Privacy and Student Debt and Bullshit Work

How I made $1,024.96 in two hours

How I got 250 followers in 48 hours

How I paid off 20K in credit card debt in 6 months

How I make a living as a stay at home mom

These are the headlines that stalk me across the web, peeking over the privacy fence of my ad-blocker and skimming through my cache. I'm solidly a millennial. I carry student debt that I don't really worry about, and credit card debt, which I worry about constantly. I've been fed the lie that student debt is "good debt" and have been putting my head down each night since graduation on the promise that someday I'll be working in a job that compensates me for all I've spent on education. I am finally in that career, and I couldn't be happier, but the year of living more lavishly than hand-to-mouth and bouncing from soul-crushing part time position to ennui-inducing part time position has taken its toll on my credit report.

There are two monsters at work here-- the specter of debt and the privacy my generation is willing to sacrifice for convenience (and potentially forced to sacrifice for affordability). The debt, and all the tongue-clucking of our elders that comes along with it (and the boring back-in-my-day-the-economy-wasn't-tanked bullshit) is all too common. The Millennial Generation stretches from the mid-1980s to the mid 2000s. Moore's Law says our technology is advancing exponentially rather than linearly. And our expectations for defining quality of life are rooted in a hopelessly outdated ideal of progress.