Rogé Karma

We've been talking a lot about this low hire, low fire, big freeze environment.

And something I mentioned up top is that like, right, this is particularly punishing for young people trying to find jobs.

But it's also really frustrating for everybody, right?

The idea, even if you have a job, feeling like you're stuck and you can't leave

if you have a boss that is terrible, if you just want a raise, there is a subjective experience that is not easily captured in statistics of like, I want a better life, I want a better job, and I feel like I can't move, that I am stuck.

I think that's happening across the labor market right now.

And there are a few statistics that actually signal that actually may be driving some pretty broad frustration.

The employee confidence index that Glassdoor does reached its all-time lows last year.

And I think what's interesting about stuckness is you're also seeing something similar in the housing market, right?

We talked about how there's a divide between millennials who bought before 2020 and bought after.

Those who didn't buy feel stuck because they can't afford a home.

But those who did buy also feel stuck because they secured ultra low interest rates.

Now interest rates have gone up and there is now emerging what's called this lock-in effect where people who bought their homes aren't selling, home sale volumes have plummeted because they're afraid if they leave, they're now gonna have to pay away higher interest rate.

So even if you own a home, you have all this paper wealth, you cannot realize if you wanna move because you just had a family

or you want to move to better schools, or you want to move because your neighborhood is unsafe, you also now feel stuck.

And so, and again, I think stuckness, this feeling of paralysis is one of those things that our statistics don't get at, but is very important to viscerally how people live in the world.

And the second concept, which is related to that, I think is uncertainty.

The unemployment rate does not tell you about how uncertain people are feeling, but we know there are not many replicable findings in psychology, but one of the few is that people place a high premium on certainty and stability.

We don't like uncertainty about the future.

We don't like volatility.