Work has if anything gotten worse in general. Remote's gone. Pay's less. ADHD maximum AI use required. Nobody can take a break. Pressure's on. 1.5 trillion more to the military. What are we even building? For what?
Is it any wonder at all?
Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age. There's a lot of denial around this topic because everywhere you turn there's a Reddit post or news headline about how housing is impossible to afford.
> Pay's less.
Less than the narrow window of post-COVID mania pay maybe, but inflation adjusted wages are actually up over the long term.
> Nobody can take a break. Pressure's on.
Annual working hours per worker is flat or slightly down from when your mom's generation made up most of the workforce https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-...
When it comes to happiness, the numbers don't actually matter though. Perceptions do. Your and your mom's worldview that everything "isn't working any more", that young people can't possibly be buying homes, that real wages are down, and that working hours are up are actually very common ideas, especially if you zoom in on demographics who read a lot of certain types of social media (Reddit especially!) where classic doomerism prevails.
Yeah but aren't they putting down less/leveraging themselves deeper?
edit: also it seems like the millenial/genZ divide here is on the order of like 1-5%, whereas the gap between either of those generations and boomers/genX is more like 10%+. It's good that the trend hasn't gotten worse in recent history, but I think it's pretty inarguable that the housing market is much worse than it was 30 years ago.
I have watched this scenario dissolve marriages over and over among my friends.
You cannot assume your job is stable for 15 years nowadays.
Our industries are routinely telling people who just spent 4-6 years in training that tough shit, you picked the wrong career.
You are looking at this with a lens of stability that no longer exists, which I personally believe is a major component about why everyone is so unhappy.
You cant just reach a level of life that you are comfortable with and stay there anymore. Its a constant cycle of learning new skills that are then useless then learning more skills that are then useless, ad on infinitum.
Birth rates have collapsed completely, so this gravy train is ending very soon. There won't be another sucker to buy the real estate, because new buyers aren't being born.
A $2200/mo mortgage on a $65k salary does indeed sound like a stretch. But even having a mortgage at all at 24 is pretty impressive, and he's probably still a ways off from his peak earning potential. Then he might have a bit more income for discretional spending.
In short - yeah it's a grind, but it sounds like he's making responsible decisions and hopefully they will start to pay dividends in another 5-10 years. And your 20s is when you are most able to grind it out - before kids (if that's something you want) start demanding a huge chunk of your time and energy, and before work starts to feel like a slog after you've been at it for 20 years.
I was in the SF Bay Area and spending $1600/mo to rent a studio apartment in my 20s, and even that looked like a bargain compared to the people that graduated a few years after me. And my starting salary was probably higher than your friend's when adjusted for inflation, but not by much.
Not saying it's right - the US needs to do better when it comes to affordable housing. Just that expensive housing is not exactly a recent phenomenon, and your friend's situation is not hopeless.
You could easily get away with a "gap year" between school and starting a career, but multiple years of screwing around seems pretty hard to come back from. There are exceptions of course, but I can't think of many. One relatively recent example was the rise of coding "boot camps" - where I know of several people who were able to change careers and land high-paying gigs. Or the more traditional path would be serving in the military, getting a free college education, and then going on to a successful career from there.
Has it actually gotten harder to do that recently? It would be tough for me to say without some data. Certainly any time the job market is tight, and there is strong competition for jobs, it's going to put non-traditional candidates at a disadvantage and make it harder to change careers.
As a boot camp graduate, you really have to either be extraordinary or know the right people. College doesn't just give you education, it also gives you references and a network, something that many boot camps lack.
> serving in the military
Nothing against our hardworking soldiers who put their lives on the line, but I would not fault anyone who does not want to serve in this particular military at this particular time. I don't expect it to be like this forever, but it does put today's young people in a predicament.
> free college education, and then going on to a successful career from there.
People with advanced degrees (paid or not) are having trouble finding work, even with masters in STEM fields. Entry level jobs are diminishing. Yes it's hard to change careers, but seems even harder to start one these days.
Impressive in what way?
> ...and he's probably still a ways off from his peak earning potential.
That's an assumption, but even if it's probably true, to what end? The issue most working Americans face is that the cost of living rises faster than their wages.
> Then he might have a bit more income for discretional spending.
So...earn more so that you can spend more. This, in a nutshell, is the insanity of America's consumer culture.
> In short - yeah it's a grind, but it sounds like he's making responsible decisions and hopefully they will start to pay dividends in another 5-10 years.
Young people who are fortunate enough to be in a position to make "responsible decisions" should obviously do so (within reason) but this "grind for the future" mindset is also part of the insanity of American culture.
There are places in this world where people in their 20s can enjoy their youth without having to worry that doing so could doom them to financial distress for the rest of their lives.
I also didn't mean to imply that I didn't enjoy my early 20s. My job was difficult but also interesting and fulfilling. For recreation I was into fitness and the outdoors, which can be done on the cheap. I was in a serious relationship with my now spouse, so I wasn't lonely. It was a very fulfilling time - we just lived very frugally.
Not saying that everyone needs to follow the same path. Or that we can't do better. Or that times haven't changed since then. Just that the parent's example doesn't sound too far off from my own experience in my early twenties, so I don't necessarily see them as doomed to a life of misery. You can certainly do worse.
Times are changing. HNers tend to be among the more fortunate in American society but even today, a STEM degree doesn't guarantee anyone a cushy, high-paying tech job.
AI might have a financial component (malinvestment that needs to be corrected) but from my own first-hand observations, I can't deny that AI is reducing the value of many jobs that people would like to believe are "high skill" and therefore "high value". I've personally seen dev teams shrink by 50% while productivity remains the same because all of the devs are using AI to knock out tasks. A lot of software engineering isn't as complex and immune to AI as software engineers would like to believe.
American companies are already incentivized by the market to maximize profit by cutting labor wherever possible and I don't think anyone should be under the illusion that managers aren't aware of the fact that many employees are already using AI to do their work.
Mortgage never rises (in the US), can only fall (if you refinance when rates dip). So that locks down the housing cost. In that sense, inflation helps you in the long run.
It can if you have an adjustable rate mortgage. But that's not all. Lots of people leverage their equity for cash (HELOCs, etc.) to remodel, take a vacation, buy more junk, etc. So your house can easily become a financial boondoggle.
And your mortgage isn't the only cost. There's maintenance and repairs, property-related taxes (which can go up), healthcare, food, gas, automobiles, the price of basic necessities, a meal out, etc.
Tons of people are living in homes that have increased substantially in value, making them "rich", but they're still under financial pressure if not outright struggling because the prices of everything else they want and need in life have increased faster than their wages.
And then what happens when the company you work for reports record profits and...lays you off into a market where tens of thousands of people who do what you do have also been laid off?
The problem with the modern American economy is that the path to "success" for the average worker gets narrower and narrower. You can "win" in one or two areas and still lose in the end. Very easily. Happens to tons of people.
> It can if you have an adjustable rate mortgage.
Yes, that is true. Also, ARMs are rare and always a bad idea. The norm is a 30 year fixed rate mortgage. Which means the mortgage can never go up. But you can refinance it down, if opportunity arises.
> There's maintenance and repairs, property-related taxes (which can go up), healthcare, food, gas, automobiles, the price of basic necessities, a meal out, etc.
Sure, if we change the goalposts then we're talking about something else.
Dining out may get more expensive (I fail to see how that is relevant to the mortgage), but the fixed rate mortgage never goes up.
Because redfin shows that just is very clearly not true
https://www.redfin.com/news/homeownership-rate-by-generation...
I do wonder about how they're calculating some of this. It looks like in the chart is saying 16% of the cohort born between 1981 and 1996 (aka millennials) owned a home in 2000. I wouldn't even expect 16% of that group to be over 18.
Like this: https://imgur.com/a/d7stXVN
Many boomers grew up in an era where even if you dropped out of high school and waited tables full time for a few years, you'd be able to afford to buy a house and start a family by age 25. Sure, interest rates were 20%, but the price of a house was often just 2-3x someone's annual salary (single earner). Now the price of a house is often 4-5x a households annual salary.
Boomers also had access to stuff like pensions.
I think boomers wouldn't get hate if it weren't a trope for them to say that the millennial generation is lazy, entitled, etc. When milennials have to be extraordinary in order to live what used to be an ordinary life (3 bedroom house, 2 kids).
If I refinanced now, I probably couldn't afford my own home.
I too dislike the Millenial whoop, but I like smashed avocado toast, so it's a wash for me.
GenX is the big tech leaders, the insurance CEO that got got, the EpiPen CEO jacking up prices, senior teachers and admins as student grades slide into the toilet, the uncreative repetitive Hollywood decision makers. Hollywood actors slapping each other live on camera and hacking their faces up to pretend they are still 25. They manage the construction companies that refuse to build more homes.
As an older Millennial it's not a shock they ended up such poor leaders. Working with GenX has always sucked.
Like: if you were a few years older, now you're the focus of your own hatred? Doesn't make much sense, does it?
It’s actually not true that a house is affordable to the person living in it.
First, plenty of people own houses, paid-off even, but have little else in the way of income or assets, and, other than not wanting to move, they might be much better off if the home magically turned into cash.
Second, taxes. In the US, in HCOL markets, selling your house may involve large amounts of capital gains tax, and in California, you risk losing your low Property 13 basis.
I suspect that, in markets like Palo Alto, a lot of houses are owned by people who could not credibly afford those houses if they were to sell and then decide to buy an equivalent house next door.
Sure, someone can afford your house, but that’s a nearly vacuous statement.
If they were to sell it, they'd have to pay taxes on 1.1m of "profit." sure they can write off renovations and deduct $500k but that's still a lot of taxes to pay!
So yeah, they wouldn't be able to sell and rebuy even their own house because uncle sam just took about $100k on the sale of their house.
IIRC, California taxes that $1.1M as ordinary income.
My point is that they wouldn't be able to rebuy their house, since they'd pay taxes on the "profit," and then need to get another mortgage at 6%.
When I was shopping for a house one of the sellers had a special exclusion where they'd roll the proceeds into a special account that they'd use to buy another house so they won't pay taxes on the profit. I think it's quite strange that RE investors get that exclusion but if it's your primary residence you don't. I feel like it should be the other way around.
Inflation is a tool for monetary policy. It doesn't track cost of living. For example, if luxury items become more affordable, but housing prices rise, inflation-adjusted pay doesn't capture this kind of negative effect on the working class.
In the US, the official inflation numbers are based on a "basket of goods" meant to be representative of a typical person's spending. Housing currently makes up about a third of the basket, while luxury items are a fairly small percentage. Here's a pretty well-written summary, albeit with numbers from 2022:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/01/24/as-inflat...
Changes in housing prices have a large effect on the BLS's inflation figures. Downward changes in the price of luxury goods have a small (and bounded) effect. Even if all luxury goods became free, the reduction in inflation wouldn't be all that much.
Well, "launder" is a strong word that the hardworking bureaucrats at BLS do not deserve, but the people who use CPI as a deflater so that they can wave around graphs "proving" that things have never been better absolutely deserve it, so I'll keep it in.
Bonus meme: the American Dream was not to Owner Imputed Rent a house.
A large company bought the building after I moved out. Ten years later, the same apartment with a fresh coat of paint and new countertops was back on the market for a rent of about three times $x.
The CPI can say that apartment, since it was refurbished, increased in quality and so it wasn't really a price increase of the same good from $x to $3x. This offers a "degree of freedom" to adjust the CPI itself (since quality is inherently subjective), and may be a big part of why CPI does not reflect the lived experience.
I didn't care one bit about paint or countertops when I rented that apartment and I assume broke young adults today don't either. At the time I wanted the cheapest place to live in the area and this was it. It still is one of the cheapest places, but you need three times as much money to rent it.
How are you measuring the "actual standard of living?”
In fact, the cost of necessities has overall risen faster than the cost of discretionary goods. This has been generally true since the mid-1990s; prior to that, inflation differences were much smaller across income groups despite lower income groups spending more of their income on necessities. In some periods like the post-COVID housing and energy price shocks, the differential effect of real inflation on basic necessities has been even greater.
Even "small" effects compound over time. For example, when someone in a low bracket loses 10% purchasing power after many years, the net economic stress they experience is much greater than for someone at a high bracket. Differential inflation of necessities vs discretionary goods magnifies this.
Depending on how one live their lifestyle, the 'inflation' calculation can greatly vary in relevance.
Source: https://www.bls.gov/cpi/tables/relative-importance/home.htm
Not according to this Redfin report (also linked by others in the thread):
"Take 28-year-olds as an example: 38.3% of 28-year-old Gen Zers owned their home in 2025, compared to 42.5% of Gen Xers when they were 28 and 44.4% of baby boomers when they were 28." (There is an accompanying chart in the linked report.)
https://www.redfin.com/news/homeownership-rate-by-generation...
That seems to show a pretty clear decline in home affordability over time, for people of the same age.
edit: besides, happiness is not about money. freedom of expression and free/impartial institutions are at all time lows across the western world. which as we speak is in an arms race to be the biggest and best surveillance system it can be.
Or are they taking out mortgages they can never pay off, meaning they are almost renting not on a path to actually buying or owning and most of their payments are interest.
If that’s the case they are renting a leveraged financial position.
Previous generations could own homes. As in pay them off.
Owners only really get screwed if their home value goes down and they need to sell for some reason.
Prices are usually going up (at least on a long enough time frame), so most owners make out pretty well when selling even with little home equity.
I suspect these stats are nationwide. There are places you can still actually buy a home without an exit event. Maybe genZ has wised up and is avoiding high cost of living traps and that’s how.
The median Zoomer is in their mid-20s. You're comparing rounding errors.
Younger people are getting into more debt, for much longer in order to be able to survive.
When we start comparing the numbers (i.e, house paid off, even reflected as a percentage paid off, relative to age) the numbers reveal the real crisis.
Anecdotally, I know tons of 20-30 year olds getting into the property market (with insane levels of debt with almost impossible loan lengths) simply because if they don't do it now, there is a high chance homeless is the next option.
True ownership is non-existent.
But yes, you do not truly own anything unless you are a sovereign power.
What if they get remarried?
Which is a pointer to the "real", general issue: materialism.
Ain't no joy in $tuff.
Joy is of the Lord.
...It's more likely than you think !!
Why? The military power owns things by enforcing their ownership. This is, in fact, the true ownership.
You have to pay taxes to own land so the power which is on your side can prevent another power to re-own it.
If you don't pay taxes to the power which is on your side, why would it allow you to own stuff and provide free protection? Out of good will?
That's how the world works, ownership without the power behind it is non-existent, as well as power without the money behind it is non-existent. When there are enough powers balancing each other, stable systems emerge, and we all can enjoy some few decades of peace and prosperity.
That's not quite true. If you want to think that way, then you'd never own it because you'll always pay property taxes so the paying never stops.
But as soon as you buy a home it is your asset. Yes, you have a debt against it. But you are the owner. Go look up the owner in the county records and it is you.
But on Jan 20, 2025 it was magically fixed instantly despite grocery store prices increasing because voters decided to elect in blanket import taxes. No one cares about these issues. They just care about the aesthetic.
It's more the case that Gen Z is giving up on having the homes that Millennials want in the places they want them. They're buying fixer uppers, moving into 3rd/4th tier cities, etc. They also have some benefits millennials didn't have: inheritances and way less student loan debt.
You can look at this in a number of ways, but it's clear we didn't solve the problem of "so you want to live in NYC/LA/Chicago/SF/Seattle".
https://www.nar.realtor/magazine/real-estate-news/how-gen-z-...
Remote work is an interesting one. Before you had 8-9 hours a day of serious social activity, and if you were lucky, people you enjoyed. Even if you didn't enjoy the people, you were at least social. Remote takes that away, and as the article noted, social contact is a definite plus for well-being.
The "leaders" forcing people into it though are just petty fiends. Linking bonuses/compensation to in office days is just punitive because you want to see bums on seats, nobody will convince me otherwise.
This is a big YMMV, but you accidentally hit on something I've observed over my years of working remote: A lot of the successful remote coworkers I've had have been people with families at home.
There is a lot of demand for remote jobs from young, single people who think it's going to be the best thing ever, but then many decline into a funk that they don't really understand. The social isolation starts to wear on most people like that.
There are very obviously ways to theoretically avoid this, like having an active social life during the work week. I know many people who fit this description and love it. However a lot of people think they're going to do that and then just don't really keep up with it. They go from bed to remote job to Netflix on the couch to sleep and repeat, then wonder why they're feeling so blah.
If you have asd or adhd (not uncommon in programmers) it can be a definitive minus for well-being. But even if you don't, between office politics and idiotic corporate mandates, it can be draining.
Especially as for the average office worker, originally you had an office of your own or at worse with one or two other people, then starting from the 80s you had a cubicle, then we got the hellish open plans. You're asked to focus on a screen and a codebase in an environment full of distractions, and full of activity around you.
And that's before we added any commute, and preparing for the commute, which can easily eat an additional 1-2 hours of your day, every day.
They don't drown out enough even with large, well insulated cups. So you add noise cancelling. Which drowns out more but not everything. In fact it keeps some very annoying stuff around that is suddenly actually audible VS being drowned out without the headphones. And having noise cancelling on for 8 hours straight for days in a row actually creates some significant pain in my ears. The next idea is music to drown out what's left but that just distracts me too.
Remote is the only good way.
In fact, being remote means I have "social interaction budget" for the family again VS it all having been used up during work hours (being an introvert)
I just googled this and what I found was this for example:
The Sony WH-1000XM3 is much better at canceling noise above 100Hz than the Bose is. However, because the Bose QC35 II can block out more sub-100Hz noise, it does a better job at killing unwanted car engines and low rumbles.
One thing that immediately turned me off when finding the Sonys on Amazon: It says "Alexa". Sorry, immediate and 150% no thank you, see you, bye.
You could try using white noise, either an app or if you have a Mac or iPhone they have native white noise generation (Accessibility -> Hearing -> Background Sounds iirc)
It can also encourage ear infections and clogging of the eustachian tubes, because covering or plugging your ears slows down the self cleaning process.
At first you won't notice, but after a decade, these problems will slowly creep up on you and fixing them is very expensive, because you're basically slowly deforming your bones.
I personally wouldn't let kids/teenagers use headphones that apply any amount of noticeable pressure.
Remote work is an interesting topic in this debate because any change in any direction (more remote work or less remote work) provokes claims that it's the reason for declining happiness.
I've managed remote teams for years, and I lean more toward your interpretation: Over the years I've seen a lot of people turn over in remote roles because they thought remote work was going to be the best thing ever, then they slowly slid into unhappiness in the isolation. (Before you downvote, I'm not claiming this is true for everyone. Remember I work remote too!)
I'd love to see a dedicated tool that does "virtual office hangouts" well, where you can spin up rooms, share screens/files/text, easily drop in and out, and see where people are. There are a few out there that come close, but I haven't seen any that let you browse to see various groups/individuals to match walking the halls.
We tried that on the team when Covid hit and we all went remote. Lasted like a week and we were sick of it. Never reintroduced.
I think it's a good idea regardless of healthcare availability
This is a major difference between US and Euro workplaces that I have noticed. In the USA, there is plenty of time for chat with colleagues, and everyone stays at work longer. In Euro workplaces it tends to be more focused on work and then everyone goes home at 5.
The most extreme example I've worked in was in Dublin, where there was an explicit "you are given 8 hours of work, and 8 hours to do it in. If you need to stay longer than that then you must be incompetent", and the entire office, everyone, emptied into the pub at 5pm. All the socialising and "cooler chat" happened over pints of Guiness in the pub. The folks with kids would have one or two and then go home, or not drink at all and then go home. The less attached folks stayed on for several. But everyone came to the pub at 5, regardless.
I've worked with German colleagues who were ex-large-consultancies and they all said the same thing about working in the USA; that Americans spend a lot of their day chatting and stay in the office much longer. It drove the Germans crazy, "they would be so much more efficient if they just stopped talking and did the work!".
I'm not holding Europe up as an example to emulate; I don't think Europeans are that much happier at the moment, particularly the UK, but I wanted to push back on this idea as work == social space.
I want to call out that while generally, Irish working hours are pretty capped, most people at most companies definitely don't go to the pub at 5pm. I am Irish, and work in Ireland (but mostly for multinationals) so 5pm pub time (unfortunately) doesn't work when you need to talk to California.
Additionally, I normally agitate for the whole 8 and only 8 hours of work, as lots of professional people in Ireland are quite driven (or people pleasing) and tend to work longer hours.
That being said, there are some employers where this definitely is a thing (particularly on Thursday or Friday), but it's 100% not the standard.
To be fair, this does happen a lot if there are visitors to the office. I can certainly believe everyone going out in that case. Alternatively, if the team is pretty young and single this would definitely happen. When I worked at FB there was a big drinking culture (not just in Ireland), so again I'd believe it of there.
Taken at an absolutists stance you could easily push that argument down (are you against ALL of modernity?!). But the overall spirit of the idea is one worth exploring.
I can say that I would personally fall into that camp and that I am fairly happy, to step out of the hustle and not be a cat chasing its own tail. But the said effect of this is a form of graceful poverty. To be a poor master rather than a rich slave. That is a very difficult sales pitch.
But I am convinced we will take a turn more towards that flavour of thinking only once we have busted out the bottom of the bucket with business as usual. Maybe we need to military budge to grow to $5 trillion dollars abd then people will say "Enough!" I just hope that we are wise in the path towards it, I fear we will not and that we throe the baby out with the bathwater.
There is a brazillian saying that goes something like, when it floods you have to wait until the water is at you hips before you can swim. maybe this is the path forwards, to endulge in our folly.
Don't get me wrong, I love Taoism and Buddhism. But, from what I understand, they are not very pro-civilization and pro-progress.
While they have the right idea about not leaning in to hard on the progress narrative, if it basically became a movement of apathy and non-science, it is basically regressing back to the stone age.
There is a possible middle ground but how we get there is anything but clear.
The goal of Buddhism is not happiness anyway it is the total cessation of suffering. If Buddhists are scoring high on happiness surveys they are doing it wrong.
And the idea of a buddhist doing anything to change the world is also impossible to me, isn't it all about accepting reality as it is?
It isn't about total passivity, but trying to not to excessive force a position. If you fall in a river, to be passive is to float with it. But the smart move is to swim to the side. Don't try to swim against the flow but with it.
The whole society has lost its goal when the only target is to maximize money.
As a commutative operation, then, also Money = Time. Humanity and Money are both driven to create more of themselves, but as long as the growth of money is allowed to outpace the growth of Humanity, money will become the dominant life-form once there is more of it than there are humans to be the Time-unit. The only thing keeping it from happening before now was the lack of an instantaneous global means to transact.
I think you misread. I literally used myself as an example and am definitely not that wealthy :p
> because they think it will be beneficial
The Capital-class have, on the other hand, definitely constructed a world where this is true for us as individual. However I am talking about the effect on Us the collective-singular.
Really, if you didn't have a job you'd be working much harder for less. The vibes say that's bullshit, but whatever.
There is no real meaningful competition between money systems. Every nation has one national money system and it's a government mandated monopoly.
Your options are basically complete autarky or using the national money system with nothing inbetween. Even if you were to use a cryptocurrency, you'd still need to pay taxes in USD.
Then there is the fact that cryptocurrencies don't really meaningfully change the rules either. You're supposed to accumulate them forever and profit off of latecomers joining in it at inflated prices. Meaning the supposed competition just amplifies the worst part of money that people would rather get away from.
Anyone who earns an income from work is by definition going to be a "latecomer" by the end of their career. Basically, you're defining yourself by the first few years of your career, e.g. buying thousands of dollars worth of BTC in 2013. By 2026, there is not much point buying more BTC.
Money is given an inherent bias towards the past being more important than the present or the future, which thereby inevitably causes the collapse of the future, which then becomes the collapsed present through the simple passage of time.
It's really bad in tech right now because the college students have been reading Blind and levels.fyi for years and think that if they're not making $500K TC they're never going to afford a house. They hit a very harsh reality when they graduate and realize their degree from an average state school and job search in a city that isn't the Bay Area, NYC, or Seattle isn't going to give them those $200K starting salaries they expected with a CS degree. Lately there's another sad discovery when they realize that nobody wants to hire a junior with no experience into a remote FAANG job.
Social media doomerism is also convincing a lot of them that everything is impossibly expensive. You wouldn't believe how many young people I've talked to who have household incomes in the $200 to $300K range who tell me they'll never be able to afford a house or to have kids. When you're immersed in doomer headlines you can lose track of the reality that people are raising families on much less than that all around you.
They know that, they just don’t want their kids to go to school with the kids in the bottom 4 quintiles. Also, I probably would have foregone kids if it meant I was not going to be financially independent by age 50. Incomes are too volatile, and healthcare too expensive to be in that age 50 to age 65 period where a healthcare issue or loss of employment can derail you forever.
It isn’t enough to be middle class, to have the proverbial white picket fence. The reach now is for glamor and wealth, which is by definition out of reach for the majority.
If that’s the ideal you compare your own life to, you will be unhappy. And the debt, etc you take on to mimic it will make you even more unhappy.
The shift was already happening pre-internet, but social media took it to the next level.
Does just being able to live mean getting a new phone occasionally? Getting a coffee/treat once a week? A job that doesn't leave you in physical pain, sometimes permanently?
Happiness is the gap between expectation and reality. Our expectations are very high without sounding unreasonable.
This is the shift I'm talking about– maybe we don't conciously yearn for glamor and wealth, but what we see as normal is a luxury lifestyle compared to previous generations.
Most people in this conversation on HN seem to just be talking about a regular house and a lifestyle that would’ve been normal for a manual laborer 60-70 years ago.
Sure, you can have another post-war economic boom if you're willing to go through another world war to get to it and a drone doesn't get you. You're in luck, seems like we'll be having one soon.
Yes, real wages have been on the rise for the past few years. With the exception of the somewhat artificial COVID peak, median real wages are the highest on record: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...
A lot of major necessities like healthcare and housing have outpaced CPI.
Unnecessary stuff (electronics, appliances, other tech) did not, and generally it is becoming cheaper (Planned obsolescence is another topic though...)
With the backdrop of it coming from the organization that is supposedly supposed to be managing inflation... :P
Rent as percentage of income is up. Groceries as percentage of income is up. Medical insurance as percentage of income is up. etc.
People aren't stupid. They can see and feel this.
Yes, it's nice that computers and phones are super cheap and powerful. That doesn't help people eat.
It was nice, but that's quickly changing now that the consumer market is being ignored by chip makers who'd rather sell to companies building data centers
While one could meme about being introverts, I just feel like the writing in older media, movies and other records of the time makes me feel people back then were just more comfortable with each other, more practiced in natural social interaction, and this lack of understanding has not only made modern media less compelling, the fact that we don't understand in general what people are really like has been a detriment to the fabric of society.
It's not what we, or even your mom's generation built (taking some liberties here, assuming your age). Whatever ideals the US stood for have been long gone.
Benjamin Franklin, when asked "What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" responded "A republic, if you can keep it”. The answer is clear today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
For all intents and purposes, every single supply chain devolves to a cabal of suppliers who have no downstream capacity. As such, even if someone downstream wanted to shake up their competition, they can't get the supply to do it. Covid didn't cause this, but it did make it obvious to even the dumbest businesspeople. Consequently, all the businesses across the chain have settled into extraction knowing that their position is unassailable.
The problem is that the general public fails to diagnose that the issue is monopolistic control, and that the solution is to keep breaking these cabals up everywhere, aggressively.
Caste of trillionaiers who could destroy nations and cultures simply because they feel so.
Multiple generations have now been born into an economy intentionally engineered to deflate their buying power.
Yes.
> Can I afford a home?
No.
There's an important lesson somewhere here.
I'm from the UK, it isn't in great shape. And the EU isn't either. The west in general has problems, just no where on the scale of every other country.
And the bulk of the population who by global standards might be middle class in terms of dollar income, are nonetheless struggling with multiple jobs, huge health care and kids education costs, no vacations.
Who could be happy?