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Comment by randomProducer | Hacker News Reader

I feel the same. The amount of poor neighborhoods with brand new cars rolling around really depresses me. As someone who grew up pretty poor it always fascinated me that my family and neighbors would buy cars worth 20k - 30k which would be enough to provide a very basic/safe way of living for the foreseeable future. I would take the peace of mind I would of had over having a status symbol that random people on the highway could look at for a few seconds on a trip.

Also driving is such a waste of human potential, I don't think the amount of attention needed to drive safely is worth the monotony/tediousness of driving. It's wasted time on a large scale.

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> The amount of poor neighborhoods with brand new cars rolling around really depresses me

I have no interest in cars and find it quite ridiculous that they can be seen as a social status, so I agree with your statement. But, people have different interests... some will spend their money travelling or playing golf, and some people just like cars!

I think that's fair but I think the amount of people that think they're into cars is far more than the amount of people that are actually into cars.

Not trying to be a gatekeeper but if I think about myself I know I "felt social pressure" (grew up in a culture that glorifies this material item and sets an expect ion of success/fulfillment) to get a car. I guess you could argue that social pressures like this can grow naturally and I suppose I agree that they can but I don't think this one grew naturally and for some people promotes values that they may not hold.

Cars as status symbols, I think, is troubling at the scale they're at. If you enjoy to ride around or appreciate their engineering then by all means.

Even as I type this I think if you want to splurge on a Car that you will just take social media pictures with to make you feel good and show others then I think you should, more power to you, do what makes you happy.

I guess my problem is that "what makes you happy" .. "is a fancy car" (you can go in debt to get) is a message that is "loud" and unlike a house (arguably the other functional yet status symbol) is within reach of people who it isn't in their best interest to get.

I think it's a nuanced subject because as most things in life it's mixed up in all aspects of human life like financial education and personal responsibility but what I'm saying is that current "car culture" (to sweep away all the nuance) doesn't feel right to me right now and I think causes a lot of harm.

I agree. It's not just cars, it's also smart phones, expensive watches, clothes, and so on. At the same time, it is what provides a fake boost of the ponzi-scheme economy. Without all of this wasteful consumption there would be no SP500.

> find it quite ridiculous that they can be seen as a social status

Yeah, I wonder when the perception will shift to represent reality. I sometimes see people with cars that are more expensive than you'd expect by the neighbourhood, but my default first thought is that it's either leased or backed by a loan, so nothing to really brag about.

Most cars are not purchased outright so I'm not sure what your point is.

Why is it ridiculous? Literally anything can be a social status symbol. What does a reasonable social status symbol look like in your view?

Status symbols in general are ridiculous vanity.

How about something that requires hard work, sacrifice, and effort to attain. For example, is most social circles, having a faster car is a source of pride and admiration. Driving a fast car requires money and the ability to press a gas pedal. Wouldn’t it be better if training to be fast runner or fast cyclist was instead the thing being judged?

Low income neighborhoods would be among the biggest beneficiaries of high quality cycling infrastructure, but a lot of people tend to reject it as gentrification.

The poor neighbourhood where I lived had a statistically extremely low rate of car ownership. If you owned a car at all, it was a cheap second-hand.

There were expensive cars rolling around though: due to rich people were passing through from expansive suburbs to the financial district, creating pollution and externalities that the poor neighbourhood had insufficient power to deal with.

If it makes you feel any better, I live in a wealthy suburb by some major traffic congestion and in the age of Google Maps, has become a major "short cut" so much that backed up cars will block my driveway each morning during rush hour.

So even the well off have to deal with these "externalities".

Our road is also in poor shape and had no shoulder to begin with. It is not meant for this level of traffic.

I would consider myself a car person, it has always saddened me when I see very expensive cars being driven badly by people that don't actually care about driving.

What sort of bad driving makes you sad?

Not understanding when or how to use the gas or brake pedals. Toss a clutch in the mix and it’s a disaster.

Running red lights, getting stuck in intersections, doing 20kmh under the speed limit in the fast lane, drifting between lanes without indicating or looking first, speeding when there's an overtaking lane and then slowing back down when it's finished. The usual.

It's wasted time on a large scale.

So is cooking, eating, sleeping, daydreaming...

I won't try to glorify a banal commute, but moving from place to place is pretty fundamental to living.

There is something about commuting that is a net stress inducer (whether by car or something else), whereas cooking is somehow relaxing.

Yeah, for me. But it is definitely not true for lot of people. My friends would drive long and through traffic to get some rather average restaurant food but cooking is pain.

I can feel stressed cooking, but usually that's from an Internal desire to create something good. It's also avoidable with frozen or delivery (or asking my wife to cook). The end result is often enjoyable, too.

Driving in traffic stress is external, reduces my faith in humanity, and is most often unavoidable. The end result (was) often that I was at work or home late. Not enjoyable.

For me at least.

I find driving my car quite enjoyable and my commute became much more fun when I started taking the backroads to the office.

I last had an uncomfortably long commute in 2003. I had 4 or 5 routes I could take, varying from almost totally Interstate freeways to almost no freeways at all. There was a small mountain range in the way. So get to work there could have been a pass via a private dirt road, a variation I never tried. Instead I went around the mountain via a freeway. I definitely rotated through the many routes that led to that freeway, especially when I was rested. Also the freeway gradually extended during the time I worked at that place, which added variety. On the other hand some of the non-freeway parts were fairly cranky because some of them were not empty backroads, but shortcuts through fully populated suburbia. But some routes were empty and enjoyable.

Now I have a 9-mile commute and I am using the empty side of the freeway both ways. Sometimes I take a coastal byway on the way home if it's summer.

Personally, I love daydreaming while in public transit (to the extent that often I dread arriving at my final destination), whereas cooking is a constant debate of "will this be edible today or will I have messed up food again" even though the failure chance is relatively low nowadays for me...

> There is something about commuting that is a net stress inducer (whether by car or something else)

Anecdotally I don't think this is true for walking and cycling commutes.

Cooking is not relaxing for me, just so you know.

I disagree with both of those points.

I've definitely had easy / comfy commutes. 10am-7pm workday, missed most traffic, easy 20 min rides, sometimes a little longer in the evening. Drive took me past a grocery store and a liquor store, so I could stop off and grab things. I don't miss it, but it wasn't a soul crushing slog.

I routinely freak out while cooking.

I bought a new but cheap car and have driven it for slightly more than 100k kilometers. I really like the car and even if I had more money I'd just buy the same car again.

I don't see how cars can be status symbols if you can just buy a 3 year old car at a steep discount. Nobody is going to know the difference between a new car owner that kept his car for more than 3 years and someone who bought a 3 year old used car.

> The amount of poor neighborhoods with brand new cars rolling around really depresses me.

This shouldn’t be depressing, this should give you hope. Imagine a world where even the poorest of people can have access to luxuries of their choosing.

The alternative is a world where if you are poor, you must drive a beat up car or more likely have no car at all, while the upper classes drive shiny brand new cars that become more powerful status symbol, because now the poor unwashed masses can no longer get their grimy hands on them. This widens the inequality gap, and stimulates rage.

And believe me, many people who have grown up with nothing aren’t sophisticated enough to understand the real goal should be “peace of mind” or sound financial decisions, rather than having a new car or whatever. What’s the average savings rate again?

Better to placate them with shiny objects and a consumerized roadmap to happiness than to tell them they’re poor and need to live accordingly so they can find happiness another way, while everybody else gets to be happy by buying cool shit.

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