Americans Have Realized the American Dream Expired a Long Time Ago

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Don't come around me asking me when I'm having kids or what I'm waiting on to have kids cuz look around. Rent $1,800 for a one-bedroom apartment. Groceries higher than Demi Lovato and Count Dracula. The groceries that they giving us, they poison them. They poison us and now we got to go to the doctor with these insurance cards that don't cover [ __ ] You still got to pay to get up in the doctor. You still might got to pay for your medicine. Any procedure that you going to need, any major procedure you going to need, you still got to pay for that. You can't send your kids to school without you worrying about them getting shot up or a bomb threat. Hell, you yourself can't even go walk freely DOWN THE STREET OR YOU KNOW, BOURBON Street and have fun and relax from the bills overtaking your life without you worrying about a [ __ ] running through here shooting this [ __ ] up.

[00:00:37]Like, I be The real question is, why are y'all still having kids? Like, I think we just need to take a step back as a community and think. Get this [ __ ] together with the people that's already here. Stop adding new [ __ ] on top of the chaos when we don't even got this [ __ ] figured out.

[00:00:55]It ain't no American dream no more.

[00:00:57]We living in American nightmare right now.

[00:01:00]You got folks working two, three jobs trying to make it.

[00:01:02]Folks working two, three jobs and still can't pay their rent.

[00:01:06]People can't buy houses no more. You don't see You don't see people in their 20s and 30s buying houses no more like they used to back in the days.

[00:01:12]People can barely afford food at the grocery store cuz the prices steady going up.

[00:01:16]Gas prices is is is is is going up.

[00:01:20]And then you got to fill your tank up every every three to four days cuz this gas is burning way too fast.

[00:01:25]You know what I'm saying?

[00:01:27]We We living in American nightmare. This ain't no American dream. I don't know what the [ __ ] is going on.

[00:01:32]This ain't no American dream, though.

[00:01:35]When Whenever you got to work two and three jobs and and you still can't afford to live, you still can't afford food, you still can't You can't put gas in your car, you can't afford basic necessities, man. Shh. This American nightmare. Ain't no more American dream.

[00:01:48]Let's talk about the American dream cuz a lot of people think that the American dream has expired a long time ago. That may be the case. Right now, more than ever, the economy is very tough. It's very tough to get ahead and pull yourself out of poverty without taking on multiple jobs cuz one job is not enough to achieve the American dream anymore.

[00:02:10]So long are the days we can have one job where you're going to be staying for decades. That used to be the past where you could just have one job, you'd commit to one company, and they'd give you a nice retirement and a pension.

[00:02:24]That's no longer the case these days.

[00:02:26]You have to get multiple jobs or job hop to get a higher-paying wage because if you stay at the same company for too long, you're going to fall behind because the raises that you get, and I don't know why this is the case, it's just minuscule. They don't really care about retention these days.

[00:02:45]And that is why a lot of people are switching jobs every three to four years compared to the past where you'd stay at the same company, the same job, you'd grow in the same company, and you'd be able to afford a house, afford a car, afford a family on a single income.

[00:03:05]And that's why nowadays people believe that the American dream is dead, it's expired, and we can't really afford retirement these days. Leave me your comments down below what you think and take a look at the rest of these clips.

[00:03:17]So a dream of mine, just like everyone else, is to own a house. Bro, that shit's never going to happen. That [ __ ] is never going to happen for me or for most people, honestly. And I've always wanted to have my own man cave, you know, go downstairs where all my gaming [ __ ] is and have everything the way I wanted it. Go outside on my porch and smoke a doobie, you know.

[00:03:35]Dude, that sounds like the life, bro, and I wouldn't hate working if that was my life. But I can't afford that [ __ ] bro. Most people can't. And I honestly And the thing is is that I could afford to rent a house, but I mean, like you know, that's like half of my dream, bro. I want to own a house I want to own a house, bro. I don't want to rent, but that's where I have That's That's where I have to do it. If I want my own house, I have to rent a house, bro, and uh for example, there's a house right next to where I live. It's a foreclosed house. And usually foreclosed is on the cheaper side and there's a lot of shitty, you know, there's a lot of problems with it most of the time. And they redid some of the house, and from what I found, it is still $200,000 in a shitty neighborhood, bro.

[00:04:25]Like, are you Like, dude, I saw the sign go up and I was like immediately excited, bro. I'm like, oh [ __ ] I'm going to And I'm going to get my realtor, we're going to look at it.

[00:04:33]$200,000.

[00:04:37]For a two-bedroom, one bath. $200,000, bro. Like, what the [ __ ] I just I want to smoke a doobie on a porch. I want to I want my own gaming setup in the basement or or in a different room, bro. I want my own space, dog. I don't want to live in any more apartments anymore, bro. I am 25 years old. I don't want to live in any more apartments. That [ __ ] sucks.

[00:05:03]It's Dude, it like it's Dude, like I don't even know how to feel anymore, bro. Like, I've gone through all the stages, all right? Like, anger, sadness, you know, hopefulness, you know, depression, all of it. I've gone through all of it, bro, and now it's just numbness because it's never going to happen for me. The only possible way that I could afford a house to actually own a house one day is if I consistently work two to three jobs.

[00:05:33]And then I But if I do that, I can't even smoke a doobie on the porch or play my games because I'm too busy working.

[00:05:39]So it's either either or, bro. I can't have both like it used to be back in the days. It's either either or, and I just I don't know, bro. I don't know. Finally getting a big boy job is crazy because you'll have the responsibilities of someone who is also salaried, be the only person in your department who is hourly. Only person direct contact, direct management to someone who makes four times what your pre-tax salary is.

[00:06:19]And they're asking me to do the Department of Marketing, HR, Student Affairs. I'm being pulled everywhere on campus. For two over a year, I was told I was going to be supervising. I was told I was going to be training, developing, working with different departments. None of that is true.

[00:06:44]And I'm supposed to wait until I'm at that point 22 months in before maybe getting a 1% raise.

[00:06:55]Yeah, I'm in that bottom 60%.

[00:06:59]That's for sure. That's for sure. And um I hear people talk about like, oh, you only got a 3% raise.

[00:07:05]3%?

[00:07:11]I was given extra departments.

[00:07:14]I was given less per paycheck.

[00:07:20]And the craziest part, the craziest part is 10 people are retiring this semester.

[00:07:31]I say that cuz I'm working in academia.

[00:07:35]None of those positions are getting replaced.

[00:07:40]And that all falls on me.

[00:07:48]But they can't afford to give me enough to pay my rent. Got it. Got it.

[00:07:52][ __ ] we're going to work until we die.

[00:07:57]>> [laughter] >> The American dream is absolutely d e a d, hoe. That [ __ ] dieded. That [ __ ] is deceased. That [ __ ] [ __ ] funeral viewing was like two years ago.

[00:08:13]Eight years ago, 2006 20 2008 2000 When Obama was president, that [ __ ] just died.

[00:08:21]I miss Obama.

[00:08:23]>> [laughter] >> I miss I miss being a kid. Like, my This is just going to sound so this, but I did not realize that when I was a beautiful little young child and I thought the world was peach and rainbows, that when it was going to be my turn, I'm 27 years young, baby. About to be 28. That when it was going to be my turn, it was going to be ass for me. The economy was going to be cheeks, and our little America is going to be run by somebody who can't even put into words. Ain't got nothing nice to say. Not going to say anything at all.

[00:09:07]And it that if if I wanted to have Ooh, this is the one that really pisses me off. I want to have kids, right? Maybe later.

[00:09:15]Maybe when I'm like 31, 32. Not Not anymore. Not until this fool's out of office. Not until my kids can get vaccinated. Not until my future kids can go to school without there being like a shooting or something like that.

[00:09:29]Like, shit's cooked. My future that I thought I was going to have as a child is literally cooked, cheese fried. I'm making about to make $19 an hour. Woo, new job with benefits. Really exciting.

[00:09:43]19 isn't good enough. This shit's not going to cut it. I'm still going to be struggling as much as I was in my old job making $17 an hour. Helping animals.

[00:09:51][ __ ] anesthetizing pets. Doing x-rays on your pets. Doing blood draws on your pets. Being a veterinary assistant, veterinary technician, hard work, zero dollars. Zero. Zippo, zilch. And then health care, excited about that, but then the American health care system is [ __ ] ass cheeks.

[00:10:09]You're going to be taking out so much money in my paycheck.

[00:10:14]>> [sighs and gasps] >> Got my tax return, had to pay somebody a little bit off my tax return because they barely helped me with doing my taxes. I'm just so confused. This is not what I thought was going to happen when I grew up. I really wanted to be an adult. OH, I CAN'T WAIT TO BE AN ADULT.

[00:10:31]NO.

[00:10:33]AMERICAN DREAM IS A SCAM. All you have to do is work hard. This is a meritocracy. Do you know how many people are working hard and have been working hard their whole life and all they have to show for it is like some sort of chronic health condition and a [ __ ] ton of debt. It's not real. It's not real.

[00:10:49]The thing they've been telling us isn't real.

[00:10:52]Which is create jobs for every but everybody will have a job so going to be chicken on every table or whatever. But here's the thing, we're going to create all the jobs in the place where it's too expensive for anybody who has those jobs to live there. So then they'll have to commute. They'll have to commute to that job because work hard, you'll be successful. Then by the time they're done commuting and they're home, 10 hours of the day are gone. Well, and but we'll give them 2 days off. But they'll work so hard that on those 2 days, one of them is just recovering from all of the work that they're done and the other one is just preparing to do more work.

[00:11:20]So when are you supposed to wake the [ __ ] up? Do you want to be an accountant? Do I want to be a banker? Am I really into plumbing? Actually, I do think blue collar work is a wonderful service and probably very rewarding. But I thought I was doing it right.

[00:11:35]I followed all of your rules. I did everything you told me to do and I'm miserable. And I'm miserable. Stop buying it. I think we can all just get paid to be ourselves. Think abundance is our natural state and this is a scam.

[00:11:48]The average price of a house in West Virginia is around $200,000.

[00:11:53]The minimum wage in West Virginia is $9.

[00:11:58]Oh, and it's 200,000 to 300,000, not the lower end of 200,000. Right. Gas is $4, going up.

[00:12:06]And somehow it's go running quicker in our tanks. We need to fill up. I used to fill up once a week, now I fill up two to three times a week.

[00:12:16]It used to be cheaper to go get groceries from the grocery store and eat healthy food than it was to go get fast food every day.

[00:12:23]Not anymore. Not anymore. Not anymore.

[00:12:26]It's cheaper to go get fast food junk poison than actually good food from the grocery stores. Why? I wonder. I wonder why. We have a felon like a felon with multiple felonies in the White House and nobody's doing anything.

[00:12:40]But we have people that are just going to work and doing their job and paying taxes that are in concent concentration camps in Florida.

[00:12:51]I I don't know what to do. There's literally nothing we can do about this.

[00:12:56]I feel so stuck. I don't want to live here and I feel like I don't like I shouldn't even be doing anything to work towards my future because I feel like I don't have a future.

[00:13:07]Like Now, I still think that the American dream is achievable. It's just way harder than it was in the past.

[00:13:14]And that is primarily due to inflation and the cost of living. Everything has skyrocketed, which makes people have less money at the end of the month after they're paying off all their bills because the bills are increasing in price every single year and your wages are not following that same pattern.

[00:13:34]People's increases in their pay just doesn't match the rate of inflation and that's causing a huge problem because no one's able to achieve the American dream anymore unless you're working for a top tech company or working multiple jobs or even having your own business. As the years were going on, I've now realized that America is not the place for me. As it stands, the idea of the American dream is completely dead. And what does that mean? Well, it means that I am going to see myself out. Luckily for me, since my dad was an immigrant, I was born with dual nationality, so I can go get citizenship in Thailand. But honestly, there's so many other places I can go. There's a lot of other first world countries where I can have a much clearer peace of mind because sure, here in the US you have all your freedoms, but with those freedoms, you have the choice to choose stupid things and that is absolutely the direction that we've been going. Which sure, that's fine.

[00:14:27]You're entitled to that, but I'm just honestly not interested anymore. Going to go somewhere where I can hang out with my neighbors and go do fun [ __ ] and then not have to worry about if I break my leg or some [ __ ] like that. I don't know. This is a pretty big world.

[00:14:41]I'm going to go see it. How did the American dream die? How did the middle class die? I'm going to tell you, it started in the 1980s with trickle-down economics that did not work. They decided to give tax cuts to the rich and corporations saying that money would trickle down. It didn't. It just made the rich richer. Then we greenlit stock buybacks. So instead of when the productivity was going up, instead of giving workers more money, they just bought back their stocks so the shareholders could make profit and the executives could get bonuses. Then we had leveraged buyouts and the government didn't regulate leveraged buyouts and that was the start of private equity basically buying up everything so that they could make more money. Then we moved away from pensions to 401ks, which essentially just took the responsibility and accountability of the company to take care of their workers with the retirement and put it on the individuals, but we were never taught economics in high school. So how the [ __ ] are we supposed to know about compound interest and investing? But they may have said the 401k was better than the pension when it wasn't. Then they started shipping our jobs overseas, building the middle class of other countries so that they could make more profit, destroying the middle class here. Then we started ramping up the borrowing money and getting into debt as a country, which devalues our dollar.

[00:15:31]Then in 2008, we had predatory lending, which crashed the housing market, [ __ ] over so many Americans and then we used taxpayer money to bail out the banks.

[00:15:38]And when all the houses were cheap, the rich went and bought those up and that's when you started to see the rent start to increase around the 2010s into the 2015s. And then in 2011, we allowed super PACs to exist so billionaires can now buy elections and they use that money on attack ads, which divides the country. Divide and conquer and that's what they did. In 2020, we had the pandemic, which both sides of the aisle handled like absolute [ __ ] shut down all small businesses, all the money went to the top, the rich got richer. They printed trillions of dollars more, which people needed, but what did all the people do? We spent the money cuz we needed to spend the money and where did that money go? To the top and they got richer. And lastly, they decided during the pandemic, let's lower the interest rates on buying a home to 2.5 to 3% so that people could refinance and get ahead. But no, all that really did was give the green light to a bunch of rich people to basically borrow free money and buy up all the [ __ ] housing so that we can no longer own a home. And that all ended in 2021. Then we've experienced 25% inflation since the pandemic and we no longer have a middle class and the American dream is dead.

[00:16:32]When I was in college, my first apartment me and my roommate had was $712 a month and I remember they gave us a 5% student discount off the rent because we was in college.

[00:16:46]When I left when we parted ways and I left, you know, from living there, my first apartment was 590 a month. It was a one-bedroom apartment in a decent side of town.

[00:16:57]And it was nice.

[00:17:00]And I was able to pay my rent off of doing hair part-time and working as a server at Applebee's.

[00:17:07]Then I remember my first car payment. I got a 2013 Nissan Altima and this is with a crazy interest rate. My car payment was $312 a month. My insurance was 98.

[00:17:18]And then I'm like, "Ooh, if I could just I know if I can make 50, 60, 70, 80 thousand dollars a year, baby, I'll be balling with these prices."

[00:17:28]And then fast forward 10 10 years later, 10, 15, and I'm at six figures and it feels like when I was making it feels like when I was in college.

[00:17:41]Now, the money AIN'T STRETCHING.

[00:17:44]WHERE IS THE $700 APARTMENT?

[00:17:47]Where is being able to find a nice rent house for 12, 1300 dollars a month?

[00:17:53]Where is the $300 car notes? Where is insurance under $100?

[00:17:58]Where is all of that? Why when I get to making some decent money, everything want to skyrocket?

[00:18:07]I used to get food stamps in college, baby, $250 in the grocery store, we could eat for years.

[00:18:15]Now I go in there. I went to Dollar General the other day to get some soap to wash my ass, some tissue paper and some meals and maybe some toothpaste and it was $45.

[00:18:27]Why the economy got to go to hell when we get in our 30s?

[00:18:34]We can't afford to buy houses. The houses that we see 350, 400 thousand dollars to live in a popcorn box.

[00:18:46]Where is the life that we was promised?

[00:18:49]I just want to know.

[00:18:52]So, I have come to realize that New York is not a place to raise a family.

[00:19:00]And I'm saying this because So, this morning as I'm getting up to get ready for work, my wife asked me if I could feed our son before I go.

[00:19:13]I'm normally, you know, if I'm working, she takes overnight, you know, and I wake up and I go about the day, but this morning she asked me. So, I asked her, you know what, I'm going to warm his bottle, jump in the shower real quick and come back. And he was a little bit fussier than usual this morning.

[00:19:29]And I took him to the living area. I fed him a little bit. He was still fussy. I couldn't, you know, I swaddled him. He's still fussy.

[00:19:39]And he didn't take all his feed, but I continued to, you know, try and calm him down. But again, I'm getting ready for work and like time is going. And I just go to the front door and I open the door.

[00:19:55]And this child immediately stopped crying as if he was saying, "All right, Dad. I know you have to go."

[00:20:02]All right? And he stopped crying and I fed him the rest of his bottle.

[00:20:11]He drank it.

[00:20:13]I brought him to Mom.

[00:20:15]He laid in bed and I ran out the house.

[00:20:20]And it just broke me that I had to leave my 3-week-old to go to work.

[00:20:33]Why is it like this? And like the system is set up in a way where you have to always be working, have to always be making sure that you have a certain amount of money coming in because you have expenses, right?

[00:20:47]>> [snorts] >> So, you know, I got over that. My hopped in the car and I started driving.

[00:20:52]And then another thing occurred to me.

[00:20:56]There is no type. So, you know, you already can't, you know, be with your family cuz you have to work so much. The times that you do get to spend with your family is like you can't spend it at home because there is literally no yard space. I mean, this morning I was driving, there's no backyard, there's no front yard. I'm just passing like this entire stretch and in the US alone, there there is an issue with obesity and the age at which people are getting type 2 diabetes is getting younger and younger.

[00:21:32]And the person who made the blueprint for New York, they knew exactly what they were doing. They said, "You know, whoever lives here, they're going to work, work, work until they retire." And and if he even if they um stop working after they retire, well, they can't even stop working because all of the expenses won't be covered with the retirement money. And it's it's it's just so sad. Like I can't, you know, I can't have a peace of mind knowing that I'm able to spend quality time with my family and not be able to worry about work. I have to always worry about work.

[00:22:06]I have to always make sure that that you know, there's food on the table, there's shelter here. And it's it's it's just it's just so sad. It's really just so sad. And you know, people talk about the American dream. This is not the American dream.

[00:22:22]This is not the American dream. It you have to work so hard and for what? You know, you work all these years and you stress yourself out.

[00:22:31]And before you know it, you get very ill that you can't even enjoy all all of what you were working with. And you know, it it's it's just heartbreaking to know now like I've been I've been seeing it and it it's like it was normalized to me, but now that I have a son and you know, just like this morning where I saw that I had to just get up and run out the house as if I'm kind of like rushing him to like hurry up and and and and eat so that I can go to work. And of course, Mommy's doing a fantastic job, but the reality is it's it's tiring. It's tiring.

[00:23:08]Um so, if she needs a break, of course, I I can give her a break, but to know that I have to now think about if I'm going to be late for work or I'm going to say, "No, I'm not feeding him." and go go to work and be early. Um it's really heartbreaking. It's really heartbreaking. Luckily enough, it's like he realized that, "Look, okay, Dad has to go. Let me just be quiet, drink the bottle and and and and, you know, and just relax." Um but that's just all I have to say. The American dream is is not the American dream and New York City, and I'm sure there's other places in the US, but I don't live in all the states, but I can only speak on New York and this is not it. This is not it at all.