Comment by jesuscript | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jesuscript | Hacker News Reader

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I too have a different take on why we want to see the world burn. We’re watching as we get trapped into the void, the proverbial rat race. We have a specific vantage point, dead smack in the middle. We see both ends of the race clearly, with boomers in retirement at the end, and GenZ/Y at the beginning. All racing.

At the beginning of the race we see the incessant vain jockeying of a group trying to socially manipulate constantly and fit in, and on the other end (the actual end of the race), you see a group constantly trying to justify and protect what scraps the race allowed them to keep.

And in the middle you run as fast as you can, hoping you escaped the beginning of the race, hoping you make it to the end with some scraps you can call treasure. You run away from the beginning of race, disgusted at what you once were, and disgusted at what you need to become to survive until the end.

It’s in that moment of realization you wish the universe imploded. All that running kills the soul.

It as always like that, so it doesn’t explain why more people want to see the world burn now.

In the 60s you could buy a median home with 2.1x the median income. In 2019, the ratio is 3.5x.

https://themreport.com/news/data/02-02-2021/pressing-housing...

Median house in the 60s is not the same as median house in 2022. You could probably buy a median house from the 60s (i.e. 1000 sqft, no air condition, in a polluted area (this was pre-EPA time, so almost everywhere was polluted) etc.) right now for way below current median.

I hear this every time. It doesn't effing matter if i don't have the option to buy a 1960s size house, let alone the newer larger home, die to price increases and high interest rates.

Your analysis does not explain away decades of mediocre wage growth in the face of inflation in healthcare, education and housing costs.

But you do have an option to buy an 1960s house. They weren't all demolished - they're still here and naturally some are for sale.

> Your analysis does not explain away decades of mediocre wage growth in the face of inflation in healthcare, education and housing costs.

Wages are typically computed per household. In the late 1960, a tsunami of divorces and single-parent households started occuring (something that wasn't widely culturally accepted before then), which makes comparisons of household wages before and after an apples to oranges comparison. It's basically bad stats.

Re: rising costs of (higher) education and healthcare. It's partially similar to the housing situation. The standard of service people get (and expect to get) today is dramatically higher than in 1960s. In 1960s, we didn't even have MRIs... Nowadays medicine is packed with expensive technology and drugs - that has to inflate the price. Similarly, today's university environment is a combination of an university of the past with a high-class resort (the student facilities are basically on the level of good hotels in many cases) - that's gotta inflate the price too. Add extractionary practices of the medicine insurance companies cartel and university administrators on top of that, and that pretty much explains current prices.

If the median quality of these goods and services goes up, and so does the median price, then why hasn't the median affordability risen proportionally along with this? You're blaming the lack of wage growth on bad stats, which sounds like a just-so story.

> I hear this every time. It doesn't effing matter if i don't have the option to buy a 1960s size house, let alone the newer larger home, die to price increases and high interest rates.

I mean, you could, either in the form of apartments (which are essentially smaller houses) or houses in less desirable areas (shittier houses).

A 1950s or 1960s 1200-1400 sq ft rambler on 0.15-0.25 acres goes for 4x the median income in my metro area in the middle of the road suburbs, 3x in more impoverished areas for a comparable house from the 1920s and 5x for a comparable 1970s-1980s home in nicer areas.

To top it off, mortgage interest rates doubled and prices have not dropped.

I think this here is the key. Automation (not globalisation) has removed many entry level and low so jobs. At the same time we have artificial scarcity through regulations in the housing market to keep neighborhood character and see the cost of required services that cannot be automated easily like health care and education go up and up. Instead of increasing wealth redistribution to compensate for the wealth centralization from automation, we reduce mechanisms that transfer wealth to supposedly cut cost and because regulation is local but capital is global.

I'd argue it's the other way all of the things you listed, healthcare, education, and housing are hugely subsidized by the governemnt. Healthcare through medica(r|d)e, education through pell grants and loans, and homes through the tax breaks associated. These things all together result in the massive increase in cost of these things, because the government is redistributing wealth from others to those industries.

I agree with you 100%, and its seems very difficult to explain this to people in terms of politics.

The intuition is that grants and loans make education more affordable, but in the medium to long term they just inflate the cost of tuition for everyone.

Similarly for healthcare and housing.

Feel like we either need to socialize these sectors of the economy, or go full free market. But a system half way in between doesn't work.

(My personal preference would be to largely socialize healthcare and education, while pushing for more free market reforms for housing, to encourage new development and increase the housing supply.)

It's an interesting dynamic. Because of rising cost, consumption of the services gets subsidized in ways that distort the market. In addition lots of regulations and controls are put in place which further drive up cost. Interesting paper on this: https://www.niskanencenter.org/cost-disease-socialism-how-su...

> education

I argue it can be automated. I have learned more from ML MOOCs than from my Romanian college.

100% agree that we could, but social dynamics seem to prevent it from happening.

I think this is a good challenge. But also nobody here really proves or argued that millennials are uniquely nihilistic either.

> nobody here really proves or argued that millennials are uniquely nihilistic either.

The comment starting this thread had:

I am an "official" millennial, born 1989. One thing I have noticed (in an anectodical, personal and subjective way) is that my age bracket, especially those I would consider higher on an intelligence/success curve, appear to be so much more closet-nihilist than everyone else around.

It can’t be proven, but common sense would say GenZ are the most nihilistic because they have to work the hardest to even get to the middle, let alone the end.

I’d say the people in the beginning and end have a tangible resentment, and not necessarily an existential crisis. In other words, GenZ would be resentful of having to start fresh against the barbarian Millenial/Boomer horde, and Boomers would be resentful of any attempt at reformation where their scraps from the race would be worth less.

It’s only Millenials who would neither resent GenZ or Boomers because they were already GenZ once upon a time, and know they have to become Boomers to survive.

That would be my best argument for why Millennials are in some deep psychological shit.

I think GenZ is less nihilistic, because they are younger - they are not as burned and scarred as millennials yet, and they still believe that things can be changed, that world can be saved.

Millennials already tried, found it didn't work, found it was for nothing, found it will never work because the systems of humanity don't allow for it.

I think one thing to note about generations prior to GenZ is that when those generations gave up, they mostly gave up on the system (too big to be changed). The cynic comes from the death of the idealist, so at some point these people believed in evolving the system.

GenZ believes in people. When they give up, they won’t give up on the system, they will give up on people. I’d keep a watchful eye on that development.

> Millennials already tried, found it didn't work, found it was for nothing, found it will never work because the systems of humanity don't allow for it.

speak for yourself. I'm changing the world, one kind gesture at a time ^_^

I'm always astounded when lengthy generational analyses invalidate themselves by neglecting even the briefest mention of Gen X.

Haven't Gen X, so used to being the overlooked generation, who dropped out and laid flat decades ago as the slacker generation, already invalidated themselves?

But why wouldn't disenchantment towards the rat race lead us more towards a "I'm just not going to play the game and enjoy myself doing art or whatever" rather than a "maybe the current conflicts will explode spectacularly and destroy the status quo" mindset?

As mentioned, this seems to be more prevalent in people who are, objectively, well-off in the financial department, so it's not like they "hate" the system per se and could afford degrees of financial independence that many others will never be allowed to.

You have to play the game to understand how weird it is, even if the weirdness benefits you.

There are financial constraints to being off the grid of the game.

Even if I wanted to run off into the woods and live in a cabin, I don’t know if I could live off the current amount I have.

So back to the grid, hence the resentment.

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