Comment by corry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by corry | Hacker News Reader

'As the appeal of “solid” living is waning...'

Is it the appeal of it that's waning, or is it increasingly clear that there will be a generation or two for which 'solidity' is simply out of reach?

So what do you do? Grin and bear it? Hope for a quick improvement to a problem decades in the making?

A common view among Gen Z or younger Millennials I know is that not only will you have a lower quality of life than your parents (and your kids probably will too), you'll have a lower quality of life even to elder Millennials (who happened to enter the housing market 5 years earlier than you).

So, you can either have a severely hampered life here in Canada (due to cost of housing and general COL), where you just kind of scrape by and try to emulate everything you've seen growing up but without any flexibility or safety net... or you can roll the dice and do something more adventurous, like move out to a rural setting in the US, or go further abroad on an adventure.

The article mentions this dynamic but strangely seems to position it as a lifestyle 'choice' akin to whether or not you like riding bikes or rock climbing.

Also, you can't help but cringe at the conclusion saying this is an "opportunity" for "brands" to capitalize on. Great, what an important silver lining!

This is bubble thinking/feeling, sure in bubbles like SF or some mega cities this can and is happening to some extent, but world as a whole keeps going and doesn't stop.

For every vocal digital nomad there are 100 folks in same industry who just settle, which can mean a lot of things, not just stereotypical US version "I must own my house or I am a complete loser" (which btw ain't true in any meaningful way and doesn't bring any form of long term satisfaction or happiness, but thats for longer discussion). Even generation ago there were generally exactly same issues for exactly same limited resources like housing, people just got a grip and worked on their goals instead of endlessly complaining how life is unfair specifically to them that they don't have fully paid mortgage by 35 and retire at 50.

I know tons and tons of young people very capable and eager to work in stable corporate environments, way more than I experienced in my days, you just have to zoom out a bit. But this mundane truth doesn't fit popular negative narrative so popular also here with these topics.

Adventures and this are not mutually exclusive, sabbaticals are often used for anything between 3-24 months. If you can't cover the scratch even in 2 years, yeah this ain't life for you (which is an important discovery of course, the sooner it happens the better, but comparably very few find nomading say after 40 as something great).

I've done my share of longer term backpacking mostly in Himalaya, but have it as a long term lifestyle? No thank you, prefer weekend adventuring and raising kids someplace more safe and stable, being close to say tropical beach ain't the most important QOL item on my list.

> where you just kind of scrape by and try to emulate everything you've seen growing up but without any flexibility or safety net... or you can roll the dice and do something more adventurous, like move out to a rural setting in the US,

Isn't there a lot more safety net in Canada than the US (especially rural US)? At least you get healthcare covered in Canada - you'd be on your own here.

> Great, what an important silver lining!

What's the audience for the Harvard Business Review?

Haha, great point, my bad :)

I'm certainly not Gen Z or a Millenial, but I do not subscribe to the notion that solidity or the quality of life your parents have experiences is unachievable for today's generation any more.

There are tons of things that are much better in today's life when compared to a generation ago.

Everything always changes, but it's usually that some things get better and others get worse. On average, though, we're still on an upward slope, if you ask me.

But he is in Canada. The wages suck, real estate is insane, taxes are high.

Well, what could his parents afford when they were his age?

Also, check out how many North American places are mentioned in this list: https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/cost-and-affordab...

Sorry for the TikTok link [1], but worth seeing this animation of income to housing price since the 1980s. To make matters worse, what's not shown is also the rising tax on that income. Then factor in student debt, which is not as severe as the US but is a big drain. Then factor in the record levels of immigration of the last 5 years or so.

Of course offsetting all of this are other big improvements in QoL - better medicine, healthcare, etc. Also, while interest rates are high compared to last 10 years, historically they aren't crazy. But even 'not crazy' interest rates vs. this disparity in income vs housing prices.

So definite 'agreed' to you and the other posters who brought up it's not a single-variable issue.

But seeing this, and having a remote-friendly job, wouldn't you rather go live on a beach in Costa Rica for a few years?

[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@thebeautyofdata/video/73147673976243...

Thanks for a well-balanced reply!

Let's not forget that interest rates were not just relatively lower, they were actually really low just a few years ago. They have gone up since but I agree they still aren't high, especially compared to what my parents got from the banks when they financed their house.

A lot of my family are builders, and when you talk to them, the old adage "they don't make them any more how they used to" is said with a "thank goodness" attached to them. In other words: they build quality has also continually gone up since the last generation built their homes and that explains a part of the increase in cost (of course, there are other factors).

I do agree with your notion that there have been a number of big improvements in the QoL. That said, though, a house is certainly the main expenditure most people ever do in their lifetime. In other words, if the one item that's orders of magnitudes more expensive that most everything else you'll ever buy in your life, the effect of that price increase is especially painful - and especially hard to compensate through savings in other places.

> wouldn't you rather go live on a beach in Costa Rica for a few years?

I personally wouldn't but, and I wonder if most people would love the idea of doing that but when it comes to actually pulling through would chose not to?!

That said, I was lucky enough to live parts of my life on three different continents of this planet - while for my parents, when they were my age, international travel was still something exotic and very expensive.

>Well, what could his parents afford when they were his age?

[Article is from 2019, before Trudeau boosted the Immigration numbers to astronomical numbers] "In 1971, those in the top 20 per cent by income had a home-ownership rate approximately 10 per cent higher than those in the bottom fifth. This difference has grown severalfold in the ensuing decades. Millennials are entering home ownership in small numbers and later than their forebears: 50 per cent of millennials own a home today compared with 55 per cent of people their age in 1981." https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2019/08/01/Gov-Created-Housing-C...

The housing situation in Canada (not just Toronto and Vancouver) is on a scale unlike any other developed country.

> The housing situation in Canada (not just Toronto and Vancouver) is on a scale unlike any other developed country.

Australia?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-67723760

Maybe it's a thing with British colonies...

more like inhabitable wastelands where much of the land can't support large quantities of people, which leads to a handful of large cities without much space.

I've worked outside in both places, -40C and +40C. there is a reason most of the population is in a few expensive places.

It’s all housing. This doesn’t apply to the average HN millionaire in 600k a year but for normal people to get the life affordable on a single average salary in the 90s requires a double salary earning far more.

But sure you’ve got Netflix rather than cable tv so I guess that offsets it.

But that’s the thing: People are buying those houses. They are not inaffordable. What we’re seeing is rather: Jobs get more and more advanced, you don’t only need to do IT, you need to be in the right sector of IT. Each new generation discovers/invents a new scale of wealth, no-one could have imagined in 2000 that developers would be paid more than $120k, but $600k is the new average in the right jobs.

I’ve made a blast as a Java/Full-stack developer in my generation, leaving hairdressers of my city in the dust in terms of purchasing power. But in 10 years? I’ll still be as rich, but AI developers will earn 10x more than me.

It scares me to death, not for myself, but how can normal people compete with a normal job, when there are more and more internet millionaires, dropshipping lords, bitcoins kingpins, youtube magnates and AI clerics who can stomach x2 on food prices and x10 on housing?

I do think people tend to overblow things because of generational miscommunication.

But... I'm 25, and won't be owning a home anytime soon. And not for lack of trying! In Canada, there's a first time homebuyers saving account, which I load up when I can. But food is quite expensive. And so is rent. I had to move (Toronto => Montréal) because I couldn't afford 2500$/m there.

I think people hear that, and attribute that the costs are directly related to me being "too picky" or overspending, unlike people in the past. But I was living in an area of Toronto a parent grew up in. In the city. Food has definitely gotten more expensive in my own lifetime. I tend to be pretty boring with meals I make, so seeing the normal grocery bill tick up from 40$ to 55~60$ has been a bit of a shock, despite buying the same things. I look at my home buyer savings account, and compare to the housing market around here in Montréal which is "good" compared to most of canada, and I see lots of 100k$ down, 750k$ units. Most of which will eat up my savings account with the down payment.

This is while working on a tech worker salary. That puts me in a lucky category, for which I'm infinitely grateful for, it's a lot more stressful for others.

I don't really want to pay a premium to not be homeless, just to fund the last generation's retirement, when I'm already paying their pension and healthcare. Why should I live here anymore? For the chance that maybe I can sell that home for more... to my children's generation?

If it means anything, that stuff looked daunting for me in my twenties too. But then a bubble burst and opportunity suddenly presented itself again. At that moment, I was actually luckier than many folk who had been a bit ahead of me, as they faced tremendous asset losses and I was just sitting on modest savings that had gone from "I'm fucked; this'll never grow fast enough" to "oh shit, I just bought a house!" overnight.

For better or worse, it's really very hard to look too far into the future and know how things will work out for ourselves. Markets and societies aren't as stable or predictable as they're made out to be.

That's a good point, it's easy to get stuck in the mindset that the current moment describes the future.

At least life is interesting, I'll come along for the ride

> There are tons of things that are much better in today's life when compared to a generation ago.

Ok, so we've got smartphones and social media now. Sure you can get a lot of info and navigation help with your phone. I'm not sure we're better off with the social media, though. And the big downside now is that housing has become unaffordable. I'm an early X'er and I think we had it a lot better - I graduated with $8K in student loans (paid off in 4 years), bought our first house at 27 ( 20% down with a 15 year mortgage) and paid it off in 9 years. That's a lot harder to do now. Bought a 2nd house (rented out the first) in 2010 when houses were on sale (paid $186K, now worth ~$450K) and paid it off a couple years ago - kind of feel like I've been at the right place & right time, but people 20 to 30 years younger have hit the wrong place at the wrong time.

Are you joking, or is smartphones and social media really the only thing you think has improved for the current generation?

When I was a kid we had vinyl records. And then there were cassette tapes. And then there were CDs. And then there was streaming. And now we're back to vinyl (and cassettes, too, apparently).

Sure, there have been medical advances, but often times it's the insurance companies that limit their use because they won't pay.

Cars: generally better. They generally last longer than they did in the 70s and get better mileage, but some of that is negated by them being much larger than they were 30 years ago - ie we could have even more efficient vehicles if they were sized like they were in the 90s. Also, I think peak reliability was probably in the 90s, especially Japanese cars from that era (I still drive a late 90s Honda - it's very simple compared to more recent models which means it's cheap to fix and there's less to go wrong).

We do have a better selection of tastier apples now, so there's that.

And no, I don't think social media has improved anything.

Social media is the Red Delicious of the internet.

I like your take, but what are the data points that lead you to the optimistic side of where things are going? Do you have a rubric or framework for thinking about "given improvements in X, Y, and Z, we are much better off now than a generation ago".

wages have been stagnant relative to inflation and especially value-generated since the 1970s.

roughly have of the US makes ~37k USD or less per year. how are they going to buy a house when the average prices are going up dramatically?

the single largest cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical debt

reasonably well off white collar workers, including many of the non-FAANG, non-Unicorn types on this site, will never be able to afford a house without moving hours out of cities.

political bad actors, blatantly funded by corporate and foreign interests, are actively trying to paralyze and overthrow the government

college, instead of getting cheaper and more ubiquitous, is more expensive than ever, creating an entire generation chained to non-dischargeable debt

recent research has shown that credit card debt is now at an all-time high

unprecedented heat waves, flooding, and stronger hurricanes than ever, suggest that climate change is here, and it's going to get very ugly

and after years of relative peace we're now seeing multiple, brutal, conflicts that threaten, in some cases, global escalations

but it's an upward slope, you say?

> A common view among Gen Z or younger Millennials I know is that not only will you have a lower quality of life than your parents (and your kids probably will too), you'll have a lower quality of life even to elder Millennials (who happened to enter the housing market 5 years earlier than you).

This meme has reached the level of conventional wisdom, so any response feels a bit like trying to empty the Atlantic Ocean with a thimble, but the evidence that Gen Z and Millennials are in any way materially worse off than their parents is very weak.

They are, in fact, doing quite well:

https://twitter.com/johanknorberg/status/1780638119156408480

https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/04/16/g...

And that's before we account for the truly massive and unprecedented wealth transfer that's about to happen when the Boomers really start dying in big numbers.

When it's all said and done Millennials are going to be the richest generation of all time and still talking about how uniquely bad they have it, which I guess is the most Millennial thing imaginable.

You can make more money and still have lower QOL because of higher COL - like with housing prices, which have shot up much more than incomes have.

No. This is obviously adjusted for inflation.

https://twitter.com/johanknorberg/status/1780892502070898828

Yeah, it's practically become a cliche that if you want to downplay wealth inequality (which is gargantuan), you cite income inequality (which is quite moderate by comparison) instead and subtly try to pretend that they're the same thing (they're not) or equally important (they're not).

Nonetheless, this meme has reached the level of conventional wisdom, so any response feels a bit like trying to empty the Atlantic Ocean with a thimble.

The ultrawealthy know that there is no way to sate the desires of the poor to tax the rich but they can get away with pretending that "the rich" are exemplified not by them by people earning $150k with no assets and lead the charge to tax them to the hilt.

If you normalize by age, younger generations are wealthier than previous generations. A 50 year old gen-xer is wealthier than 50 year boomers were, a 25 year old z-er is wealthier than previous generations were at that age, etc.

Yes, wealth inequality is increasing. There is more variation in that set of 50 year old gen-x'ers than there was in that set of 50 year old boomers.

But on average and normalized for age, younger generations have both more wealth and more income than older generation.

Yeah it's honestly insane to me the number of my peers who own homes (expensive ones sure...) And eat out way more than I ever remember and have subscriptions for every entertainment service imaginable and who take multiple international trips per year, but will then talk about how everyone's living paycheck to paycheck.

My parents are shocked by how often we eat out. And not without cause. These life conveniences are way more common today, and we have the money to support it. And before someone talks about dual income, my parents both worked and we are single income.

By all measures, material standard of living has improved.

In reality people are more stressed out today not because of money but because they choose to live complicated, stressful lives mainly driven by unhealthy social media addictions. That's why they feel materially poorer than their parents despite all evidence to the contrary.

If someone is prettier than you or has more luck with women than you and it's in your face every single days you'll feel shitty no matter how much money you have.

Do you make the US median household income of $75K?

No but I have a household size almost 4x the median american size of 2.1, so my 200k in income is actually pretty close.

> eat out way more than I ever remember and have subscriptions for every entertainment service imaginable and who take multiple international trips per year

> By all measures, material standard of living has improved.

Ah! You've fallen for it. Those are not the same thing. Consumer luxuries do not a standard of living make.

Material standard of living is a secure home, ready and sufficient access to nutritious food, ready access to remedies and ease for illness, welcoming opportunities for fulfilling work, etc

Access to all of those things is eroding, and for essentially everyone (not just young people). You can have 5 ways to watch a video now, and your choice of 500 varieties of sugar water, and can hop on a plane instead of taking a road trip, but none of those have made the life of yourself or your family meaningfully improved.

The conflation of idle luxuries for secure living is a trap that lets people not notice as real standards continue to decline.

Wasn't GP's point that were people to engage in fewer consumer luxuries, they would be able to invest in their "real" standard of living instead?

Oh, I read them as saying that the experience of hardship was materially inaccurate and just a psychological fiction fed by social media and perpetually measuring against others.

I still read it that way on a second look, but maybe I'm reading it wrong.

And you've fallen for the idea that simply since I'm a believer in using real economic data, I must also believe in all the various consumeristic nonsense that Americans engage in, which is their real source of unhappiness.

> The conflation of idle luxuries for secure living is a trap that lets people not notice as real standards continue to decline.

I agree, which is why you should have read my comment:

> In reality people are more stressed out today not because of money but because they choose to live complicated, stressful lives mainly driven by unhealthy social media addictions. That's why they feel materially poorer than their parents despite all evidence to the contrary.

That's the end point. People work too much to make money so they can afford junk and material improvements in their life, instead of working to make their life nice. My family had less growing up and was much better off. As adults, my wife and I have chosen to replicate my parents and her parents way of life (one working parent, heavy time spent with family and friends, no divorce, no broken families, no spending all day at work, prioritizing life over money, etc). That works. Always has. Doesn't matter how many yachts you own. If you don't have a loving wife / husband and a good family or you never see them, and you have no friends (not the fake superficial friendships many Americans have, but actual friends), then you're always going to be sad.

I don't get the Economist, but I'm wondering how bimodal the distribution is - are we seeing a small cohort run away with the game or is everyone better off?

With where I am compared to family, that's my bet - people doing absurdly well in tech are screwing up the numbers. And I'm not even close to what some people casually toss out on here.

These are medians.

These numbers don't appear to be adjusted for inflation, but even if they were, I still wouldn't trust it. Lot of people know by now that the government fudges those numbers to understate them.

They are adjusted for inflation (standardized to "2019 prices"). In unadjusted nominal terms, the average annual wage in 1900 was in the order of hundreds of dollars.

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