The club of people with water up to their necks, by Agnès Marquès

Claudia and Marina are twenty-eight years old, have a good job and a room each in a shared apartment. for five and a half years. Luckily they are friends, they say, because it is impossible for them to consider another scenario. Going to live alone in Barcelona or nearby is impossible due to the prices and considering it with your partner, when you have one, is almost jumping into the middle of the ocean without a life preserver: If the relationship doesn’t work, start over

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On paper, as financiers instruct us, Housing should not take more than 35%, at most, of our income. But paper no longer supports everything. Make numbers: impossible or very risky for the majority, and nothing seems to indicate that there is a solution for Claudia and Marina’s generation, who knows if for those who will come later and for those who, older, encounter the same difficulties. Like Màrius and Tere, who have it more difficult: they are fictitious names, but It is true that they do not separate because it is impossible for them to start againlook for two apartments with enough space for the two girls, so they can endure out of necessity. Together they live well (but badly). Separated they do not make ends meet.

The numbers are cold, and without taking into account the people and the economic context they indicate a single conclusion: Those who do not have enough to save and a little more to invest at the end of the month are living beyond their means and should change something. Well. That something doesn’t even occur to many of us: changing everything. The place of residence and what you do that is so poorly paid. Start over to be able to live better. But what does it mean to live better? Doing something that doesn’t excite you, far from home, but that allows you to live without choking? Most prefer this fight against all the elements. Perhaps it is because the historical self-perception we have does not correspond to the tightness at the end of the month. The select and increasingly larger club of people with water up to their necks.

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