly fatal benefit of the doubt.
So yeah, that's the short and skinny of it. The economy is anything but healthy, and as much as it will suck, it needs to crash again to be a splash of ice-cold water across everyone's face so we can attempt to right the ship again.
