What happens when a whole generation never grows up?
wsj.com
wsj.com
I don't want the money, I want the things people used to be able to buy with the money.
U.S. population has increased ~19% since 2000 [1]. Has there been an ~19% increase in housing in the last quarter century? (Spoiler: No!!). Basic necessities like housing are priced at the margins, so of course costs have exploded by ~45%, and they trickle into literally everything else getting more expensive.
This is a political problem, and I've done the best I can to support the creation of more housing by voting accordingly, even though I've been lucky enough to buy at what now looks like a much more reasonable price. At this point it's up to younger people to push politicians to get more housing built, because the older generation has clearly voted for what they want.
Not everything is a culture war, sometimes you just gotta show up at a hearing and tell your neighbor/councel member to STFU and let that multiplex get built.
[1] https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2024/12/population-es...
One might just as well say that you're blaming the older generation for not just dying to make place for the younger generation after 40/50 years of constant work. It's the same claim.
If you take away housing as an investment ... will you then double existing pensions, by working harder? You'll call that absurd. So, here we are. The older generation has something you need and needs the younger generation to work and pay for their old age ...
Banks are indeed profiting off this, but the very large bulk is pensions of tens of millions of other Americans.
Yes, governance is the answer.
Even white collar wages are largely stagnant, yet the costs to get those white collar jobs are insane.
In 2006, an MBA from HBS had a total tuition of around $75,000 [0] and net you a $140,000 TC job [1].
In 2024, an MBA from HBS has a total tuition of $170,000 [2] and net you a $200,000 TC job [3].
If this is the situation at Harvard Business School, imagine at other programs or universities who don't have as many doors open. Hell, I haven't even factored housing in the tuition numbers above.
We've entered the same trap Germany and France was in during the 2010s and Japan in the 2000s. For a lot of young people, there's no point even trying if you are still stuck.
Either you spend inordinate amounts of money to tread water and attempt to start a career, or you don't and just remain a NEET. Either way you're unable to hit traditional milestones until you late 30s if you're able to somehow get back on track.
[0] - https://www.hbs.edu/about/annualreport/Documents/2006/HBS-An...
[1] - https://www.alumni.hbs.edu/stories/Pages/story-bulletin.aspx...
[2] - https://www.hbs.edu/mba/financial-aid/tuition-assistance/Pag...
[3] - https://www.hbs.edu/recruiting/employment-data/Pages/default...
And most administrators don't understand it/want to blame this on 'today's generation' or whatever else nonsense.
They've been fed doom and gloom from politics, society, and climate science their entire lives. They can physically see that their lives aren't as easy as their parents and grandparents at the same age through photographs and home movies.
I get it. It's hard to be optimistic as a kid; parents have to try harder than ever to keep them pointed in a positive direction.
So true. The amount of suicides among young people is staggering. It is like they globally don't see any aim in their lives. I thought about this for a long time and believe the reasons are quite complex but definitely also include the points you mentioned.
Why would they? In most of the western world, there is pretty much no positive outlook at like anything going forward. Many things are worse than before, and are only projected to continue in that trend.
I am not really sure what is the answer, but the current system is just not working for the young at all.
Which is my point.
Plenty of white collar careers with significant upward monetary and social potential are gatekept via higher education, and those fields without that gatekeeping are extremely commodified.
It's the same story of medicine, law, accounting, actuary, academia, and even engineering to a certain extent.
Either you spend an inordinate amount just to barely tread water in your career, or spend little-to-no money and drown with no career.
Forget about even buying a house or starting a family without parental support because you have a down payment's worth of loans to pay off.
Edit:
I re-read your post and I kinda agree. The era of being able to hoof it on your own is largely over, and parental help is increasingly critical.
This will require a massive culture change in America (eg. normalize living with parents after college like back in Asia, de-emphasize certain "milestones" like marriage and kids by late 20s, etc).
Step 2: Blame young adults for spontaneously avoiding those milestones for no reason except their own moral failings
There used to be intense social pressure for young adults to get married whether they wanted to or not -- whether they found a good partner or not -- unless they wanted to live at the margins of society.
At the same time, a house was 4x the median income, where now houses are 9x the median income.
Or those with pensions vs. those without
1: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/03/19/pensions-are...
https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/home-price-income-ratio-re...
There are areas where it still is sane but much less of them than historically and concentrated in areas with very little population.
Is it worth $500k to not have your kids live in fear of loonies on their steet? Hard to say it isn't if you can possibly manage.
Investment idea : buy a bunch of homes in troubled areas and then build a mental health facility. Resell them as a safe neighbourhood.
RTO or lack thereof isn't very relevant one way or the other. Fully remote work is a great option for some employees but it simply isn't possible for the vast majority of jobs. Most employees have to occasionally be in a certain physical place it order to interact with other people or use specialized equipment or follow security rules.
If you were a teacher, do you think it would be easier to find a nice home in Brookton South Dakota or San Francisco California?
And I’m not trying to come across as being pro or anti rural America. I’ve lived in major metropolitan areas my adult life. But I’m from and still visit family in south GA.
On the other hand, drugs are endemic everywhere in the US. I know a few middle class families with teenagers and their relatives struggling with heavy drugs - not just weed.
What demographic are they?
My "alternately" was not to say that the alternate was an accurate description of reality but only to highlight how silly such broad statements are when you look from the other end.
And in cases where it isn't, you should be talking to a lawyer asap.
> Scholars tended to associate it with the theories of economists working with the Mont Pelerin Society, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, and James M. Buchanan, along with politicians and policy-makers such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Alan Greenspan.
As a person in their early 30's who has never dated, I thought about this kind of thing recently and concluded I don't really know what I want out of life. A lot of journaling and therapy led me to believe this may stem from a lack of interest in taking risks. And that may stem from my upbringing. Specifically trauma for at least a portion.
I agree that there are a lot of reasons to think pessimistically about the future. However in my case it simply feels good to seek out such pessimism because it already fits into my world view. Which was shaped by mindset/trauma and disconnected logically from the fact that the Earth is melting etc. The people who raised me I was essentially given by chance. And they did not fulfill all my critical needs while excelling in other (material) needs.
And that causes pessimism in me to some extent. Not the economy, really. Not AI, really. Those are things I can be pessimistic about by proxy. Because generally my mind rewards pessimism stronger than others, so those topics become abstract punching bags. I can't remember how many times I've opened HN and come across a sentiment of pessimism I largely agree with in the comments. But is that because I seek HN for that? What would it matter if I just stayed ignorant for a week? What difference would it make?
Ideally, I think if I were to focus on things important to me it wouldn't be pessimism in general. I recently spoke to a woman in her mid-30s married with children and in talking about finding a partner she discussed how she believed all people are fundamentally good at heart, and the dating market is about finding those who will accept you now for who you are, without needing to change for them. This including an obligation to go to therapy or similar to change some of your beliefs that aren't as productive while still letting your true self on the inside shine outwards.
This I believe is where the disconnect lies. Because I've already been in therapy since 3rd grade until today, a period of over 20 years, and the longer I've gone the more I've realized those "true self" components that are left without being reconfigured by therapy are not conducive with "you are a good person at heart" that the fiancee automatically believes. And it might have been that incorrect belief that enabled her to get married, because it enabled her to find a person that wasn't like me. But I don't parse it the same way.
For a long time I didn't see an issue with myself. I just thought that's what "be yourself" meant. To believe the world is fundamentally chaotic and absurd. Because there isn't any other way to see it, having experienced first-hand what I did. And also I disagreed that there aren't any "fundamental" qualities so to speak that every single person on Earth would reject you for. If they accepted me for those it would be like accepting that they know someone will take advantage of them and deciding it's in their best interest to interact with them daily. I can only imagine the number of people diagnosable with narcissistic personality disorder that love "being themselves" and never want to change their fundamental nature for anyone.
This is better than where I was 5 years ago. I was so busy dissociating with work that there was no reason at all for me to think about marriage or dating. Even in the middle of therapy. And I would say I am not restricted by finances or lack of homeownership (it sounded like a weird American obligation to me not grounded in true desires). This is my personal explanation for "people are better off but don't seem to know it" in the article. My mind reconfigured itself so that such any notion of "success" becomes unrecognizable. How effective is a human whose brain does not process rewards and punishment normally?
We're just not very coherent beings. There's conflicting ideas and fuzziness in our minds. If you bring that under the microscope with the goal of "accepting yourself", it's just a recursive never ending hole. You are yourself, there's nothing really down there other than the thoughts you generate as you think about the thoughts you have, and it all ends up being rather made up. Moving on means doing something different. When I was treated for anxiety problems the idea was to prevent endlessly grinding over the same thoughts, but therapy for other things seems to encourage it.
If I dismiss this I usually expect the conversation to swing in the direction of "alright, so what do you want out of life?" I mean, if you ask me so suddenly, I would just respond "I don't really know." I do understand this is because of my mindset and upbringing, etc. But I feel that's a "wrong" answer when it comes to many people I have spoken to in and out of therapy. I certainly have gotten pushback from such an answer from people I was supposed to trust. I have also gotten pushback from stating therapy as it pertains to me isn't quite as effective as I thought it would be. Because I think "go to therapy" is often a last resort for talking to a person about their larger-than-life problems, so if that doesn't work out, what are they supposed to do? It seems to often be taken as saying "I don't want help," which I disagree with.
Such statements from me sound like a shallow dismissals. Although I was used to handing out such dismissals when I was younger out of pessimism and a lack of insight, nowadays my general feeling is "no, this really is what I think. I just don't know what I want right now." I don't want to count that as a loss, as depression permanently changing my brain chemistry, because what will that do for me? Make me more depressed. It's certainly a downside of introspection.
I could feel myself sinking but I didn't know what was causing it. I started getting caught up in drugs, alcohol, etc., and I knew that it wasn't me but at the same time like a hydra if I cut off one vice suddenly another way to "cope" would surface. I now understand where the traditional notion of being "possessed" comes from, it's not possession by an external force but possession by your own inner demons that simply can't be suppressed any longer.
You are right that most therapy was useless, they don't address the core issues. I will suggest the book "The Presence Process". I'm sure you're tired of self-help books, but this one is the first one I've read that actually "pulls up the weeds of trauma" out of your mind (actually it can't do such a thing and it even says so, what it can do is pull back the facade to allow you to feel for yourself where the weeds are and allow the mind's natural garbage collection mechanism to take over. This isn't an easy process, as the shadow self surfaces you're going to feel worse). And what you wrote about issues being "largely the same ones I dealt with 5 or 10 years ago" is actually almost straight from a chapter in the book, it calls it the "7 year cycle" of resurfacing trauma.
Because I refused all substances my addiction went to computer-related things and for a very long time that was work, which I guess wasn't all bad since now I have some amount of capital. But since then I've learned to take a better work-life balance and stay healthier. Actually I was afraid for a very long time of becoming a literal NEET and holing up in my room for years expending my life on television and games. If instead I was "productive" then I could create my own virtue and produce objects of substance. But of course life is more nuanced than that. So instead I decided to give myself a break this year and marathon some pieces of media I put off due to "being productive" taking a higher priority for so long. Maybe it's a better problem to have since I likely did several times the amount of work I needed to in a relatively short timespan, so I see it as being "caught up" so to speak.
Curious wording, I've come across many people who say they are afraid of taking risks, but you're the only one that I've read saying "lacks interest" in risk taking.
If you read about game theory and search and "explore vs. exploit" it should become pretty obvious that it is highly beneficial to take a balanced amount of risk.
I think for me it may be the same with a lot of things. I don't know how unusual it is to say this, but it's the same feeling as thinking about video games for the first time in a while and realizing I don't have the same attachment to them I did when I was a teenager. I likewise didn't feel the attachment towards dating until very recently when I deliberately went down a chain of reasoning related to age.
For the last thing you said, in German, there is even an explicit word for this, "Torschlusspanik", the fear and sense of urgency you get when you feel a (imaginary or real) deadline or "last shot at something" starts to approach. So also a common feeling.
Feel hugged. Childhood trauma sucks big time. :/
What I believe is that there are a lot of people in the world who believe they are right and certain others are wrong. These people are frequently sighted, I guess because people generally like being listened to. And a lot of amicable disagreements are included in this, as is necessary to exist as an individual in a diverse society. But if you take a person who believes they are mostly wrong and the rest of society is mostly correct, yet there is some complicating factor preventing the two belief systems from aligning closely enough (be it ego, pride, timidity, or something else), then such a person may decide to turn inward on themselves. It doesn't make sense to try to yell out into the world that they are wrong, because it's a "fact" they already understand. To say it out loud only carries a risk of lowering one's status further in the eyes of the public. So I guess a natural inclination is to remain in a safer place where symbols and beliefs are most familiar. But this is why I think such persons don't get as much attention as others, because they're naturally hard to find and might not speak up as often. And if they do, it's a daunting task to attach that belief in wrongness to a stable identity.
And I should add that your hug is accepted.
As an aside, NPD is a terribly misunderstood disorder. The popular image of someone who just loves themselves, navigates life without caring about anything or anyone, and hurts people for fun isn't what NPD actually is. [1]
The irony is that (as far as I understand it) majority of people with NPD who appear grandiose don't actually love themselves, they're really drowning in shame and self-hatred which motivates the way they want to present themselves and how they interact with other people. It's often deeply rooted in their own childhood trauma.
Or do you blame the parents?
To make it short, the main issue with housing is that it is considered an investment and not a commodity like a car.