Well, you are absolutely right that it doesn’t make it better lol. It’s like that “Well, it could be worse” thing people say. The people doing very well during the depression were doing so at the expense of everyone else. I wouldn’t say it’s a good thing for a parasite to be engorged on its host.

I just hate how the media acts like everything is peachy and good as I see another mass layoff knowing my contract won’t be renewed. While I get that this is not at all representative, I did see a big industry fire so many people after record profits.

Where I live, I’ve been seeing a lot of people struggling to get groceries and shit while the market boomed, as supermarkets made record profits. I applied to many hundreds of jobs during a hiring shortage, and I have a few friends who applied to more.

I get these metrics aren’t supposed to represent me, but they do not represent the world around me either. If not that, then who is it supposed to represent?

And to be told that “Bidenomics is good for the economy” might be factual based on these metrics, but to see all those good lines go up and bad lines go down and see everyone around me struggle is super fucking dissonant, and to get that level of gaslighting is a bit insulting.

The economy is complete bullshit and isn’t a metric of the average either.

I’m glad things are going well for you, and I don’t mean this in any sarcastic way or anything.

Because my personal situation has been so good, should I assume that this is true for everyone in our country? Or should I be smart and recognize my personal experience is anecdotal and not representative of the whole economy? Should I blame the media too for reporting what’s actually happening?

I get my personal experience isn’t the average. I also get that, while a better representation, knowing the experiences that my friends and family are having isn’t the average.

My problem isn’t my experiences not matching the average. My issue is the metrics used by media are not a representation of average, and the pain of seeing these metrics show things are supposedly getting better where so many things around me are getting worse, at times in order to improve the metrics used by the media.

My issues are twofold:

I don’t think the metrics used by the media, ie the stock market, are wholly representative of whether or not things are going good for the average American. When things plummet, sure, I’d agree that’s a good metric, since companies will panic and then people will get screwed. But I don’t think markets doing well means things are doing well for the average American.

Sure, the line might be going up, that’s good for some people, but there are many reasons why that could be happening that have no impact, or even a negative impact on the average person. For example, a new technology could have been discovered that lets workers do double the work. A company that fires half their staff will now be making more profit, since they are paying less in wages, and therefore their stock values will rise. Half of their employees were sacrificed on the altar of the stock market for those gains. To use a more recent and frequent example of something that fucked me over: tech layoffs. Tech companies will often purge a lot of employees when doing things like preparing for an acquisition, or immediately following one. Sometimes, they will just thin out their staff following a completed project, or something similar. This often has a positive impact on stocks, but a dire impact on workers.

I also have an issue with the partisanship of the media and how the economy is presented to us differently based on who is in power and the bias of those, but that’s a whole new can of worms.

Yeah, I know. Unemployment is a fucked metric, especially if you have the misfortune to have student loans, a shit job, and live in an expensive area, you’re quite simply fucked.