Posted on 04/30/2026 7:32:21 AM PDT by CondoleezzaProtege
Existential crises tend to arrive when the gap between how life feels and how we thought it would feel becomes too wide to ignore.
For a growing number of Americans, 2026 hasn’t just been hard. It’s been disorienting. A Talker Research survey of 2,000 U.S. adults found that one in three people (32%) say they’re currently experiencing an existential crisis, with younger adults far more likely to feel that way than older generations. Nearly four in ten (37%) say their entire lives feel out of their control...
A separate survey of 5,000 Americans, conducted by Talker Research for Current in December 2025, adds context to how raw the financial picture looks.
In that study, 87% of respondents said the country is in a crisis because of how unaffordable life has become. More than half (52%) said they struggle to pay their bills on time each month, and 50% said they’ve had difficulty affording groceries.
Across age groups, the through line is clear: a loss of agency. When people feel unable to influence the things that matter most, their career, their finances, the broader sense of where the country is headed, the psychological fallout is predictable. Anxiety, helplessness, and that disquieting sense of watching your own life happen to you rather than being authored by you.
Rather than staying stuck, a large majority (79%) said they’re planning some kind of mid-year reset, whether focused on mental health (33%), physical health (33%), or finances (25%).
(Excerpt) Read more at studyfinds.com ...
Good for you for mentoring her! And especially good for her! She can easily save $1,000/year (or more) by cutting out the Starbucks coffee habit.
Jeeze, the WWII generation owes them all a slap in the face.
ridesthemiles has a keyboard that only types capital letters
I once worked at a high school. You never saw so many teens concerned about their grades than in the few weeks before graduation. They want to “walk the stage” with their friends even though they have said for four years that they don’t need to know math or how to read and write, they think they are going to be a rapper or play in the NBA. They don’t seem to realize that there are not that many openings for NBA players and rappers.
I don’t read your negative BS.
well, you know, if you don’t want the gloom, actually there really is something that could help. But unfortunately, it’s fantasy. The space program used to mean something I mean, at least we were moving to a particular point.
if we had the means to move into space cheaply, then we could harvest resources and materials and pay off our national debt in about 10 seconds. That would definitely help. They say there are earthlike planets or something similar out there. If we could colonize new worlds, it would be like back in the old days when we were moving out west and going to the New World.
Do we have technology like that? I seriously doubt it. I’ve never seen it but I sure hope we have something like that.
The United States Navy a few years ago patented what amounts to a warp drive, so who knows?. Maybe it’s just BS psyops for the Chinese but who knows:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20170313446A1/en
but yes, going into space would help
Some (though not here, honestly) have called me pretty much exactly that, but they could not be farther from the Truth of the matter. I’m old school, raised in lower middle class, sometimes close to poverty, and just really tried to apply myself in my vocation. Along the way, there was fortune and misfortune, as there is for all of us. My complaining, while definitely personal (the whining...), is more about how our middle class has been gutted, and how grotesque the ‘elite’ have become. This phenomena is culturally divisive/destabilizing, and so has disastrous long-term consequences for a free people/nation. (I won’t go into my rant about how Social Security and Medicare always seem to be on the chopping block, while every single other governmental use/waste of my money seems never to be in danger. It’s almost as if the powers that be want to keep reminding us that they’re in control or something...)
... and another third suffer from TDS ... approximately 80 percent of those afflicted are suffering from Stage 4 TDS.
Dear lord we absolutely agree on something.
Want to know why so many people hate most boomers? Read your own post.
Personally know a ton of younger people not doing any of that shit, working two+ jobs and barely scraping by
Things get bad enough those young people are gonna turn your medicare off and many of us int he middle aren’t gonna fight them
Lol nice exaggeration there grandpa
I don’t know about anyone else, but my whole life is existentializing right in front of my very eyes.
I agree. There is a huge split between the haves and have nots in this country today and unless they're living off of daddy's money the young are mostly in the have not category. It's driving them towards socialism because they feel like it's hopeless that they'll ever be able to afford a middle class lifestyle. When I graduated college in 1990 a bachelor's degree was a ticket to the middle class, now it gets you a job at starbucks for minimum wage. You could put yourself through college on a part time job, today it's $40k a year in student loans to go to the University of Nowhere state school.
The conditions are not the same as when most of us came of age. We can tell them to work hard and pay their dues like we did but the truth is we didn't have the roadblocks to success they have today. Where it's going to bite us is when people feel hopeless they install totalitarians who promise to fix things for them. We've seen it countless times throughout history with the USSR, Hitler, FDR, Obama, etc. When it gets to the point where a majority of the people feel they're being screwed then bad things start to happen.
You wrote: “Want to know why so many people hate most boomers?”
That alone is ultra weird. Never in all my years growing up as a child, teen, young adult, adult did it EVER occur to me to “hate” a previous generation. They were all wonderful people, great Americans, good citizens, kind, gracious, etc. For a younger generation to hate on an older generation is just a deep-rooted sickness of the soul. I hope you and your ilk seek professional help for your mental health problems.
I’m just telling you what I see—and it wasn’t like that in the past because no generation as ever been like the boomers.
Shame on them for thinking they should be able to keep the fruits of their labor.
*** Can you tell us where you see all this misery? ***
I am in Central Tx.
Doctor, you ain’t wrong, not at all…
Exactly right, Gary.
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