> the stability is still there for the people who's skills are in demand

Saying this after 2008 is just empirically false. You do realize that people lost their entire 401(k)s, right? My dad worked at IBM for over a decade and was laid off. More recently, my buddy (late 20s) was laid off by IBM after working there for the past 7 years; I know people in their 40s and 50s (at big companies and startups alike) that were laid off at the drop of a hat once the pandemic hit.

I live in West LA and make a "comfortable" engineer's salary. Guess what, I'll never be able to afford a house here (unless one of my startups takes off or some other equally-unlikely miracle happens). I don't care if you blame this on "macroeconomic conditions," it just happens to be the reality of my generation. To touch on the loneliness/isolation angle, while doing the whole startup thing, particularly in my 20s, I was putting off dating; although I've recently said screw it: even if I die poor†, I'd rather be with someone.

I'm very much a libertarian "pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps" entrepreneur's entrepreneur but let's be real: it's not surprising there's so much cynicism.

† Relatively, of course. I grew up in post-Communist Eastern Europe in actual poverty, so my life is much better than it used to be.

It kind of is. 1. Debt accumulates 2. Return on investment grows faster than the economy 3. Capital starts to strangle economy through rent causing political tensions. 4. Suffering 5. Economic reset through war, revolution, plague.

> But the stock market is not a ponzi scheme.

That depends on who you ask. https://www.hughescapital.com/the-stock-market-is-a-ponzi-sc...

I think that's debatable, but it's most definitely people being cynical about the current state of the economic realities we face. It's all fun and games, until someone commits suicide[1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/18/young-trader-dies-by-suicide...

I dropped ~$1000 of my last savings into options earlier this year because "DIS is going to print." Actually, it's because I was unemployed and staring down the barrel of a rent payment that that money would not be able to cover. I figure I lose the money and not make rent, just as if I'd done nothing, or it makes the money back and then some, and I'm able to cover another month. If I'd sold about a week into holding, I'd have made ~50%. Then our Fed Chairman made the totally sane and not completely unprecedented decision to pump $2 trillion dollars into the economy. The underlying stock shot up and my options values evaporated overnight, amidst the issuing corporation announcing that all of its revenue streams would be effectively dead for the foreseeable future.

Just sensible market behavior.

For most on there it is with a small amount of disposable income or house money. But there are some doing it with the money they need to survive or retire. Or just don't understand the naked position they just screwed themselves with.