I had an interesting conversation with a gentleman today about what has been happening likely across America with people who’ve found themselves in employment positions that offer a wage that barely keeps them financially afloat. I truly empathize with those people because I’m sure they feel as though they’re on an endless gerbil mill that takes them no farther than they were the day, week, month, and year before. In noticing that the rental housing costs have been rising, I can imagine how it is impacting those that are already on a tight budget.
I had a pang of sadness yesterday when a young woman told me that she had only $20 and several days worth of foodstuffs at her home which had to make due until she received her paycheck in two days. The daily struggles of many of the young single people surely cannot be fully understood unless one actually lives their situations. It all goes back to the frog and the pot. If you throw a frog in a boiling pot of water it will instinctively jump out, but if you place a frog in a pot of water at temperature water it will not jump out even when you turn the burner on and the water continues to heat to boiling point. The frog of course dies simply because it continued to acclimate itself to the increasing water temperature up to and including the time it expires.
Perhaps the pressures of simply surviving is giving cause for people to make compromises in their lives that they normally wouldn’t do had their environments not been so financially stormy.
Part time jobs have become not so much a novelty for people to make a little extra spending money as in the past, but to now help plug holes in monthly budgets that call for more money to keep from falling backwards. I must sadly agree with what has been written about the evolution of our socio-economic way of life here in America. The wealthy are becoming far more wealthy, the middle class is disappearing and the remainder has fallen into the realm of living from pay to pay.
