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Comment by EA-3167 | Hacker News Reader

Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense. What is Instagram if not a giant machine to generate the exact feeling? After all it “inspires” people to emulate what they see, which usually involves spending whatever they have on their appearance and lifestyle.

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> Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense.

Nobody is seeing how the wealthy live. They're seeing caricatures of how people imagine the wealthy live, or sometimes the extravagance of the nouveau riche living out those fictions. And even when they get glimpses of actual wealth, like all forms of entertainment (including rage bait) they're seeing highly compressed slices that only superficially reflect the fictions.

And the same is largely true for every class and group depiction. People forming expectations based on digital content (social media videos, but even "news" stories and narratives) are bound to be confused. Over time their expectations simply won't match the way reality unfolds, but they don't understand why. This helps drive conspiracy theories, both on the left and the right; narratives are concocted to explain the fictitious universes people are living in.

"Wealthy" is extremely relative, which is why people here think of SV oligarchs, but people in a very poor part of the world might see the standard of living of the average middle class person in another country as wealthy.

For example the people in Fnideq, Morocco can see how people in Ceuta are living directly, and media deptiction (including quite accurate ones) of how people live in Spain. Now while you or I would find both to probably be a significant lifestyle downgrade, to a destitute young man in Fnideq it's literally tempting enough to risk their lives to bridge that gap.

Wherever you are in the world you now have a window into the possibilities, the lifestyles, the leisure, the lack of humiliating poverty that others experience. It's not just human nature to see that and want it, it's primate nature.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2141866/

> Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense.

What are they seeing? I admittedly have yet to meet a billionaire (that I know of), but I've seen plenty of deca- and centimillionaires out in the wild. They were just doing mundane things like eating at McDonald's or sitting in the stands watching their children/grandchildren play sports. They were just regular people living regular, every day lives. If I didn't already know who they were before seeing them I'd have never guessed they were so wealthy. My sense after seeing that was that the wealthy are just as boring as I am.

I addressed this is an earlier reply, but I'll add that almost by definition if your and their lives are intersecting it's going to be at the level of YOUR life. You're never going to be showing up for a private $20k per plate fundraiser, the Met Gala, various retreats and vacations, or their private residences. You DEFINITELY won't see their healthcare experiences, the options you have to travel or not work, the chances to simply not worry about the ups and downs of the world at large. Knowing that it's in your power to take care of any family member or friend regardless of the magnitude of the financial challenge.

So yes, when you see them, it's because that segment of their life and yours share a common point, but not a common trajectory.

You're right that we won't see everything, but the discussion taking place here was specifically said to be about what we do get to see and the sense that brings. And what I've seen and the sense that gave is that being wealthy is nothing special. I mean, I'd take it over life on skid row, but I'm not sure I'd care to trade it for my modest life. There is no obvious step up, as fun as looking at substantially larger numbers might be. Like you say, the things I don't get to see could change that calculus, but since the original comment being replied to explicitly defined the conversation to be about what we do see, that's moot. No need to change the subject.

I've known people with net worth in the $100m range and even someone in the three commas range.

They are indeed just people doing their thing with their families. All of them dressed normally and drove upper middle class cars most of the time, leaving the expensive cars at home. Some had expensive hobbies, all traveled a lot.

None of them appeared anything like the ultra-wealthy stereotypes that people develop from watching Shark Tank and Succession while scrolling through Instagram photos of influencers posing on private jets. Most of them were pretty nice people who were actually active in improving their communities, mostly around schools.

Pretty boring, really.

Yes, that's true too

I was honestly just talking about "people used to afford a house and family with two vacations per year on a single income, now people can't even afford a house on two incomes" which seems to be a common refrain nowadays

I know a lot of my friends and peers believe they have worse standard of living than their parents did at the same age, and the data does seem to agree with them. Existence of smartphones is a nice convenience but it doesn't seem to offset being able to afford a house or flights and hotels for vacations

I doubt "the data" is anything more than a survey of said people's feelings on the manner, which is basically of zero value. But we live in an age where if enough people say something is true that "makes" it true, objective reality be damned.

While true a lot of subtlety is hidden in those seemingly simple comparisons. For example has the median/average home size grown since then? If so by how much? How about amenities that are expected in a modern home? In the 1950's and 1960's what did a vacation look like for a single-income family with kids back then? What does it look like now?

If you look at the data what you see is that people have more, want more, and spend more. People didn't necessarily fly to Europe, maybe a vacation was a local seaside, a road trip, or something similar. Heck even for the same vacation to the same place you pay more today because supply and demand lets it happen; you'll pay 250% more for a trip to Disney now than you would in the 1970's, but then again the global population has exploded along with the population globally that can afford to go to Disney.

https://247wallst.com/special-report/2016/05/25/the-size-of-...

I know that everyone wants to believe in some kind of quick political or economic fix, but it just isn't that simple. If you want to spread out the existing wealth for everyone then the average standard of living would drop. If you want to raise that standard of living while extending it to more people... well, good luck?

> For example has the median/average home size grown since then

Sure. Let's compare to the 90s.

According to Google, New detached homes are 10-20% larger in square feet today than they were in the 90s.

Also according to Google, new detached homes are 3.3x more expensive, inflation adjusted, than the 90s. Of course mortgage interest rates play a part here too, but that's a really bad starting point

And that's just for starters.

There are also places in the USA where the minimum wage has not increased since the 90s, and there may actually still be people trying to get by on a wage of 5.50 an hour.

I know all of this is oversimplifying things to an extent. Economics is hard. But it's not that hard...

I was around in the 1980's and people weren't buying a home and a yearly family vacation on a single income, that era was long gone. If you're talking about those "Good Old Days" then you're talking about the postwar economy that was decisively long gone by '80s.

They were buying a home and a yearly family vacation on two modest incomes, though. Try doing that now.

They might have been "buying" a home with a long-term mortgage, and by the 1980's you were seeing the rise of individual credit card debt as a way to finance a previously unobtainable lifestyle. The 1980's saw the first "cash back" card and rewards cards followed, along with a culture of assuming debt to consume.

What you saw in the 1980's ended much like it did in 2008, it wasn't sustainable and it went bust just as it would over and over and over since. BUT people want more, they want to pay less for it, and many more people want that. If you're a politician you don't win by fighting against that, you swim with the currents and find scapegoats to blame instead.

> They might have been "buying" a home with a long-term mortgage

Oh thanks for reminding me, people used to buy houses on 20 year mortgages now to make them remotely affordable they have to be 30-year mortgages

Good catch!

I take it from the shift in tone that you understood my point, although you don't particularly care to discuss it. I get it, no one ever wants to hear that biggest changes have been:

More people

More money

More people with more money

More competition for something previously limited to far fewer people historically

Costs rise

Expectations rise

Debt rises

And now if you've been keeping track we're at the "people who can't afford delivery finance their Doordash with a short-term loan" stage of the game.

Housing is not more expensive because people have granite countertops. If anything it's the other way around. The land houses sit on has grown exponentially in value regardless of the quality of the building itself. Take any modest US suburban house that's been around since the 70s, and check its value over time. Even if the house is still the same building, same square footage, its current value will be much more than its initial value in today's dollars. If you're paying $700k for a house that was worth half that in today's dollars a generation ago, you might as well spend the extra few thousand it takes to get the nice countertops; their value relative to the rest of the house has gone down considerably.

https://www.nahb.org/blog/2026/08/Median-Lot-Sizes-by-Region...

If you're buying a $700k house there are only a few parts of the country where your statement is true, and frankly much of that comes down to a few cities and metro areas. The idea that people buying a house in rural NC today and 30 years ago are somehow facing radically different (inflation adjusted) lot prices doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

But again, if you want to look at houses in the 1970's then you have to remember that the US population has risen by 150,000,000 since then... the land is the same size. The cities that everyone wants to live and work in are mostly the same with some changes in the Pacific coast of course. You're also competing with far more people who have relatively more money to spend, including a willingness to go into serious debt, to live their "dream".

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