Young People Are Happier Than They Used to Be

I can relate to his comment. In particular I have no idea how my parents (a young couple in the 80s) decided to have 3 kids, other than blind optimism or a sense of security that doesn't seem to exist for us today.

High expectations, no grasp of statistics, and a total misunderstanding of just how much of a role luck plays in everyone's outcome.

That was back when the first dot-com bubble was rapidly inflating, and it seemed that all you had to do was put in a few years at Netscape, Sun or SGI, and then go found a startup, and you'd be a guaranteed success. People really believed this!

In reality, the job environment consisted of those few known companies plus this big spread of unknowns (much like today, actually, except back then they were actually hiring). Nobody knew which ones would go out of business, which ones would succeed, and which ones would mean Maseratis for their early employees. I mean nobody had a clue. If you graduated in Comp sci or Comp eng or EE, you basically just rolled the dice and picked one, and that ended up being the difference between doing astoundingly well and just putzing along after 20 years.

Maybe a bit off-topic, but I have a relatively close example of what you are talking about.

An older friend of mine got together with his childhood friends and built a retirement home, they essentially built a small building with small, private apartments (1 bedroom, bathroom, kitchenette and small living room), common areas and so on...

Now that they are all retiring (this friend of mine retired 3 years ago), they are all going there, each couple having their small apartment but being able to socialize whenever they want. Plus, they even have a kitchen service, cleaners, etc, etc because the shared cost is way less of what they would pay to have it at home or what they'd pay in a normal retirement home.

Been thinking that I wouldn't mind doing something like that...

I agree regarding the commune-like situation, though I think I'd prefer a shared small hamlet rather than shared chores. I remember Plato said that best friends should live together, or something along those lines.

With the exception of 'good friends' (unless you're lucky) you're just describing a houseshare.

This is what everyone does in their 20s (and probably becoming the norm for most people through their 30s too) in cities in the UK, London in particular, because rents are so high there is literally no alternative that doesn't involve spending most of your salary on rent.

Even with a houseshare, a 30 min commute is not just normal but actually, rather good! You're usually nowhere near the centre. Again, this is particularly true of London.

I'm sorry to deflate you on this one but I can tell you, having lived in houseshares for years, it is absolutely not an ideal living situation. Everyone in one wants their own place, but can't afford it without moving way out of the city, or saving nothing, or living somewhere truly awful, or some combination of the above. It's not a choice but a corner you're backed into by the market.

If you're contemplating this as something which is optional, you are lucky indeed, and I'd advise you to stick with your current, non-shared, living arrangements :-)

I think this is the tail wagging the dog here, akin to saying that easy access to violent video games makes people violent.

Culture can affect mood, but I think mood affects culture much more strongly than the other way around. We mostly seek out things that validate the way we already feel inside, not go, "I'm feeling pretty crappy today, let me go watch some cat vids to cheer me up." If something comes along that doesn't feed into our current state, we tend to ignore it.

We had the Internet for a lot longer than we've had cat videos. It wasn't that we couldn't have had them or that none existed, they just weren't all that popular. There was a definite turn in the 2000s where people, and the Internet, suddenly got a lot happier.

My theory is that Internetting before Facebook was mostly a solitary thing that loners would do to get away from lives they otherwise hated. With Facebook the masses came, and so everyone all of a sudden had to cater to a wider audience. People who really do want to get away from humanity have their 4chans, but they're in the minority now. Reddit would have been a very different place in the late nineties.

Increasing inequality sucks the wealth into the top. At first, most citizens in developed countries benefits from rising inequality as the wealth from poorer countries are channeled into the country. As inequality rises, the bottom levels start to lose wealth to the upper levels. As it rises past your neighbourhood, you'll see your neighbourhood getting poorer, while the countries' richest get richer and richer. That's why there's more global wealth than at any point, still growing, but it looks like everyone is getting poorer, because almost everyone is. Not saying that's good or bad, maybe it's even necessary in our society for inequality to continue to rise and then collapse. Many communist experiments have already been tried.

EDIT: All conjecture.

I understand. But I didn't mean it that way. Gay people were left out of this analysis completely.