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Comment by timdaub | Hacker News Reader

Can we please stop to assume that younger generations don't want to own and do things?

I don't know where this self-proclaimed fact comes from but hell I know a lot of people that define themselves not as non-materialistic AirBnB-Homejoy-Uber users. Instead, like everyone else on this planet, they want to express status with watches, cars and houses. Some maybe even enjoy mowing their lawn and cleaning their house, as it cleans their mind from stressful work related stuff.

Yes, Uber and AirBnB are great services and we will use them a lot more in the future, but this doesn't mean that everyone will use a dogfood-delivery or brush-my-teeth service. The DIFM-Economy surely will exist, but it will probably be far smaller than silicon valley based journalist imagine it.

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You're definitely not wrong. Of course there are those in the younger generation who want to own things. I bet most of them do, in fact. I own my car, of course, and although I'm happy renting an apartment now, I'll be getting a house once I settle down and have a family.

But there's no denying that there are those who just don't want the hassle. I have a friend who uses Uber to get anywhere -- even if it's a 5 minute drive. Most of my friends don't own homes and don't intend to (anytime soon, at least). I have a tenant who makes a very good living, has a very large savings account, and a very high credit score, owned his own home previously, and chose to rent from me because it's just easier.

There's a pretty big market for those sorts of people -- and I think that's what the article was getting at.

Alright, I accept that and I don't think its a phenomena caused by our wealthy society for a specific generation, as some self-proclaimed millennial-educators suggest. Essentially what they're saying is that we millennials do not want to own things, because we already did had strong abundance of that in our childhood. Firstly, that is certainly not true for most people I know. Secondly, people I know that had strong abundance in their childhood, strive towards even more now.

I think its owed to the fact of these peoples' current living situation as well as the state of the economy that there are some people that actually don't want to own things.

But lets face it: To much of your money (at least in percentages) in a bank account ultimately is worth nothing. Spending it on services does - on the long term - not yield as much value as ownership. Think about it: You can sell your car after using it for 5-10 years. Same goes for your house, phone, watch, laptop, apartment. Ownership returns securities, and people need securities!

I think people from our generation just ride this wave because of convenience but will ultimately converge to the ownership-game as everyone else.

> You can sell your car after using it for 5-10 years. Same goes for your house, phone, watch, laptop, apartment.

Seriously?

Well, all right, houses and apartments are still securities. But how much does a 10-year-old car depreciate? I'd expect it to lose 70%-90% of the price of a new one. Phones, laptops, even non-mechanical watches — they lose close to 100% of value over 10 years unless you can sell them as collector items.

Imagine that you could own a nice jug and come buy your milk with it. Nice, and your children could reuse the jug or sell it. But most people prefer to buy milk in disposable cardboard and plastic containers. Possibly, in 30 years they will use a different (but still disposable) container entirely.

Technology moves too fast.

Good point, but selling an item is not the only security/value ownership provides.

I can do what ever I want with the item. I can use the item whenever I want. I can still lend the item to someone. Etc...

Also, you don't have to necessarily sell the item once its lost all its value, but prior to that. And actually, I do this with my MBP every few years. I buy it intentionally, because I know its value isn't going to decline as fast as other laptops.

Still, after 5-10 years you at least get SOMETHING out of your car for example, in contrast to all those Uber-rides you took 5 years ago.

BTW.: These examples were probably not the best ones. I'm trying to think about better ones right now...

I see your point: ownership provides better control. You can do things that are not possible with a rented item. Sometimes this makes perfect sense. I'm glad I'm not renting my computers and can do whatever I please with them.

Still for some other items for which the amount of control you need over them is acceptably low, you can rent them. I'm fine buying a ride in a subway train or a taxi.

These two approaches have different strong and weak sides, so they will probably coexist for a long time. What we see now is that people start to need less control or maybe even less use of certain things. I don't own a car which is perfectly reasonable in NYC; if I lived outside a metropolis I'd own one. Not owning a house has drawbacks but also has upsides; possibly these upsides, like more mobility, start to overweigh the downsides. For instnace, living in San Francisco or on Manhattan is quite possible when you rent an apartment, but buying a house there is mostly for millionaires.

Careful about drawing a false equivalence here. I think I can see what you're trying to say, but for example owning a car has both an opportunity cost, and a high depreciation cost.

It's entirely plausible to end up financially far ahead by not owning a car (The same can be true for housing in some markets). Of course this depends on your usage, but it is plausible. So if you want to argue about the (very real for some people) less tangible benefits, you can't ignore the fact that these may come at a very real financial (i.e. opportunity) cost.

I feel we're on the same wavelength here -- the article seems to claim that there is a singular force behind this trend and that the trend is new. I think there are a multitude of forces at work here and I think you're right to suggest the state of the economy has a big part to do with it. I'm sure in previous recessions, there was a lot more borrowing, sharing and renting going on too. It's happening online now because the internet exists and it's in everyone's pocket.

I'd also make the assertion that the article fails to account for people like my co-workers, who are not millennials and use Car2Go more often than anyone else I know. Parking is absurdly expensive where I work, so people use Car2Go to avoid that. I used it to get to school until I was able to purchase a car of my own, at which point the costs shot down dramatically and I now have a secure asset -- as you pointed out. It made way more sense to own -- and still does. Perhaps as these businesses grow, they will be able to rival the prices of ownership and offset the downsides of not having a secure asset. If that happens, I will certainly reconsider owning.

That being said, I do feel that a lot more people in my generation are less inclined to desire a thing because of the status it assigns you. Perhaps I'm just an out of touch dreamer though.

Yeah. I'd bet that a huge portion of the people these articles refer also to live in places like Silicon Valley, where the price of ownership of things is very high, but services are abundant (because of the startup culture).

Oh, for sure. I didn't say "not owning things" was smart (although I guess it depends on what you're trying to own) and running up your monthly expenses on unnecessary services is probably not the best way to get ahead in life.

But people aren't always smart.

> But people aren't always smart.

I totally agree. But they will be smart after getting burned by reality. History repeats itself and the next crisis is right at our doorsteps. The desire to own things physically is correlating to the fear in society (just an assumption of mine). Thats why currently (I'd assume we're in a boom right now) some people rather use services instead of buying stuff.

BTW.: I think it would be a super cool task to research ownership-spending vs services-spending correlated to economic-state!

Silicon Valley has taken the motto "Build things you want" to heart, and is building things that are a great fit for living in silicon valley.

By "silicon valley based journalist" did you mean "Altos Ventures...an investor in several DIFM companies including Bench, OutboundEngine and Whitehat Security"?

This is true. But even if just 5-10% of the population is DIFM, that's enough to fund a lot of companies and take the growth away from a lot of mature companies.

With interest rates low, a mature company can get away with 3-4% profit growth. Drop their topline revenue 5-10%, and their profit drops much more than that.

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