The family income of the Johnsons is a fifth of what it used to be. And the children are about to feel the pain. Mr. Johnson’s two oldest are attending his alma mater, Johns Hopkins University, at an annual cost of $50,000 apiece. And his youngest daughter, 15 years old, recently began her own college search. Mr. Johnson isn’t sure whether he’ll be able to help her to go to college, or even to get the older kids to graduation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Further expenses such as first homes and weddings are out of the question. “They’re going to have to elope,” he says. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Really? This is the upper-middle class struggle? I always assumed I grew up in an upper-middle class family, but let me tell you, my “college savings” weren’t anything near $50,000, let alone for four years. I think I spent most of them on flight training for my private pilots license (which I still need to finish) anyway. Maybe it’s my bias against the path of school, school, school, college, maybe more college, (* change the world), job, marriage, house, kids… my sarcasm recently engaged a facebook thread about this that was apparently only funny to me… but, hey, crap-tastic entitlement. Yeah yeah, I know, I’m lucky, most people can’t get jobs without college degrees, but I’m still unconvinced that if they had started working as young as I had and worked as hard as I have, they wouldn’t have had more to show for it. I’m fairly certain I’ve been making more money the last couple of years than my father ever did. A asked me what class I thought I belonged to, and I realized had never stopped to consider these matters. I’m not against college, if that isn’t obvious. I just sense something really wrong in the way we’re finding out what to do with our lives, and the money we spend in between.<\/p>\n
Anyhow, *grumble*. <\/p>\n
Sometimes I wonder if I can leverage reminding myself that which emotionally upsets me now, won’t in five years, since the good things don’t really feel like I pendulum quite so far that way as well. But then there’s me, bouncing up and down on my touring bike last Sunday purely at the thought of fries. Is that happy? Silly? Crazy? Oh, bother.<\/p>\n
Oh, exhausted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A and I sat in her car in the rain, talking about volunteering and working in emergency and disaster services, pondering plans for the future, the flux between joining up and running off. I talked about my feeling that some day someone will convey to me that I’ve done enough, and I’ll finally slow down […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1101"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1103,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101\/revisions\/1103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.loftninjas.org\/rants\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}