The young are falling out of love with home ownership, cars, dating, drinking etc. I suspect a lack of money is the common factor.
Subreddits like r/solarpunk, r/fuckcars, r/notjustbikes, along with the push for 15 minute cities are a testament that young people dont want to be in the grip of petrol companies or owning a car as they are not sustainable, cause traffic, accidents, and on and on.
... that the Internet is dominated by the small niche of loud people who think other people want to hear their opinion. That's it. Anybody who is not deep inside the Reddit (and HN, for that matter) bubble can quickly appreciate how dissimilar the viewpoints on Reddit are from the real world.
Now, I understand your cynicism, but you'd be naive to believe that small pockets of change are not happening. But then again, what does a European know about European cities?
Anyhow, I found this somewhere on HN, I am certain you will enjoy the irony.
> everyone is preening, bragging, trying to seem better than you, claiming to have the moral high ground, or the only correct answer.
Around 30% of households in Berlin do not own a car.
The "I like bikes and I bike everywhere" group is a small minority. I know, I'm one of them. As soon as it's even slightly rainy mine is the only bike in front of the super market (though I'm sure it would be slightly different in Berlin, or at least in some parts of Berlin). But if you looked at surveys, you'd think that driving your car to the super market would be the exception. People on reddit talking about how much they hate cars aren't representative.
I walked everywhere, but I saw people riding their bikes in the rain, in the snow, and all kinds of weather in between.
Now, I am not expressing that everyone shouldn’t own a car nor that people outside cities shouldn’t.
I am expressing that __young__ people seem to not want to own a car, with young people being predominantly in cities. Wanting to own, and having to own are two different things as well.
My claim appears to be incongruous to what other commenters seem to have assumed I meant.
No, most people are not on Reddit.
You can get away without one, that is if you don’t mind sharing transit with violent junkies in any North American city. Transit can be down right terrifying to use these days.
=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Anecdotally, in Boston the MBTA is one of the "falling apart" systems. I could still rely on it to commute to my college / job, and the worst that has happened was sometimes being late due to delays. There are certainly a lot of sketchy people, but I have never seen someone attacked or have anything stolen or been harassed myself - then again I am a man and I'm certain it's different for women.
But more importantly, when living in Boston I never had to use the train. Only when commuting. Because when I lived in Boston everything was at most a 3 mile walk. Even in the really bad weather I could layer up still get places without public transit.
Now I'm in a less urban area but it's the same: I don't have a car and rarely end up using transit / Lyft. I do get groceries and things delivered though, but my job and everything else is within walking distance.
I still agree it would be a lot better if public transit was more reliable, but I think many people in cities can be well-off without a car. Not anecdotally I know that most of the college students in Boston don't have a car (especially because there is basically no parking...)
As you point out, when you can find all of life's necessities within a reasonable walking distance, the need to own a car is significantly diminished. That's the goal that "anti-car" activists are pushing for.
Even in this small town (~2,000 people) in which I live I have almost no reason for a car. Everything I need is in comfortable walking distance... Other than family and friends who live in other places that I like to visit from time to time.
When I was young there was enough economic hardship around that people had to disperse to make a living, leaving those social ties I established all over the place. With the strong economy we've been living for a number of years one has been comfortably able to stay put; living a great life anywhere they want. Now everyone in your life is able to remain close. If I could walk to their homes, that would certainly remove the last reason I keep a car. The younger people have that option.
I wonder if that's what has changed?
"You will own nothing"...
I get that a car is the only realistic option in the 'great outdoors', but anywhere even slightly dense, they're a pain to buy, to maintain, to drive, to park. If you want the fun of driving, go to a track. If you want to get around, there are often better options. Car ownership seem like an outdated aspiration, IMHO.
I am not interested in owning a "house", too expensive, there is little to no reason to strap myself with long term responsibilities.
I am also not interested in drinking, given all evidence on how bad alcohol is, I am not keen on destroying the only tool I have that allows me to live as well as I do. Unless of course you mean drinking for social reasons, which is another thing entirely but I don't do that either.
Having been a renter for the last 10 years, I'm sick of landlords dragging their heels on repairs (in one case I had to take a landlord to small claims court) and my monthly rent spiking 6-10% or else going up by a mere 2-3%, forcing me to lock-in longer term leases to save money.
Especially now that the wife and I are in the family formation part of our lives, buying a house in the suburbs is looking more and more attractive. More space, room to do stuff at home, a fixed-rate payment to plan around etc. But I'm assuming that doesn't apply to you at your current stage of life.
From a financial perspective, renting is great for staying relatively mobile, but if you're planning to stay in one place for more than a few years, buying is probably the way to go. Nerdwallet has a good calculator comparing the two with a couple of dozen factors taken into account: https://www.nerdwallet.com/mortgages/rent-vs-buy-calculator
I agree with you that at the end of the day housing is an expense, I'd much rather fund my retirement with stocks. Although once the kids have moved out downsizing might be able to net a few hundred grand more, but that's a decision for 30 years from now.
equity, retirement
It's a store of value, not an investment. The goal isn't to get rich. It's to not have to pay rent in retirement (yes, I know property taxes).
Cars are really just trash technology that has made city life worse.
Older generation have an emotional attachment to cars, and project a lot of virtuous attributes onto it (freedom, independence, wealth, ...). Younger generations just do that less. They accurately see what cars are.
The young have that luxury. They're not at that age yet where they need to capitulate to the cult of the car. Once you have children, the thousands of vectors pushing a family in all directions, car life in some burb is the only one that's financially affordable.
It's the other way around. Youth reject cars because cars are objectively shit. As people get older, options dwindle, aspirations get adjusted, and people submit.
I plan to retire (finances willing) in a walkable city, for just that reason.
Same argument at the other end of age spectrum. American children have no independence, only because cities are dangerous because of cars.
Having to own a car and drive it everywhere every day can be pretty miserable. Being able to afford owning a car and not having to drive it all the time is wonderful. Freedom of having an option to just go anywhere at any time is not something I ever thought I would appreciate so much before I had to get a car for security reasons. But it absolutely is a luxury as even mediocre public or commercial services will get you 90% of own car utility. And good public or commercial services can eliminate whole categories of car use cases.
Is it because of this intense fear of getting a job that was starting to emerge when I was young and seems to have really taken off since?
Something odd, that I haven't seen many folks talk about, is that a lot of jobs are tacitly considered "beneath them" for Gen Z who grow up in middle class or higher affluence families. This is despite the fact that their parents don't think this, but the kids see a lifestyle on social media and an expectation that they have set for themselves that is not realistic and refuse to accept anything less. My own teenager is going through something similar, and it's a huge argument every time we talk about her getting a summer job. The type of work I did (stocking shelves and later running a till at a grocery store) when I was her age appalls her, even though it was by my standards pretty easy since at least I was inside in the air conditioning while working during the summer.
At the same time, hardly anyone in Gen Z would dare utter any statement that might be considered to be classist, because many Gen Zers believe in some chopped up Marxist fantasy, and consider classism one of the deadly sins, saying that those jobs are beneath them and they think they're better than the kids who take those jobs would get them cancelled. But that's exactly what they're thinking. They all want to be YouTubers or influencers, not the person who works the drive through at McDonald's.
My generation was never exposed to that, we were exposed to Tommy the lawyer who got his start working the stock room at the hardware store and now drives a Porsche. The type of "instant" fame and money that kids get exposed to now just wasn't even in the realm of possibility for my generation, except perhaps sports stars. Even though the number of people who "make it" vs those who try is vanishingly small, a lot of folks in Gen Z seem to think being an influencer or a similar role is the primary career path they want to try for, and unlike something like being a sports star, it's less limited by outside influences and requires less genetic talent. Anyone could, possibly, be an influencer, even though very few people actually will become one.
Now, taking that job is no longer seen as a stepping stone, it's seen as giving up and admitting to yourself and the world you won't be able to hack it online. It's truly remarkable if you observe high schoolers, girls especially, these days and how much of their life is spent online vs with those directly around them. Social media is not just entertainment, it's one of the most important things in their lives, and their presence there is seen as a determinant for their future. This is a very different social zeitgeist than my generation grew up with, and I'm a Millennial, grew up with Internet and computers, but prior to the dawn of social media.
This isn't an economic issue in that sense, then, it's a social issue, a rejection of the type of work that most people in the US started with when they were that age. A drive through worker at McDonald's makes nearly $37k/yr if they work full-time at the starting wage where I reside now. That's more than many professionals made when they started their careers when I was a teenager, and it's more than double what I made starting as a shelf-stocker /inflation-adjusted/. It's not that the job doesn't pay enough to attract people who are starting out, it's that those people see it as a serious social faux pas to be caught working that type of job, it's an admission and acceptance of failure, rather than an admirable place to begin.
That said I kinda get the social media obsession, that was college for me and I was all in on the facebook parasocial queues (not liking someone's post that they KNOW you saw was an offense, and other crazy shit). For me it was ultimately a function of not having anything better to do. High school is supermax prison in terms of options, college is like minimum security prison, it's not really until you hit the realization that your decisions have actual weight in your life and you aren't just going to be pushed along by external forces that you start to grow out of that. High school ends and eventually becomes irrelevant, but good luck explaining that to a teenager.
I'd argue the income question is also part of the problem, the "mail room to executive" pipeline, if it ever really existed, has been completely broken. As you say, it used to be that person working the McDonalds drive through might be something big some day. Nowadays that's 100% assured to not be the case, McDonalds drive through is a dead-end job you do to stay alive until you can trade up to a different career path.
That's the source of fear I mentioned earlier, being sold this idea that the only way to get a job is to go to college and if you don't 100% focus on college you won't make it. But there is nothing in the data to suggest that idea actually panned out. All signs point to young adults having a much harder time moving up because they didn't work in their youth to gain the experience necessary to navigate the waters of the economy.
Can you expand on how you see these two statements as different conceptually? At least for folks in my generation, I don't think anyone harbored delusions that they were going to make it big by working at McDonald's, but it was seen as a way to get basic work experience and the benefit of a wage while you worked towards something different. The "mail room to executive" pipeline was always a fantasy, as far as I'm concerned, just due to basic math, there's a lot more mail room clerks than executives, so it in all probability won't happen to you. On the flip side, working a summer job provides you a pathway to pay for entertainment and a modicum of freedom so you can explore the world and figure out what you actually want to do. At least that's how it was seen when I was a teenager.
Nowadays the options for standard middle-class success are a lot more constricted. There is much less "freedom" and "exploring" unless you're wealthy, working at McDonalds will just get you an ultimately meaningless amount of money and experience that no one values, while sucking up your time. Even when I was in high school there was no time for "exploration" outside of academics if you wanted a positive outcome. You were either on the AP/honors track and going to college to be a "success", or you had a job/took normal classes and either couldn't afford college or were just coasting into mediocrity. I imagine it's gotten even more stark since I graduated, given prevailing economic circumstances.
I'd say the desire to be an influencer/streamer is also partially the result of that. Sure statistically most influencers/streamers don't make much, but there's at least the potential of freedom/success that doesn't exist with a McDonalds job, directly or indirectly; and the barrier to entry is low. It would be like if everyone's parents bought them a guitar/drum set and there was a social hierarchy based on being a rock star.
If I can be so bold as to link it into larger trends, one thread I've noticed is that in previous generations' countercultures, whether it was the hippies in the 60s/70s or grungy Xers in the 90s, there was an underlying assumption that the American Dream was vanity. That you didn't need all of that stuff and could "drop out", calling someone a "sellout" was a serious insult. You could always find a way to "get by" even if you weren't living large. Because during those times where the income/cost of living disparity wasn't so large, you probably could. Don't worry about prosperity, go become an assistant manager at Staples and spend your time on what really matters! Nowadays economics don't support that, so we have "hustle culture", where you're expected to "grind", and that's the superficially "cool" thing to do. Even if you're just hocking bullshit, make that money! Given the limited options available to high school students, it follows that being an influence/streamer, something they can literally do on their phone, is the only universally attractive objective.
So, if they are seriously trying to become an influencer, accepting any time commitment that doesn't further that objective and removes them from that social sphere effectively ends any chances of it happening. Additionally to the above, my teenager has admitted to me that she knows that influencers are time-limited with their success, it's something that really only happens when you're young, cool, and pretty, and shortly after you have a fall-off. They'd rather make the attempt while they're young and have a lot of anxiety around not doing it, and falling into mediocrity.