Comparative performance with people in the same demographic and income range seems a lot better. Otherwise you can pretty argue ad absurdum that yeah, you aren't starving, you aren't dead so everything is good! R-r...right?
That seems like a great way to always be depressed about your position in life. Someone is always doing better than you are.
Is that unreasonable for people to improve their living conditions and be disappointed when those don't even match the ones of their parents? Or should they just accept the extreme poverty threshold as the sole upper bound required to be content about their lives.
I don't. That's the basic human thing to do and harnessing that greed has lifted billions of people out of poverty.
And our parents' lives don't have to serve as a measuring stick for our lives. There is no law of nature that says we deserve to live better than our parents, or in fact live in this world at all.
No, I don't think that's unreasonable at all. I think it's a good value to adopt and a good goal to strive for. No guarantees of success, of course, but it's the road I wish more of us would choose.
>You need to earn a dollar a minute to even have a hope of a basic apartment in the city.
Or you could have picked the more charitable (dare I say reasonable?) interpretation that they meant earnings of $10k/mo, which is a little bit low tbh, if we're talking pre-tax dollars.