Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

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Americans are way too materialistic and there needs to be a reckoning of this if anything is going to change.

If this lifestyle works for you, then good for you.

Try raising children that way.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to live a comfortable life; the vast majority of humans forever have wanted this.

In the USA we have a problem with cost of living, but at the end of the day the reason for this is almost always misguided government intervention.

For example, in the housing market, many cities have made it prohibitively expensive to build high density housing (which is what is needed when you have high population density).

If you wanted to make medical care unaffordable then you’d design a system like the US system, with artificial limits everywhere on increasing supply, and (well I am well off topic but could go on forever on this).

I can completely sympathize with young people today who look at the ridiculous cost of living today and come to the (incorrect) conclusion that the problem is consumerism.

But it’s not. It’s a century of well-intentioned but ultimately harmful government policies.

> There is nothing wrong with wanting to live a comfortable life; the vast majority of humans forever have wanted this.

By itself I think that this is a positive attribute. The problem comes when people believe that they deserve to live more comfortable lives than others, which seems true of most Americans.

or a comfortable life subsidized by the work of someone else

and a tacit understanding that people who aren't integrated into that world need to be swept under the rug until they just go away and die already

> Try raising children that way.

Come on now, people have done it for hundreds of thousands of years. Just because it’s different from what you used to doesn’t mean it can’t be done. And it doesn’t mean the children will come out harmed in anyway.

> In the USA we have a problem with cost of living, but at the end of the day the reason for this is almost always misguided government intervention.

If there is no government intervention after the 2008 recession (QE, 0% rates) then many more people would be living like I am living. That’s how much people don’t want to reduce their lifestyle, they push it out as far into the future as they can. No matter what the cost of that is later on.

But you seem to think that the government and the corporate state or two different things when they’re one and the same. All these measures were to save stock, prices, assets, etc..But you seem to think that the government and the corporate state or two different things when they’re one in the same. All these measures were to save stock prices, assets, etc.

I’m not a young person, but I can understand what young people think when they see the boomers, who are doing all the consuming, spending all their money which they got from the government interest rates. It’s both not consumers and it is, because the government instituting 0% rates just turned every asset market into a bubble. And this gave everyone with the assets the ability to consume. But you know the government needs people to consume because that’s what creates GDP right?

So all the boomers with the larger amount amount of increase in asset prices, they didn’t have to sell their prices for more money, they don’t have to go on vacation and buy more things, they could’ve live more simply, and there would’ve been no inflation. But it’s the consumption from the people with the assets that to inflation. It’s not 0% interest rates alone that Cause inflation.

> Come on now, people have done it for hundreds of thousands of years.

Come now, people also used to die from toothaches, and during those hundreds of thousands of years infant and child mortality was incredibly high, and education practically nonexistent.

These “we have done this since the beginning of time” arguments always make me chuckle, they are so incredibly simplistic.

>Come now, people also used to die from toothaches

Last time I was in America (about 20 years ago) there was an item on the news about a child that had died because of an untreated dental problem.

If its on the news its because its interesting due to its novelty.

"Millions of Americans – as many as 25% of the population – are delaying getting medical help because of skyrocketing costs"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-he...

That doesn't mean it's false though? The parent seems correct that human beings are capable of subsisting and surviving for many many generations on very austere conditions.

From reading these comments you’d think that human beings were miserable and incapable of any happiness or meaning until someone invented air conditioning and sewage systems.

Yes, life used to be more difficult. No, that doesn’t mean such a life was without meaning.

Perhaps you confused my comment with another comment chain?

No, I was agreeing with you. Human beings survive and thrive even under difficult conditions.

psychologically, though, it’s much easier to suffer hardship. If everyone in your community is also suffering the same hardship. Making unilateral choices to deny yourself, creature comfort doesn’t seem all tha likely to succeed as a strategy.

Maybe not for the median person, but many types of people do succeed with it, such as ascetic monks, stoics, many religious sects, etc...

And the reason for living such a simplistic life is to be a model for those of people who think that it can’t be done.

I have zero unhappiness about the way I live, my problem is other people make it hard for me to live this simplistic life.

I just read that some sociopath is trying to make it illegal for people to live intense in the UK. That’s what I’m talking about.

Only by means of statistics - they had so many children that it compensated for high mortality rates.

As recently as in the early 20th century the fertility rate required to sustain population numbers in Germany was over 2.5 - and that was well into the industrial era.

Before such obvious to us things like antibiotics or doctors washing hands it was likely much higher.

So you are saying it works? You just have to have 2.5 children.

Well, that and survive yourself through said childbirths, which was (and indeed is) never guaranteed for approximately half of humanity. Childbirth is dangerous! Obviously, humans have always had more than enough children on average, but the burden of it is quite high.

It does, but the parent poster who lives in a van does not do it, and therefore he's not really surviving anything. And as the first reply to the van implied, he would not be boasting "spiritually" if he had to deal with children in his van.

Everything works as long as you discount survivorship bias.

The species can survive this way. Individuals - not really.

If the species is also alive, that means individuals are alive.

But they don’t want that, and they are not wrong for wanting to live a more comfortable and less brutal life.

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