> Has the financial situation forced everyone into always looking for a side hustle or way to 'escape the rat race'? Inflation has risen and minimum wage hasn'

> Has the financial situation forced everyone into always looking for a side hustle or way to 'escape the rat race'? Inflation has risen and minimum wage hasn't kept up with it. Unions are dead in the US. Boomers got their college education paid by the GI bill, Millennials got their college education paid by excruciatingly huge loans that are impossible to get out from under even by bankruptcy. Some of those have been forgiven by the federal government, with the utmost reluctance. Keeping up with the bills is not easy. You can afford to have a hobby if you're making enough money to not worry about paying your bills. If you're constantly on the verge of going broke then yes, every single thing you do ends up being examined for its money-making possibilities. And then when you do, you have to deal with the fact that the social-media giants that are where you have to go to tell people about whatever hobby you're trying to turn into a side hustle are immensely reluctant to let anyone divert eyeballs off their sites; they'll actively hide posts with words like "patreon" or "commissions", or links to your own site where you can get people to look at your stuff and consider giving you money. Oh yes and those social sites are of course also highly optimized for addiction, so your own scarce free time is colonized by mindlessly scrolling FacebookTwitterTiktokInstagramEtc and not really having a good time but being too amused on a moment-to-moment basis to get up and do something that's actually fun. tl;dr: Yes.