Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Work your ass off so the company's stock will rise.  Get a watch at retirement. 
Worker bees.
Rat race.
TGIF.

Maybe decades of that have got people thinking maybe there's a better way.

maybe there is
so far there is not.  Not for the masses.

How's your heart and blood pressure? That stuff isn't good for those things.

Decent. BP usually 80ish over 120-130 ish. 

What I run into is quite a lot of misinformation, from both sides ( older generations versus your generation or younger generations). 

For example, the very large multinational Fortune 100 company that I work for has been a major economic force in my little community for almost 100 years. My wife’s grandfather worked there 40+ years, made a good living, and retired from there with a decent pension and benefits. Her dad also worked there for 35 years, retired with a good pension and decent benefits ( health insurance). Her uncles worked and retired from there, some of my family and family friends retired from there. It was seen as having it made in previous decades if you worked there, you had it made. Good pension, good healthcare retirement benefits, good 401k. My own dad retired from another large multinational corporation, retired with good health benefits and 401k, but not a very good pension because he left too early. He was really forced out early. 

There is actually a lot of logic in what OAM is trying to say, but he’s doing a very poor job of explaining a lot of his positions and interjecting too much emotion into it, while blaming the problem on “boomers” who were fortunate only because they were born in an era with good timing with favorable policies and things that can never be replaced with near the same costs as we have today.

My emotion isn't over the issue itself, but by the reaction of a certain group of people here who know better. 

There is no substitute for hard work

This is great.  And true.  And something we can all agree on.
BUT
Many or most of us, in our individual sample sizes of one, with our anecdotal observances, looked around growing up and saw that hard work was rewarded often, maybe 60-70-80, even 90% of the time.  There was a payoff.  It was easier to put in the hard work because there was a high-confidence in it yielding success.  This is key.

What we need to understand and acknowledge (and not blame laziness or Starbucks) is that there are enormous swaths of the populace who grow up seeing hard work paying off only 30% of the time, or 20 or even 10% of the time.  And fewer people perhaps putting in that hard work.

But that makes logical sense.  With such a low likelihood of paying off, that's going to decrease those of a population to put in that hard work.....and that's not some hippy, far-left thing to say.  It's just true.  And if all of our experiences and observations and relatives had such low likelihoods of success while putting in hard work, maybe far fewer of them would have bothered to do it.
And THAT isn't some crazy liberal nonsense, it's just logically probable.  It's okay to say it, as it's a hypothetical.  It's not an attack on you, your family members, or your anything.

I'll never EVER understand the severe pushback I get on this board from what I deem to be logical, unremarkable observations that seem perfectly obvious to me.  I really won't ever understand it. 

What I run into is quite a lot of misinformation, from both sides ( older generations versus your generation or younger generations).

For example, the very large multinational Fortune 100 company that I work for has been a major economic force in my little community for almost 100 years. My wife’s grandfather worked there 40+ years, made a good living, and retired from there with a decent pension and benefits. Her dad also worked there for 35 years, retired with a good pension and decent benefits ( health insurance). Her uncles worked and retired from there, some of my family and family friends retired from there. It was seen as having it made in previous decades if you worked there, you had it made. Good pension, good healthcare retirement benefits, good 401k. My own dad retired from another large multinational corporation, retired with good health benefits and 401k, but not a very good pension because he left too early. He was really forced out early.

Where the misinformation and misunderstanding from different generations is that each and every person sees the world through their life experiences and travels and applies the lessons to the modern world. 

For example, in my previous posts I explained how the company I work for was known for having generous retirement packages and pensions. Well, that is no more. They stopped giving a pension to all new employees many years ago, and froze our pension two years ago. So the thing that I was working for when I started, no longer exists. Healthcare benefits past retirement are a thing of the past as well. Most of the older generation either doesn’t know this, or can’t comprehend this. My mom pays something like $250 per month for her retirement medical insurance.  Mi e will cost $1200 per month in todays dollars. It will be way more when I reach my 70’s. 
The world she went thru simply no longer exists. 
College costs so much more now for my kids than it did for me in the 90’s. Easily 3-5 times more. Someone posted up a few pages ago how they worked their way through college debt free, so why can’t this generation?  They simply don’t understand that is just not possible like it was in the past. The world they knew simply no longer exists. 

A lot of things get skipped over when discussing the economic conditions of decades past. Much talk is centered around how high interest is now. But you can look it up, it was much higher for much of the time in the late 70’s, 80’s, and most of the 90’s. It was not unusual at all for people to finance a brand new home for upwards of 10-12% interest in that time. I think we had this weird run starting around 2000 where interest got low, and just stayed low seemingly forever. For decades. We’ve only seen interest rates that are “high” post Covid. 

Interest rates are one of those things that can have negative, and positive aspects.