To make a fortune, target bored young men who want to make a fortune
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It started a few years ago when sports betting was legalized in my home state and when I was at a bar before Thanksgiving to see some friends, half of them were watching a basketball game involving teams they've never cared about. They showed me that they were betting some wild parlays to hit on this game they had no interest in watching otherwise. They showed me that the apps keep track of your net earnings (I assume this is a legal requirement) and _all_ of them were in the negative between $400 and $800. Keep in mind that these are young men who just graduated college and we were all pretty broke.
Flash forward, a lot of them still sports bet regularly with regular losses. I live in a different state now, but a group of my friends around here recently go into going to a casino near by. I was blown away by the justifications on their gambling habits. "I usually win" or "I only gamble what I come in with", but the latter isn't true and I've seen it with my own eyes. I met up with them (not to gamble, but to see a friend), and thirty minutes in one of them was asking the other for $40 so he could "win it all back" at the roulette table.
It blows my mind. We know so well that gambling is a losing battle. Some can have fun and call it the price of fun, but it's such a slippery slope to find yourself losing way more than you intended.
Anecdotally, I notice that the women in my life gamble less.
I like in NYC, so achieving the typical cost of drinks is not hard.
And the house edge at a casino isn’t THAT bad. Eg if you’re playing blackjack at $20/hand, a house edge of 1% means you can play 500 hands for your $100.
It's interesting the types of people who can walk into a casino like you and I and say OK, $20, that's all I'm spending. We lose that and we say good night. Other people… They say no, I can win this, and so they go and spend another $20.
That decision point - to continue or withdraw - is utterly fascinating.
By the time I’d slowly bled away my $20 and gave up, she was still there.
This seems like funny logic.
My local provincial lottery can range from $5 to $50 million. If I were to accept that I could possibly win, anything in that range is a ridiculous sum of money for me - easily more than I am likely to make for the remainder of my career.
I know I won't win if I play, but if I thought I might I can't figure out why $5M is gambling, but $50M would be an investment. Either way, it's absolutely life changing "quit my job tomorrow" money.
and conditional on you being the sole winner too (unless the lottery is guaranteed to only have one winner).
If the lottery gets too big, then it's an investment = if your gambling gets to big, then it's an investment. If you do big gambling, then it's an investment. The law of bigger figures :) the often you try, the higher the chances (whereas the chances stay unchanged here)
It's not about the lottery and it's pots itself (like euro jackpot, USA Powerball.. etc)
Of course, calculating EV is very hard, so people just draw a line in the sand - "if the payout is $50MM or over, I will buy a ticket, otherwise, I won't".
It makes sense in statistics, but as a single person with a single ticket, it's much less relevant. The EV of a ticket is over 100% of the cost, but that doesn't matter for 99.9999% of the players and only matters for the very very few with the correct numbers.
The casino can live with a 0.01% edge because they are conducting millions of games. You're not playing that many times.
People who can't stop are possible gambling addicts already, or, are about to become ones without even noticing by themselves.
And further, I classify myself to: I wouldn't even go to a casino except it's the money I found right before it's entrance I want to spend there.
And that actually minimize the possibility that I'll ever will make the experience how it is to feel lucky/lose/win in a series, minimizing my understanding of such a situation. And that's may be is the point we don't understand how it is, not to be able to leave after 20 bucks are lost, but rather try to get it back. Just a thought.
(I compare it to an alcoholic. One alcohol addict, because too often & too much & too good feelings. One occasional drinker will never go over the threshold. One who never drinks can't even understand how it is to want to get drunk.)
Now they cut back on that, I park elsewhere and they don’t even get a chance at my $20 on red anymore.
It is fun though, the casinos especially have gotten very good at making it entertaining. Unless you have an addiction to it there's no inherent difference between spending a $50 on a night out with your friends of losing the same amount at the casino.
Unless you're so woke that you think testosterone is a social construct, yes it's still very ok
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3653580/#:~:tex....
The first one you really didn't read, did you? "In contrast to received wisdom regarding testosterone and risk, the present data provide the first robust evidence for a nonlinear association between economic preferences and levels of endogenous testosterone."
"Despite the common view that high testosterone levels lead to risky decisions across numerous domains, we found that testosterone has a quadratic relationship with economic risk preferences: Individuals with low and high levels of testosterone (within their gender) were risk and ambiguity neutral, whereas individuals with intermediate levels of testosterone were risk and ambiguity averse."
I find it funny how you're willing to offhandedly dismiss a paper because "economists, not real scientists", but seemingly have no problems with the field psychology which had the replication crisis and "experiment on a bunch of freshmen psychology students and extrapolate to the whole population" studies.
I normally target an estrogen level similar to an average woman and a testosterone level between the female and male reference ranges. I'm able to adjust the mix on the order of days when it suits me, and there absolutely is a difference. People who know me well can usually tell what mix I'm running.
I dunno, people who do the former seem a lot happier the next day.
If you enjoy blackjack, or poker, or craps, regardless of winning or losing, then it's fine to gamble. If you're only having fun from the exhileration from the large winnings, then it's not "fun", but thrill seeking, just like skydivers or extreme sports. Except for those thrill seeking sports, there's often safety measures in place.
Never been back. The only gambling I do now is buying a $2 powerball ticket every time the jackpot goes above $1B. The momentary fantasy is worth the two bucks.
With small sums ($5), it's too easy to slip into the same mindset after your buddy offers you a beer (since it's basically paid for)
In high school we combatted this with a $20 buy in. Now we do a $50 buy in. Sure, it kinda sucks to lose. But the money is just going back to your friends, and a dinner + drinks out on the town is likely to cost the same. Even when you lose you still had a fun night. And when you win it's even better!
Of course, we are only playing once every few months.. so it's really not a big issue financially.
As long as you don't try to define your terms.
This what scares me the most in that trend
Nothing good comes from it. It only increases the wealth gap.
The same illegal drugs used by the lower echelons of society is the same as the ones used in higher echelons of society. You’d be hard pressed to find folks not using hard drugs in the Fortune 500 list.
The difference is the availability of drugs. Many rich people never struggle to find high quality drugs. That is not the same for everyone.
Oh for sure, the big difference is that rich people can afford to go into the best private rehab whenever they cross the line, whereas working class people tend to end up broke, homeless and sick.
Of course they could have externalities too, but their blast radius is mostly contained to their near circle of family instead of the entire society.
So to you there's no difference between someone voluntarily and consciously choosing to wear a diaper so he can continue doing an activity for longer without toilet breaks(some video gamers do that too), and someone who is soiled himself because his mind can't control the bowel movements due to being fried by hard drugs?
Yeh, they're technically both addicts, but gambling addicts tend to harass less people and cause less overall ER calls, petty crime, trash, feces in the neighborhoods, than hard drug addicts.
One is a much greater annoyance to general people on the street than the other. What actual arguments do you have to refute this other than just calling it splitting hairs?
You tried to establish mutual exclusivity between conscious decisions and mental illness.
I refuted that.
Never said the impact on society of your examples were similar.
https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/2023/11/6/23931877/alcohol...
IDK about in the US, but in Canada the lotteries do fund a lot of charitable things but I wasn't able to find a good stat about the proportion. Also at the end of a day it just a waste of human potential (running the corporation and wasting human hopes on useless things instead of potentially beneficial things)
I don’t really get skiing, it’s a very expensive and dangerous activity to me, yet to others it’s a whole lifestyle. Fine by me, put knives on your feet and fall down a hill. Life is short, find your dumb thrills, it’s fine.
You don’t need to gamble yourself, that’s not the point, just maybe understand that you’re talking shit about “friends” behind their backs? Kind of a dick move where I am from.
however, if we ever came up with such an indicator the gambling companies would be quick to campbells-law it to death so people would ignore it
> Losing a few hundred dollars every now and then is fine
Agreed. I think everyone has that freedom to do so. I'm just commenting on the gambling trend I see in my peer group. That said, a few hundred dollars means different things to different people, and without diving in, these friends should not be losing a few hundred dollars every month.
> just maybe understand that you’re talking shit about “friends” behind their backs? Kind of a dick move where I am from.
I feel like there's some hostility in this comment. I'm sharing an anecdote anonymously on an online forum in a relevant thread. I don't have these conversations with our mutuals.
Anyway, they had a scene where they were showing the different games that were being played in the casino. Things like a bunch of Saudi princes playing an extremely high stakes game of Candyland, etc.
One of the games was called the black hole or something like that. Anyway, people would step up to the table and the guy working the table would just sweep up their money into a hole and tell them they lost. It had a constant stream of people walking up to the table to lose money.
It's more or less the mental model that I use for gambling.
IIRC Mafia! was a parody of the Godfather series, or the mobster movies of the 70s-80s in general.
Let me tell you a story. Fifteen years ago, a person named n4r9 made £10 at the blackjack table.
They turned around, left the casino, and never returned.
Now they're making 25 times that amount every day they step into the office.
And do you know who that person was?
I don't know anybody who gambles, on betting or crypto, and only a small number who even pick individual stocks. Some people play poker, but only for nominal sums, and it's usually presented as more of an intellectual exercise. I get the sense that if somebody said they like sports betting, it would produce a half-second awkward glitch in a conversation. I doubt anybody would moralize, but there might be an unspoken question like "[you gamble? don't you have more fulfilling things to do?]"
The simple answer here is probably that if you already have enough money then you don't need to gamble, but it's not like most people who gamble actually believe it's the path to profit, it seems like there's something else here where gambling is viewed as low-status (in my bubble).
Either that, or its because the race was fixed.+
Which isn't exactly wrong - if you're a retail investor who isn't using satellite footage of parking lots, picking individual stocks is closer to gambling.
Investing in the aggregate is less gambling.
Investing in the stock market as a whole is just betting the game will be played.
With individual stocks, you are just betting on horses.
With hedging, you are betting on economic sectors (which can be as large as the whole world economic system) growing infinitely.
And regarding systems growing infinitely in limited environments, I have some bad news for you. Some would call them cancerous.
My impression is that it’s a scoring system for competition with his (wealthy and successful) siblings; the dollar values are an afterthought.
Broadly, though sports in particular is something different bubbles care more or less about, I'd say your perspective is entirely foreign to me. My experience is that the more intelligent groups I'm around are vastly more interested in predicting things and putting money behind their predictions.
I think this is wrong. The most skilled poker player at the table has an edge and is likely to win over time. I don’t think there is a similar thing in sports betting.
Granted, cash poker is all about sitting at the right table. It’s really the poker tournament structure that legitimizes it.
Rich people gamble. Poor people gamble. Everyone can get hooked; casinos are great at that!
I see this among a fair number of engineers in their 30s, 40s, and one pushing 50. I don't think many of the older crowd are doing it, but maybe they just don't talk about it. I have no idea how well they do, but I'm sure they lose on average. Bets are often in the hundreds of dollars if I'm hearing them correctly.
That's why this is called gambling _addiction_. If you understand the existence of other behavioral addictions, it's not so different.
vs.
A lifelong proclivity to quantize, metrify, and reduce all social interactions to transactional objects that exist soley to be leveraged.
The latter also happens to drug addicts, but the it is a psychological phenomenon that can be stymied with medication.
Unfortunately, no analogous chemical exists (yet!) for the similarly inflected urge to gamble.
I spent a couple nights in Vegas because my 13yo was interested in seeing it. I watched what was happening in the casinos, and wondered if I was missing something. I read a bit about craps, because I didn't really understand the bets people were making.
Reading gambling forums is just depressing. Many people understand it's just luck and are doing it for fun, but there are so many people who think that you can get "good" at rolling dice. People talk about winning big on a roll and then "reinvesting" their winnings at the table.
Legalized gambling is just a giant machine for separating people of all classes from whatever money they have.
You were missing the dopamine hits.
The highs and lows and 'drama' and 'excitement' of winning (and losing) is what people tend to go for. That's why it can become an addiction: wanting another hit.
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-brain-get...
sports betting, table games, etc: gambler motivated by excitement, somehow thinks they are going to win and make money. often racks up massive losses due to desire to "win it all back" as you say. this is stereotypically the "male" style of gambling addiction. like your friends.
slot machines, video poker: the psychology is very different. the heaviest slot machine players don't have any expectation that they are going to come out ahead. they play the game partly because it puts them into a soothing flow state (though in many cases it is just compulsive behavior with no good motivation). losing money overtime is understood as the cost of playing.
slot machine gambling is stereotypically associated with women. you wouldn't see this either because it's a more solitary activity (unlike table games/sports betting) but it can be very dark -- I think probably worse than the classic gambling addiction.
i think the gender distinctions are real although obviously it's not hard and fast (plenty of male slot machine players, plenty of women losing money placing bets). i think it's probably partly brain differences and partly who casinos/bookies vs. video slot companies choose to market to.
Edit, my school is the top link when I searched for a reference, I guess they included it after the casinos went into Atlantic City. Generalized Gambler's Ruin Problem - Rutgers Math https://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/EM20/GamblersRuin.p...
Lots of my women friends do various scratch and win tickets and joke around that winning is the only way they're going to be able to retire.
At the core of it both groups clearly feel that the economy is so broken that it's no longer to achieve the outcomes they want through normal means and only some short cut of luck will get them there.
Explain to them that they not have just lost an avarage $600 of their live-time earnings, but over $70,000, if they had invested the money in the stock market for retirement. If we assume that the avarage S&P 500 return with dividends reinvested is somewhat above 10%, as it was in the past, investing $600 now would yield them over $70,000 for their retirement in 50 years. The real value must be adjusted somewhat due to taxes and inflation. But in addition, investing in the stock market provides one with some sort of an inflation insurance for free.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/average-stock-marke...
And at the same time, I find conversations about money with younger generations to be very hostile (btw, I still consider myself young). Accusations, assumptions, and name-calling start circulating quickly if you dare to ask 'the youth of reddit' as it were, if they understand compound interest, how much money they spend on food delivery, vapes, weed, and booze.
And then there's this pervasive social media messaging that it doesn't matter. Well, if you doom-scroll and ... don't believe? in compound interest, then I guess that is a hard narrative to escape.
The one that is mind-blowing to me is giving money to streamers. Utterly, utterly wasted money.
It's just an entertainment budget item. If the generation isn't spending that money on traditional forms of entertainment--concerts, cable, movies, sports games--then how is it wasting to spend it on the form of entertainment you don't like?
Sure, you don't have to pay to watch them but its a way of giving back to them. And on platforms like twitch, being subscribed to a channel does things like remove ads and access to emotes that are part of the live interaction if you want to participate in that.
To be clear, I don't actually like this model of payment. I'd much rather there be a system that could automatically distribute a pool of money in terms of how much I watched.
If a waiter was expecting only 10% of people would actually tip, its not stealing to then not tip most of the time.
If the streamer didn't want me to watch for free, they should have put up a paywall.
That's not what I said. Paying a streamer to pretend to like you is not being part of a community. There is no community; they just constantly call it a community. A real community wouldn't vanish if one person (the streamer) left. That's a cult.
> Your criticism would be no different leveled at donating to charity, giving loose change to someone on the street, dropping money on a collection plate, or using the "buy me a coffee" tip like for FOSS projects. What's not real about being part of a community that doesn't have restricted access?
Doing none of those things is being part of a community.
Parasocial relationships are monetisable. That's all. I think it's a bad idea to be on the paying end of that transaction.
I see, so the communities that developer around FOSS projects would continue if the FOSS project disappeared? Do you think having a friendly and personable regular bartender that smiles when you talk to them makes you a cult member? Or is that different because some of your money gets you a beer?
> Doing none of those things is being part of a community. Parasocial relationships are monetisable. That's all. I think it's a bad idea to be on the paying end of that transaction.
Oh, being in a church congregation isn't being part of a community? Or being part of a FOSS user group? Come on now.
> Parasocial relationships are monetisable. That's all.
Any relationship is monetizable, including the ones I listed. Not everybody that chips in for a streamer has an unhealthy parasocial fixation, just as not everybody who plays video games is addicted to escapism, not everybody that drinks is an alcoholic, and not everybody that drops a coin in the collection plate is an obsessed zealot.
> I think it's a bad idea to be on the paying end of that transaction.
Yes, I gathered that, and you're certainly free to spend money on whatever you want. It's your needlessly black-and-white perspective and subsequent judgement of people who disagree that's strange.
I’m not young, and if you tried to start a “conversation about money” with me in this fashion it would go poorly. Perhaps you just aren’t giving a clear picture of these attempted conversations, but you come across as rather condescending in your own post.
Both are dependent on good will, even if I think that a not-antisocial person should be open to this in a functioning culture. Demanding both at the same time is assuming some crazy level of authority that you might associate with some figures in your life sometimes. Not some randoms on the internet. Docility is not maturity.
There's a lot of pointless/ultimately destructive ways to make money. Precious few to get dpne what needs to get done. And I wholeheartedly believe much of society has forgotten that "what is profittable" != "What needs to be done".
I'd like to consider myself pretty financially literate and I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.
I get the sentiment and I think it's a socially-conscious investment method, but also a great way to lose all that money and potentially friends when their businesses fail.
Is it painful? Yes. Does it prevent centralized allocation? Damn straight. Is centralized allocation of capital something to be avoided like the plague? In my opinion, yes. Even at the cost of the inherent pain previously mentioned.
> I spend my "political advocacy" bucks on trying to convince older generations around me just how much they and their peers pulled the ladder up behind them.
Yes. And this takes many forms, whether that's hanging on to property long past you need it, staying in jobs past retirement, or falsely believing the current economic climate is at all like what it was 30 years ago.
> I find conversations about money with younger generations to be very hostile
I can understand how if you grew up around the tech boom years of the 2010s you can believe that a bit of smart gambling is all it takes to generate wealth. In some sense this article is entirely relatable: I once believed if I worked for the right company I could make enough money on my own to buy myself out of the system entirely. This is a conscientious person's version of the gambling fallacy that the article discusses.
Really, any sufficiently simple path to wealth that doesn't involve the capital class gets patched out by the system relatively quickly (see Wall St's furor over FAANG engineer salaries).
You can always find something to do with property to generate income. Once that property is gone, you'll probably never be able to buy it back for what you sold it for
Primary home with ~400k in equity, 400k loan @ 2.7%. Moving and bought a new house, and deciding what to do.
Market is hot, equity up 300k in 3 years.
I always believed in this "don't sell property, you can always generate income" but now that i'm facing this decision, I don't see how to justify keeping it.
Cashflow (factoring in expenses/maintenance/vacancy) from renting would be ~$400/mo. If you include principal paydown, then it'd be ~$2000/mo.
Selling the property, and taking the equity seems like the best option. Either a) rolling it into the new house or b) investing it in nearly risk free muni's. Both of those would net me more than keeping the property with a significantly better risk adjusted return.
If you live in a place with wild property appreciation over the last 4 years (most of the country), then I don't really see how it makes sense to keep a property. What am I missing?
We've got to live somewhere, and the new house has a mortgage at 7.65%. The principle decrease + cashflow from holding the existing property barely offsets the interest cost on new property.
So I guess the way to look at it is a zero-cost, but potentially highly stressful, bet on the property market appreciating?
Ultimately what it came down to was my own sanity of managing a rental, and I didn't want to be a leech on society. It is important for people to be able to buy houses. I sold it.
Money from the house went into some vanguard funds, a young family got their first house, and I have a lot less stress in my life.
Leading up to selling the my previous house I had literally every person I talk to tell me I should keep it as an investment. It's in a HCOL city, but it's a townhouse in a slightly rough neighborhood. Great starter home for my family, but not a rental I wanted to manage. Being a landlord in this city is also fighting upstream against the politics.
The money dropped into my account a few weeks ago from the sale. The profit on the sale was not mind blowing, I bought and sold it for a fair price (2018 -> 2024).
Zero regrets.
I believe in making my own decisions that work for me and my family, not just blindly following the crowd. It's working well so far.
As part of not blindly following the crowd, I took a risk on a startup back in 2017 and took a huge paycut in the hopes it would pay off down the road.
Not only did that not happen (which again, was part of the entire point of taking a risk), I had pissed all my retirement away to stay afloat, changed jobs to start making good money again, but not before real estate got out of control and I'm basically worse off now than I was a decade ago in relative terms, especially since I was affected by the mass tech industry layoffs last year, was unemployed for months, and then secured a job for far less than before, going from 120k down to 50k annual income, which is humiliating and awful. And to top it all off... I don't have any major assets to speak of aside from some money in a ROTH. I'm at the mercy of landlords.
I've been applying at stuff for nearly a year and, aside from the job I'm working at now that I got through the unemployment office, I'm getting nowhere on the job hunt.
Your profit might not be mind blowing, but in my mind, you're way ahead of folks like me that took a different path.
I personally would stay away from the online platforms (although others may attest differently), as they can be a race to the bottom in terms of price.
Instead hit up tech meetups in your area, give some talks, and let people know you're a gun for hire. Write some linkedIn posts in your area of expertise (yes folks that overdo this can be a bit cringe, but a little high effort content will go a long way).
If one sold the property and invested the rest you will be paying some sort of taxes on the investment returns (at varying rates depending on the investment), while with the property it may be possible that the taxation could be low to nil. By writing depreciation of the property against your rental income it is possible you could pay no tax at all.
Also do not forget to consider various costs associated with the sale of the property.
My understanding of it is that you have something of great value right now, which is that 2.7% loan.
I think the conventional wisdom on not selling the property has less to do with the cash flow and more to do with having that very cheap debt leveraged such that you "get" the return on the value of the entire property rather than just your portion of equity in it.
But I think individuals, for pretty good reasons, put a higher premium on cash flows in the shorter than on-paper wealth in the longer term.
But I wish I knew the specifics of how to quantify the value of that fixed loan relative to investment returns.
And even if there is a strong quantitative argument for holding onto the property and renting it, I think there is still a strong qualitative argument for "I'm a person with other things to do, I'm not a rental business proprietor".
You're missing the point.
Yes. It's financially suboptimal to do this. But it's destroying society.
And while this requires policy change to fix, policy change is still "SUBOPTIMAL".
People love hating modern tech billionaires or old time industrialists, but this class at least create something and hire people.
> You can always find something to do with property to generate income.
Where do you think that income is coming from? Especially when we are talking about a limited resource like housing, the dollar of your “extra income” is a dollar that a young family could have saved for their future.
People love to demonize small property owners who have a rental property and take a moralistic campaign but don't look at how their own lives are funded.
Housing, at least in the USA, often doesn't work like this. The population grows and more people want to live in place X and the current NIMBY occupants of place X go to the government to make sure more housing can't appear in place X. The current occupants make some arguments about neighborhood character that are really about preserving their own lives and investments and another family goes to a worse district or a worse house or no house at all.
Housing is a unique investment category, pretending it's like everything else is disingenuous.
You are arguing as if workers receive their wages as a gift or some kind of welfare. They receive their wages in exchange for their labour.
If you think that wealth actually comes from the monetary supply, then you'll have to go down the Zimbabwe route and print trillion dollar bills.
I didn't argue "workers receive their wages as a gift or some kind of welfare."
And I want to just highlight that "all wealth is labour" is actually not a universally held truth nor a fundamental fact of economics but is the basis for one theory of economics: the Labor theory of value (Smith and Marx).
Build your argument from a solid foundation and not something that is easily picked at apart by inaccuracies if you want to yield influence.
I'm not saying that all labour creates wealth. That's something else and I don't believe it. Trench warfare is the most laborious thing imaginable and it certainly creates no wealth.
> I didn't argue "workers receive their wages as a gift or some kind of welfare."
You absolutely did not, but I sensed that angle. The difference is that a worker will never receive any wages in exchange of not doing anything, while a landlord will always receive his wages for not doing anything. "How their own lives are funded" are through their labour when it comes to the worker and through the worker's labour when it comes to the landlord.
Most tech companies operate on a free market where nobody is forced to pay them if they don't want to. Nobody is strictly dependent on their services, while we are all dependent on having shelter. And painting with a broad stroke you can't say that tech companies are rent-seeking, information technology is highly beneficial for the economy at large, in practical ways that are too numerous to list.
It's not one small-time landlord, it is millions of small time landlords. Just like one small time police officer demanding protection money from local businesses is not a problem for the economy of a nation, but millions of police officers doing that is.
You could say that people can go somewhere else if they don't like it. Don't hate the player, hate the game. And that is true, I think a lot of people will go somewhere else and are already doing that.
With that said, I've never worked for a company engaging in rent-seeking and never done that myself, tech or other industry, so in that aspect I'm completely clean even though I'm a sinner like all of us.
You don't get to be upset that someone keeps their property for longer than you deem they need it, or telling people they should stop working to do nothing for their last 20 - 30 years of their life.
As for me, I'm absolutely upset. Older homeowners sit on housing with multiple unused bedrooms in major cities (and everywhere else) while wages and construction have stagnated. It's another form of wealth concentration. Two 80-year-olds don't need a 6 bedroom mansion. Meanwhile there's families with kids (who by the way, societies depend on) out there with income to buy a home that are priced out of everything. Meanwhile the generationally wealthy family can continue to leverage their equity to buy up more property, further exarcebating the issue.
Let's not act like there's a moral ground here, it's all in self-interest and greed. And frankly many of us on HN are part of the problem (I know I am).
Me and my wife own 4 properties. Each time we bought a property it was through a different lender (the cheapest one with the lowest interest rate). When it came time to existing rentals the paperwork wanted to know the lease agreement for the current tenants, monthly expenses and monthly rental income. There was no question about mortgage principal, nor about market value of real estate.
When we bought (yet) another property, the lender could not (and did not) use the existing real estate assets to secure the new loan. Each loan was secured by its property and nothing else.
And no I don't mean the JShit we have today. That you need an army of people to keep a gui running is the victory of Wall St over the hackers.
I'd rather have 90% of a 1 piece pie than 50% of a full pie. 90 > 50
Keep in mind that the main reason for today's seniors to continue working after age 65 is because the ladder was already being pulled up when their fathers and grandfathers were in their teens & 20's, by the same forces that are still acting today.
If you do the math you would have to figure that the majority of people working to reduce opportunities for today's young people, are not senior citizens but mainly just a different class of younger people closer in age to their 20's than their 60's.
>Really, any sufficiently simple path to wealth that doesn't involve the capital class gets patched out by the system relatively quickly
So true, but sometimes quicker than others.
It's more like a zero-sum outcome for seekers of a simple path to riches before a certain age, of which there is never going to be enough opportunity to satisfy.
You can't buy yourself out of a financial system by working for money.
You don't stand a chance unless you work for something else more worthwhile.
And why would you want to retire from that?
But now they took the ball away, and everything is getting suddenly really expensive just as they are moving into independence and need money for housing, marriage, maybe even kids. But the habits of having life greased by all these services is hard to walk away from… how many GenX would give up having a washing machine and microwave?
Vaping and weed, well they are literally addictive and a scourge all around…
Maybe doom scrolling is addictive to this level too. But the point is, we, and especially young people, are being targeted for addictive substances in a way that Joe Camel could only dream of, and yes, addiction is hard to escape.
I don't personally know anyone who uses doordash regularly, but I've seen a handful of commenters on hn complaining about doordash while pretending there's no possible other way to get their food (even after getting possible alternatives). Just wait for doordash to come up in the news again and see if you can't ask someone anonymously about it here :)
I complain about DoorDash but still use it because around me there's no meaningful alternative for delivery. Even pizza places around here have ditched organic delivery service and just use DoorDash.
I don't use DoorDash all the time, I save it for when I've been busy and don't feel like cooking and cleaning. It's usually a replacement for going out to eat.
I can't understand people that use it all the time though. Even the relative convenience comes at a significant cost. A lot of restaurants have higher prices on DoorDash or have required up-sells be added to meals. With the fees you're spending more than you would if you ate the same meal at the restaurant.
I completely understand the occasional delivery where convenience trumps price but constantly paying a 20-50% markup on meals is ludicrous.
This generation war thing seems strange. Like, do you accuse the people of wrong things they did personally? Or do you make them responsible for other people's decisions? What's exactly the point? Instill a feel of collective guilt?
Seems like setting ourselves up for the same kind of harsh critique from the coming generations. I doubt they will look upon us (the current young people) kindly, and "boomers did it" likely won't work as an explanation for why we still indulge ourselves in material luxury, airline travel etc.
They voted for policies that pulled the ladder up behind them, are they not responsible of their vote?
As for the second paragraph, I guess I'll just say, I think you're probably completely spot on.
That's quite a bit different from your original accusatory "they and their peers pulled the ladder up behind them". Kinda makes it difficult to believe it's not about guilt when you're phrasing it like this.
I think we are kind of looking back decades ago with rose colored glasses, too. I went to a very middle class school in the late 70s, early 80s, and nobody I knew went on a family vacation every year. I don't think I even stepped foot on an airline until I was 16. Nobody went out to restaurants--that was for rare, special occasions. We shared rooms with our siblings, ate boxed macaroni and cheese, played with second hand toys (or went out side and played with sticks and rocks). We had one TV with 13 channels, which we all shared when something was on. I mean at least we had a house, but it had something like a 13-15% mortgage that I'm sure my parents could barely pay.
This idea that middle class boomer parents could afford a luxurious lifestyle for their families is not all that truthful.
“Middle class” has a slippery definition, but it is definitely the case that by many measures Millenials are, overall, seeing worse family financial conditions any any given age than Boomers did (e.g., median real wealth is lower for Millenials than it was for Boomers the same age.) There is also indications that this is accompanied by much greater in-generation disparity (e.g., 90th percentile wealth is higher for Millenials than it was for Boomers of the same age, despite the median being lower.)
Particular examples are from https://thehill.com/homenews/4319352-are-millennials-worse-o...
Eating in restaurants is as much a marker of wealth and a luxurious lifestyle as owning a wireless telephone – ie not at all.
But owning your own home has by monetary policy means been turned to something only achievable with huge wealth – or selling the rest of your life to the bank.
Compounding gains in investments still work out in the long run, but an older generation trying to tell the younger one about putting money in a savings account and letting it earn compound interest has been out of touch for a couple of decades now.
i have not heard a single older person saying this. Every one of them says to invest in assets, not bank interest.
But, I bought my house in 1982 with a 15.5% mortgage, refinanced @ 11.25 after a couple years and again @ 8.5% until it was paid off in 2002
Compounding applies to stock returns as well, which have been on a tear for the past decade. If anything not knowing what to do with your money besides parking it in a bank account is a sign of financial illiteracy, which is what OP was decrying.
people are eating out more than ever before, getting delivery more than ever before, and vacations are also booming. consumption is up no matter how you slice it.
i think a lot of the younger generation have completely given up on the idea that they are ever going to own a house and instead of saving for that are just blowing it on food, booze, vacations etc.
£50k is now a deposit.
The boring reality is that small things done consistently over time seriously add up. It's true for health and exercise. It's true for relationships. It's true for finances. A $5 pick-me-up every now and then isn't a bad thing by itself. But if it becomes a daily habit, then you're missing out on other choices with better long-run returns. The immediate costs are small, but the eventual opportunity costs are huge.
Younger people have a resource older people don't: time. That's time for habits to compound. May as well choose good ones to compound, because you're never getting that time back again.
If you quit that habit, it might make you miserable enough to make even worse financial choices.
These petty expenditures are a tax on misery.
Anecdote: My father's criminal history (racketeering) more-or-less forced him into a career in backbreaking construction in order to support his family when he got out of prison. He would come home after work with burns from creosote and often looked as if he had gone balls-to-the-wall in the gym all day. Back then, I wouldn't dare think to try to separate him from his cigarettes and lottery tickets. It would have been cruel.
Which can also as easily be used as an argument to actually spend that money and enjoy it. In the end, it's important that the money is well spent: If you enjoy that 10$ coffee or 25$ takeout, it's awesome. If it's a daily habit that you're used to and doesn't give you much joy anymore, it's wasted money.
The problem is the mindset of "I should be able to have a luxury because it makes me feel better" which, if you accept it, starts to pervade all of your spending. It justifies the Netflix subscription. Then it justifies the weekly beer bill and food delivery. Then it justifies a few video game DLCs or virtual items. Then it justifies blowing $500 on a banger birthday party or a nice vacation somewhere. Before you know it, you're buying a new wardrobe and a pickup truck you don't need. All because "You only live once and I deserve those little luxuries that bring me joy."
Ok so I only have to save up 7,000 now, so I can do it in 6 years, I guess. But that extra 1800 a month I'm continuing to save each year afterwards by forgoing my late doesn't actually cover the 7% APR on the additional loaned 33,000
(interest rates only high as of recent, but still)
The person I was replying to was saying it would take 30 years at that savings rate to have enough money for a down payment. You do agree, it wouldn't take 30 years to have a downpayment right? Like, we've now both done the math, and found its significantly less than 30 years, right?
And actually, at 6.96% for a 30 year FHA loan, the added payment for the additional $33,000, is ~$218/mo. $1,800/yr is $150/mo, so it covers 68% of that amount if you're looking at it that way. Cut out another ~$2.26/day or $68/mo and you'll have completely covered it while owning a house. But I'd look at it this way, your mortgage taking out a $293,000 loan is ~$1,950. Property tax rates vary a lot, but we'll add ~$3k/yr to that (250/mo), budget $3k/yr for repairs as well, so $2,450/mo in the end. What are you paying for rent? How much of that are you keeping as equity?
And yeah, property taxes will probably tick upwards a bit, you might need more repairs than budgeted here, but chances are you'll refinance your mortgage and cut that part down to like $1,300/mo or even less in several years if interest rates fall to like 4% or lower. Is your rent going to get lower?
I guess most people just get the signal empirically, so they discover it in real time.
Now, after that time savings started to matter. But must people are completely unable to relate to people that aren't an exact copy of themselves. Even when they once experienced the same thing. And yeah, people tend to get worse on this when they age.
~30 years ago the median house price in Toronto (Canada) was 4x the median household income. It is currently 13x the median income.
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFlIfg0XoJk&t=47s
No amount of skipping lattés is going to add to make a dent in that difference. (I say this as someone in participates in /r/PersonalFinanceCanada who helps people educate themselves on living with-in their means and saving for the future (while enjoying the present).)
I'll take your $16/wk for vaping costs, I don't have any hard data but I think that's probably a bit low.
$5 for coffee 5 times a week, that's $25/wk.
Looking around me, its hard to get a meal delivered with a food delivery service for less than $18. Making a meal at home, even a frozen pre-cooked dinner, is usually like $5 or less, so we'll say an additional $13 meal 4x a week so $52/wk.
52 + 25 + 16 * 4 weeks in a month is $372/mo. Over $4,400/yr, on just eating out/delivery, one coffee 5 times a week, and vaping. And somehow I doubt its really just 5 coffees a week, its probably not just $13 additional cost per meal only 4 times a week, I doubt a vaping habit is really only $16/wk.
Is an extra $4,400/yr in their budget a big deal to the people in question?
Well, since you saved it by excluding a lot of pleasurable spending, you can't really count it as "fun" money and therefore it's not that great, really. With the current market, it's also not nearly enough to get you anywhere near buying a house or an apartment. It can be used for a car, but then again, is a car a better investment than nice coffee and food?
While I do see the value in saving and I get why spending this money looks wasteful, I can also see the other side of not bothering pass on convenience for a bit of extra money. Of course, it all depends on how well you're set up generally (i.e. if you don't have an emergency fund, those 4k$ are a lot more important).
We're talking about kicking a vaping habit, not eating out or doing food delivery four times less a week and making your coffee at home. Its not like they're now no longer doing anything fun in their lives.
Saving only that for 3 years and you've got over $13,000. While not a ton of money, $13k is more than enough to qualify for a down payment on a small house or condo in many housing markets in the US. Sure, probably not NYC or LA or SF, but doable in DFW, KC, San Antonio, Houston, Oklahoma City, Cleaveland, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Philly, Wilmington, Tallahassee, Corpus Christie, Albuquerque, and more.
Housing is incredibly expensive these days, and there's really no way to make that cheaper other than live someplace terrible or spend hours and hours extra commuting. Both make huge differences in quality of life.
I'm sure there are many people throwing money away for no good reason, in fact many of those people are rich. But at a certain point you just need more income.
From my personal circle of friends, the people that I know that own the most real estate are people who are disciplined (think accountant in a 500 Fortune company, or an engineer working for Boeing, or a web developer slinging some internal Asp.Net website at some company you never heard of). Meanwhile some guy working at my current huge-tech company sold all his stock when it vested and "invested" the proceeds in options... He was taking uber to work even though you can show up anytime you want (maybe take the bus? maybe some days you work remotely?) and he was complaining to me that he will never be able to buy a condo...
At the same time, I see a pretty pervasive attitude among young people that boils down to "if I don't do well, it's society's fault". It's like this overwhelming victim mentality, like a sense of learned helplessness that affects areas of their life even where they are not helpless. Not only is this a bad attitude for society, it also becomes ultimately unhelpful for the individual as well.
Obviously I see where a lot of this attitude comes from (see the first paragraph), and yes, I'm speaking in very broad generalizations that don't apply to everyone. But it just feels like this big shift where a lot of people feel the only path to success is, essentially, luck or some sort of scheme.
Why is it a foregone conclusion that these things are only occurring in one direction? What evidence is there to support that (or not)?
I'm going to use that. Great summary.
The more pertinent question is how these have changed on a percentage basis, and relative to each other and median income.
Housing is, though.
If they are stable at 6%-7% for the next 20 years, you're right, they will absolutely be "totally within reason". But it's a big distortionary problem that a huge number of people have fixed rates at ~2.5% with almost three decades left on them, while the current rate is more than double that. It's super hard to eat an almost 5% rate increase to do the kind of normal nearly like-for-like home sale that usually comprises a big portion of housing turnover.
I make about 2 times the median income in my area, that puts me in the top 5% nationally. I can 'afford' the bottom 10-15% of housing. It's already a shitty proposition for me with 16 years experience and career progress. I can't blame young people for saying fuck this shit.
But at least I can afford food. So there is that.
Either way, it has never been the case that the average person is able to afford to live in the city and raise a family. why do you think that everyone moves out to the suburbs to buy a house.
The town your parents moved to was not as built up when they moved there as it is now. The city expanded. We just have to accept that we'll probably have to move a lot farther out from the city which is really the same equivalent that your parents did.
The CA housing market is just totally distorted by Prop 13. It is by design meant to screw new home buyers. And has been doing this for 46 years, with absolutely no end in sight.
I guess my point is that CA folks shouldn't generalize the issues with the housing market to the rest of the US/world just because they have a dogshit law on their books.
No, this is true almost everywhere. Wages are low in comparison to housing cost. If the poster was living and working where houses are cheaper than SF, then his salary would also be lower and he would still be limited to bottom tier housing on his income.
The only way possible right now is to own real estate by inheritance or by having been born earlier to get in before those people who decided to be born later. Either that or you have to find a way to get your income from somewhere different to where you live, so that you can afford property. With WFH normalised I'm predicting massive migration waves as the younger generations from expensive towns, cities and countries move away to where they can afford to live.
the nation is not completely homogeneous. In the situation where you are looking to purchase housing, the only comparison is in the immediate region (such as the county or at most, the state), as only others in the region competes with you, not somebody in a faraway state whose wages are much lower.
What percentile are you in your area?
And yeah, housing is screwed, but no that does not mean "the economy" is fucked.
I think a good lesson to learn from this period is "people are very sensitive to gas prices and the rates on mortgages and car loans".
If the central banks can keep from going down to near zero interest rates of course.
And I agree with you that younger generations, probably at large due to social media, are not patient enough to get rich by saving.
Speaking as someone in a younger generation, there's a sense that with the climate sword of Damocles dangling overhead and countless people stressing the already fraying hair, perhaps we may not have sufficient time to accumulate any sort of wealth by saving. Perhaps this is just a lack of patience in our generation, but I think it's quite possible there are bigger factors at play.
Think of it like nuclear weapons. You can't really plan for nuclear war, but you can still take nuclear capability into account when making financial decisions (e.g. China is unlikely to annex Taiwan because of US nukes so investing in TSMC is not a terrible move).
Which is why people are choosing not to bother saving, of course
Because they're constantly being told that it is in fact cataclysmic and there's no stopping it
People forget that the "climate cataclysm" doomsaying started decades ago. There are articles about "we will be under water/burning alive/etc in only a few years!!" As far back as the 70s. Maybe before!
So it's been a huge mistake in two ways, because it's led to two types of outcomes:
The first is like you said, the younger generations have basically given up. High rates of depression, anxiety, and just general "checked out of society"
The second is the older generations that have high rates of "They've been saying the world will end in five years for the past fifty years, so clearly this climate stuff isn't a problem at all" and they are behaving accordingly, as though it weren't a problem at all
It's also notable that the "Boomers" managed to do this with the spectre of nuclear war hanging over them and this threat never actually went away. The younger generation just chooses to ignore possible nuclear war cataclysms in favor of possible climate cataclysms.
Edit: Just consider how "real" the threat of nuclear war must have been to someone who had regular "duck and cover" drills in school. There's nothing comparable for climate change (yet).
while the climate crisis "is happening already and it's too late to stop"
People genuinely believe we will not have a habitable planet in a couple of decades no matter what we do now.
That seems a lot different than "maybe some people decide to fire nukes but probably not"
A lot of people live paycheck to paycheck, especially younger people. How are they supposed to take advantage of this, exactly?
I was born in abject poverty. I went to public school and state colleges. I made money in TN, GA, AL, and TX before settling in northern CA. This area is my dream location and it took nearly 2 decades of planning and effort out of college to prepare to buy and settle here in a financially stable way.
San Fransisco isn't the only city available to US citizens. If you can't save in a high COL location, move to a lower COL location so you can save. Then, when you've saved enough, move back to a higher COL area.
This idea that you're stuck in some expensive geography and can't do anything about it is plain silly. I made most of my moves with less than $1,000 in the bank and plenty of credit card debt. After moving a dozen times across nearly half a dozen states, today I own a home in the Bay Area outright, have zero debt, and do what I like with my time and I'm not yet 50.
If I would have left college for the Bay Area immediately, none of that could have happened. It took planning and stages and moving all around the country (and living in the cheap South) but it was doable and is doable now for anyone that wants to make the effort. Yeah, boomers had it a lot easier, but so what. That's history. That was what they got for living in a high tax high investment era and we get what 20 years of Reagan and Clinton gave us, trickle down, so we deal with it.
"I want to live in SF or NYC out of college and own a home because boomers could do that" is bullshit. There's a substantial generation between you and boomers, my generation, X, that saw we weren't gonna have it as easy as the boomers and we didn't complain, we changed tactics and adapted to the environment. We figured out by going to state schools, busting our humps at a half a dozen different jobs including ones with serious physical labor that might even cost you a finger, being illing to live in less than ideal places for years or even decades, could let us settle into something better in middle age.
California costs about 2.5 months more salary to live in than the national average and about 4 months of salary more than truly affordable states. If you can increase your savings by 2.5-4 months of take home all for the price of a bus ticket and a few days of hotel stay to find a place to rent in a more appropriate COL location, you can save for a house, even a house in a high COL location, no problem. You probably cannot save for a high COL location house living in a top 3 COL state while trying to do so.
Moving costs thousands. Finding a better job is good advice but often requires investment in yourself (education costs money).
How could anyone move to a lower COL area for less than $1000? A security deposit and first month's rent will be more than that almost anywhere you can "find a better job". And that's ignoring the cost to move your things. (But maybe you didn't have any things or expect someone to sell/start over?)
It's clear your intentions here are good but you're giving poor advice. You're out of touch.
That sounds like you've got some extra money laying around that should belong to your landlord...
In any case, there is no reason people cannot put some money aside each month and earn some interest every year. And on top of that the house prices will not increase, at least not insanely as in the past, so you have a chance to catch up if increasing your salary and savings for a few years.
It's unrealistic that renters could save themselves out of the hole they are in. Their efforts are much better spent making drastic career changes, high risk investments, or even extreme measures such as drug dealing or moving to another country, than thinking they can beat a game that is completely rigged against them.
This seems a _little_ alarmist, no? Assuming you're in a major developed economy, inflation is falling. It's still too high, but 'ever increasing pace' is simply incorrect.
And while this high inflation is kinda shocking in modern terms, it's not actually that_ unusual historically. The current US inflation rate is lower than it was for the _entire period_, bar one year in the 80s, between 1971 and 1992, for instance.
The housing thing is much more of a legitimate point, but people are over stressing the inflation thing.
It is really important that people understand that inflation isn't "falling" in the sense that things are getting cheaper
A lower inflation rate just means that stuff is getting more expensive more slowly, but it is still getting more expensive
Unless we see actual negative inflation, the damage of high inflation rates has already basically been done. Salaries have not kept up and will likely just continue to fall further behind
"Inflation falling" does not mean "things are getting cheaper" in exactly the same way that "driving backwards" does not mean "reducing speed".
Where did this meme even come from, that this is confusing? Did they stop teaching what the definition of the word "inflation" is? Or did they stop teaching about the relationship between measuring values over time and measuring rates of change in those values?
Inflation isn't a confusing concept! Are people really confused by it, or is there just a lot of noise about this?
> Unless we see actual negative inflation, the damage of high inflation rates has already basically been done.
"Negative inflation" is called deflation. That's what happens during a depression. Deflation would be a very bad thing, you do not want deflation.
> Salaries have not kept up and will likely just continue to fall further behind
This one is just simply not supported by economic data. If you're just talking about the tech industry, then, yeah, maybe. But it's not true of the workforce as a whole.
It's a fairly straightforward misunderstanding of terminology being used in public discussions
"Why are things getting more expensive?" "Inflation"
"Inflation is falling" "Oh so that means things are getting cheaper right?"
People make this mistake constantly. One could argue that discussions about inflation is framed specifically to lead people to make this mistake
> This one is just simply not supported by economic data
Look at any graph of cost of living versus incomes and it's absolutely plain to see that it's true. Not sure what other economic data you're referring to, but I suspect it's misleading at best
So I've been trying to put together graphs to share with you, but I think it's sort of hopeless without knowing what data series you mean when you say "cost of living" and "incomes", or what time period you're thinking of.
I think "cost of living" is usually a city or region specific concept. To get a sense of that nationally, are you thinking of one of the inflation measures, like consumer price index (either "headline" or "core")?
For "incomes", FRED has both "personal income" and "disposable personal income" measures, both from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Is that what you're thinking of?
Probably more interestingly, what time period are you thinking of when you say "have not kept up"? I was thinking of "since the pandemic started", so I was looking at what's been going on since 2020, but I realized it's quite sensitive to this starting point, and you might be thinking of a different one.
I should have asked these questions before I replied originally :) Sorry about that!
Edit to add:
I guess you did say "look at any graph of cost of living versus incomes and it's absolutely plain to see that it's true", so I can at least give one counterexample before you answer my questions:
Here is CPI (both headline and core) against personal income (and disposable personal income also), with the value of each index set to 100 on 2020-01-01: [0]. The income lines are up ~25% since then, while the CPI lines are up ~20% from then until February 2024. That's 49 months, so normalized by the number of months, that's ~0.5 for income and ~0.4 for CPI.
0: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1kiu7
But here is the same thing, starting one year later: [1]. This is a very different story! In this case, income is only up ~8% while CPI is up ~17%! This is 37 months, so normalizing the same way gives ~0.2 for income and ~0.45 for CPI each month on average.
1: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1kiv5
But then the story since 2023 is better again: [2].
2: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1kivz
So I guess, if you accept the series I've chosen to analyze this, and the time period you're thinking of is the beginning of 2021 to now, then I accept your premise.
But I still don't see any evidence for "will likely just continue to fall further behind"; the trend is flat to closing (albeit slowly).
https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/08/07/for-most-...
That first article is focused on making the case that inequality is a big problem. And on that, I certainly agree! But the amazing thing about the pandemic recovery in the US is that inequality has actually improved. The recovery has been better for lower wage workers and worse for higher wage workers. This is not unrelated to the bleak feeling in "tech" at the moment; we are among those higher wage workers for whom the recovery has been relatively less robust.
And again, the starting and ending points matter a lot. That article from 2015 showing how bad the financial crisis and "great recession" were just aren't very relevant to this discussion of "is the economy good right now?". It's true that the great recession was incredibly awful! But since them we've had a period where the economy was good again, and global upheaval due to a pandemic, and a complicated recovery from that upheaval. So that's the period that is more relevant, IMO.
I think the second article is more interesting though. I'd certainly be interested to see a fresh analysis of that same thing.
But I honestly really wonder what people use to anchor their expectations for real wage growth. I think it's pretty clear why it's super bad for it to be negative (that is for nominal wage growth to be less than inflation), but how high "should" it be?
I guess, to me, all else equal - that is, for the same work at the same company, without getting promoted or taking on new responsibilities or switching into a new role at a new company (or a different organization within the same big company) - I don't expect my income to grow much if at all above the rate of inflation. And I don't think the aggregate wage data captures this kind of income growth through career progression (nor is it intended to).
So I dunno, I'm unsure about it, but when I see "real wages haven't grown much", I kind of think, ok, but should they even be expected to grow much?
Again, I'm specifically talking about real (that is, inflation adjusted) wages here. Of course everyone expects nominal wages to increase over time, but I think that's mostly because we also expect inflation to be nonzero.
Seems a bit of a strawman to me, because I don't think you can realistically stay in one place this way without taking on anything new or extra over time
Some new tool is built or purchased that makes you 5x more productive, so half your team is cut and now you're doing the work of multiple people. Or maybe they just downsize and toss extra responsibility onto you. Or you get promoted just because of seniority. Or frankly, because of seniority you now have knowledge few people do so you are responsible for mentoring
The "static, never done anything extra, no new responsibilities" is not realistic
And the productivity thing is massive too. Computers mean that one person can do the work that entire teams used to, in a lot of industries. But they aren't earning as much as entire teams. Workers have captured basically none of the value of our increased productivity
So, yeah. I think it's actually just plainly obvious that our real money incomes should have grown faster than they have
Yes, this (and the rest of what you said about this) is true for an individual. Certainly, individuals should expect their real wages to rise over time, as they gain experience and seniority, or take on new roles at new organizations.
But that's not what is tracked by aggregate wage / income data. In aggregate, as one person is getting raises based on growing experience and seniority, other people are filling in behind them, all the way down the line until you get to new entry level people coming in. So absent any other effects, that would all balance out to no real growth.
But you're right that the missing variable is productivity growth. (Which is also what drives real gdp growth.)
So yeah, that's the answer to my question about what makes sense to anchor expectations for real wage growth on. But, to out myself as a capitalist monster, I think it is actually reasonable for a larger portion of those gains from productivity growth to accrue more heavily toward the top of the income range. But, to remind you of my comment above about how I think inequality is very bad, I do think those gains have been and have a tendency to be way too concentrated toward the top.
So I guess the upshot of all of this for me is that I am actually sympathetic to people who hold the view that "the economy" has always (or at least, for generations) been "bad" because of this problem of inequality. But I'm not so sympathetic to the view that the economy of 2024 is comparatively bad. I think it is, and has been for a little over a year, quite good relative to any recent period.
I'd estimate that a single individual with zero skills in NYC could get:
1) A receptionist job for $46k/yr (includes health insurance) [1]
2) A shared $2k/mo 2BR Jersey City apartment [2]
They'd have a take-home pay of $2960 - $1000/mo (rent) - $1000/mo in other expenses (fairly high estimate IMO).
Annual savings (with a traditional IRA) would be about $13k/yr.
It's not much, but the savings rate is almost 30% of gross income, and retirement calculators say you'll retire at 65 a multimillionaire. Surprisingly, a daily Starbucks or avocado toast (or forgetting the tax-deductible IRA contribution) really does eat into the savings numbers. And forget about having kids until you get a career upgrade.
The major risk is an increase in rent without an increase in wages. Let's investigate:
From 2012-2024, rent in Queens (not sure about JC) rose 45% ('only' 3.14% APY) [3]. Over the same period, national wages grew 47% (3.3% APY) [4]. That's good, since our individual earns 3x more wages than they pay rent. Wage growth was even higher among nonmanagers, so I don't think the growth was captured by the 1%. [5]
Overall, it looks OK to me, though the margins are thin, and you need to share an apartment. Hard to make it work for a family. I'd be curious to see some others run the numbers.
[1] https://www.indeed.com/jobs?q=receptionist+-hour+-experience...
[2] https://streeteasy.com/building/3657-kennedy-boulevard-jerse...
[3] StreetEasy Rent Index: https://streeteasy.com/blog/data-dashboard , chose Queens as it was most comparable in price to JC
It all comes down to biology. The dopamine hit you get when your 0DTE you bought for pennies per option skyrockets the next day for a 1,000% return. It’s a dopamine hit unlike anything before it. Forget heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine.
That hit of dopamine from just 1 successful “trade”/gamble is enough to wipe out the previous 100 failed trades. Some people in the drug addiction trade would call this “chasing the high”. Same thing for casinos.
Same reason why your grandparents might spend hours pulling the lever of a penny or nickel slot.
Also probably why insurance companies tend to rate new drivers, especially young men, as “risky”
It's easy for me to sit here with righteous indignation, acting like I'm super smart for not blowing my money on gambling, and for a long time I did just that, but recently I've kind of realized that my cowardice towards losing money is also why I'll never be wealthy.
I gravitate towards decent-but-not-amazing-paying W2 jobs. I like them fine, I'm comfortable enough, and that's the safe, nearly-zero-risk path. It's certainly not a bad life or anything, but you also do kind of top-out fairly early. By age 27, I was a senior engineer at Apple. I didn't really have any intention of becoming a manager, so I was only like two promotions away from seemingly maxing out my career. I absolutely hated my job, and it depressed me because it felt like this was the end goal, and I was miserable; there was no more substantial path "upwards", and the top was just not a place I was happy.
If I weren't such a coward, and had a higher tolerance for risk, I almost certainly would have started a real business. Starting a business is basically a fancy gamble; most businesses don't succeed. It's kind of hard for me to condemn gamblers at that point.
You have a lot more impact as a founder over whether that business succeeds than you would ever have over a wager in roulette or a 4 game NFL parlay on Sunday.
Both are risks. Only one is a gamble.
I do think that there's a bit of overlap in that part of the mentality of people who gamble and people who start businesses. You have to accept that there's a good chunk of luck with starting a business, and also acknowledge that if you don't have that luck that the business will likely go belly-up.
What I was getting at is I am personally a coward. I don't say this with pride, and this isn't some attempt at humble-bragging or anything, it's a dig at myself, not entrepreneurs.
Sometimes being a coward isn't a bad thing, if nothing else I don't waste my money at casinos, so that's good. But because I'm so terrified of losing money, and so terrified of anything involving "risk", I feel like I took the cowards way out by working for BigCos at a desk job instead of trying to build my own thing. Sometimes I'm a little jealous of the people who can throw caution to the wind.
Anecdata, but me and all of my friends started to pretty aggressively save money at around age 25. It’s probably not coincidental that that’s also when we all started to get reasonably high paying jobs.
That said, assuming that the person doesn’t treat Robinhood like a gambling app, avoid margin and options, and only buy boring ETFs on there, it doesn’t really seem like it’s fundamentally different.
#3 - A friend who recently (within the last year) drained his savings to $0 paying for a trip to Europe. All of the money came from day trading stocks on Robinhood.
#4 - A friend who bought a house just over a year ago. The house cost a few hundred thousand, and he decided to put a >50% down payment on it, which he did by liquidating some (not anywhere close to all) of the money he has in index funds.
Those are probably the two most extreme examples, and I could provide more examples that are anywhere in between. I'm going to wait for a study that does some statistical analysis over the population before I draw any conclusions.
The point that I was trying to get across is that across the people I personally know around my age, I can find examples that run the gamut of financial risk - everything from "leave it in a savings account" to "YOLO on options." Because of this, I don't think it's particularly useful to draw conclusions about what the general population is doing based on anecdata alone.
I don't do index funds cuz there was some tax weirdness associated with them at some point and an accountant told me to do the ETF versions of them instead, but I do keep a large percentage of my money in low-risk ETF version of the normal index funds.
I bring all this up because I think part of a reason that a potential reason for why the next generation of men don't save (if that's even true) might not be "generational" so much as just being a product of being young.
I didn't take saving money terribly seriously until I was 25, and it wasn't because someone explained all the pros of having a nice savings account, it was because I was nearly homeless because I hadn't saved. The CEO of the company I worked for embezzled all the money and ran away, leading to about six weeks of no paychecks before I was unceremoniously laid off. It took almost three months to find a new job, I stopped paying my rent because I couldn't afford it, and my landlord drafted a lawsuit against me to evict me. Fortunately in this case, I was able to bother my father in law and he was able to get me enough cash to get the lawsuit dropped, and eventually I found a job and was able to pay him back, and it all worked out.
I sort of a swore an oath to myself that I will never, ever, ever be in that position ever again if I can avoid it, and once I was earning money again I started putting as much money as I could spare into savings of some kind, and this hasn't really stopped.
I wouldn't wish the depression I went through at that time on my worst enemy, but in a bizarre way I'm kind of glad it happened. It forced me to learn how to actually take care of myself, and how to be financially responsible, and that's what I'm kind of getting at: some of this stuff sort of requires you to fall on your face before you really understand it.
ETA:
To be clear, I'm not angry at my landlord for filing the lawsuit. I think that was totally fair all things considered, I wasn't paying the rent, they're a business.
If there is one piece of advice you take, save early, save consistently, put your savings in index funds (I target my portfolio at 50% VTI, 25% VEA, and 25% VCSH).
Simplicity trumps optimality. And VTI is close to optimal for most people, even (perhaps especially) people who think they can do better than it.
Also the biggest companies are most often the least societal beneficial ones, so it's morally more difficult for me to justify investing at a stock exchange.
Yeah, this is a hard one. There a handful of funds out there that invest in less damaging companies, obviously with a somewhat smaller return. I ended up choosing PAXWX, for example, though there are others. I'd be happy to hear others' ideas for ethical investing (preferably without a lot of effort).
There are various funds which include or exclude companies based on various criteria, whether generic ESG ones or more specific ones.
In this case, boring is the entire point, but it's hard to sell the average 20-something something boring that they won't get to use until 30+ years from now.
They have very reasonable standards in how they expect men to treat them, and the men they date are overwhelmingly not willing to rise to those standards. These standards are maybe much higher than they would have been even a generation ago but for the most part they are still very reasonable! And I am not even talking about money here.
If your friends can't find men that meet their standards by definition their standards aren't reasonable since they aren't being met.
Were they reasonable they would be met.
Let's not pretend that social media hasn't had a much worse impact on women than on men.
The standards I'm talking about here are things like "will not mock or belittle me" and "will consider me an equal participant in the relationship and value my desires accordingly."
They haven't misunderstood the situation or made a mistake. Their BATNA is to not have a spouse and they are taking it. Where a generation or two they might have settled for someone who treated them dismissively, but not abusively.
What you're describing there is a woman's expectation of a man.
A man's expectations of a woman have nothing to do with the above.
>Their BATNA is to not have a spouse and they are taking it.
Interesting claim, let's revisit it when they are in their 50s.
None of the rest regret leaving their shitty husbands, or are willing to accept another weak marriage.
It's rather sad that someone as old as you has such a martyrdom complex.
The well adjusted of us don't want people to suffer because we disagree with them.
Wut?
/u/giraffe_lady pretty much stated a baseline minimum for what you should expect from a partner. Are you honestly stating that you believe (most) men don't expect that from women? Because I certainly do and I have ended relationships with women because I didn't get that baseline standard of treatment.
Your assertion is basically "lower your standards to what you see around you."
Yes, that's the definition of reasonable expectations.
It's time to tell them that they will not be special and the best they can hope for is comfortable mediocrity.
Lower your expectations and you won't be living on the street when you're in your 60s.
I think the mismatch is largely due to implicit standards on the part of women (must be a certain race, must be at least average height, must be gender conventional) that are so ubiquitous that they don't even consider them standards.
Women tend to want the single best man they can find. Many men seem to enjoy pursing as many women as they can get and are willing to have casual relationships with women that are less attractive and who they would never commit to. Combine that with online dating where women get to choose from a huge number of men. All the women are pursuing the few most attractive men. Those men have lots of options. Many women are sharing the same top men.
its my opinion that you simply cannot trust people's words when it comes to hypothetical partners. Peoples stated preferences and actual actions are completely divergent.
But overall dating is not something i care to even acknolwedge statistics about. Never going to find a partner if you're not living a fulfilling life and have unrealistic standards.
Still though, where's the data?
Hmm...
20 years ago your dating pool was far more limited to location and social circles you were in. Online dating has decimated that. The illusion that you are a big win away from achieving a fast track to status is the allure.
I know plenty of old-school companies that treat their people remarkably well and loyalty goes both ways. But I struggle to think of a new-schools tech company that won't exploit an employee's naivety.
However, you do see a lot of gambling shops around, and we get news stories of it being a huge problem.
I think if you're not based in the UK it would seem like it's a much bigger deal than it really is to many of the population. It's a big deal to a (small?) subset of the population.
There are some people that are hooked, and I've no doubt it causes a lot of misery in certain communities. I doubt there'd be so many betting shops without the addicts. Had friends who worked in those shops as students and they saw some pretty sad stuff. We'd be better off as a society without the betting shops, but now it'd probably all just go online and perhaps become something even more pernicious.
May I guess that you are not a soccer football fan? If you were I think this comment would be different. Football fans have been bombarded with gambling adverts for 20+ years.
Gambling is a very big deal in the UK. 40% of the population gambles on non-lottery at least once a year, 27% have done so in the last 4 weeks. 0.5% are problem gamblers and 7% have been affected by someone else's gambling. (all stats from Govt gambling harms review)
The highest-paid person in the UK is the head of a betting company. MPs are openly (Benton) and quietly selling themselves to the industy, who have succeeded in delaying reviews and watering down rules.
The parent post to yours is quite right to say that the US will inherit all of our problems in this area (if anything it will be worse) and I'm not sure you have the information to wave it away as you did.
My point is not that it's uncommon, but rather that it is very much not a feature of UK life or a defining part of culture for many people, perhaps a majority. We have a big problem with it in aggregate, but the coverage would suggest that this is something that everyone in the UK feels a part of, and that's just not the case.
The coverage of the US situation seems to suggest that the demographic split is quite different – that it's perhaps a younger crowd and perhaps not tracking so much with socio-economic status, where the UK mostly skews in different ways. There are similarities like our lotteries though. I think the US will get worse as they deregulate, although I suspect as it's in some ways a newer industry there it'll probably look a little different to ours. The problems will be the same though.
Anyone can become a problem gambler and, just as with other drugs, they become a problem for the rest of us.
In mainstream culture, it appears that Generation Z consumes less alcohol compared to earlier generations (although they might be substituting it with other intoxicants).
More niche but still present are the peculiar trends associated with right-wing groups, 'nofap' and similar movements.
If you're referring specifically to a movement involving spending money, I agree and anticipate that emerging as well, probably merging with one of the above two.
A very stupid analysis supports that idea: Looking at subreddit overlap with r/nofap reveals many right-wing adjacent subreddits in the top 10: MGTOW and asktrp (ask the red pill).
It's not to suggest that all forms of temperance are affiliated with the right-wing—many aren't, and some have even been noted in sibling comments.
* https://kyla.substack.com/p/gen-z-and-financial-nihilism
A lot of people don't see a bright (financial) future for themselves, and that working hard won't get them anything meaningful. So long shots are perceived the only way that you can improve your lot in life, as otherwise The System™ is stacked against you (student loans, housing costs, etc).
Rent eats up half your take home pay and while you're not terrible with money, you are also not super frugal. So you are ultimately saving a few thousand a year. At this point road to being rich is half a century away and pretty narrow. You better not get sick, or have to take care of an injured family member, or scammed, or divorced, or laid off for an extended period of time. And all around you is a media, political, and social ecosystem telling you the good times are over.
It makes sense why some people just decide to lie-flat.
Which isn't to say it's not an issue--both are. But despair driving people to spend increasingly on short-term endorphin hits is universal. The most meaningful metric would be the proportion of income that's saved and invested.
Is burning $100 in a fire really any worse than spending $500 on a real, usable item?
Despair is certainly an issue.
Or you could lose it all, whereas buying a designer hand bag has a 100% chance of you ending up with a designer handbag afterwards.
But, you say, it gives me pleasure! Well, so does gambling. And spending money for pleasure is fine, so long as you can afford it. And if you can't, it's equally bad.
The relatively utility of a $500 bag is no more than a $50 one, that’s for sure.
The effect on pleasure between gambling and a handbag are immeasurable and maybe equal so in some sense you’re right.
I’ll never buy one, but it seems like you’re distorting reality to make your point.
Probably. A bag is an item with utility that can be resold. Typically the person buying the handbag also gets entertainment value out of the time spent shopping for the handbag and also enjoys using the handbag for some period of time.
Sports betting is pure entertainment. I don't know how far $100 goes in sports betting. If that's what you spend in a night, I'd say the handbag is easily a better value for a person who likes handbags. If $100 is what you'd lose in the aggregate over a month, with several hours a day spent enjoying sports betting, maybe the sports betting is the better value. I guess it depends on how good of a gambler you are.
For both, I say if you can afford it and it gives you enjoyment, go for it: that's the reason to have money. If you can't, don't do either.
No it is not. If it was, people wouldn't have those sad face and wouldn't look like zombies when gambling.
Usually fans aren't really into the sport itself if they can't enjoy a good game/race and be happy for the winner whoever it is. It is usually more dubious and akin to nationalism or religion.
You can argue anything with made up numbers.
Is more money in the US spent on gambling, or on prestige goods?
> Americans wagered a record $119.84 billion on sports betting in 2023
> Slots and table games across the U.S. generated $43.79 billion
Yes, simply because the risk of addiction is higher with sport betting than handbags.
You could easily rephrase this as "It's just entertainment. Is blowing $100 on heroin really any worse than $500 on a designer handbag?" to illustrate the absurd case where this is obviously true.
https://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/19/us/cia-says-it-has-found-...
A bit of that attitude leached off on me as well, but I have noticed that it is almost completely vanished from American culture.
Gambling used to be something that whole swaths of society looked upon with absolute contempt as nothing but an unmitigated vice.
"To make a fortune, coach young men to their benefit" -- Good market economy stuff
"To make a fortune, exploit the depression/negativity of young men to your benefit" -- What this article is actually about.
I'm often seen as the more successful and stable member of friend groups. The number of people that come to me talking about their puts, calls, crypto, and other high risk investment play is way to high. I always tell them "I invest long, so I don't know anything about that" and try to steer them towards more predictable investment options. No matter how many people I point to real estate deals they could feasibly get into, and talk about how much I've made on real estate, not one of these people have gone down that route. In the way they talk, they actually want to gamble and don't want to grow wealth. I think it might also be the marshmallow experiment, because they also don't want to discuss any play that I measure in years.
I'm seeing this in more demographics than just young male. I was looking into a business plan and talking to a trusted boomer about the business plan. They have more experience in some specific aspects, and I was looking to identify more risks. Towards the end of the conversation they told me "of course, I was never a gambler", to which I replay "neither am I, that's why I'm talking to you and doing my homework."
The only RE investing that still works is buy, rent, have retirement equity in 30 years, maybe. Occasionally put some money IN. Potentially lose a lot of money mid term and hold paper losses if RE bubble pops. And guess what? Maybe not even that with the current rates.
It's funny to see people acting like RE is some bastion of stability. Stock market is inflated atm too.
Yes. What other way could you possibly reliably generate positive cash flow with real estate as a normal person without a lot(!) of initial equity?
Common advice where I'm from is buy tiny apartments without rent cap in good locations (Stuttgart, Vienna, etc.) on maximum loan runtime to refinance later and rent them out. Preferably one every 1-2 years. These typically cost anywhere around € 120-150k and the common 20% deposit can be earned reasonably quickly. Banks will usually be completely fine with this as long as you have positive cash flow and you can write off a lot of things around your business as a renter on your income tax forms in most countries.
I have only ever heard variations of this advice. Never anything else.
1. Flip - buy undervalued property, fix it, sell it. Variation: buy in bad neighborhood, fix, rent, neighborhood gets better, sell it.
2. "Buy cashflow" - e.g. find properties where rent > monthly payment/taxes/interest/maintenance. Impossible now.
3. Split and short term rental - buy house, fix, split single family home into 5 units (garage == unit, basement == 2 units, each room == unit, etc. I see this in the US more and more now, which is an indication of the economy.
4. Rent, short term rent out (often fully legally with consent of apartment / house owner). Benefit to this is no cash investment.
5. Houses at foreclosure auctions. tldr: Sell for more than normal open market houses now because everyone goes.
I can list about 15 more, but again, the point is that the market isn't what it used to be so none of these really work anymore, but it doesn't keep people from pushing them.
People tend to forget that real estate is a local market to some extent.
What happened?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy_v._National_Collegiate_...
Folks who don't want to fund their state from the loss and despair of other people, for one.
Faith in this system is dwindling, and whatever your political inclinations, that is dangerous. Fewer people believe that putting in a solid eight hours of honest labor is going to assure a decent lifestyle. Gambling is one potential path out, maybe not even that irrational if you perceive it’s your only shot.
If there's some combo of a floor effect (if they don't have much now, they don't have much to lose) and pessimism about the future (they think this is the only way they can manage to get ahead), I can see people deciding that gambling is worth it.
But I assume you know that so you must be asking, "Is there a situation where somebody can accurately understand the expected outcomes of any particular bet where the odds are against them winning and still come to the conclusion that taking the bet is rational?"
And one answer comes immediately to mind although I'm sure there are several: when I'm willing to lose for the entertainment value of having the chance to win and knowing that short term variance means I may in fact win.
(Speaking in population-level averages here. The "elder millenials" that came of age into the financial crisis are now own homes and have families to a large extent, though of course many individuals still can't afford homes or families.)
I despise that this has only gotten worse for today's young people (after getting better for awhile, I think). But even still, working and saving continues to have much higher "expected value" than gambling.
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It's a blatant signal that your society is stalling and cannot produce actual value.
I don't think the 9-5 job is going to survive another generation.
I don’t really see though how increased financial risk among certain people would kill the 9-5, though.
The future belongs to those who believe there will be one, and who act constructively. Or, negatively, those who believe there won't be a future often act in ways that sabotage any possibility that there could be one.
Bootstraps?
This sounds very nice, poetic even.
Too bad you can't believe your way into a house when working at a near minimum wage job with tens of thousands of dollars of student debt and being one health crisis away from living on the streets. How does one work constructively out of that? Take on more debt to get more education? Apply for the 700th job this year, and hope it's the one? Move away from your support structure to somewhere "affordable" (where?) and hope you land a job there?
Statements like yours tend to ruffle my feathers. I can't help but picture someone who already has a comfortable life looking at the people who don't, saying "I'm fine, you should be too. Just believe in yourself and work". That is not how you intended it, I'm sure. But that's how it reads to many of the people who are struggling.
How you managed to read this out of what I wrote is astonishing.
Can you help me by pointing out which part of my comment encourages laziness? And which part "attacks employment"?
I was trying to illustrate the struggle that many young people face. That they are trying. They are doing what they were told (go to school, work hard, etc). Yet the dream (comfortably living) just keeps getting farther away.
"Belief" wont pay the mortgage. That doesn't mean I'm suggesting that young people be lazy and not work. I'm suggesting that saying "believe" is shitty advice (often given by people who have 'made it' to the comfortable life).
That's the part where people think you're encourages laziness.
Look, my initial point wasn't "just close your eyes and believe real hard". Perhaps you were taking it that way?
My point was, people act (in general) consistently with what they believe. If you believe that you can make a future, you generally act to make a future. If you believe you can't, you may make halfhearted attempts because people tell you to, but you generally don't work the same as the person who thinks it's possible to actually make something happen.
The belief isn't what drives the outcome - the action is. But the action flows out of the belief.
[Edit to reply, since I'm rate-limited: Fair reply. Yes, you did say that in your initial comment; I had forgotten. Thanks for the charitable reading.]
Thanks. I didn't realize it would be read like that, so it helps to have it pointed out. I certainly didn't intend that to be read as "be lazy".
>Look, my initial point wasn't "just close your eyes and believe real hard". Perhaps you were taking it that way?
I know that you didn't intend it that way. I could have maybe said it more clearly, but I'll repeat the end of my comment:
>That is not how you intended it, I'm sure. But that's how it reads to many of the people who are struggling.
Your comment reads that way, just as mine apparently read as "be lazy".
If you make $30/hr, your subsidized rate under SAVE for the same loan is $48.
But you can make that argument about anything, I guess, and if you make that argument I don't think it's even possible to think of yourself as blowing money, no matter what.
Looks like the HN post title has now been updated to that subheading.
This article nails down some things about this phenomenon - at least concretely identifying the demographics - but it doesn't really give any satisfying answers or propose any solutions.
We've made it so easy for people with addictive personalities to click "gamble" that it's unsurprising to see it on the rise. With stuff like crypto we've normalized - even glamorized - the behaviors. Gambling is "useless" in an economic sense - it doesn't create any real value, it only provides "entertainment."
The problem is that not every gambler is going to be entertained, especially if they light a bunch of money on fire and suffer real negative economic consequences. It seems like we should be doing something to mitigate this...
Even investing meme stocks is better then gambling, because it's a positive sum game.
Business Insider is such clickbait trash these days.
I've helped a ton of my friends stop living paycheck to paycheck (even adults in their 50s); my journey to this was not easy, and I really just needed a mentor.
The difference between a young 20s and the older generations is thirst. The older generations have experienced drought and hardship in a way that Gen-Z might not ever experience, leading to a seemingly entitled response to everything.
Another commenter said Boomers, Silents, Gen-X, Millennials, etc, "rolled up the ladder behind them" and I think that's accurate; I'm bit a tired of trying to help and being met with insult... so someone I've 'rolled up the ladder', in a way by not offering as much advice.
>The difference between a young 20s and the older generations is thirst.
If your version of "helping" is telling them that they're fine, other generations had it harder, and that they lack 'thirst'... No wonder they respond negatively.