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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

We were sold a model where having a career is the most important thing in life, at the expense of family and relationships. Because of that, the world gets richer but unhappier.

Additionally, local human contact has been replaced by a world of upvotes by strangers with quirky online names.

We need to work on figuring out how we can get the undeniable benefits of modern technologies without forgetting our biological needs. Thousands of years of civilization teaches some lessons on what's important (and what's unfair and dangerous). We should look back for some ideas.

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I've been raised in an environment where we talked with neighbours and so on - Now 50 after moving a few times - I feel many times people look at me weird when I say things like "Hi, Hey what's this dog breed", "Did you just move in?" or "If you need anything I'm in the house over there"... I'm not looking to build a relationship with everyone, but basic social skills are in some kind of drought.

It's incredible! Even people your age and older are doing it! Blank stares.

I'm going full Flanders. I'm gonna get a howdly doodly out of these freaks!

There was recently a spate of people getting shot (or shot at) for knocking on someone’s door, or pulling into someone’s driveway. (Someone inevitably being an older white man.) How do you develop a sense of community with people who behave that way?

Luckily most people don’t want to live like that. It’s true that people have lost a lot of their ability to socialize, but the kind of hate you’re promoting takes a lot more work. It’s tiring for everyone.

I have trouble imagining that anybody wants to live like that. And yet people do.

Career and grinding is not a goal, but is needed to afford an house and money to help your parents.

Apartment prices relative to income have gone greatly up. Thus, more grinding needed and some low wage occupations are priced out from the market altogether.

The question is why apartment prices keep going up and can we stop it.

Apartment rental prices have dropped for the last three months in a row in Canada.

Why?

Not OP but in a nutshell, everybody who could bought an condo downtown (Toronto + Vancouver especially but this is broadly true of the country) with a home equity loan from their main property as an investment, and the loan math only works if all properties are increasing in value and the interest rate stays very close to zero. Neither are true and unless something happens Canada could have our very own 2008 financial crisis. No biggie.

Sounds great for everyone who doesn't own.

I've read that it's only a specific time of apartment, one that's not conducive to raising families.

Just like the US, 3+ bedroom apartments are very uncommon in Canada. So their prices aren't going to have much impact on the average.

But there are lots of people with one or two kids in a 2br.

>Career and grinding is not a goal, but is needed to afford an house and money to help your parents.

It is for me. I have way more than I need to survive or help the people I love. But I want to progress my career and personal brand. I assume that's also true for many tech-millionaires who attends this site.

Yes, the goal is for me. But most people are usually family-oriented, and have been in the past.

Meet the housing theory of everything:

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

I think this understates the argument. I’ve been saying for a while that housing prices are the economic problem in much of the developed world. The. Singular. Most other things are in at least okay shape. Tuition and health care are nutty but they are less unavoidable than housing.

Human breeding impulses are infinite but there is only so much space. That is why prices keep going up. The earth is getting full.

https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/my-parting-prescript...

My suspicion is it's the financialization of everything driven by fiance capitalism and enabled by the huge twentieth century population boom.

I know that sounds edgy but explaining it.

With the population surging you could just flat out ignore the need to have children and create the next generation. So the priority then became amassing wealth. As long as the working classes were still behaving like they were living under malthusian conditions that worked. But now the working classes have caught on and are either trying to acquire capital wealth or they're trying to just hang on.

So yeah the working class knows what economic reality they are living under and acting accordingly. Having few children in order to acquire wealth and funnel it to the smaller next generation. The tell this is true is that it's happening everywhere. And the longer a place has been operating where childhood mortality is low and you can acquire financial wealth the lower the birthrate. With the caveat that some places are more culturally amenable to that.

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