Hacker News Reader

Comment by lbrito | Hacker News Reader

I'm a parent of two young kids and don't really sympathize with this.

Its self-inflicted and part of a larger culture of Having More Stuff. Having lived most of my life in South America and later migrated to North America, I feel I can see that more clearly than people who grew up here.

People always go over the top with anything material. Have a single child? You need a minivan. Family of four? You need a 3-level, 2000-sqft house (with the garage where you will never park your minivan, because it is full to the ceiling with clutter you never use). Toys are just another facet of this culture.

As someone from the outside who has been around, I can say the rest of world is not like this. Its not particularly hard to avoid. Just buy less stuff, and donate/dispose of things you don't want or need.

View on HN

>Have a single child? You need a minivan.

Seems like hyperbole. If anything, the empirical evidence suggests the opposite. You can only fit 2 child seats in a "normal" car, so if you want 3 kids (requiring 3 child seats), you need a minivan. However, minivans are apparently so undesirable that there's a mild contraceptive effect on births, because parents keep their kid count to under 3 to avoid getting a minivan.

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/731812

The GP poster simply misspoke - for the last 10-15 years replace "minivan" with "SUV". For many people, even single people without children, the default vehicle is giant, wasteful, and deadly.

My family has passed down through the generations an old farmhouse in the mountains where we go on vacation. When my father was growing up, they would pack the family of five and their bags into a Volkswagen Beetle and head up for a weekend. When I was growing up, we were also a family of five and we filled a minivan to the brim for a weekend.

> As someone from the outside who has been around, I can say the rest of world is not like this.

I agree with your general point that this is part of a broader cultural phenomenon, but I think your "rest of world" point is over extrapolating from your specific life experience in a small number of countries. I grew up in a European country and the culture around toys/stuff/etc is basically the same as the US.

I considered adding "the rest of the world (or what I know of it)", but that is kind of implied, as no single person can plausibly have knowledge of life in every single place in the world.

I lived in a few different places in Europe, and while the underlying desires that power materialism might be the same as in the US/Canada, I would very strongly argue that the practical manifestation of those desires is still at least an order of magnitude lower. Or in other words: middle-class Americans have much easier and cheaper access to industrialized goods, not to mention large housing, than most of their EU counterparts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com