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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

The OP doesn't claim the it was the peak of humanity, the claim is much tighter than that: it was the perfect balance of technology usage.

Almost universally, any time closer to today is better for most people in most ways than a previous time. But there are exceptions -- prehistoric hunter/gatherer lifestyle is superior in several ways to the modern one, but the risk of dying early in a horrible way is high enough that it's not true overall.

Should we live more like cavemen in very constrained specific ways? Probably. Do we want to force 8 billion people to starve to death by returning to that life? Heck no.

Similar, there are likely small parts of the 2000's that are better than today. That doesn't mean the 2000's are the peak of humanity.

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"Almost universally, any time closer to today is better for most people in most ways than a previous time"

Wind that back 20 years. Yeah we got cheaper computing. Luxury items got cheaper, necessities got more expensive. I can make do with a 2010 think pad, but my rent is cooked and I'll never own a house. I'd rather be born in the 70s than the 90s.

20 years ago the average house cost 7-8.5 times the average income (cf 5X today). 2006 was the worst time to buy a house in America, ever. It was an exceptionally bad time because prices collapsed in 2008 and anybody buying in 2006 would have been seriously underwater.

Well I live in Australia. The situation is quite different.

You know what else you had in 2006? Loans, without jumping through hoops. "Being underwater" is the kind of thing people say when they look at their home as a thing they intend to make money reselling later. If you want to own the place you live, then you want easily-acquired loans and available inventory. It doesn't matter what someone else thinks it's worth, as long as you can pay your note.

You seem to have rose glasses for the actual situation. Many of those people with easily acquired loans have lost everything since the terms of the loans were as easily changed in 2009 and they could no longer afford the payments

Those loans are the only reason many elder millenials managed to own property at all. Not all of the loans given in that era were ARMs or otherwise amenable to modification; many were regular old fixed-rate mortgages.

In the US, adjustable rate is extremely rare in general. I had never even heard of them until my 30s in threads like these.

> The OP doesn't claim the it was the peak of humanity, the claim is much tighter than that: it was the perfect balance of technology usage.

From the literal title of the article:

> Early 2000s were peak of humanity

First sentence there-after:

> I genuinely believe that the early 2000s were probably the closest humanity ever got to the perfect balance between technology and actual life.

Titles are almost always over-simplified clickbait and frequently contradict the article.

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