Just lost my job and it’s so depressing seeing stuff like this every single day. 400+ applications and you don’t even get a call anymore. Nothing from recruiters. When you do get an offer, its 20% lower pay than ever before, while cost of living goes up. So you have to engage in borderline indentured servitude just to eat and pay rent.
The amount of investment you’d need to reduce your need to work takes the average person multiple decades, that’s literally what retirement is. And even if you only considered a part time retirement that still takes decades. In fact my current understanding is most people’s retirement funds will be insufficient when they go to retire.
No amount of investing will save the majority of people from needing to work for the majority of their life. The other alternatives to selling your labor to capital, like starting your own business, requires up front investment and even then isn’t a guarantee. The number of jobs that require minimal investment and can serve as a sole source of income do not exist in sufficient quantities.
So no, investing is not the solution, becoming an entrepreneur is not a solution, at the scale of our society there are few solutions and the primary one is taxing corporations more and taxing billionaires out of existence.
People deserve a right to live. I’m not saying people shouldn’t plan for retirement, I’m not saying don’t try and start a business. I’m saying to you stop framing it as dependency, that’s a fuckin crazy thought process. The overwhelming majority of people go to school and then get a job. Those people deserve to thrive without having a perfect stock portfolio which will materialize in 40 years, without having a second job, without turning their art into a commercial enterprise.