Cozzie livs means no one can afford secret second families anymore.

I love the internet. The dot com. Every day there's a fresh take, a new hot topic sending the world into a tailspin. The current topic du jour is secret second families. Remember those? 

From the '80s to the early 2000s it seemed they were all the rage, as it became more widely reported that some men had a rogue habit of having secret second families hidden away in other suburbs, states, or even other countries. It's a tale as old as time, really. It was surely always happening, but modern life meant those secrets were bubbling to the surface a little sooner.

In 1999, The Guardian published a piece called 'Double Trouble' where journalist Maureen Freely claimed it was getting harder for men to maintain second families against the rising advent of technology (meaning telephones, for stalking purposes, of course) and monetary woes. Add a couple more decades and a cost of living crisis, and it seems they've disappeared completely. 

Now, the trendsetters on social media have a fun new take on the current state of the economy, based on the astute observation that secret families seem to have disappeared from the mainstream.

Okay, I'm listening.

According to the internet, people can't afford secret families anymore. Image: Getty/Twitter.

According to the folks on TikTok and Twitter (X if you're a fan of Elon Musk), no one is doing secret second families anymore, due to the cost of living crisis. 

Is this based on fact? Not exactly. Is it based on vibes? Yes! And the internet loves vibes.  

Over the weekend, Stan Fritz kicked off the discussion when he tweeted that his dad "worked 16 hours a day on minimum wage and had a secret apartment and family in the 90s," before adding, "this economy is insane."

The post has 366,000 likes. The top reply said, "bring back affordable second families." Another added, "most people can’t even afford half of a family".

"Can someone please write a paper on the decline of secret families due to inflation?" one person asked. 

Fritz's words sparked a flame of deranged thinking that can truly only thrive on social media, and the topic quickly picked up steam on TikTok. 

Over on the old video app, E.D. Kadence shared a post about secret families and reached 4.7 million views in just two days.

"The economy is so bad men can't afford to have secret families anymore," she says in the viral clip. "Think about it, they used to be taking care of two households, and kids, and the women. We used to be a proper country."

I am all for using "secret family discourse" as an official measure of the economic state of the nation.

@edkadence

But for real, I can’t believe everything was so cheap back then lmfaoo

♬ original sound - E.D. Kadence

There were even some secret family folks in the comments.

"My grandad had two families and four kids in total while running a hot dog stand like he wasn't even doing something big and he could do all that," one user commented.

"My grandpa had three families total and he put all the kids through college!" another revealed.

Just to be clear, in case you're confused, we're not actually talking about men's rights to have secret families. That's just weird. 

We're simply having a little giggle over the fact that the economy used to be so good people could work a standard job and afford multiple properties, food for the whole multi-family gang, and petrol and/or air fare to travel between their families. I spent seven minutes debating my deodorant choices the other day because the options were a few dollars apart.

Jokes aside, what does it say about us that we're reminiscing on a time when men could afford secret families? What else are the people yearning for? 

The most recent example of cost of living yearning on social media was the trend where people posted their dream grocery haul, which included bougie buys they can't normally afford. Dream groceries! And it was just like... buying the "good" juice.

The trend followed a local one, where people showcased what they could buy for $10 in an ode to the iconic Curtis Stone advertisements for Coles, where the chef boldly declared you could feed the whole family for under that amount. Nowadays you can't even buy a classic Coles and Woolies staple, the roast chicken, for $10. 

Looks like we'll be adding BBQ chooks to the long list of things we can no longer afford due to cozzie livs, right alongside avocado toast, iced lattes, oh and I don't know, healthcare, rent, petrol and secret families.

Feature Image: Getty.