I Feel Crazy Every Time Someone Tells Me the Economy is Fine

Five women in my life are proof of something no headline number explains. If you feel the same cognitive dissonance, read on.

I have spent the last year living inside a split screen I can’t turn off. In the same week, I’ll watch one friend casually mention booking a second vacation, the way you’d mention a haircut, and then get a call from another friend asking how she’s going to keep the lights on. Same year. Same country. Sometimes the same zip code. I used to think I knew where I fit on one shared economic timeline. I don’t anymore. I can see two different economies running side by side, and being able to see both of them at once might be the actual problem.

Economists have a name for it: the K-shaped economy, with two divergent paths running at once rather than a single shared recovery. It traces back to an actual sequence of events. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the response was to flood the system with stimulus and push interest rates close to zero. That money found its way overwhelmingly into assets, stocks, real estate, and anything someone could already own, and the people who already owned those assets got dramatically wealthier, fast.

Then came the inflation that followed, landing hardest on groceries, rent, and gas, the exact expenses that eat up a far bigger share of a paycheck for someone without assets to fall back on than for someone with them. Then came the rate hikes meant to fight that inflation, which made saving more rewarding for people who already had savings, and made borrowing brutally expensive for everyone else. Each stage of the same policy response, meant to rescue the whole economy, ended up running in two different directions depending on which side of the asset line you started on. Nobody designed it to split this way on purpose. It just kept splitting that way anyway, stage after stage, for going on six years now.

Here’s the part I don’t think the people at the top of that split fully feel yet. Insulation isn’t the same thing as immunity. The top of the K is being propped up right now by spending and confidence that ultimately depends on a much larger base of people who are running out of room to spend. When most consumers pull back because they’re maxed out, the businesses serving the top eventually feel it too, just later, and through a different door. Wealth concentrated in a small number of companies and asset classes is concentrated risk, not safety, if any of those names stumble. And a country with this much of its population structurally locked out of building any wealth at all doesn’t stay politically and socially stable forever, which is its own risk to everyone, including the people currently doing best. I’m not predicting a date for when this catches up. I’m saying the math doesn’t support feeling permanently safe up there, and most of the people I know who are doing well haven’t actually run that math.

Five people in my own life are already living on the other side of that split, right now, in ways I have never seen from any of them before.

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Five Lives the Index Will Never Count

I’ve started keeping a quiet list. Not of stock tickers. Of people. Five of them, in my own life, right now, living through something I have never seen before in any of them. Every time I describe it to someone in finance, I get the same response. A small laugh. A pat reassurance. We’re not in a recession. We’re not in stagflation. Projected earnings are great. I want to tell you about the five people instead.

The Business That Couldn’t Outrun the Economy

One of them spent most of her life building a thriving business. The last few years broke that. As the business declined, she did the one thing she could: she borrowed against her house, the only real investment she had ever made, the one asset that had quietly doubled in value over thirty years while she put her actual effort into running the business instead of watching a portfolio. She drew against that equity again and again, until there was nothing left to draw against. She has spent months now leaning on the nonprofits that exist to catch women exactly like her, and she is worn down by that in a way I don’t think she has words for yet. This is a woman who did everything the textbook says you’re supposed to do: build something real, work hard, put your equity into the one asset everyone tells you is safe.

Doing Everything Right, Still Underwater

Another is divorced, raising her children on her own. She is well employed, the kind of job that looks solid from the outside, but it’s the kind of job that comes with a paycheck and nothing else, no stock options, no equity, none of the wealth-building extras that start layering on top of a salary further up the ladder. Almost everything she earns goes toward getting her children into school: grants applied for, scholarships chased down, student loans signed for in her own name on top of theirs. That’s the actual front she’s fighting on, and there’s nothing left over for her own future once that fight is paid for. She’s one of roughly a quarter of American adults who now put groceries on a credit card and carry the balance forward, not for anything extravagant, just food, while that balance quietly compounds in the background of a life that, by every external measure, looks like she’s doing everything right.

A Retirement Spent on Everyone Else

Someone close to me has reached the age she always pictured as retirement, and instead spends every spare dollar holding up her grown children, who are underemployed in ways that don’t match the educations or expectations they grew up with. She never invested herself. After her divorce, she remarried someone with a 401(k), which means whatever security she has now isn’t really hers; it’s borrowed from her husband’s retirement account instead of built from her own decades of work. She covered one of her children’s weddings. Another lost a job and now has an apartment that isn’t actually affordable without her stepping in. A third, well into adulthood, still depends on her outright. None of this shows on the surface. She isn’t struggling in any way that a stranger passing her on the street could see. But she is one serious illness away from watching the entire structure come down at once, hers and three other adult lives stacked on top of it.

What Survival Left Behind

Someone else I know is in her sixties. She lost her job a few years ago, and has spent that stretch living at a pace her savings were never built to support. What’s left is disappearing faster than she can slow it down, and none of it was ever invested. She survived an abusive relationship, and the weight of that history is part of why she can’t bring herself to hand what’s left to a financial advisor. She has also lived through financial abuse directly, the kind where someone else holds the money and the power that comes with it, which is its own quiet way a woman arrives at sixty having never invested a dollar without ever really choosing that for herself. Right now, I’m the one helping her stop the bleeding: getting her enrolled in SNAP, connecting her to food banks, writing her a resume after years outside the workforce, and working to get her health insurance down from two thousand dollars a month to something she can actually afford through a state program. She is one diagnosis away from watching all of it collapse at once.

What Caring for Her Mother Cost Her

And one more spent two years caring for her own mother through a serious illness, setting aside her own life to do it, quietly draining what little she had until there was nothing left. Then she got sick herself. She is fighting that illness right now while homeless, on a waiting list for housing that runs years long, the kind of wait that assumes she has years left to wait it out. I’m not going to add more detail than that. Some things don’t need it to land, and this person deserves better than becoming a case study.

All five are women. None of them were ever taught that investing was something they were supposed to do, not as a household practice, not as a system, not even as an idea worth raising at the table. For most of their lives, money and markets were coded as something men handled, demonstrated to sons rather than daughters, and discussed in conversations they weren’t part of. That’s not a personal failing on their part. It’s a generation of women who were never given instructions, arriving now at the exact moment in life when not following them comes at the highest cost.

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The Road Ahead

When I bring any of this up with people who work in finance, the reaction is almost uniform. The small laugh, like I’ve said something quaint. Look at the data. We’re not in a recession. Earnings are strong. The laugh is the part that gets to me more than the disagreement. It’s not the laugh of someone who’s weighed these five lives against their own data and concluded I’m wrong. It’s the laugh of someone for whom these five lives were never on the table to begin with, not a contested data point, just unthinkable.

I don’t think that makes them bad people. I’ve sat with this for a while now, and I keep landing somewhere less satisfying than “they got rich and stopped caring.” It’s closer to a blind spot that correlates with where someone sits in the economy than to a character flaw. The advisors and analysts laughing at me are, almost by definition, standing on the upper part of the K-shaped economy I write about constantly on this site.

Their clients are doing fine because their clients can afford to have a financial advisor at all. That’s not a representative sample of anything except who currently has assets large enough to be worth managing. The data they’re citing isn’t fabricated. Unemployment really is low by the headline number. Earnings really are growing in aggregate. But aggregate numbers are built, almost by design, to reflect the people and companies with the most weight in the average, and the five people on my list have none. Add to that a few years of recession calls that turned out wrong, soft landing after soft landing, and you get a profession that’s trained itself to hear “things are bad” as noise rather than signal, even in a moment when the signal might actually be real.

I’m not telling you we’re in a recession. I genuinely don’t know if that’s the right word for what’s happening. What I know is that I have never, in all the years I’ve known these five people, watched this many of them hit a wall at the same time. That’s not a forecast. That’s a count.

None of the advisors I know personally sees any of this in their daily lives. Not the business that couldn’t outrun the economy, not the credit card balance that’s just groceries, not the retirement spent on three adult children, not the abuse survivor counting down half a million dollars, not the woman who gave two years to her mother and got sick herself in return. None of it ever crosses their desk. Their actual daily evidence is whatever their own clients tell them, and their clients can afford a financial advisor in the first place.

It makes me wonder when the economy is finally coming for them, too. They keep telling me to invest heavily, stay the course, ride it out. Meanwhile, I’m the one looking at the cracks they’re not tracking: the federal government now pays more in interest than it spends on the entire military, with that bill projected to double within a decade. A bond market that never actually recovered from its worst year on record, sitting on the exact same conditions that caused that crash. Private equity firms holding trillions in losses they haven’t admitted to yet, with a wave of funds forced to sell in the next two years, whether the market cooperates or not. A trillion dollars in office building loans are coming due this year at rates that don’t work anymore for half the buildings carrying them. A real question about whether the hundreds of billions being poured into AI infrastructure is actually turning into profit fast enough to justify it, one that lenders themselves are already pricing in as risk. A two-trillion-dollar private lending market that international regulators have openly admitted they cannot fully see into. And a freshly signed peace deal in the Middle East that both sides are already describing differently within days of signing it.

I don’t think the people telling me to stay fully invested are immune to any of that. I think they’re standing closer to the edge of it than they realize, and the only reason it doesn’t feel that way to them yet is that none of it has reached their desk.

Fall is when several of these pressures land at once, even without anything new going wrong. Some of that damage is already locked in. Wholesale prices are running at 6.5% while consumer prices sit at 4.2%, and that gap typically takes two to six months to fully reach store shelves. It hasn’t closed yet, which means autumn already has built-in room to get more expensive before it gets less expensive, independent of any fresh shock. Layer the situation in Iran on top of that. The peace deal signed in June gives itself sixty days to fully resolve, putting the real test right around mid-August, and the two sides are already describing what they agreed to differently within days of signing it. If it breaks, as the spring ceasefire did, oil heads back toward $100 a barrel quickly, adding a second source of upward price pressure on top of the first.

October 1 marks a real shift, too, just not the one most people assume. SNAP itself isn’t being eliminated. What actually changes that day is the federal government cutting its share of states’ administrative costs for the program from 50% to 25%, handing states a much larger bill just to keep the program running. States facing that bill are already warning they may have to tighten eligibility or shrink benefits to absorb it, a slower, state-by-state squeeze rather than one clean nationwide cut. None of that needs a single dramatic headline to hurt people. It just needs each state quietly making the same impossible choice, on its own timeline, mostly invisible to anyone outside it. It’s the five women on my list, and millions like them, who feel an energy shock and a shrinking safety net first and hardest. The upper-K mostly reads about a state budget fight in the news and moves on.

The rules themselves are broken right now, and rebuilding a financial life around what I’m actually seeing, instead of what I’m being told, is going to be tricky. More judgment call than formula. More navigation than a fixed route. But tricky isn’t the same as impossible, and after watching what happened to five women who tried to do this alone, I know I don’t want to navigate it without help either.

A quick closing thought. I debated for a long time whether to write this at all, because I never want anyone in my life to open this newsletter and recognize themselves in a stranger’s worst year. I’ve changed enough details here that I don’t think they will. But I needed to say this somewhere, because I’m tired of being laughed at for noticing something that five people I love are living through, whether anyone in finance believes it or not.

Stay Aware,

Pam

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