Harris poll for Guardian finds people reconsidering major life events such as having children or buying a home
Americans are reconsidering major life events including marriage, having children and buying a home amid economic anxiety in the opening months of the Trump presidency, according to an exclusive poll for the Guardian.
Six in 10 Americans said the economy has affected at least one of their major life goals, according to the Harris poll, citing either lack of affordability or anxiety around the current economy.
Though Donald Trump’s tariff policies have only been in place for a few weeks, and though he has temporarily walked back on some of his harshest policies, the findings are a sign that Trump’s economic agenda could have long-term effects.
My family desperately needs a bigger house or an addition but I have no idea if I will ever be able to afford another loan.
The entire country is suffering from narcissistic abuse Sure some are enabling it but we’re all suffering
Indeed, all of our big ticket items are on hold.
This is a weird connection to make, but since this started happening, my wife and I have been unintentionally saving money.
I don’t think we’re doing it ‘on purpose’, but instead of the usual stream of random frivolity, we’re just sort of trimming back, and as a result, find ourselves with extra money to transfer to savings when we look at our accounts.
I think we’re both just trying to be ready, should we need extra resources for whatever reason.Yeah same, we’re saving because we dont know if shit could just hit the fan. I’m actually in the process of converting 50% of my savings into foreign currency. The US is finally on its way out
What currency are you going for?
Euro/yen when the exchange rates are favorable.
Interesting. Well, I already live in the Eurozone but never thought I’d see the day where Americans would buy a lot of Euros
For me, Euros. I am aligned with the concept of democracy and civil rights, so it feels natural to participate with their economy. Plus, they have an ocean dividing them and US, so they have a bit of insulation when our streets start being painted red.
Mind, I am also tempted to drop about $3k for a gold bar from CostCo.
I never thought I would be thinking of buying gold. Seemed like sucker shit. Yet here we are.
Yup. Apparently the same gold bar from Costco was about $2k a year ago. I have been doomspending as of late, stocking on stuff and renovating, since I don’t believe in the American Dollar anymore. Up to a year ago, I was seriously trying to develop my wealth, slowly but steadily, expecting to cash out in a couple decades.
Now…well, what is the point? The death rattle of our institutions makes it clear that there is no good future to rely upon.
Interesting. Well, I already live in the Eurozone but never thought I’d see the day where Americans would buy a lot of Euros
That’s a surefire way into a depression. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not blaming any individual for behaving like that. It’s the reasonable thing to do. But for an administration to fuck up that badly in such a short timeframe is just unbelievable.
Yeah i mean, we actually spent a little more last month to stock up on stuff. We haven’t really felt the “tariffs” yet except for some temu orders I cancelled. But if it stays the current course we want to be safe.
Realistically trump has just been adding alot of uncertainty. Its annoying he doesn’t have a real plan and just reacts
Im Canadian and avoiding American products has saved me a lot of money, so much junk food we don’t need is American, and the off brand Canadian versions are even better and cheap. I never realized how much of my money went to American junk until this tariff thing, so I’ve stopped buying anything i don’t NEED
I’m an elder millennial. I feel like my life has spent more time on hold than otherwise. Economic crisis, plague, not-really-a-war-but-war, more economic crisis, watered down dictator. . .
Can I just die already?
No you can’t die! We need more hard workers in the workforce! How else will your boss and bosses boss afford that extra house, car, and vacation time?
If you need hard workers, I am not your man.
Fn same
Millennials are also the first generation to really lean into child free lifestyles too, usually out of necessity not because we hate babies. We got fucked and had the audacity to throw a wrench in the machine of not following orders and being clones of our parents
Can I just die already?
I feel this. I also used to believe in and not mind the idea of reincarnation, but Jesus Christ would I hate to come back. I didn’t procreate because I know there’s nothing good on the horizon for future generations. It’s become a nightmare to think I may ever have to come back again.
“A crisis is coming!”
Well I’ve been in crisis since I got laid off at Christmas so everyone, welcome to the show.
Before that I’ve been trying to come out of my crises since Covid fucked my life up, still not fixed that.
And then going back, my life is still hugely derailed from the past 2.5 decades of crises, macro and micro.
So yeah it’s just more of the same over here.
I’ve been trying to get back to the life I had before it blew up in 2008. My 26 year old son says that the Bush Economic Crash of 2008 looms large in the lives of his friends. Many in his generation had their entire lives thrown into chaos in the middle of their childhoods, giving them a wired in sense of foreboding toward their future. They know that no matter how good your life is, the government can destroy your life with mindless policies designed to benefit a tiny few elites, at the expense of everyone else.
No wonder that so many young people are thinking that Socialism/ Marxism/ Communism sounds like a reasonable alternative to whatever arbitrary system we have now.
My faith that things could be better was snuffed out during COVID. I watched the true empathy gap between myself and those who couldn’t be bothered to do the bare minimum without whining like a 5-year-old throwing a tantrum. What optimism I had for a better life for my child vanished in 2020. I’m a shell of the person I used to be.
I don’t know what the future holds, but if it gets much worse, I don’t know how I’ll survive.
The entire image of America sold to me as a child was a lie and I’m having a very difficult time rectifying that.
No wonder that so many young people are thinking that Socialism/ Marxism/ Communism sounds like a reasonable alternative to whatever arbitrary system we have now.
Plenty of societies have demonstrated that socialist policies do work. It’s sometimes called the “Nordic model”. We have the blueprint, but America is neoliberal (aka oligarchic/neo-feudal) and those who hoard all the wealth and power will not give any of it up without a fight.
Marxism/Communism has noble ends - a classless, stateless, truly equal and equitable society - but there no viable means to such an end, as history has demonstrated, due to the innate wickedness and selfishness of human nature.
Gen X, here. Feel the same. Move forward two steps, stop. Back up one, stop. Take three forward, take 4 back. Move up one. Etc. X got lucky with cheaper college and sometimes you could find affordable homes, but damn. It feels like treading water and maybe occasionally swallowing some since forever.
It’s like our lives are written like a book about Russian history where every chapter ends with “… and then it got worse”.
Try voting Republicans out.
I keep waiting for everyone to catch up. The solution isn’t hard. 🤷♂️
someone posts about basically being suicidal
HMMM TRY DOING THIS THING THAT HASN’T WORKED AND YOU PROBABLY DID ALREADY! HMMM HMMM I’M SMARTER THAN EVERYONE ELSE, IT’S LIKE, DUH, THAT’S THE SOLUTION HA HA EVERYONE ELSE SHOULD CATCH UP HA HA I DON’T CARE THAT YOU’RE IN SO MUCH DESPAIR YOU WANT TO DIE, MY SOLUTION ISN’T VERY HARD🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️🤷♂️
Sometimes even empty platitudes of hope can help a deeply depressed person.
If only it was one
Do you think anyone here has been voting Republican?
No but it’s likely many people here simply didn’t vote or aren’t Americans.
Amazing seeing these responses. 2/3 Americans either voted for Trump or didn’t think it was important enough to bother with.
I do my best every two years or so. It’s like trying to put out the sun with a mouthful of water in this state.
The message isn’t for you, then, but for the 2/3 Americans who got us here.
Older millennial here.
Within my group of friends, none of us had career jobs or the semblance of stability until well into our 30s. Some of us are just now starting to have kids as we’re turning 40. Probably less than half though. We’re half and half on home ownership.
The propaganda we grew up with was intense. I’m not pretending the U.S. is the worst country to live in, but the reality is it really isn’t that great. We’re being abused by our system despite working our asses off for it.
Would he just have a coronary already.
It’s a Harris poll so it’s obviously financed by the woke globalist transdimensional space vampires. Wake up sheeple!
Space vampires ate muh eggz.
Leave it up to dumbfuck conservatives to kill a recovering economy. An economy that was recovering from COVID better than most, if not all, other nation’s economies.
Can we just let these braindead scumfucks run their own red states into the ground and cannibalize each other? I’m tired of supporting these fucking losers.
It’s like a family death. You’re in trauma for a year and have to put off any major life decisions because of brain fog and anxiety.
Trump doesnt get what that impact does doesnt do anything for business and is unsustainable.
Then again he did bankrupt a bunch of casinos so it’s really on the public for voting him full well knowing he’s a convicted criminal and liar.
Even if the economy recovers and we don’t enter a “recession” none of the other Millennials I know are ever gonna be able to trust the federal government again. In my experience, as a demographic, we tended to lean LibLeft anyway, or at least those of us with IQs and test scores to stay out of remedial classes do. There are exceptions - we all know that guy, and it’s always a guy. But still.
…
Sorry I had more but I got distracted by the sounds of birds in my yard and, well 🤷♂️
You think millenials were betrayed…
Imagine being any generation in Ukraine right now. Or gaza. Or an immigrant of any color of skin but white in the US. Imagine being a child at an ICE detention center rn. Any child divided from their parent because of the continued ICE agent incompetence setting examples with children. Or the child with cancer that got yanked out of treatment to be deported.
Can you imagine how many babies they’d get if labor and delivery were free? How many parents would return to the work force if child care were free (or affordable)? It’s cheaper for republicans to trap people in poverty.
having children
Not having children produces a long-term negative economic impact on the country, as the economic potential is tied to the size of the labor force.
Having children ensures a human must suffer through the worsening climate crisis.
Try telling that to the idiotic ruling class. ¯\(ツ)/¯
My life has never been off of hold…
Would be nice if the job I trained the better part of a decade for paid more than living expenses.
Ever generation has less than 1/2 of the wealth as the previous, eventually we are just slaves
Republicans: We want Americans to have more babies!
The science on how to make more babies: Stop electing Republicans!
I’ve been doing this my whole life.
Oh how the time doesn’t fly. This will be the longest four years ever with the question lingering, will we even be allowed out? Will there be enough leftover to rebuild from? Will we learn the right lessons before its too late? 2042 isnt far off :/
Four years? That’s might optimistic. Trump’s already planning for a third term. He’s not leaving the oval office alive.
Meanwhile the little “color in the thermometer” progress chart on the back of the Project 2025 workbook is nearly half filled.
Theres always the chance that the US Balkanizes or the feds become otherwise irrelevant because of cascade failures. Remember the US has about a dozen empire destroying issues in the oven and Trump not only turned up the heat but threw in like 12 more.
Rebuilding could take 10 to 20 years. If he’s shit enough it could take two to six.
If he does Herbert Hoover levels of damage there’s likely to be broad motivation to take heavy handed action to fix it. Re-nationalizing land, nullifying contracts, and disregarding the impact it has on those who invested money or otherwise relied on the changes. Some of the programs being torn apart today are direct responses to trying to fix the problems Hoover caused.
It’s not a lot, but it’s worth remembering that Hoover had a lot of similar stances to Trump. He made things so bad that America elected the closest thing we’ve ever had to democratic socialism, and people liked it so much that they elected him four times and Congress changed the Constitution out of spite.
It could take decades longer than even that. America has experienced mind-boggling collapse in just 4 months. The damage to its reputation will take an entire restructuring of the powers of the executive branch to overcome. I mean, who wants to make a deal with an admin, when every 4 years it can go back on its word?
We still have at least 43 more months to look forward to. The bottom hasn’t even begun to drop.
The soft power will take the longest to repair, but 40-50 years is a bit long. That’s on par with how long it took for us to build most of it in the first place.
I mean, who wants to make a deal with an admin, when every 4 years it can go back on its word?
This certainly isn’t unique to the US. It may be more pronounced here at this moment in time but that wouldn’t have been true 20 years ago. The system hasn’t changed in that time. The same can happen anywhere else with the right conditions.
That’s very true. It’s less that it can happen, and more that it’s happening with virtually every trade agreement at once, along with dozens of diplomatic norms.
That said, the authority of the executive is undeniably stronger today than back then. Congress has acquiesed its authority and powers on virtually every issue imaginable and it alternates between being too complicit and too incompetent to change that (and too gridlocked to achieve meaningful policy anyway).
There are too many metastisizing issues to count at this point.
The compromising of things like voter data and social security databases has really disturbed me. Even if we have the best president in history next, how can we ever trust those systems again when an unknown number of people potentially have backdoor access to that info? I think a lot is going to need to be scrapped and rebuilt from zero if we’re supposed to have confidence in it. It’s not like the normal stuff like when we get a crummy EPA or FCC person and we can just roll some policies back or what have you, we have been severely exposed to unknown parties about many of the most private and personal levels.
It is one of the reasons why a civil war would actually do America good: for security’s sake, the non-fascist side would have to overhaul their systems.
This is the stupidest timeline, that the best solution to a problem lines up with social armageddon.
I really don’t want to see people crossing the line to war/terrorism. I guess it would be the fastest way to get impactful change, but likely at a high cost. Destabilization also seems much easier than establishing a new system that enough people are happy with without fracturing again. That’s also assuming the side we’re on comes out on top.
We don’t necessarily need something catastrophic to build back. We just need to seriously learn from the mistakes we’ve allowed, not just to smooth things over with words and by ignoring transgressions.
If we get a new Theodore and Franklin as our presidents, that certainly would be preferable. Unfortunately, I have the feeling that isn’t happening. Unlike those days of yore, we got a president who wants to be king, and cares not who else has to pay the price for it.
Best I can do for you right now is a slightly used Kamala and a Newsom. (sad laughter)
I was somewhat pleased the other day to see Andy Beshear being mentioned. I’m not an expert on Kentucky politics, but I used to listen to a show from Cincinnatti during Covid, and Basheer seemed to navigate issues in a largely red state well, and he seems to be on what I feel is the right side of many issues. Skimming his wiki page quickly, I don’t see any controversies, and actually a few more good things I wasn’t aware that he managed to accomplish.
There are still many powerful people with a lot to lose that I don’t think are interested in seeing the US go fully off the rails, plus the head of the MAGA cult of personality is an old and unhealthy person, so we may yet get to see the movement run out of steam naturally before it is too late. I’d like this BS stopped yesterday of course, but I don’t want a violent leftist government any more than I do a violent right government. I’m neither rich nor well connected, so either would be bad for me and the people I care about.
