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Comment by liftsh | Hacker News Reader

Expectations are important and are missing from the equation here. Not everyone needs children, a fat pension or a large house to be fulfilled. It is also perfectly fine to be with the same group of people, have the same routines and the same hobbies for your entire life.

The less you want, the fewer milestones you need to hit.

I used to think my dad was boring because he never really wanted to do anything. Worked the same mid-level job for 30+ years, had no friends--just took care of us. A couple years back he passed away, smile on his face. Told me he did everything he ever wanted. Told me not to work so hard.

I think about this all the time whenever I'm stressed about claiming my "ownership in society."

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That's a good point. Trying to attain milestones because of some absorbed societal pressure is a recipe for unhappiness.

But that's not really what this article says. If they had someone who said "I thought I needed kids, then I didn't and I'm totally happy with it" that would be aligned with that message. But to have someone who says "I didn't have kids until I was 50" is a bit dishonest, because biological realities make that almost impossible (for women, anyway).

It's really uplifting to show lots of examples of people who took a different path and found happiness in a less conventional way. It's less uplifting to show lots of examples of people who did the conventional stuff, but later in life, because statistically that is unlikely to be possible for most people who leave those things until later. It feels more like building false hope.

The article presents kids as an option after 50 for men, not women, and that’s reasonable. It’s a popular thing to do to draw similarities between decreases in fertility between men and women, but it’s not helpful. There’s a plethora of risks that increase for men, but they all go from “negligable” to “slightly less negligable”.

> The less you want, the fewer milestones you need to hit.

Doesn't feel like a good answer to the complaint that young people today can't possibly hit all the milestones their parents did, and their grandparents took for granted.

The same amount of life, the same amount of effort and dedication, in a seemingly improving and more advanced world, still buys you less life milestones than it did for your elders. If anything, this sounds like a social analogue of a textbook case of inflation.

In 1970, a US couple might have an “imaginarily fair” claim on 1/100Mth of America.

Now, that same age couple might only have a claim on about 1/167Mth of America. That’s about 40% less land or share of other inherently-constrained resources per American. Other countries have had more pressure on their populations.

It’s no surprise that “buying a big lot with a freestanding house” was a lot more attainable when there were 40% fewer people chasing that dream. Part of it is inescapable math.

Huh, I never thought about it this way. I'm not 100% convinced this is valid math, but I can't find any obvious fault with it. Thanks, I have something to think through.

EDIT: in the 50 years since 1970s the US economy wasn't still - technology made huge leaps across all industries, and lots of wealth has been created. One would think this would offset the population growth, but it seems that it didn't.

Yeah, but people aren't satisfied with just any land. They want the same land everybody else wants in the big cities. They want to be near the population center, but the land there was already relatively filled back then. The computation naturally pushes the prices up to levels that most cannot afford it.

This makes housing into a lucrative investment, which probably drives prices up even further. Nobody wants to see the value of their investment fall, so they fight against anything nearby that would decrease it (NIMBY).

The idea that the cost of housing is relative to the number of people per sq mile is absurd and easy to falsify.

https://www.russellsage.org/sites/default/files/inflation-ad...

Inflation adjusted housing prices were basically steady from 1950 to 2000. Yet the US population went from 150 million to 300 million.

It is surprising that for most of the 20th century housing was very affordable and then something changed in the late 20th century that culminated in two housing disasters in the 21st (the first is the housing crash and now a housing market that basically excludes all but the rich).

With interest rates consistently over 7% and sometimes over 16%, a simple price chart doesn’t tell the full affordability story.

When rates fall under 4%, house prices will naturally be higher in desirable areas because a lot of buyers are buying on monthly payment, not headline purchase price. Cheaper mortgages make for more expensive houses.

You said that the size of the population determines housing cost.

Now, when I showed you this is totally wrong, beyond any doubt, you changed the story. Now it's the interest rates that determine housing cost.

This is like trying to have a discussion with an antivaxer. No matter what they say, you prove them wrong, and then they change their story, pretending like the nonsense they said before never existed.

Look up a chart of mortgage rates. You're still wrong. Bye!

The mythical "middle class on easy mode" of boomers isn't coming back, it should be considered a historical anomaly. A vacuum in time where post-WW2 all but the US was in ruins, giving it economic free reign for a few decades.

That being said, I admit it's not as simple as international competition only. Quite a few life supporting institutes (healthcare, education, housing) are downright dysfunctional for various other reasons.

I'm not sure the "various other reasons" are unrelated. Give people a comfortable, secure life and they will be happy and productive. Chip away at that and you start to unravel every other part of society.

I agree, the economic contract is broken.

It's bad enough that we have to work for most of our waking hours for ~45 years, but this used to achieve a middle class existence and relative security, an essential basis to form a family.

Now you can be a working couple (twice as much labor as before) and struggle to achieve middle class basics. And even if you do, the world is so volatile that it can be taken away from you on any given day.

This is a good perspective, but I'm not sure I fully agree. I wonder if it's just that the nature of work, the nature of "what pays well," has changed.

Sure, my grandparents had a nice house, but they also worked the mines (literally). Would I say that the work they do is less effort than making $200k+ sitting in bed writing some code, while drinking Starbucks?

If you don't adapt to the times, you're going to have a bad time no matter what era you are in.

Hard agree. There's this amazing tweet I want to share on this context: https://twitter.com/Nithin0dha/status/1655557936868102146?t=...

Expectations go both ways too. Literally like an itch, the more you scratch the more it will itch after the most transient moment of relief.

People tend to foolishly believe that their wants and desires are in some static container that once filled will lead to satiation as opposed to the reality that the more the container is filled, the bigger the container gets and at the same time it gets harder and harder to add to the container.

Which suggests one excellent play could be learning to find satiation in the act of filling the container.

My dad can be described the exact same way (though still alive).

I didn't inherent his tranquil mind. My life just looks so much different than his.

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