What's the line between personal responsibility and systemic failure?

People need to look at the data more.

That’s the least exciting opening I’ve ever written, but I’ve never felt more strongly about it. We now live in a moment when nearly every complicated problem is filtered through personal experience.

Recently, I came across a CBS News story featuring a woman in her 30s who had moved back home with her parents. She had previously lived with a boyfriend, but after the relationship ended, the cost of living was too much.

The story covered the usual ground. What is it like to move back home as an adult? How did she end up there? What financial barriers are keeping her from living independently? What does the future look like?

The story itself wasn’t especially remarkable. I’m fairly certain everyone reading this column knows someone — or many someones — in their 20s or 30s who are years removed from college and still living at home.

Some never left. Some left and came back. Some are saving money. Some are paying off debt. Some are helping aging parents. Some just can’t find affordable housing.

None of this should be surprising.

There’s a housing shortage. The cost of nearly everything is historically high. Wages have not kept pace with housing, health care, food, transportation and other basic expenses. Interest rates have made homeownership more difficult, while rents have climbed far beyond what many single-income households can handle.

Simply put, the math doesn’t work for most people in their 20s and 30s.

Meanwhile, very little policy is being passed at either the state or federal level that fundamentally changes that math.

We talk about affordability constantly, but our response is usually a collection of temporary rebates, narrowly targeted programs, and mostly political messaging that gives electeds something to announce without requiring them to confront the scale of the problem.

Setting all of that aside, though, what struck me most about the CBS story was the reaction to it.

For better or worse, Facebook and Instagram comments now represent one of the closest things we have to a running public focus group. Obviously, it’s not scientific, but you can learn an awful lot about people by reading the comments — for better or worse.

There were two common threads in responses to the story:

The first was this: “Well, if she had done _______________ differently, she wouldn’t be in this predicament.”

Fill in the blank with whatever personal decision the commenter found objectionable.

Some pointed to the clothes she wore during the interview. Others criticized her for keeping two dogs after the relationship ended. Some questioned her career choices, spending habits or relationship history, often with little or no information beyond what appeared in a 180 second news package.

The underlying message was clear: This isn’t a housing or cost of living problem. This is her problem.

That personal-responsibility framework appears in almost every discussion about economic hardship. And personal responsibility matters. People make decisions. Some are good. Some are bad. Some create consequences that last for years.

But there’s a difference between saying individual choices matter and pretending individual choices explain everything.

It’s easy to believe someone else’s hardship must be the result of a personal failure when you successfully navigated similar challenges. If you managed to buy a house, avoid major debt, maintain a relationship for financial gain, or live independently, it can be comforting to assume others could’ve done the same if they had just made better choices.

That thought process protects people from having to consider a more likely scenario: Timing, geography, family circumstances, health, income, luck, and the broader economy may matter just as much as personal discipline.

The outfit someone wears during a television interview has nothing to do with the nation’s housing supply. Owning two dogs does not explain stagnant wages. Inflation wasn’t created by her failed relationship. Someone’s monthly streaming subscriptions are not the reason entry-level homes disappeared from the market.

You get the point.

One can scrutinize every line in a person’s budget and still avoid the larger question: Why does one adult income no longer reliably provide the kind of modest independence it once did?

The second type of response felt even stranger.

Because the person featured in the story was a woman, many commenters framed her financial situation around her inability to find a partner. The breakup wasn’t just the end of her relationship, but the loss of her economic plan.

The implication was that the solution to unaffordable housing was finding another man with whom to split the bills.

That response says quite a bit about where we are. Instead of confronting the core place both those lines of logic take a person — time and energy is spent aiming it at the individual. The burden is always shifted back to the individual, who has little to no control over the broader economic reality we find ourselves.

Find a partner, get married, split the rent, choose a better career, regret going to college, give up the joys in life, and stop buying coffee. And if none of that works — just pick up and move someplace cheaper. Like that costs nothing.

Point being, there’s always another personal adjustment available when people are determined not to talk about the structural problem or do something about it.

They’re lazy responses to complicated issues, and they’re becoming annoyingly common.

Point to something only the afflicted person can control, and the rest of society is released from any responsibility to deal with the very clear, data supported broader consequences.

If young adults can’t afford homes because they spend too much money on small luxuries, we don’t have to discuss wages, inventory, zoning, interest rates or the concentration of wealth.

If someone just needs to find a spouse, we don’t have to ask why economic independence increasingly requires two incomes.

I guess this way of thinking is so appealing because, as a society, we love to make everything a story about morality. You are good if you do this, and bad if you don’t. Bad choices, planning, and discipline — they should’ve known better.

Despite all that though, the data just keeps getting in the way. At some point, a widespread pattern is no longer a collection of isolated mistakes. It’s the system producing the types of results it was intended to produce.

It doesn’t mean every person is blameless. It doesn’t mean every financial decision is wise or every hardship is unavoidable. It just means the scale of the problem can’t be explained away by anecdotes.

Two things can be are true at the same time.

People are responsible for their decisions. And people make those decisions inside economic conditions they didn’t create and can’t control.

Both are true.

It requires policy changes, public investment, zoning reform, wage growth, new housing construction, and a willingness to reconsider systems that have worked very well for some people while leaving others with fewer and fewer options.

Blaming an individual requires nothing. That’s why it happens everyday.

But if we’re serious about solving these problems, we need to stop treating every person struggling in a broken market as evidence of personal failure.

We need to focus on the data.

Not because data tells the whole story, but because it’s harder to dismiss millions of similar stories as coincidence, laziness, or bad judgment.

And right now, that dismissal is doing far more harm than good. It’s not teaching anyone anything. It’s not the lecture that’ll fix everything overnight.

It’s giving us permission to ignore problems that are getting worse every day.

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Last week I talked with a local environmental scientist about her podcast and YouTube Channel where she tries to educate people about really complex stuff. It was a fascinating conversation.