Jesse shared his story as part of MECEP’s State of Working Maine 2025 report. Click here to read the full report.
Jesse is a carpenter living in Hope with his wife and daughter. They are expecting their second child in 2026.
“It sounds cliché, but when you dial it back to when things really changed in terms of the pace of life, the crazy inflation, how much we all have to work, and how tired we all are, COVID was the moment. I’m glad I was in Maine when it happened. There was enough space to breathe, literally and figuratively.
Here in a rural town, you’re scrappy. You do what it takes to survive. When you ask Mainers what they do for work, they’ll say they do one thing, but they also fix cars, or have a huge garden, or take care of 300 pigs, or have a food truck in town, or they keep bees. Everybody has all these legitimate side hustles! At first, I was really charmed by that, but now I realize it’s because that’s what’s necessary to survive up here. There’s no Netflix and chilling up here, dude. We have to stack the wood!
I can’t imagine working more than I do and keeping a household going. But health care is completely unaffordable, and it’s the one thing I could cut out of my monthly budget. We can’t go without food. We can’t go without heat or electricity. So I am just going to take the risk. I don’t think that’s uncommon in the trades. But it feels really unstable for me, and kind of scary.
My new employer does offer health insurance plans, but they don’t pay as much towards the plans as my previous employer. You might as well not have insurance at all because the deductible is so high. That’s like $4,000 a year just to be in the club. And if I chop my finger off on the table saw, the deductibles and co-insurance costs are so high — how do I pay for that? Honestly, I’d rather have that $4,000 to put towards my credit card, because that’s how I’m going to be paying for the health care anyway. I need that money paycheck to paycheck.
We used to qualify for SNAP, which was really helpful when my daughter was first born. But then I got a raise of about 50 cents an hour and it put us just over the income threshold. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, seriously?’ I’d rather take the SNAP. $150 in food aid is worth a lot more than that $20 per week raise!
And what they’re doing with the SNAP and the WIC right now – all the new hoops to jump through to prove your income – working parents don’t have time to do that paperwork. That’s a lot of work, just to be honest and keep up. They keep saying people take advantage of the system, but maybe it’s the system that’s taking advantage of them.
I have a healthy kid and another one on the way, I have two dogs and three acres of land. I’m living the life I want to live. I just wish I had a little more free time to enjoy it. I wish I didn’t have to work so much and work so hard, so that I could actually run around in the chicken coop with the kid. I mean, damn, man, it’s dark when I leave and it’s dark when I come home.
We live in ‘vacationland,’ but vacationland for who? Because we’re working our butts off. We all are.”