They actually don't. Everything from dating and fitness to manufacturing and politics is in decline in activities, and more so in effect and understanding. You can't convince (enough) people anymore that it is even important as many don't have capacity to do it. And it isn't even something new at this point.
I think the real change is that nowadays it's just easier and more practical NOT to maintain friendships. Yes, it's lonely, but it's more efficient.
Looked online and found maps suggesting eastern Europe has more laws relating to it, although many of them in practice don't apply
Which "eastern parts"? I've never seen that rule here, but have seen people drinking in public. Do you know that or are you just asking AI to confirm your biases?
Public drinking is generally illegal in Poland ('police take a strict approach'), Romania, Lithuania, Slovakia (apparently not enforced in Slovakia).
Barton Springs in Austin is always brimming with people and Shiner Bock makes a frequent appearance.
Dolores Park in SF never has a dull moment and you can buy shrooms or edibles from vendors walking around.
Golden Gate Park in SF is massive and there are tons of clusters of people socializing and drinking throughout the park (especially near the Conservatory of Flowers!)
Central Park in NY in many ways mirrors Golden Gate Park only its way busier. Good luck finding a spot near the south side of the park on a sunny day. You might spot a mimosa or two, three…
You are talking about 3 of the trendiest places in the United States.
They are anomalies, not the norm.
Boozy picnics at the beaches, wine in plastic cups at the parks, etc. And fully sanctioned alcohol at the dozens of neighborhood street fests held throughout the year.
And it’s also a thing in suburbia, where backyard coolers full of beer are common at weekend gatherings.
I live in the Midwest US. The city government sponsors floating (as in they move around, not that they're in water) beer gardens across public parks in the summer, and our local Lutheran and Catholic churches will run outdoor beer gardens and barbecues as a way to enjoy the nice weather and bring in a little money. The various state fairs also sell beer, and a local outdoor, public music festival goes through a staggering amount of alcohol consumed in public.
People are out in public, often with the authorities around, drinking beer and mixed drinks out of clear plastic cups (usually) and nobody cares. It's just a summer thing.
Maybe openly but I don't know of a place where a cop will stop you and ask what's in your red cup.
Parent commenter is a narc.
* Drinking in public is legal
* Drinking in public is illegal (strictly enforced)
* Drinking in public is illegal (give cops discretion to arrest intoxicated troublemakers who are hollering, pestering people, or otherwise engaging in mild antisocial behavior)
Also, drinking in public is not allowed in much of Europe. Don’t go there and assume it is.
There are also many US locations and parks where alcohol is allowed.
https://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/justice/criminal-law/c...
Edit: Wikipedia page on drinking in public: "In some countries, such as Norway,[1] Poland,[2] India and Sri Lanka[3][non-tertiary source needed], some states in the United States,[4] as well as Muslim-majority countries where alcohol is legal, public drinking is almost universally condemned or outlawed, while in other countries, such as Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Germany,[5][6] the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Japan, Finland, and China, public drinking is socially acceptable."
I live and have traveled a lot around Europe, and have never ran into that rule, but have almost always seen people drinking alcohol in public parks. From what I could find online it's only Norway, Ireland, and perhaps Poland, plus a few places in cities in other countries (Vienna, Milan, Barcelona, Riga...) which is far from "much of Europe".
Take a trip to New Orleans for the extreme end of it, but we have drive-through Daiquiri shops all over and at least half of the people I grew up with have at least one DUI and I've never thought twice about being outside with a drink in my hand, as rarely as I do drink (I do refuse to drink and drive and am constantly lecturing others about it out here)
I would be more concerned about lack of accessible public spaces.
And in reverse, you’re visiting the park and see someone there drinking. What’s your impression?
So nothing extra compared to people who are drinking in pubs.
In London on sunny days the park is 100% rammed with people sitting in circles on the grass drinking, from like noon to sunset
Now in your example, suppose you’re a lonely stranger. Do you just nudge in on a circle with your beer and “Hi I’m Shawa” ?
Your answer may be yes, but in other cultures that’s going to get the police called, or maybe end in a stabbing. Which is why society is in the state it’s in
It doesn’t make much sense to me to put loneliness against efficiency.
What does it matter if it’s “inefficient” to maintain friendships of the easily is a lonely life without social connections?
People are prioritizing the wrong things IMO.
Humans need a variety of things to live happy lives. Strong social connection is as important as food in the long run when considering the overall health and survival of the species.
Clearly not everyone has the same access to resources and there’s a spectrum of experiences available as a result. I think this lack of resources at the bottom is an existential risk.
But what I find interesting is that people with resources are just as lonely as people without in many cases. Almost everyone in my extended circles laments the decline of social connection in their lives, and many of these people certainly have the resources.
I think we’ve gotten lulled into a stupor by the social media / internet content drug, and it takes just enough of the edge off of our need for social connection they we don’t properly feed it anymore. In the short term, we kinda survive living “meh” lives. What worries me is the long term impact on social cohesion.
In the UK, most councils have made parks alcohol-free zones. Also, the parks are only nice about 3 months a year. The rest of the time it's damp and miserable.
Uh, citation needed?
Some small parks, cemeteries, kids playgrounds maybe
Every large park in London at least is full of people drinking
There's even a kids playground next to a pub in London fields where I often go drinking with other parents while the kids play
Most of the UK has laws or bylaws at least against antisocial drinking e.g. if you're being a twat, violent, homeless, etc you will be asked to pour it out and leave, in incredibly rare cases I guess you might be fined but probably not.
Just having a beer in public at a picnic with friends is fine and is a national pastime.
You end up on video for drunkenness with police, and assuming they don't shoot you or beat the fuck out of you, the video still ends up on the internet.
The next day at work, you quickly get called in to talk to your manager and HR, and now you have to find a new job.
Time to find a new job! And in this market? Not worth the risk. Now companies are searching for New Hires on social media, and guess what? Your video pops up.
This is why people stay at home. Nobody trusts one another, or most of the institutions.
This is illegal in almost all of the USA. Sometimes you can get away with it, but if the cops decide to enforce the law on a particular day you’ll get a ticket.
made up fears are stealing your joy
On the whole I would not use the term “reasonable” to describe police. They’re power tripping infants who love to lord authority over people, and to the extent we get away with things it’s because they’re also lazy.
I’ve lived in places where it’s basically tolerated so long as everyone is civil and discrete. I’ve also lived in places where they enforce it to the letter and they’re not messing around.
I think people forget how big and messy the US can be.
https://ottawa.ca/en/city-hall/city-news/newsroom/city-lists...
Absolutely, but still, that is a reality in many cities. They are places where "going to the mall" is the main form of entertainment left.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mallrats
(But malls are much less popular now, probably mainly due to the rise of Internet retail)
The point being it's culture not economics. In fact Japanese generally make less money. IT salaries are in the $50k range. Minimum wage is $7.5 Yet they still go out.
It's vastly cheaper to go out in Japan, even if there are more expensive options. Not many cheap hangout options in a lot of places.
In sparse areas, going to the same few options over and over again isn't fun, and they tend to be more expensive, maybe due to lack of competition.
A functional rail network allow the public to move with much less restraint. Think about it. A highly car dependent society which much of the world unfortunately still is, will make going to 3rd places much less attractive. Easier to sit at home, doom scroll and watch Netflix.
Inter city trains should run at least every half hour, reliably.
You can just go where you like, and if you want to go somewhere else, sure it might not be the strictly fastest option, but it sure is convenient. You can go from A to B to C to D to A without having to go back to B to grab your elephant box and bring it to D.
When I stayed in the US for a while, I'm from Germany, what I noticed was is that there's an extreme "upward striverism" when it comes to going out. In most places I stayed you could find dirt cheap bars and clubs (although maybe clubbing overall in the US is worse), but people in their 20s and 30s just seemed to be reluctant to go in a way they're not in Europe or Japan.
I noticed it more with Gen Z than with American millennials, there seems to be an extreme Great Gatsby-ish fake richness.
It’s an eventual conclusion of everything having cameras, and thinking of being caught in a TikTok drama. This also tracks how most of the kids nowadays want to become a YouTuber. Which is, basically, being their own brands.
On the other hand those kinds of bars tend to be pretty enjoyable in neighborhoods that are above poverty-stricken but not yet gentrified. Basically a working class neighborhood of old, which rarely exist anymore - or not for long.
How much is missing from our own historical data? Things understood in the day, but not now, rendering stats less translateable.
[1]: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resu...
Lots of examples in Latam as well.
Capital can be used to produce more capital, but you cannot produce more land, more electromagnetic spectrum, more orbitals, etc.
The housing crisis is a restriction on what activity are allowed on land, and incentive structure that prioritize hoarding of land over engaging in societal beneficial activities.
I suggest you read up Georgism, the tax ideology that had largely disappeared from political life in the west.
> even domain names,
With an alternative DNS root, you can have any domain name you like, except for legal constraints such as trademarks, defamation, obscenity, etc. The problem is none of the alternative roots ever took off, in part because the browser vendors didn’t want to get on-board (they saw it as a high risk low reward feature)-and alternative browsers offering that feature failed in the market. This really isn’t comparable to land, in that the scarcity isn’t imposed by the laws of nature or laws written by government, it is scarcity entailed by a (predominantly) private social arrangement where competing arrangements are permitted, but have thus far failed in the market.
> the orbitals in the sky
Orbit is huge and while it is getting more congested, I don’t think that congestion is (as yet) a significant barrier to new entrants. The primary barrier remains the launch costs. The governments of major spacefaring powers don’t see orbital slots as a revenue source, their regulation of them is purely about avoiding conflict, and the fees they charge are about recovering the cost of that regulation, not contributing to general revenue. Some equatorial states tried to claim geostationary orbit slots over their territory as part of their territory, in order to charge for access to them - but the claim failed because the major spacefaring states refused to accept it, and these states lacked the geopolitical power to compel anyone else to take this claim seriously-and, anyway, with the growth of LEO constellations, geostationary orbit arguably isn’t as economically important as it was when those claims were first asserted
It's a network effect. The same reason it's easy to build a facebook clone yet nearly impossible to get it off the ground.
Closer to land are things like mining rights, water rights, fishing rights, pollution rights - taxing them is an obvious extension of the Georgist idea of land taxation, and it would be difficult for a consistent Georgist to oppose them, at least in principle
Domain names are a good example, because as skissane said, you could just make another DNS root. The trouble is convincing people (browsers) to use it. The problem in attempting to overturn Facebook isn't mainly the coding, either, but having a critical mass care. Those barriers don't seem like absolutes the way land is; they're just very high, high enough for those who control them to extract economic rent.
It also has nothing to do with labor vs capital. Billionaires don't invest (much) in housing. Sometimes they do invest in commercial real estate, but never into housing. It's the middle class who buys up everything - now almost exclusively in cash - and then won't leave those houses till death, as Silent generation currently dies.
Thing is, they do it because they can. Because their disposable income is by far the biggest in the world, so their needs in everything else are more than satisified: they already overeat, have full two-car garages filled to the brim with "stuff", have enough of everything that people might want in "multiple" quantities. So what's left to spend money on, is either investments (this is their stock market is so insanely huge), or things one don't really need in more than single units - so they don't have many houses, but single BIG houses, same for cars. Which makes a picture of unaffordability, as natually if people's residual free incomes are so large, so much money is going to be pushed into these, they will indeed become very expensive as a portion of entire income, just because everything else (except healthcare) makes a so much smaller proportion. It's simply that it just means huge houses, a lot bigger than anywhere else except Australia (which is also Anglosphere!).
Want to make housing truly afforable? Make people poor, also make them die off to free up space. Japan does both with great "success".
Our parents did, maybe, but we're doing it because we have to.
Inner cities went from unlivable crime dens to highly gentrified in the span of about a few decades. The moment the crime went away, people moved back in. But most of the people who actually show up to town council meetings are the people who grew up seeing riots in LA and graffiti-covered NYC subway cars. So building any more of the now highly valuable high-density, mixed-use neighborhoods that inner cities have is a drawn out political fight with people who think making their neighborhood more valuable will ruin it.
And this situation also applied before the last major urban crime wave too. The low-density suburban neighborhoods that are also expensive now used to actually be affordable. You could build cheap housing on low-value land at the outskirts of town and sell it for a huge profit, to people who had extremely generous government loans[0]. This is what triggered the white flight[1] that started the inner city crime wave[2] that Americans now cite as why density is always bad.
Problem is, that's unsustainable, there's only so much land that can be near a valuable set of jobs. So now you have cities where both the high-density core and the suburbs are equally as unaffordable. The next rung on the latter would be to move to smaller cities, except then COVID happened, and suddenly the housing market was flooded with people moving out of San Francisco at the same time rich Chinese people were buying up houses to hide their money from the CCP, themselves in competition with hedge funds like BlackRock that want to buy up entire neighborhoods and rent them back to the people who lived there.
America's obsession with single-family home ownership is an unsustainable system, propped up by deliberate market distortions. We don't buy into it because we're so much richer than anyone else, we buy it because the system is built to make it the only option for most people.
[0] To be clear, nobody would loan you money for 30 years, on a fixed interest rate, and let you pay it back early otherwise. The amount of risk shouldered by the bank is insane, but for the fact that the US government pumps money into banks to make this kind of financing viable to offer.
[1] The peak of suburbanization happened before desegregation.
[2] Don't forget leaded gasoline! Once racial minorities were trapped in cities, we made their kids breathe shittons of lead fumes, creating fuel for the crime wave fire.
There's dirt cheap housing in some very rural places and impossibly expensive housing in several of the major population centers where most people actually live.
Ever inflating house prices are caused by high demand and ease of access of debt. It predictably leads to endless price appreciation until you fill the bubble up enough to burst it, then we simply repeat again. Same thing happened to education. It's a 'commodity' seen as priceless and the government ensured access to endless debt to purchase it. You'll never guess what happened next.
[1] - https://blog.gaijinpot.com/what-is-the-average-salary-in-jap...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
No such mechanism happens in education, once you have your degree it is yours forever. There is no secondary market. If the value goes down, sure, other people will not pay as much for new degrees, but there's no direct connection between the market value and the tuition. There is no reinforcement loop.
And especially in the era of the internet the concept of college being a necessity to educate oneself is rather plainly artificial, and it's also highly debatable whether the current GPA inflated profit motivated degree treadmills that colleges have turned into is even providing a meaningful education.
A connection, yes, but not a feedback loop. A drop in the value of a degree does not lead to everyone panic-selling their degree.
What you're describing is simple ROI---as the return on the education investment declines, people reduce their investment in degrees. But falling tuition does not further reduce the ROI, as in the case of housing where there is a general expectation of appreciation, and therefore, speculation.
Housing in Japan is kept sensible in large part thanks to their land value tax for real estate.
When prices are high anyone who owns has incentive to prevent the supply problem from being fixed.
Unless… you have a land value tax
Their housing prices are being further depressed by the fact that they're now dying off fast enough that even Tokyo's population is starting to significantly decline. And that, in turn, is further compounded by a prevalent superstition in Japan against living in a house where somebody died, which helps to further reduce demand for many housing units that 'become available.'
Now it's rather the opposite. If you go to Japan on a Western salary (and especially after converting Western currency post ~2022), everything's dirt cheap for a foreigner, yet quite expensive for locals, which is much more akin to the economic state when visiting a developing country.
And so saying housing is cheap in Japan is kind of crass in a way. I mean yeah obviously it is, so long as you don't happen to live and work there.
I don't know of any other country were living in the burbs is desirable, everyone wants to be close to where the action and the businesses are.
There aren't natural places where you see the same people as the communities are very dispersed, with mostly single-family homes in large lots. So it takes a lot of effort not to be lonely. I've seen many people that moved here from other states/countries and now regret the decision as building community is incredibly hard.
I see this claim a lot but I don't understand it. Can you give me some examples of common third places in other countries that aren't paid that don't exist in US suburbs?
> The front stoop/street/sidewalk where everybody hangs out?
My kids and other kids in the neighborhood close by play around in the cul-de-sac quite often. Lots of people are out walking around. A lot of neighbors have patio furniture in their front yard and can be found out there, at least when its not 100F+ outside.
> The public square?
The downtown area nearby has lots of events going on.
> The park?
My suburban town has 42 of them. Almost 2,000 acres. They're mostly connected by dedicated bike paths. There's a city park attached to nearly every neighborhood area. Down the street from me there's a park with multiple playground areas, walking path through some small woods, a fishing pond, some basic sports areas (fences and graveled areas for baseball/softball, space for soccer, etc). So yeah, plenty of parks to be had. And there's usually a good bit of people at these places.
And that's before getting into the public sports facilities and other recreation facilities.
> The market—not to buy or sell necessarily, but because everybody’s there?
I hung out at the farmer's market this morning that's routinely held in town most weeks on Saturday mornings. Lots of people walking/biking to it.
> The library?
Excellent library with lots of events going on. They're rebuilding the main building after a fire, but even in their temporary space its great. Its usually pretty busy. It has excellent transit and bike paths to get to it, even in its temporary location.
> The public pool/baths?
Lots of city pools. Even one with a lot of water slides, its like a small water park.
> The house of worship in walking distance?
There are plenty of churches in Texas, trust me.
So once again, what's missing? And I'm not in an absurdly wealthy place, my suburb has a pretty average average household income. And its been roughly like this for most places I've lived or stayed at for significant periods of time. Maybe a bit less on transit, that is something my current place is probably a decent bit better than the average US suburb there.
> My kids and other kids in the neighborhood close by play around in the cul-de-sac quite often. Lots of people are out walking around. A lot of neighbors have patio furniture in their front yard and can be found out there, at least when its not 100F+ outside.
How big is the cul-de-sac? When I was a kid, my 'local neighborhood cul-de-sac' was about 50 kids playing around, forming their own little cliques, learning how to interact with a lot of other different kids. The actual cul-de-sac was more like 200-300 families with kids of varying ages, all interacting with each other
>The downtown area nearby has lots of events going on.
How many are spontaneous and unorganized? How often does the local band drop by for an impromptu performance that you didn't need to plan for, find parking for...that you could just be out walking your dog and stop by for a half hour?
> I hung out at the farmer's market this morning that's routinely held in town most weeks on Saturday mornings. Lots of people walking/biking to it.
How much of the market is just your average stay-at-home that is selling their extra produce to make some extra cash and avoid it going to waste? Do you need to sign up to be a seller, or can you just show up, set up at an empty stall and sell your stuff?
> My suburban town has 42 of them. Almost 2,000 acres. They're mostly connected by dedicated bike paths. There's a city park attached to nearly every neighborhood area. Down the street from me there's a park with multiple playground areas, walking path through some small woods, a fishing pond, some basic sports areas (fences and graveled areas for baseball/softball, space for soccer, etc). So yeah, plenty of parks to be had. And there's usually a good bit of people at these places.
Wow, 2000 acres...thats, not a whole lot. My hometown had something like 200mi^2 of public land around it that you could just go and make use of. And that's just in easy walking distance.
> Pools, farmers stands, churches, library...
My hometown had all of these a plenty too, and they weren't all heavily regimented. And by most measures, you probably lived in what was an ivory palace compared to where I came from. Yet, from your descriptions, you can't even manage the most destitute period of the post-soviet-collapse period.
We had plenty of third places to gather around with other people. Parks, beaches, forests. The biggest difference to me was that our experiences weren't sanitized. They weren't regimented to respond to certain rules, to be calendarized to occur on certain days or times. Our parents didn't need to plan play dates, or so schedule time off to make sure their kids could experience certain things. Those were just a given. The American experience with this is, speaking from 30-ish years of experience, is very lacking, and the saddest part is that most don't realize that.
The city I live in is less than 30 square miles. Hard to have 200 square miles of parks when the town is only 30. And it's entirely surrounded by other cities and towns.
And are you just talking undeveloped woods or something? I'm talking parks, as in playgrounds, soccer fields, baseball fields, water fountains, stocked fishing ponds, etc.
But I do get that. Where I grew up (another US suburb), walking out my back gate connected to loads of creeks and bayous and woods and ranches.
Still though, goal posts moved even more than 200mi. We went from "there are no parks" to "there are no forests".
> They weren't regimented to respond to certain rules, to be calendarized to occur on certain days or times
Neither are mine. I didn't arrange a play date. My kids just went outside and played with the kids out there. We just go down to the park and play on the playgrounds with the other kids. We just hop on the bus and head to the downtown and see what's happening. We just go to the library. We just stopped by the farmers market. We just go to the pool. Maybe shoot some messages to some friends we're heading that way, but not necessarily something planned well ahead of time.
> you probably lived in what was an ivory palace compared to where I came from
I don't know where you came from. But where I'm from, the average household income isn't too far off from the current national average. This isn't some ultra wealthy place.
All of the above. Well, maybe swap baseball fields to basketball courts.
> Neither are mine. I didn't arrange a play date. My kids just went outside and played with the kids out there. We just go down to the park and play on the playgrounds with the other kids. We just hop on the bus and head to the downtown and see what's happening. We just go to the library. We just stopped by the farmers market. We just go to the pool. Maybe shoot some messages to some friends we're heading that way, but not necessarily something planned well ahead of time.
If it's anything like my experience in the US, the other side -- hosting such events, is regimented and calendarized.
> I don't know where you came from. But where I'm from, the average household income isn't too far off from the current national average. This isn't some ultra wealthy place.
When I was a kid, $3000/annum would have put you in the upper 2-3%.
I've since lived in places with very nice public spaces, what most would consider to be enviable 3rd places. Yet it all still feels so artificial, so made up. It feels designed, not organic, and the behaviours that I observe follow that.
And when I visit friends in San Antonio and Austin, I get pretty similar experiences. Neighborhood grill outs. People chilling in the parks. Excellent libraries around.
> the most common American experience will be to hop in a car to do almost anything
The question was, what were those non-profit/free public third spaces that are allegedly missing. I do agree, in many places there's probably a drive to those things, but they do still exist. And from what I experienced, they're busy.
Other countries have similar issues, of course, but often (not always) they have more cultural factors keeping third spaces alive. In my experience traveling Europe and Africa, community and familial ties generally have a more active role, so there’s just more opportunities for stable third places to develop. It’s not that the spaces are different, imo, but they do seem more common.
And because you're in America, you can actually earn good money and have more disposable income than Europeans.
Getting cheap drinks with some friends is hardly an option anymore.
What's their healthcare like? If something bad happens, do they need to rely on savings to pull through, or does their society have stronger social safety nets that allow them to spend their money with less concern?
It's not really about safety nets since most people don't discount (or account) for them (they're in the future). It's about disposable income, and for huge numbers of Americans, that's in short supply due to the exorbitant cost of housing, college education and health insurance & care.
Safety nets in my mind are what kick in after a person has no way to pay for necessary stuff by themselves.
Disposable income is what gets cut down by the costs of necessary stuff.
Very few people are going to not go to dinner because they are aware that if they become indigent US society will not pay, and thus feel an obligation to save.
Lots of people will not go to dinner because they've already had to pay for (... you name it ...)
Way too many (many millions) have no insurance or inadequate insurance, but that's a problem we need to fix, not a description of the country as a whole.
The problem for most Americans is that what is not covered by insurance is still too expensive for them, but that's a subtly different problem than "no socialized healthcare => everyone has to pay out of pocket for any healthcare they receive"
I just don't get this part in the article and GP. Everyone in the developed country has instant access to ice cream. We don't say "people manage to enjoy $ICE_CREAM despite disgusting abundance of cold desserts". More supply only drives consumption and accelerate consumerism.
And I'm replying here because I have relevant, though anecdotal, memory. Social media is detoxifying Japanese communication at an unbelievable pace over the past decade or two. Japanese lack of social skills and proficiency in verbal abuse used to be otherworldly. Little Sgt. Hartman was just ubiquitous. Not nearly as much as it used to be.
All while mobile televisions, gambling, pornography etc had grown massively, which implies, though not proves, causality. How is that relationship between those supposed to be a "despite"? It just doesn't make any sense. Doing more is learning more.
Japan has a really bad drinking culture, or so I've been led to believe.
The only people I see out are families with grandpa in tow to pay for a mediocre overpriced wood fired pizza.
No one has analog skills. Just social analysis skills. Very briefly dated a 39 year old who admitted she had never baked, boiled, or microwaved her own potato. Already got 2 kids.
We reach endgame sooner in life. We grind all the content immediately because we aren't growing the potatoes and sewing the clothes, weaving textiles.
Parks, public pools, libraries and museums are the main things we do as a family. We also live in a metro of about 1.5 M. Maybe other metro areas charge for parks, libraries and museums?
Especially museums now I think about it? Museums in small metro areas can be free. Likely because there's nothing in them. (Still fun, just not as many exhibits as museums in large metro areas.) I mean, just imagine trying to run something like the Museum of Science and Industry, Museum of Natural History, or the Field Museum for free. I'm thinking at some point they would break down and have to start charging?
While it is possible they'll get gutted and/or forced to charge admission in the current craze to cut government funding, by far the best museums in the country -- the Smithsonian ones in DC -- are absolutely free to visit.
Parks around here, one is safe during the day with many people, it is divided up in many sections well, and you don't notice the drug dealing and needles until the ratio changes after dark.
Most of the other parks, I'd say a majority of women do not feel comfortable, which leads to less use by women and men, which changes the ratio of people that do go there. Some of the parks have been charging and increasing the fees to try to reverse that.
Libraries are the only real bastion of third space that seems to have a mostly neutral vibe imho. Although the downtown libraries have had to change some of what they allow to try to stave off the changing ratio of unshowered, just as several of the starbucks now have number pads on the bathrooms to access.
Libraries are not the best place for socializing as they normally have a keep it quieter vibe in my experience, but it's still doable to meet someone. The lack of open hours is a real limiting factor. I'd like to open a library that is more like a social club and open 24 hours.
Museums have gotten pretty expensive around here, and I don't see them as a great place to socialize. I imagine it's great to bring a family, but replacing the social connect that malls and bars at once had, not really. I also can't imagine people going to the local museum every friday night.
We're the adults now but prefer the responsibility of kids still
Anyway, gonna go watch the new Marvel joint.
Society collapses when the capable are helpless. There's no bandwidth to help the actual needy when enough of the normies need caretaking too.
Old puritans in government and corporate would just lop off the tail but that's actual people who mean something to their useful people.
this is a bit extreme..you don't need to go back 100+ years to know how to cook your own food. And plenty of people do cook their own food now despite having grown up on YouTube.
Young people in US consume much more of those things you listed than people over 40 did at the same age. Young people have more purchasing power than previous generations.
EDIT: Data from the fed and payroll providers show this overwhelmingly to be the case, but just to add some color/anecdote.
I found all of the first jobs I had in highschool and just after. 3/3 of my first roles now advertise a minimum salary over twice what I was paid 14-18 years ago. Prices have gone up around 20-30% since then overall so I would have had 40% more purchasing power today with the same jobs.
Second, no it does not cost 5x as much, closer to 15-20% more based on all the data I could find. Anecdotally in San Francisco, NYC, and Austin it is maybe 2x more at the most expensive places.
Nothing on FRED suggests you're correct.
Productivity was an example of a benefit I chose off the cuff but you could choose others. Are today’s video game consoles 1000X more fun than a NES? Given that many people actually prefer old NES games and are even willing to pay inflated prices to collect them suggests the answer is a resounding no.
The question is: "are you getting (anywhere near) a linear scaling of computer for your money?"
Because to me the answer to the second question is a resounding "no" and the strongest evidence of that is all the people walking around with high-end iPhones who can barely afford rent on tiny single-bedroom apartments.
I need a source on this, like [1], and I need you to also share the cost-of-living average increases, which PLAINLY show that despite wages increasing, the increasing costs for goods and services within that same time period have outpaced wage increase percentages [2][3].
And don't be a typical HN-crowder and say ANYTHING about wages in our industries — it's white-collar work, and a functioning society sees to accomplishing an ever-progressing standard of living for members in ALL sectors of the status-quo 'bell curve'.
Shit, even average household income is down 2k from 6 years ago [4]
1 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CEU0500000003
2 - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CSUSHPINSA
3 - https://www.kff.org/health-costs/press-release/annual-family...
https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker
Click "age"
Then compare to price levels. Wages have outpaced price levels for this age group significantly
Here's men 16-24 showing 20% increase after CPI adjustment
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252882200Q
EDIT: the data you shared is not specific to "young people", that's why it's different. While everyone's wages are up over the last 10 years relative to prices (according to the data you shared), young people have gained much more
For someone that lives with their parents and works full time, yeah - they've probably never had it better. But a lot of youth right now have expenses drawn out in such a way where, even if they're making more than their predecessors, they have less upwards mobility for today, let alone any potential to invest in assets that afford them any upwards mobility in the future.
>"Thats how you make generalizations about what's going on."
Right after saying:
>"You're trying to bend the data to your pre-existing beliefs.
Is a little funny, but fair play.
If you want to have a conversation about specific people, then yes, you can find some young renter that is having problems. But that does not make it generally true.
1 - https://www.bls.gov/cex/tables/calendar-year/aggregate-group...
Copy it into ChatGPT and ask "how much does each age group spend on housing"
You're going to have to share with me what that means. Are you using GPT to come to your conclusions? Did you read the BLS table and literally CTRL+F the data percentages I gave?
Drinks in some places are more, other places have not increased as much. You basically couldn't find a $5 drink in SF in 2015. You can still find $2 drinks in Austin today
Back in my day you didn't even leave home for a night out before 11PM. You couldn't spend that much even if you tried before everything was closed and there was nowhere left to spend. Young people today, on the other hand, are favouring starting the night out in the early evening, even the afternoon.
A night out may cost 5x more, but the same night out doesn't.
The drinking started much earlier. Typically you'd drink at home first so that you were already drunk on cheap liquor. Sure, if you had a place nearby that had specials that could compete with the cost of drinking at home, you might opt for that instead, but there is no material difference found in that. What is key here is that people did everything they could to keep the cost down, limiting the high cost experience associated with going out to just a couple of hours before everything closed down.
The "YOLO youth" of today don't care. Some researchers have suggested that because they feel they have no future they have no qualms about spending today, but whatever the exact mechanics of are it is clear that they aren't trying to pinch pennies like previous generations did. They are almost certainly spending 5x more, but that is buying them an entirely different night out as compared to what people were accustomed to in the past. The same night out isn't 5x more expensive. Not in any way, shape, or form.
Other related things like concert attendance have gone up.
My take is that the main reason young people don't go out is not price, they often seem to be making choices that cost more when they avoid going out
Restaurant prices are up 50-100% over the past decade. This isn't hard to check: look at old and new menu photos on yelp. Banh mi have gone from $3 to $6 in less than ten years.
My local gas station mexican place (which has excellent food) has seem a price increase of 50% since 2019 and more like 100% since 2016. Coffee ditto, but luckily I don't buy coffee out. Fast food is actually the worst offender of all, with fast food prices up more like 3-5x over ten years.
Grocery prices are similar:
Meat prices are up roughly 50% in ten years or more from my perspective. Googling, it's actually worse: chicken is up almost 100%, beef is up 45%.
Staples like rice and bread are also up ~50%.
These are all relative valuations with your pears and expectations. No one cares we are all vastly more wealthy than people living a 100 years ago.
People know how much Jamie Dimon is worth. No one cares they basically have more abundance today than JP Morgan himself.
It is also the difference that when I was in my 20s I had no illusions that I was going to become Michael Jackson or a popular TV sitcom actor since I never danced, sang or acted. Now though you do have that anxiety since people your own age are famous and wealthy from nothing more than network effects.
When I was in my 20s the only people that seemed to have disposable income were drug dealers lol. It was easy to not feel anxiety that I wasn't as well off as a drug dealer.
On the other hand, your claim that prices have risen 20-30% since 14-18 years ago doesn't even hold up to BLS inflation numbers. Try 46-59%.
edit: I'm also wrong about rice. Rice commodity prices are the same as 2015, retail price is up 15%. I will say that if you don't shop at the right places, though, you're now getting gouged on the rice.
I've seen the same effect happen like a mirror in all dollar-pegged economies I've visited since COVID.
Holy Anecdote, Batman!
> Data from the fed and payroll providers show this overwhelmingly to be the case, but just to add some color/anecdote.
My first job as a cook pays basically the same as what my first processional job pays now. It was a huge win for me at the time and now would have been no raise at all.
I think this is expressed in the jump in housing prices since covid too. So young people have better purchasing power besides for the one thing everyone wants.
If you look through the statistics we are actually richer in terms of housing than ever before. There's two stats: home size, and persons-per-house. In the past half century or so, home size doubled while persons-per-house dropped by 25%. So we live in bigger homes and share them with fewer people, housing-per-person has been increasing decade after decade to the point it's almost 3x what it was since the war.
This doesn't work for women.
So if any type in just some big names... like that with the madonna true blue CD selling 1986 for US$40,- per CD, how do you think her and the studio label became richier, and specially founding a Copyright-war just after the ridigious pricedrops (around 2001/-2)?
+++
Ask: Do you made the populous take from you? Mark?
> You virtually starve them doing so.
Oh.
> Muahahaha!
+++
Now let me disturb You,
1st:) You consumed content, you have created content, now the machine kicks in creating content consuming you.
2nd:) Machines programming kicks in while consuming you - just a random guy on the internet said: "App deals are the way to go if you are 'cheap' and wanting to die fast."
Conclusion: Many can't pay for anything anymore, cos no work left via been consumed by AI (-absorbing), so even changed in-app-advertising for "better products" will result in prices no one in the masses may be able to pay anymore. And quality of "food" ('stuff for thought' you may think) needed for experience so (tough capitalistic view, as before in the scene told above) may sank more and more, to meet ends, prices...
And no, it wasn't my intention to write something that damned mixed up dark-and-ugly-thinking...but ...yet i did, or consumed it, hey there it was... and sure, "via easy distractions!" ^^
Regards...
In 90s in Europe, my socializing was predominantly "walk down to the pedestrian zone and meet your friends for a walk". Not sure how it is there these days - Canadian social life today is indeed highly correlated with movies / restaurants / expenses.
https://www.derekthompson.org/p/the-death-of-partying-in-the...
Even solo hobbies are in decline. The war on attention that began with mass media and has accelerated through Television and the Internet to Smartphones has not been good for a society not ready for it.
None of those TOOLS are evil things. It's how they're allowed to be used by corporations who bombard people's attention all the time.
City recreational parks in America used to have water fountains and cool stuff like climbable sculptures for kids and decommissioned Korean War era fighter jets in sand pits. That all went away with the helicopter parents.
Insane to blame parents when Republicans have been destroying all manner of public goods for the last however many decades.
And I can't imagine any parks around me without water fountains.
Where are these places where playgrounds don't have climbable structures and parks don't have water fountains? Maybe you should vote differently or move.
I want you to complete that thought. Stay with it. Explain exactly how the helicopter parents are responsible for removing the things you liked in American city recreational parks.
I always find it surprising that American lament the death of shared spaces - because that’s what public spaces are - when it’s pretty obvious that they don’t actually want to spend time with each other. I mean two comments under this one you will find a commenter explaining that the situation is to be blamed on the other half of America they dislike. Well, that’s not very conductive to an environment where public spaces thrive.
Yes, fear of being sued was the ultimate death of all that stuff, but, to be fair, helicopter parenting is a manifestation of what is the same fear (e.g. "What if someone calls CPS?"). You are ultimately talking about the same thing.
> when it’s pretty obvious that they don’t actually want to spend time with each other.
Which too no doubt stems from the very same fear again. Hard to want to spend time with other people when you have to continually look over your shoulder. Most people show love, compassion, and kindness, but there is always that one person who is ready to go atomic at the drop of a hat that ruins it for everyone else.
It seems in many places that are free or cheap, there are many more types of people that show up and it sometimes gets weird.
This has led to less women and children going to open spaces, which leads to less men in my observations.
This varies greatly depending on the exact neighborhood, and it may not be obvious if you spend most time in a wealthier or more homogeneous part of a city/town. Although they are not immune, it strongly depends on the forces allowed to keep the others away.
As a member of the younger generations you notice that everything is owned by the older generations, which means you have to beg the older generations to let you live in dignity.
But this doesn't end once the younger generations turn into the older generations, because their parents also suffered the same problem, which means they might have enough for themselves, but they didn't have enough to pass down for you, leading to a spiral of immiseration.
Smart parents notice this pattern and decide "If I was unwanted and my children are or will be unwanted, then how about I don't have any at all?"
Many of the people doing these activities discovers them online or met others to do it online.
I don’t buy the claim that everything social and in-person is in decline.
Though I could see how easy it would be to believe that for someone who gets caught in the internet bubble. You’re not seeing the people out and about if you’re always at home yourself.
But there are time use surveys etc which provide a quantitative view of a lot of people. Because they're voluntary, they can't be a perfect representative sample of the overall population. But I think the broad, systematic view is still the best view we have of the overall trend. Also note that the scale and pace of the trend is slow enough that any individual _can't_ really provide an anecdotal view of it, because their own life is in a different place.
E.g. one source [1]:
> Atalay reports that, between 2003 and 2019, people spent an increasing amount of time alone. Over this 16-year period, the portion of free time people spent alone increased, on average, from 43.5 percent to 48.7 percent, representing an increase of over 5 percentage points.
Any given individual's time-use would probably change over 16 years regardless of what the population-level trends were just because that duration might also be the difference between e.g. being in school vs being married with young children or from being a busy professional to being a retiree.
[1] https://www.philadelphiafed.org/the-economy/macroeconomics/h...
No, I’m saying the same social activities are more popular now than they were 10-20 years ago.
I’ve been doing some of the same activities and going on some of the same hikes, bikes, runs, trails, and parks on and off for two decades. The popularity of these activities has exploded.
Even previously hidden trails and hikes are now very busy on Saturdays and Sundays because so many people are discovering them via social media.
If you’re just staying home and consuming doomerism news you’d think everyone else was doing the same.
> Over this 16-year period, the portion of free time people spent alone increased, on average, from 43.5 percent to 48.7 percent, representing an increase of over 5 percentage points.
That’s hardly equivalent to the claim above of a collapse of socialization.
I am in a "top 20" US city and all of these things are in extreme decline.
I think it’s more likely that your experience is the unique one. Or you’re not experiencing the activities you’re not attending.
More than half of the office buildings downtown are empty, and the ones that do have something only have a business in a handful of offices on a handful of floors.
Because of that, people started moving away because of lack of nearby jobs.
As people moved away, rents increased in both commercial and residential spaces to cover losses.
Library attendance and checkouts are way down.
Public transportation use is down.
Tax revenue in the city is down, which means less support for public services.
It's fucking awful.
https://www.jimersonfirm.com/blog/2025/02/the-approaching-co...
I spent 3 years renting a commercial property that subsidized the rest of the property locations. As soon as my business left, the building and rest of the tenants were gone within 3 months.
It's now vacant, and has been for 2 years.
I.e. rather empty to not break the silent understanding with the bank than too make money.
Remember the stock is the product not the leases.
If you do actually go to a bar or club, you'll even notice nobody is dancing. People don't even dance anymore.
But if you don't want to believe me, we do actually have statistics. Young people are drinking less than ever and having less sex than ever. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, but if people aren't fucking and drinking - why would they be going to bars? To play Scrabble?
More bars and restaurants over all but each sees less traffic still means more people going out than before.
Take any European city. The old core of specialized shops and people working trades has been replaced with social venues.
Where I'm sitting, there are no social places, just corporate hellscapes. You're correct, mom and pop is gone. But it's replaced by big chains, who want you in and out and give nothing to their community.,
Personalized and interesting is the name of the name of the game. Big chains have been stagnant or even reducing for a while now here.
There’s also an endless list of non profit organizations where a good cause and the social interactions are the goal.
But I can very much see that the old school genderized social clubs are dying. That niche is dead with our less segregated modern generations, and it is good that it is.
Cant wait for "kids play less videogames, we are doomed!" round.
[1] https://www.trade.gov/media-entertainment-video-games-sector
Ok, interpreting "everything ... is in decline" literally by pointing to specific deviations from the broader trend is pointlessly correct. Lots of activities experience transient surges in popularity.
But also regarding the popularity of hikes/trails etc, for basically the same statistical reasons, how would you distinguish how much of this effect is due to concentration? If people gravitate towards the trails that have high ratings on AllTrails etc, because it's easier to find out about them now, even if the same proportion of the population were hiking, you'd expect to share the trail with more people. Do you ever pick a running route because it's got a lot of popular segments on Strava? Possibly that route is more pleasant than some other streets nearby ... and it's also easier for runners to discover than it used to be. I don't know whether more people are actually running than 15 years ago, but I know I'm running on routes with more other runners.
> That’s hardly equivalent to the claim above of a collapse of socialization.
I do think the overall trend gets both overstated, and also that the impacts on age-bracketed cohorts have been more substantial. Also, the study discussed is stale already and doesn't really cover post-pandemic shifts.
I can't link to specific query results from the American Time Use Survey, but from this page [1], you can check "Avg hrs per day - Socializing and communicating", click "Retrieve Data", then adjust the time range using the dropdowns at the top, to be up to 2003 - 2024. In absolute terms (hours, not percent) there are declines both for the whole period, and from from 2003-2019 (i.e. before the pandemic).
And you can look at the series for "Avg hrs per day for participants - Working at home" and confirm that as expected it is relatively stable through 2019 and jumps in 2020, so the decrease in socializing through 2019 is not about WFH.
Honestly not that big of a change.
Insofar as people online talk about a big shift towards loneliness, I suspect that Aurornis is correct that self-selection has a lot to do with it.
I wonder if that small change in the average is masking a larger change in the variance. Perhaps we have more hypersocial people and more hyposocial people.
I could believe that you're right that the variance has increased, but is that driven by a growing share of shutins who only interact online and who are shifting to LLM friends?
In the old days, not-socialize people tend to be forced to socialize anyway; but techonology enables them to not-socialize 99% of time now. Likewise, socialize people needed to put in more effort to socialize in the old days, but now it's easier than ever.
When more people realize this, the discourse should shift from "technology creates this trend" to "technology widens the gap between X and not-X".
This is my favorite point from the whole thread.
It has never been easier for someone to stay home, get a remote job, and even order grocery delivery to their door if they want.
A couple of my friends started going down that path unintentionally. Once you have a well paying remote job and your city makes it easy to get groceries and food delivered, combined with the infinite availability of entertainment on Netflix or from games, social skills and relationships can start to atrophy rapidly.
It’s even worse for people who never had much of a social life. When there are so many paths forward to continue avoiding a social life, it takes a lot of effort to break free and change your routines.
I'm pretty confident this is a well measured fact.
It absolutely is not. It's very concrete and is a real problem.
In the UK, for example, there's a well documented trend of pubs and clubs shutting as business declines.
And this has real world impacts or causes, the number of people who are single is rising substantially: https://archive.is/kyk2L
This isn't rationalizing personal loneliness as a societal ill. It's noticing a societal ill based on real world effects.
Just to be clear, this is a sign of a cultural shift. Pubs are an old English tradition that people aren't interested in as much anymore. They would rather go to a sushi restaurant or go get curry. Same thing has happened with fish and chips shops.
If I was an investing man I'd stick all of my money into Garmin, running shoe companies, gyms and the like.
But it’s not about the price of going out. It is about the crushing stress of surviving in this economic climate that is leaving people absolutely no energy to go and socialize. Whenever the average personal economy swings back towards “can afford to live in this country” again, people will socialize again. Until then everything will be in decline except stock trading and investment in AI projects.
My kinese television-set says: "People are digitally often misled by disinformation."
Have you ever "searchengined" a look for a "lesbian sunset"? The search-engine i used had more than 29,000 search-hits for "lesbian sunset", and i clicked on nearly all of them...but there was none "lesbian sunset" no one, no a single one, none. It showed (for example)...
lesbian sunset
lesbian sunset today lesbian sunset Berlin lesbian sunset Munich lesbian sunset 4k
Lesbian Sunset - Check out our selection of lesbian sunsets to find the most amazing unique or custom-made handmade lesbian sunsets from our stores.
Lesbian sunset: what's going on?
Classic lesbian sunset... Regular special offers and discounts up to 70%
Lesbians on the Beach: Stock video
...and they dance! Sunset as a stage of belonging.
High-quality lesbian sunset-themed items from all over the world. Get out the cylinder and monocle, now it's time
Sunset for Sale
Reel with a feminist touch and sunset golf course.
Lesbian sunset for adults Colorful ... Lively, inspired by the sunset, expressing identity in style.
Manifesto of the „Lesbian Sunset“
Sunset in red and purple - not just beautiful.
Lesbian sunset in Munich and after-party
A different scene...
I mean, that's a myth.
There is no lesbian sunset for me!
But typed in a search line... over 29,000 hits for "lesbian sunset" (counts)
They don't exist!
You don't even remotely know, even one
not even a single lesbian sunset...
At this point you may ask: "What he/she/it/div was thinking about?" (using an 'AI' to translate and for some 'chars' i forgot the asci-code for - too often...)
A battle-painting is probably the most accurate, i was thinking about 12 x 4 meters, where you've been able to zoom in, if you are at a computerscreen...
I even looked for fresco painters, nothing...!
Not a single lesbian sunset... not one...
(feeling rude about...)
That is what i call a Myth...
...talked too dumb, free! (explanation: How to set a one topic record for been too relevant OT but still related hahaha?)^^
(See community controversies surrounding Girls' Frontline 2 and Snowbreak for examples.)
Everybody is quick to jump the gun and blame the victim, while all this can be easily explained by the insane lifestyle we are forced to subscribe in order to survive in this crazy cut-throat productivist job market.
I'm happy to accept the idea that people are simply brainwashed into thinking they need money and that is the root of their problems, but needing money is not a problem for a human being in and of itself.
Edit: but I think you said it yourself, you seem to think that you're forced to live a certain lifestyle, that's not true. You want to live a certain lifestyle and that lifestyle takes a lot of money.
That thinking assumes that money and human behaviour is in a one direction. You first have human behaviour and then you have money, so it would stand to reason that one is subject to the other. However, in reality the relationship is of co-dependency. Human behaviour adapts to the availability of money and what it buys. Have you ever seen trying to reintroduce a wild animal after it's being treated for a long time? You can't just throw it in the jungle and expect them to survive.
> needing money is not a problem for a human being in and of itself.
Which I'm reading that is not essential, following the previous paragraph, which I disagree. Take electricity out, most people wouldn't be able to survive too long. We weren't dependent but we've built lifesyles that are and we are trapped in it. Which doesn't mean we need to return to jungle, it's just that we need to treat the relationship between humans and the economy with much more respect than that.
> you seem to think that you're forced to live a certain lifestyle, that's not true.
I believe you are thinking about a ostentatious lifestyle. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about lifestyle where we are used to electricity and supermarkets. Where everything is taken care of so that we hyperspecialize our skill sets.
If you see yourself improving the lives of people around you later in life, which is commendable and the right thing to do, you have to start now, while you are still in your prime years. If you leave it when you are older chances are you'll be just another John waiting in line for the next Black Friday.
I have, from drawing to music, from writing novels to doing programming projects on my free time.
It's not very fun, you aren't good at most of it and it's very frustrating. It's also very rewarding being able to overcome limitations and building up skills. But it's first and foremost very demanding. You can't expect someone that just got retired to suddenly spark in creative energy, even if they intimately wanted to do everything.
Maybe we agree that it's all work, but there are types of work that even though they're frustrating, they are also rewarding in specific ways that is interesting for those that retire.
I’ve gone through extended periods of unemployment (by choice, not in a stressful way) before, and it’s wonderful but by month 3 I’m always kinda over it.
Retirement for me will probably look pretty much the same as working except I won’t necessarily pick a job that pays well.
Even if everybody could, they wouldn't because they are immersed in a culture that celebrated consumerism at every instance. You can't just turn a switch and now you live self-sustainably.
And yes, I agree with your second paragraph. "The culture" celebrates it — but that culture is not violently enforced top-down by a handful of people twirling mustaches. We all participate in our own little ways — and the more of us that step off the treadmill, the less those messages find footing, in a virtuous cycle. Again, it's not about blame. But for those of us who have the capacity and desire to decondition ourselves, it's very much worth doing. It can affect the feedback loop more powerfully than we think.
I see now. But I still think it's a side effect of what society currently celebrates which is consumerism.
> but that culture is not violently enforced top-down by a handful of people twirling mustaches
That's assuming it's the only way to force a population into a specific behaviour, by force. It's actually the least effective method in my opinion. There is also the digital panopticon.
Blame and victim is just a way to give structure to the world. It's not essential. Not even in violence, in the Roman republic it was very well accepted to put women and children to the sword when pillaging a city.
And sure, all changes start in the private sphere, even if it's a more general movement in society. If people stop buying stuff, there is someone consciously or not choosing not to buy that specific thing.
I just think that it's the same with clothing. If you leave for the people to choose not to buy clothing made by slaving children that's just not going to happen if they cost a fraction of clothing made otherwise. It's also not a matter of prohibition because that goes against people's individual freedom to choose. You just have to give society enough time so that it gravitates towards willing to choose differently, meanwhile advocating for the change you want to see in your immediate community.
would happily spend 6 hours any evening, drinking with anyone, gossiping about completely useless things.
They could be doing this with complete strangers whom they would never meet again,
they could even be doing this with someone visiting to let them know that they were going to sue them (actually happened at least once).
They thought they were very "social".
Yeah, if this is what "sociality" means, please spare me its gifts.
The wonderful life of a coal miner in 1890 lol. It is just a completely insane idea.
Take some take to think before casually dismissing others.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A229RX0
Unless socialization activities like bars or athletics are major outliers, it seems likely that in income-relative terms, the average American has much cheaper access to social activities.
(Unrelated, but if you squint at that chart you can see why Trump got elected, almost & then actually reelected.)
And yes, in the 1800s housing was comparatively cheap because land was close to free and you built your own home. Same goes for booze and venues to drink it because you made your own and there was zero regulation.
Today everyone is being choked by the relatively high cost of real estate (inflation looks ok because we have cheap durable goods like electronics). The death of 3rd spaces is well documented.
Absolute numbers are completely worthless because of the price level of the goods we're talking about in the first place. They could make a dollar a week and it's fine if a drink costs a penny and housing is free, for the purposes of this discussion.
Price level aka inflation of real estate and drinks/food is literally the most relevant number here.
Edit - I did some napkin maths. A beer in 1890 was about 3 times cheaper than today relative to income, assuming Google's numbers are somewhat accurate.
Also, anecdotally, food and drink in North America are expensive. We have a second home in Czech Republic, and beer is about 4-5x cheaper there than in Canada, while incomes are only about 30% less, and for young people the gap is even less.
Tough to use them as proof that this "doesn't have anything to do with economics" when their entire social life was defined by the economics of coal mining.
Worse off, a significant minority are actively violent with a good dose of various untreated mental illnesses. Crossing them is not good for your health. And it also makes kind of a terrible environment to talk with friends, while avoiding drug needles.
Even the public library has similar problems, but at least they have security guards (yes, plural, sigh).
That basically leaves our respective homes/apartments and pay-money-to-consume-and-sit places. And even bars are mostly off limits due to highly acoustic reflective surfaces and overly loud music, to dissuade talking and encourage more drinking.
There's very little places to meet in public that is encouraging and free. Then again, I think that really is by design.
Here it’s not uncommon to meet some rowdy people out and about. Not necessarily homeless. But it’s not hard to find some silent corner to enjoy some coffee from a thermos.
Other option… Maybe head out to nature trails? Chat while walking at enjoy some coffee at a rest stop? Even few kilometers from the city homeless are unlikely even whereever you are…?
Where I am all the nature and bike trails lined with homeless encampments. It's actually been quite a problem. Unless you go out on serious hike type trails you're surrounded by homeless.
And our community routinely clears out encampments every 4-6 months. Makes a big production about it as well.
Sometimes they're on private property, and sometimes they're on public property. Either way, their belongings are confiscated and hailed away to the city garage miles away, with the full intent to destroy. Not like homeless can get transportation there.
The craziest part? 60% of the homeless have actual jobs. These aren't 'lazy' people. In fact, society has slowly priced people out of even living, and criminalized homelessness.
Its bad enough that on sidewalks, they're pitching nylon tents. Its starting to look like LA in some aspects.
There's also state laws felonizing having needles on you. Naturally, they get disposed by being dropped wherever. Bad drug laws created this hazard.
Its just one thing after another. And any community that tries to help gets flooded. Greyhound Therapy is a real thing.
Its bad enough, that sometimes I just want to shut down and just shield myself from the suffering, since I'm damn near powerless in fixing it. Its an abject system failure, and needs systematic changes. And realistically, we're not going to see anything get better for the next 3.5 years at absolute minimum.
These democrat counties usually try to offer better homeless support either at the local government or NGO level. In doing so, all the red/republican counties ship their homeless using Greyhound Therapy.
Helping to make homelessness not suffer as much gets more homeless, thus flooding the system.
We've increased our homeless population by 4x in the last 5 years. It popped up hard after the ban on evictions disappeared. Turns out kicking people out of housing makes them (drumroll)... Homeless.
I try not to judge homeless people as it happens for a thousand reasons, many outside peoples' control. That being said having open spaces filled with homeless doesn't make anyone want or even able to use those spaces. It's not just the people but tents, trash, and literal shit.
Then one by one, we got cars and the friend groups shuffled from "Who is in bicycling range" to "Who is in driving range", and driving range is so big that it's not practical to drive 4 miles to my closest friend, knock on her door, hope she isn't having sex with her husband, and ask if she wants to chill
Does she not have a phone? Calling someone up and saying "hey, let's hang out" and then driving over to hang out was literally how most of suburban social interactions happened in the 90s.
It's not naivete; it's dishonesty.
Play volleyball on the free net at the local park instead of signing up for pickleball and buying great.
The people who want to avoid activities and socialization will always pick the more expensive activities so they can dismiss them. Yet go into the real world and people have no problem finding ways to socialize and have fun without spending much money.
Coincidentally, my neighborhood just put up its first volleyball net a week or so back. It was stolen within two days lol
Pickleball courts do not cost money, they are freely provided by the state. I go to free pickleball courts every week in SF, and I bike there for free. You can buy 4 paddles for $20 at sports basement and get literally hundreds if not thousands of hours of entertainment just on that.
I dunno, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this perspective. Almost everything I do with friends isn’t particularly expensive - if you can’t find cheap things to do you just aren’t even looking.
I agree the "shit is just too expensive" is a pretty lame excuse. I think to back when I was a poor ballet dancer around college age, and we always found lots of cheap things to do - a lot of it was like you said, usually just going over to people's houses to hang out, or doing stuff in the city that was cheap or free. Going out to restaurants was a rare treat, and it was almost always a cheap dive place. I had to laugh about the comment about the expense of "8 oz cocktails" - we weren't drinking cocktails, we were drinking 6 packs of Natty Light in someone's studio apartment.
But what I think has changed is that it's so much easier to not be bored with modern tech, even if it makes you lonely. There is TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, multiplayer gaming, etc. It's just a lot easier to sit at home with these kinds of entertainment, so the "activation energy" required to go get up and plan things with friends just feels a lot higher.
Ding ding ding!
> There is TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, multiplayer gaming, etc.
With the one caveat that 'multiplayer gaming' can indeed be a proper socialization experience if you're playing with friends/etc (vs say just YOLOing in something like FPS lobbies etc.)
Or, at bare minimum, it's still more effort than the other options you mention.
In the last few weeks I've tried to be extra mindful about being more 'interactive' with other things in my free time. It's shocking how easy it gets to just fall into a Youtube video rabbit hole. It reinforces how sad I get about my partner's constant scrolling through Facebook.
Heck even now I feel guilty about just doing HN, on the other hand I am still recovering from a good proper bike ride this morning so I guess there's that.
It is just a much more postmodern world than when I was young. There is a whole level of digital simulation on top of the activity that I never had to think about. The post about the expensive cocktail is the real social activity now.
We may as well be comparing dating on tinder to a rural barn dance in the 1950s. Technology has moved faster than our language as these aren't even the same activities but the words are the same. "Dating", "socializing".
Not that shit is expensive as a be all explanation in and of itself.
It’s a point on the relative ease/benefit of content vs meeting people. And you can even meet people over zoom or a video game now.
It’s no longer a nice or safe place to go.
IMO some activists are exploiting homeless people and drug addicts for power and profit.
What I am saying is that even if "activists" are doing... whatever, I kinda don't give a fuck?
These are people. Human beings. The only shit people seem to give is to get them out of their sight and make them somebody else's problem.
https://apnews.com/article/los-angeles-homeless-audit-spendi...
https://invisiblepeople.tv/unveiling-corruption-the-dark-rea...
You are right, the people being exploited are human beings, and rather than working to end the suffering, some people end up prolonging the suffering and creating more of it, because fixing problems ends the flow of funds and power.
You aren't refuting what I am saying, you only seem to justify corruption and incompetence because the apparent intention is noble.
What I am interested in is long term support and funding for workable, humane solutions.
These things require bipartisan support at the state and federal level (rooting out many of the causes and aiding homeless prevention), and I'm pretty sure that's fucking toast.
Shipping people around the country sure as fuck isn't helping.
The homeless problem is all downstream of shit like the Sacklers pushing opioids and creating millions of addicts for profit. Yet they avoided jail and even can start up new businesses.
The libraries near me are not like this at all.
One library has some homeless people but anyone being disruptive is quickly removed.
We take the kids to the libraries all the time and it’s fine.
There isn’t a thing Seattle can do to fix drug addiction/mental health/housing costs (it will remain a high priced local for the foreseeable future). So why should the people of Seattle fall on their sword because the rest of the country won’t get their act together?
In fact, the rest of the country loved that activists in certain cities take on the brunt of the problem, as it lowers their costs.
What do you propose locally instead of "falling on the sword"? Unless the city council purposely makes the library a drug den there is no easy cheap solution. Especially since the symptoms are an indication of a malfunctional city in the first place in which I wouldn't trust them with some sort of radical endouver.
The symptoms are an indication of a malfunctioning federal government. All you can do is keep your house in order.
Here's an article from 1999[1]:
> Although you may think your parents are unreasonable when they tell you to get off the phone after you've "only" been talking two hours, it doesn't have to turn into a big blow-up.
It honestly feels like a lot of people are trying to find excuses to be anti-social these days.
[1] https://www.ucg.org/watch/beyond-today/virtual-christian-mag...
Now that I can talk to anyone for free at any moment, I have no desire to
What would I even talk about? We have little in common
Most of my best years with friends I spent little to no money while meeting them.
Just going to the local park and sit down and talk or do dumb things, free.
This drags me down immensely, even though economically, I am doing alright. It seems like short/mid term economy/GDP is all that governments are optimizing for - actual well-being of the average citizen seems pretty far down on the list.
And my state is addicted to alcohol. The overwhelming majority of people I know in this state won't even meet up with you if there's not a beer waiting for them. People work all week and then spend half their paycheck in one night, then rinse, wash, repeat.
I consider the state of affairs here to be nothing short of abject poverty.
I look around at the declining, unmaintained infrastructure, I hear youth talk about how so many establishments have closed and how if you don't have money there is nothing to do, and you get harassed at parks (I have personally had the police pull up and accost me for just existing at a park) so the only thing left to do is get into mischief, unless you just don't want social contact with your peers. I tell people it looks and feels worse than post-Soviet Eastern Europe out here in Louisiana.
Cocktails were expensive when I was young, too. We just hardly ever drank them. We went to the liquor store and bought the cheapest shit we could that probably had a 50/50 chance of making us go blind.
But then given that stuff is actually harder, I think blaming "stuff is just too expensive" is simply easier. Otherwise it forces you to confront the fact that a lot of this stuff is in your control.
Young people don't have space on their houses.
I'm not blaming young people today for not seeing this as an option. But it is the case that lots of folks have/had a lot less space and didn't see that as any barrier to hanging out.
That's around the size of the home one can buy in my city nowadays with the top 1% income...
I make $20/h as a cleaner but after bills etc, I don’t have the money for fun events, dining out or socializing beyond hanging out on discord and playing games.
When I was a young person in the mid 90s, I (and most of my friends) made the equivalent or less of what you make now. But we also didn't have discord or Internet multiplayer games, so we were basically forced to go hang out in person and find other cheap stuff to do.
In the eighties I might save up months or even 1-2 years for a nice television set, but my rent/mortgage, food, etc. was relatively inexpensive. Now, I can go buy 15-20 decent televisions a month for the same amount it costs me to pay my rent or mortgage here on a 0-2 bedroom place, and I live in a shithole backwoods state, not San Francisco.
> In the eighties I might save up months or even 1-2 years for a nice television set
I remember times from the late 80s and early 90s where my parents would have to save up to repair the VCR, or that time we had to get the PC Monitor repaired; back then the 100-200$ in repair costs was way cheaper than 'buying a new one'.
First house I rented starting in 2007 was 500 a month [0]. Our first Flatscreen TV that we got in 2008 was somewhere between 700-800$ (37 inch 720p).
Then, in 2015 I bought a 40(?) inch 4K tv to celebrate a promotion for myself. Since that was the 'new-ish tech' I spent about 500$, vs the 425$/mo I was paying for a room that could barely fit a Queen bed in a 'shared household' [1]
In 2017, I was able to rent an 800 sq foot apartment for I think about 900$ a month. The 50 inch 1080P TV for the living room was somehow only 200$ tho, I guess that was a plus...
... As an odd contrast to the thought about repairing versus replacing earlier... a colleague recently asked me for some advice; His wife's iPhone screen was cracked. He was wondering of good shops to check out, because the labor cost in the US dwarfs the shipping cost of him sending it back to India and having family get it fixed there and shipping back to the US.
-----
I think COVID really fucked a lot up in the US, vis a vis the unemployment stimulus. People got 600$ a week on top of normal state unemployment; I remember White Castle was offering 15$/hr base (I say that because some fast food restaurants would say '15/hr' with a little star saying that was only for management/etc) to get workers in the door.
I suppose it was an interesting experiment in trying out UBI, on one hand people seemed 'happier', on the other hand it probably contributed to the influencer epidemic since suddenly a bunch of people had nothing better to do.
I also think at least in the US, the fast whiplash of interest rates has had a profound impact on a lot of companies balance sheets and pricing in some cases has been adjusted to avoid borrowing more money or pay off existing debts.
It also provided terrible signalling/forecasting for manufacturers of certain goods; I know specifically for vehicles, far too many people just went along with stupid 'market adjustments' from dealers because the at or near 0% financing 'softened the blow'. Then the manufacturers themselves decided they wanted more of that pie and started raising prices too... Or at best bought into the 'look at EV Margins' while forgetting the point that EV prices need to drop for mass adoption.
There's also the challenge of this 3.5+ year Russian invasion shitshow; It puts an impact on a lot of pricing both directly (e.x. grain but also wiring harnesses for cars, go figure) and indirectly (countries having to send support, even if frequently half-assed and thus prolonging the problem, that diverts money from other things.)
And we haven't even gotten into the impact on tariffs yet... not really anyway...
[0] - Although, that was at a bit of a 'discount' since the landlord knew us for years and that we would be good tenants. Also that 800 sq foot house ironically cost more to heat in the winter than any other place I lived since...
[1] - Other people in the house later informed me I was paying 200$/mo more than them for less space than they got, so not that good a deal TBH, but was cheaper than other options...
[2] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS , look at the difference in slope on the 10 year view for the great recession vs COVID.
I paid $700 for a two-story, 2bed/2bath unit in a quadplex in 2013 in this city. Last year, when I moved back, I was paying $750 for a tiny 400sqft studio apartment the size of my old apartment's living room.
My landlord was lagging on getting me my new lease to sign for another year. Turns out, I was a bargaining chip. A new landlord just bought the building at the beginning of this year and raised the rent to $850, out of the blue a month before my old lease expired. This was a ~13% sudden increase in expenses, and we do not have rent control.
He said, and I quote, "I like the community you have helped build here[0], I don't want everyone to run off, so I don't want to increase rent too high, too fast." (He wanted to boil the frog)
Our immediate response was to find a home in our neighborhood and purchase it. The median price is around $380-550k in this neighborhood, and that nets you almost no yard and maybe 700-1800sqft in living space on average. This is the oldest neighborhood in the city. It has a long, colorful history, and was originally settled by ex-slaves.
Today, when a home goes on the market in this neighborhood, it is usually snapped up by either private equity or rent-seeking landlords within 1-2 weeks, renovated and either flipped for way more to a gentrifying population, or most-often leased out to younger people who are then priced out of owning their own property.
We found one which was considerably cheaper than the average, but have to put in about $50k worth of work for it to be up to code, fix the foundation, the roof, completely rewire the home, repairing and refinishing the floors, repainting, and more. It's a great home, a good deal for the area, but it is very old, badly-maintained and has a lot of serious problems.
And much of this has to be done now, right after purchasing and before we can even move in, for safety and practical and scheduling reasons, and also because our insurance suddenly dropped us without warning until we prioritize the $13k in electrical work that needs to be done, meaning we have to also maintain rent and utilities at another dwelling while also paying this mortgage and tens of thousands to contractors.
This, in addition to the large up-front deposit for such a large home price, and an insane mortgage rate, means we are paying an exorbitant amount of money, over half a million dollars to own a home in a shithole, run-down state with zero economic opportunities, compared to the local median wage. This kind of money would have bought you a small mansion out here when I was younger.
A few years ago, I moved into a neighborhood in Fort Worth. I couldn't find a house with a reasonable mortgage, almost none for sale at all, and so I rented a home instead through a corporate property management company. The sinking foundation was causing the roof to cave in and there were humongous cracks across every wall and ceiling. The fan was so loud it sounded like you were next to a jet, and there was a huge lack of insulation in the walls. The roof needed replacing. There was water damage. There were a million other issues with the place, and all in all it was a dump which I should have been able to buy for a great price if it was on the market and not being used as an investment vehicle for private equity.
I appraised all of the issues and offered to buy the place from them at a reasonable value. They wouldn't even entertain the conversation, even though I persisted. Resigned, I finally forced them to carry out the repairs anyway after making arguments about it being uninhabitable and not even close to being worth the $1800 a month in rent. They probably spent $30k repairing the foundation alone. They also replaced A/C components, replaced the roof, landscaped, did a bunch of other things. All the while refusing to just sell me the place and let me fix it up and live in it. I'm sure they put it back on the market for even more after I left.
It sure feels like late-stage capitalism is progressively getting harder to prop up. And we're seeing that it only accelerates at the very end, with a far-right, populist sentiment sweeping the globe under the guise of economic redemption, and the accompanying policies having disastrous economic effects on the middle and lower classes.
[0] I got two other people to move into other units, and am long-time friends with another dweller, and have made an effort to meet the other tenants and establish some level of social interaction between us
And yes I know, people could and should be more frugal: I only even drink more than single cocktail at a time 0-3 times a year on average, so my personal financial frustrations lie elsewhere. I guess it's just important because we're comparing lifestyles from different points in history, and in the old days, going out drinking with your pals was a cheaper affair, and it still is the usual activity chosen for socializing where I live.
I'm in one of the largest metros in the US.
Yes, there are plenty of places that will charge $12 for a beer. I don't go there. I can get the same beer cheaper down the street and have a more entertaining crowd.
Things were better pre-COVID, I had a spot I could get $2 pitchers of bud and 50 cents an oyster on Monday nights at a local watering hole. Weekends, not so much, you get overcharged. But, COVID did away with that and now my city is almost as expensive as major metros in California while having absolutely none of the benefits those cities offer.
Who cares what the federal minimum wage is if anyone who walks in to get a job at McDonald's can make twice as much? Who cares if beers are $5-12 at some places if they're much cheaper elsewhere?
The entire point I was making, and the which you are trying to deny by your argument (you may have quoted some factual info, but you're putting it together to make a specific argument to back up your opinion), is that it's actually not that hard to go out and entertain yourself, in person, with friends, for cheap or free.
You need to read more carefully and make less assumptions. My state has no minimum wage. We never gave up slavery, instead becoming a prison state with more prisoners per capita than any single country in the world. We only have an effective minimum wage because of the federal minimum wage. You walk into McDonald's here without experience and you're getting paid $7.25. McDonald's does not do twice that much here.
> The entire point I was making, and the which you are trying to deny by your argument (you may have quoted some factual info, but you're putting it together to make a specific argument to back up your opinion), is that it's actually not that hard to go out and entertain yourself, in person, with friends, for cheap or free.
I'm aware you'd like to make that point, and while focusing on this is moving goalposts/ceding parts of your argument, it's still entirely ignoring everything I explained to you.
I barely drink, and my girlfriend and I do all sorts of things that are cheap or free in addition to things that aren't. But that is not the culture in my state. The entire state suffers from alcoholism, and traditional third spaces are harder and harder to come by. The average person simply does not do anything other than go out and drink and eat. Ask anyone who lives here. It's a seriously depressing state of affairs and for most people, there is not another solution waiting. It's self-reinforcing; I just made plans to catch up with an old high school buddy and the only way I'm going to be able to do that is by meeting him somewhere for some drinks and going to see a movie. And all of his friends are the same, and once most of your friends are at the bar, why wouldn't you be? Almost all of us have been bartenders at one point or another. One of my friends even bought a bar in order to provide a third space to our community (we come from a small town and we all know each other).
My girlfriend and I wanted to go swimming two weekends ago. We tried going to the local community center's swimming pool, but it's now closed indefinitely because some black kids broke in just to swim, but one of them had a weapon on them, presumably for protection (my city floats around the top 5 highest homicide rates in the US[0]) and so the racist community center operators took it as an excuse to close the pool indefinitely and temporarily shut down another of the very few third spaces we have.
Instead, my girlfriend and I had to rent a hotel room just to use their pool for the evening.
The bottom line is you are not from here, you have no idea what it's like living in Louisiana, and you frankly have no idea what you are talking about. Instead, you should listen to what I'm trying to explain to you about an extremely dire, worsening situation that is continuing to erode whatever sense of community we have left here. And it's no accident, this is engineered by an owner class interested in squeezing every last nickel and drop of blood out of our citizenry.
The wealth gap here is just frightening, we're running out of places to go, and the average social pipeline for inner-city youth here typically involves committing crimes and putting yourself in danger. Especially when there are purposefully designed prison funnels intended to bring in profit for the private prison industry and businesses that exploit cheap inmate labor instead of providing those jobs to free citizens.
Consider yourself blessed and privileged to not understand what it's like here.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/murder-ra...
It sounds like Dickens, to be honest. Or Zola.
These comments are so strange to read. There’s an entire world of people out there doing things and socializing without buying cocktails or $100 amusement park tickets to do it.
You don’t need to pay anything more than what it takes to get you to someone else or a common meeting spot like a walk through the park.
In the fitness world there’s a never ending stream of people who complain that they want to get in shape but can’t afford a $100/month gym membership. When you explain to them that the $20/month budget gym is fine or you can buy some $30 quality running shoes on clearance, they either disappear or get angry because you’ve pierced their excuse for avoiding the activity. I tend to see something similar when you explain that you don’t need to buy $8 coffees or $100 amusement park tickets to socialize with people.
No body is putting up billboards for silent reading clubs so they get drowned out making it appear as if those options aren’t there. Advertising works.
You also need somone to go take that walk with you and the social skills to organize it
Yes, it is possible to hangout without spending money. That said, the kind of activities it tends to be easier to get people to agree to go do also tend to cost money. As those activities cost more and more, that decreases the amount of socialization that happens. Sure, some of that shifts to lower cost activities and perhaps that shift increases over time as culture changes. That doesn't mean that rising prices don't explain some of the measured decrease in social activity.
I went to dinner with a friend last night and my meal was $22. I go to lunch with coworkers and often only spend ~$15-ish.
One also doesn't need to do activities that cost money in order to hang out with people one knows. Get together and play board games or cards. I hung out with my friends last weekend - we brought our records over and DJ'd, someone brought some frozen burgers, I supplied some THC tincture I've had for months, another person brought a cheap bottle of wine they also already had. We had a blast for like seven hours.
Hiking is also fantastic, and free!
Including tax and tip?
I don't know about that, we meet with a group of friends at someone's house, we all pitch in for the ingredients and make the cocktails ourselves.
It’s like how someone who avoids socialization imagines what socialization looks like. I hope some people are reading this thread and realizing it’s not as expensive as they assume to go out and do things. There are many people out there making a fraction of what most readers here do who have no problem finding things to do for socialization.
The past 2-years have been some of the most difficult of my life (for a number of non-work reasons). After work, family, and household tasks, I have often been left with little energy in the evenings (and no real desire to socialize). And yet, as a part of a church men's group I attend weekly, I have had the opportunity to engage with others going through similar things. How do I know that they are going through similar things? Because it's come out when as I've consistently engaged with the same group of people.
It's very easy when you're tired and stressed to “turtle” and internalize everything; I've done it more times than I can count. And yet this is the time when I most need others. These guys are not in my friends group, and yet the struggles (and successes) that are shared are sometimes more than I hear from close friends. The result of hearing others' struggles is the realization that a) I am not the only one going through hard stuff, and b) focusing on others' struggles makes dealing with my own easier.
“Socializing” with others may cost money, but connecting with them doesn't have to: I spend $0/week meeting the guys in my group for an hour or two. In reflecting on my own attitudes towards socializing in the past, I've come to realize that it can be very self-focused: How can _I_ feel better? How can _I_ have fun? What can _I_ get out of going out?
I am, by no means, the arbiter of selflessness (not even close, ha!), but I have learned that connecting with others' with their good in mind has had the incredible effect of giving me energy where there was very little before.
Just my $0.02.
It also doesn't sit well with my personal anecdata. My life and that of my friends is way better than their parents. I've literally travelled to all major continents in the world for recreational travel by the time mom had only left her village at around 20 years old, for example.
Cocktails is just an absurd standard for anything. It's the one item you can buy that is completely and utterly divorced from its costs, its price is a function of how rich people are that this thing is being sold, not how expensive it is to produce a cocktail. 2 cents of sugar and 30 cents of liquor and $15 of branding being sold for $15.50 doesn't mean life is expensive, it means people in this neighbourhood are pretty rich and can throw away money. My mom literally has never had a cocktail in her life yet has had a very socially rich life.
Yesterday I spent the day with my brother, we rented a car for $50, drove to another town, had some sandwiches and drinks, we spent $100. Today a friend is coming over to my house and I'll pour him a 20 cent coffee and I'll probably make a snack as well, then we'll go for a walk around town while catching up, maybe grab a $2 beer from the supermarket and some fruit and sit by the water. Total cost <$10 for 6 hours of hanging out for two people. You make about $20 in a supermarket per hour here, so we'd have made $240 of wages in the same six hours. These experiences are mostly similar for me and just as fun, the cost factor is purely a choice. If I didn't have any money they'd all be cheap.
On a side, a thread full of 600k per year FAANG programmers writing that life is easy for everyone is incredibly ironic.
Even if that was true (no data offered), that's a choice, not some kind of economic inevitability...
And again even if it was true, no it's not because of roommates, the number of people per household has gone down over time, not up, for decades.
And no it's also not because we live in smaller homes, the average size of homes has gone up also, for decades. We now have about 2.5x more square footage per-person in our homes than 50 years ago.
And we all know that are homes are way more equipped with entertainment than ever before (internet with the world's content at our fingertips, home cinema, home libraries, home music sets etc).
As for the 600k FAANG, I've never earned more than 100k, never worked in tech, and grew up on welfare. I've been a bottom 10% of the economic ladder for about 80% of my life, and a top 10% (not top 0.1%) for about 20% of my life. Regardless of background, I think we can speak about facts borne out by the data.
Same for restaurant and bar bills, or catching a film. Not like the old days where you could go out drinking with your friends each evening by just having a light student job and some summer work.
What's happening is a gap - people are becoming more bimodal with respect to these things.
There are lots of people who live pretty normal lives (by the standards of the last 20-40y) but there are also so many people who have nihilistic views of it all and are left behind.
Everyone's too busy scrambling to survive.
I know, the e-destructions are there to make a society of 8billion "happy" as can be without ravaging the planet, but the life this creates is absolute misery. I rather prefer death or war to that.
"TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku" has never been a replacement for "meet for drinks, work out at the gym, go on dates"
To be fair, I have not used TikTok or Candy Crush, but let's say Youtube Shorts and a random video game instead. Still does not compute.
Source ? At least about fitness - I'm a regular runner and I've never seen so many people jog outside. Not sure what's going on in gyms though.
And here I am regularly having to wait for a free squat rack ;)
It surprises me how people are less and less open to socialize, to the point that some even see you with disgust if you DARE to interrupt them from.their mobile phone trance.
Society nowadays is pretty ugly. Younger generations seem very isolationist to me.
I guess at some point people started taking themselves way too seriously. Worrying about what others think, or something, I don't know. In a way, social interaction is kind of like a standoff in the dusty streets of an old west town. Someone has to make the first move to expose themselves, and it doesn't seem like anyone wants to be that person anymore.
Near as I can tell that was still roughly the model on paper if less and less until COVID and lockdown and all that. Something snapped, you can see it walking down the street of any city you knew well before. People never came back outside with the same vigor.
I don't claim to understand the causal structure between all the various factors: the bleak economic prospects, the decline in institutions, the increasingly rapacious and cynical Big Tech cabal, there are a ton of factors.
But COVID before and after, that's when it collectively became too much to easily bounce back from.
Still are! As I post this we're establishing where we meet for beers and at what time on my whatsapp friends group. Ofc, we're old geezers too.
I am extremely lucky though, living by myself in the capital city of my country makes it very easy to go out and do stuff
When I was a teenager, precisely one guy had videoed his teenage self waving around a broomstick like a lightsaber, and had it end up online. Video cameras and editing equipment were rare and expensive. And that one man was a cautionary tale, not to wave a broomstick like a lightsaber anywhere there are video cameras.
Now the video cameras are in everyone's pockets 24/7, and with the internet connection built in. Is it any wonder nobody's waving a broomstick like a lightsaber?
I notice when just out and about other people my age and older still have the familiar vibe. Young people are in another universe and it doesn’t seem like a more pleasant one.
There are exceptions though of course
I've always felt that we (older millennials) sort of hit a sweet spot technology wise. We pretty naturally straddled that analog to digital world.
I was actually thinking the other day, I haven’t hit anybody with a boffer in a while, might need to get back to it.
People are afraid to open up and be honest, because of the fear of local, internet or political rejection.
Have you considered that maybe it's you, and you're just interrupting at the wrong time? Imagine someone's reading a book and you interrupt them and then you blame them for getting annoyed?!
Gen Z here, blame smartphones and the destruction of communal areas/3rd spaces; COVID really threw gasoline on an already bad fire.
You might get the random ultra woke person who makes it impossible for others to have a conversation because they're just waiting to be triggered by anything anyone else says and find a way to spin every comment into an offence.
If anyone brings up politics then the meetup is over, at least for me.
I struck up a conversation with the person setting next to me at an outdoor cafe. He was probably 84-ish. He'd married someone from Japan he'd met there in the 60s. They had not had any children. I brought up the population issue in a light way (Japan's population is declining), something like making the joke that they didn't help Japan's population decline. He replied something like "anyone who tells you there's an underpopulation issue is lying. The planet has 8 billion people which is way too many". And that was when I knew I wasn't going to continue the conversation.
(not Japan but same topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk)
This 3,000 person study [1] in Germany matched pairs of strangers for private face-to-face meetings to discuss divisive political issues. It found asymmetric effects: conversations with like-minded individuals caused political views to become more extreme (ideological polarization); by contrast, conversations with contrary-minded individuals did not lead to a convergence of political views, but significantly reduced negative beliefs and attitudes toward ideological out-group members (affective polarization), while also improving perceived social cohesion more generally. These effects of contrary-minded conversations seem to be driven mostly by positive experiences of interpersonal contact.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004727272...
> If anyone brings up politics then the meetup is over, at least for me.
> I brought up the population issue in a light way (Japan's population is declining), something like making the joke that they didn't help Japan's population decline. He replied something like "anyone who tells you there's an underpopulation issue is lying. The planet has 8 billion people which is way too many". And that was when I knew I wasn't going to continue the conversation.
You brought up an intensely political issue (population decline), they responded, and then you got mad at them and felt like they brought up a political issue?
It sounds like you are doing exactly the thing you are complaining about "ultra woke" people doing.
I think younger generations have lost Nuance, in the University I had several good friends who had very opposite political views from me. Still we could sit down and play a D&D round.
Maybe get outside if you really think that people "actually don't" or that there aren't "enough" of them. Society is right here, chugging along.
the last 7 years of my life have been filled with nothing but community. from skate diys and meetups, and other outdoor activities to, skate diys, bars, live music, and gym communities (once regular programming resumed post covid).
if you feel this isolated i am inclined to ask -- what is it about your life that seemingly lacks these things? i have somehow managed to find community wherever i go and wherever my interests guide me.
what experience of yours caused you to arrive at "they actually don't"?
people in my city are always out and about and socializing and walking their dogs or getting drinks or coffee or working remotely or at work spaces or in offices or whatever. they go out on weekends and drink and eat and hang with friends.
i recently went to berlin and as an american i could not get enough of the summer vibe, the sparkaufts and casual communal hangs and byob bars.
where do you live?
Where once a family could easily be supported on a single income and you could afford to send your kids to college, real wages have been stagnant for decades and people now need 5 jobs between 2 people to not be homeless. Why? Student debt, medical debt, mortgage debt.
The time we spend not working is time we spend not making someone else slightly wealthier.
So people don't have the time nor the disposable income to socialize. And even if they did those activities continue to get more expensive because housing specifically and property generally gets more expensive and that's an input into the cost of every real world activity.
But again, somebody is profiting from that.
Additionally people are in for a rude shock. They see light at the end of the tunnel when their parents or grandparents pass and they inherit housing or sufficient wealth for housing. But many of these people won't see a dime thanks to draining long-term elderly care, particularly with Medicaid funding being stripped.
The capital-owning class wants you in debt. They don't want you owning anything. They will want us in worker housing. We are becoming South Asian brick kiln workers with nicer TVs.
It’s unpleasant to say that people actively desire the current outcomes, but nature does not care how people feel. It is valid to say the purpose of a system is what it does.