“Middle Class Americans Are Quietly Falling Behind…”

Ajouté : 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]I can't keep doing this. Like, what the is even going on?

[00:00:03]>> I'm really trying not to stress and panic and freak out.

[00:00:06]>> And mark my words, none of these prices are going down. Not gas, not housing, not interest rates, not food, not nothing.

[00:00:16]>> Something is changing in America and the numbers don't feel normal anymore. The middle class used to be the majority of the country. Around 61% of Americans in the early 70s were considered middle class. Today, the number is closer to about half of all the households. At the same time, the pressure on everyday families keep stacking up. Rent, food, and debt all moving in the wrong direction. So, what happens in between?

[00:00:49]>> I can't keep doing this. Like, what the is even going on?

[00:00:54]everything that's happening and having to still go to work every day and pay bills and rent and stress about money and go to work and pretend like everything is normal. This shit's not normal and I don't know how much longer I can do this. It's like eating me from the inside out. Why aren't we doing something? What the guys? I'm really trying not to stress and panic and freak out, but even working as much as I absolutely can, it's not enough. And this month, I fear I'm going to fall behind.

[00:01:29]And I'm petrified. I'm already like can't afford food.

[00:01:33]What else can I cut out?

[00:01:37]I don't know what to do.

[00:01:40]>> Anyone else feeling more depressed than normal lately? I'm just curious. like just this like looming depression. And it's not like boohoo, lock yourself in a dark room depression, but you can feel something's off. My take is this. I just filled up my gas tank and for $30 I got a day's worth of gas in my truck essentially. And I'm realizing more and more of how [ __ ] our economy is. I went through this last recession deal that we did in the early 2000s and it [ __ ] sucks. And this is all the signs of what it was. I mean, who how many people out there right now have no credit card debt because you don't need to live on your credit cards? I make more money today than I did 5 years ago by far. Yet, I am broker like tremendously broker than I was 5 years ago. If I would have made this money five years a years ago, holy [ __ ] like life would be amazing.

[00:02:34]But it's like it's not enough. And now all of a sudden, you kind of like feel like a failure and and you start to get in your head of like why am I constantly stressed? I mean, are you driving around with your your check, you know, your fuel light on, or are you giving up your health insurance because you're trying to cut corners somewhere just to get some more money and cash flow somewhere?

[00:02:51]I don't know, man. I will say this. I think it's going to get a lot worse, way worse, way worse than this before it ever gets better. I think you're going to see a lot of people struggle with addiction. I think you're going to see us a lot of people struggle with mental health. Like, it's going to get [ __ ] crazy. Uh, kind of like it did back then. And I don't mean to be like some like like sound the alarms or whatever [ __ ] but I'm just like I'm watching more and more people just using credit cards on [ __ ] and just not having money all of a sudden and never slowed down the spending and now all of a sudden it's like we didn't even slow down the spending and you're just broke. I don't know. I hope that I'm wrong. I hope that this is just a little phase. I guess we'll find out. I just want to let you know if you're struggling right now, you ain't alone. Millions of Americans are literally giving up. Like day by day, they're saying, "I'm done. I'm quitting.

[00:03:38]I'm not doing this anymore." Because we're all tired of it. On the realest note ever, the fact that everything in the freaking store is $5. Good luck trying to get like I'm a single man and it still is about a hundred bucks if you're trying to eat some healthy quality foods like just to get out the store. Then you go and get your gas, it's five bucks at a minimum. like everywhere you go. So, here's the thing.

[00:04:03]I'm making more money than I have ever made in my life, y'all. Like, for real.

[00:04:09]For real. I thought that if you made this kind of money back when I was younger, like 10, 15 years ago, I thought that dang, you really might have made it if you made this kind of money.

[00:04:18]So, it's the fact that I don't even know how anybody making less than say 25 an hour can afford to live in America right now. Like you go getting a car payment, dude, that's $600. That's not even with the insurance. Okay, you go trying to get a house, they are seven, eight times the average income. So like the bare minimum house is 400,000. I'm just trying to say, dude, something's got to make sense because it's Memorial Day.

[00:04:49]All right. And I'm going to work because if you don't go to work today, you're going to end up spending money that you didn't have to spend. Like I'm It's just you got to stay ahead and if you slip up, if you take a single break, gosh, dude, you're eating with the wolves.

[00:05:05]Like that's how America has become.

[00:05:07]>> When do you think they'll get it? When do you think they're going to understand that people cannot afford the lives that they want? They can't afford the children. The generations will continue to get smaller. People will continue having fewer children.

[00:05:21]When do you think that's going to happen? Like it's not a matter of, oh well, this is like a minor dip. It's a matter of the fact that people can barely make it work on their own or if you're in a situation like myself, I'm finally making really good money. I'm not going to immediately funnel that to a freaking kid. No, absolutely not. And yet the cost of living is still insane.

[00:05:43]Inflation's still insane. House housing still insane. And it's like they just think that they can continue to escalate on every front and everyone's still going to comply.

[00:05:55]Like what do you think is going to happen? It's going to collapse. Like I just don't understand why this is all coming as a surprise for them. They just think they can squeeze more and more and more. Everyone's increasing their prices on every front and saying why isn't anyone having children? Gee, I wonder.

[00:06:13]>> Here's where it gets heavier. The top 1% of Americans now take about 18% of all income. Up from roughly 9% in 1979.

[00:06:25]That's a massive shift toward the top over time. Meanwhile, wages haven't kept pace with the cost in real ways for many households. For example, rent prices in the United States have increased roughly around 30% in the last few years, depending on the city, while wages have not moved at the same speed. And it shows up in real life, man. In real life, it shows up. Everybody's complaining and people who you never thought would complain is now talking about it. Listen, man.

[00:07:07]We used to black people crashing out right on the internet. We used to it. It don't it don't surprise us, man. We're like, "Oh, well, he crashing out because she left. She crashing out." But when you see a white woman that's close to middle age, look like that she got her [ __ ] together, look like she got some type of business about herself, is she on her crashing out, bro? You know it's bad. You know we're in trouble when you see white folks with money on the internet crashing out, screaming, pulling their hair, talking about high gas prices, talking about food prices, talking about she can't afford her rent and all that. This lady right here, bro.

[00:07:49]I'm not going to put her name up there.

[00:07:50]But y'all can just just type in crash out. Listen, man. That made me nervous just to see that because we know what's going on in our economy. We know who stuff in their pockets are making us suffer.

[00:08:03]But when white folks, and she's one of the white folks that voted, voted for them, people are reversing their decisions.

[00:08:14]And every time they get in their car and they see that gas light come on, it's messing with them. It's making them rethink the decision that they made. How they were so wanting to put that red hat on their head, that red baseball cap, and now they the one suffering. They suffered right along with every last one of us, man.

[00:08:34]Gas prices. It's ridiculous.

[00:08:37]It's ridiculous.

[00:08:39]People can't even afford to go to work, man. I went to the store and I seen a line of people before I walked through the door. I thought they opened up a new bank branch inside the store. No, those people were lined up at the change exchange machine with bags of coin.

[00:08:56]>> I need to rant about the cost of rent in Michigan. So, I'm getting ready to sell my 4bedroom 1 and 1 halfb home in Michigan. Um, and currently my mortgage payment is around $2,300.

[00:09:11]I thought about buying. The market to buy is absolutely psychotic. And so I thought, well, maybe I'll just rent for a year or so and save some money and that will be great, right? No, absolutely not. Because what I've found as I'm looking at the cost of rentals is that for a two-bedroom apartment, they want often between $2,300 and $2,800.

[00:09:38]And no, I'm not [ __ ] with you. Who is paying these costs? Well, in one city in particular, which is Ann Arbor, I'm sure it's outofstate parents that have quite a bit of money that are sending their teenagers to University of Michigan. And that has something to do with driving up the cost of rent there. But even the in the cities that are surrounding there, the rents are psychotic. And I can also tell you that even an hour away prior to buying this house I rented for a year and the cost for a two-bedroom apartment was [ __ ] $2,000.

[00:10:14]I can pay this if I have to. But what the [ __ ] do they expect people to do who can't? All of the people that help our society operate, who make $50, $60,000 a year or less in many cases, they need a place to live. And I am honestly just on a daily basis increasingly more and more disgusted with what this country has become. Cuz I can tell you in that same city in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 2011, I paid less than $700 for a one-bedroom apartment pretty close to downtown. And literally 15 years later, it's quadrupled. I mean, I don't know. I can tell you right now that the wages sure haven't quadrupled. So, good luck. Like, I don't know what we're going to do. And mark my words, none of these prices are going down. Not gas, not housing, not interest rates, not food, not nothing.

[00:11:18]Nothing is going down. You won't be able to afford [ __ ] the way you used to afford [ __ ] because they need you grinding yourselves in the dirt. They need you clocking in from those 9 to5s, those 10 to fours, those 12 to 12. They need you doing that because they need you distracted. They need your mind elsewhere. Because once you have the time to slow down, once that worry is off your chest and you know where food is coming from, you know where lights are coming from, you know you going to have a roof over your head. Once you have time to set to slow down and you know that you're taken care of and you don't have to slave anymore, you start thinking consciousness expands. It it has room to expand.

[00:11:54]>> Okay, I wanted to just make a follow-up video cuz I'm getting a lot of people who are actually really thinking about unaliving themselves. Please don't underloive yourself. Like, please, please call 988. Please get a psychiatrist. Please reach out to someone because I didn't know I'd be getting this many like messages from people who essentially just want to [ __ ] just end it all. And and it's just it it's so so [ __ ] sad how awfully we have [ __ ] failed Gen Z. And honestly, just the millennials, it's just I just I I the last I'm sorry I've been busy just packing. I'm about to move, but it's just I am so [ __ ] sorry for people out there.

[00:12:54]>> Public announcement. Um, everyone's struggling.

[00:12:58]>> Not just you. You're not alone. And summertime is coming up. you're going to see all the shopping sprees, the nails, the makeup, the hair, the outfits, uh the new hijabs, whatnot. Um, just know if you're thinking, I don't get it. How are they doing it? Like, they're a stay at home wife, they're a stay-at-home mom, their husband works in a gas station, their husband's a taxi driver, Uber driver, whatever.

[00:13:22]Just know that they're buying everything on credit and returning it because I promise you life out here is so freaking expensive. None of us can afford it. And I'm not knocking them down. I'm just I'm like you guys. I'm thinking like how are people going by and affording this life?

[00:13:42]That's the thing. No one can afford this life. We can't afford it. It's too expensive and wages have not gone up.

[00:13:49]So, >> so when people say it feels like they falling behind, it's not just a feeling.

[00:13:55]The structure has shifted over decades.

[00:13:58]More money concentrated at the top, more pressure at the bottom, and less stability in the middle. The real question is simple. Can a system like this stay stable long term or does it eventually snap?