>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.
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.