9 ms·

I really like this read, something just smells off about blaming young people for "wasting years" on video games. We've got a horribly stacked real life "game"

• deelowe 10y ago
  This really hits home for me. Seems like every older family member I have just has tons and tons of useless stuff. I dont get it.
  • ehnto 10y ago
    They also have the useful stuff, like property that was reasonably priced at the time of purchase.
    • astrodust 10y ago
      How else do you think grandma stores her priceless porcelain dolls and collectible thimbles? In that giant house that cost a year's salary when she got it, that's where.
    • deelowe 10y ago
      I have more real estate than all of them combined actually, but that's not really what I meant. The stuff they have purchased and still own is baffling. It's all cheap, throw away, walmart crap. Compare this to the things I've saved from my grandparents and great grandparents which are mostly heirloom quality and the difference is striking. The wastefulness is simply depressing.
      • deleted 10y ago
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      • throwawaycanada 10y ago
        I've said for a long time that millenials have more in common with their grandparents than their parents from a values point of view. (I consider a millenial anyone born early 80's to 18-20 now fwiw).
      • mos_basik 10y ago
        careful, there. that line of reasoning smells a bit like "why is old music always so much better than the crap that comes out these days?" only the high quality old music is still played and remembered today, and only the high quality old things survive long enough to be saved by great grandchildren. i imagine cheap throw away old crap has disintegrated long ago.
        • Aeolun 10y ago
          But it's certainly true that mum has not even one item of 'heirloom quality' or higher.
    • ethbro 10y ago
      And then rig the game to keep said stuff (e.g. Prop 13).
  • flomo 10y ago
    Right now, the biggest pile of useless stuff I have is .. video games. (~Twenty years ago I bought every Atari/Intellivision/Vetrex/etc game I could find at various flea market and thrift stores, and for the last ten I've been dreading getting rid these boxes of useless stuff.)
    • deelowe 10y ago
      Useless is 3 different vacuums that have different brand names, colors, attachments, etc... but are all made by the same parent company and all break predictably after 2 years of use. Collecting game systems that you play and use which are also not being made anymore isn't useless in the least. Comparatively, that is.
  • Turing_Machine 10y ago
    If you'd ever experienced real privation, you would understand why they hang on to that "useless" stuff.
  • tonyedgecombe 10y ago
    Rationing was still in place when my parents were children (they are early boomers), even after that material goods and many foods weren't readily available, you can see how they developed the attitude that accumulation is important. Unfortunately they haven't been able to turn it off and their constant pursuit of comfort hasn't done them any good in the longer term.
• branchless 10y ago
  Spot on. I've got a good job and it has gotten me almost nowhere. Land prices have outrun wage gains. No point working. If I didn't have kids I'd drop out. Landlords, banks and boomers are disgusting.
  • 09bjb 10y ago
    Owning your own home has never been an optimal investing strategy anyway--consider index-based investing instead. Play with a compound interest calculator and see where you can get with 4-10% interest each year.
    • branchless 10y ago
      You don't get it at all. None of it. This goes to show how people who consider themselves financially literate have no idea how things work. Banks create new money by lending. Most lending is issued against real estate. People who "invest" in holding the same piece of land to accrue the effort of others do not have 400K. They "borrow" it from the bank (the bank creates it). Go to your bank and tell them you want to borrow 400k to invest in indexes.
• sandworm101 10y ago
  And how many of those boomers have themselves slipped into the alternate realities of drugs and alcohol? If you are going to distract yourself, videogames are better than drinking. The remark in the OP about the father having to change a baby while playing a game is telling. That father could put his gaming on pause. A generation ago, how many fathers in similar situations were catatonic with a bottle in one hand? Rather than being down at the local watering hole, the traditional place for forgetting life problems, this father was at home. That's progress.
  • dmoy 10y ago
    I don't mean to derail because I think you have a valid point, but I believe alcoholism is still a way worse problem today. If I'm remembering correctly, it's something like the same number of people die due to alcohol every year in the US as shoot themselves death (~30k)... and that's just fatalities; if we're talking family problems it's way higher.
    • lovich 10y ago
      What was it when the boomers were starting families? If it was higher then, his point still stands even if there's work to do
    • sandworm101 10y ago
      Alcoholism is certainly still a thing, but there is a generation of young people these days who simply aren't drinking. Some do, and do so to an excess, but something like like half of collage-educated young people just don't. It isn't religion or ideology and so they aren't shouting it from rooftops. They just don't want to drink. For me it started at university. I was riding a motorcycle to class and a job with insane hours (film/TV). Drinking wasn't a practical option. (Riding in pouring rain, on a fiday night night, after 20+ hours of class and work... I would not have survived long.) Without making any decisions either way, one day I realized I hadn't had a drink in over a year. "The proportion of 16-24-year-olds who do not drink increased by more than 40 per cent between 2005 and 2013. Today, one in five is teetotal." "...wet sales at student union bars have dived in the last 10-15 years." http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/generation-abstemious-more-and-more-young-people-are-shunning-alcohol-a6811186.html http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/featu...
• tabeth 10y ago
  I completely agree with the sentiment, but isn't your own comment being dishonest? There's plenty of land in the United States, and plenty of cities that have hardly been met with the "hoarding" you mention. That being said, living in Boston, MA, I totally feel what you're saying (literally, most of the houses here are expensive, even in crappy areas).
  • deleted 10y ago
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  • nitemice 10y ago
    The same is true out here in Australia. Places like Melbourne and Sydney are crowded and expensive, but the cheaper properties are all out in rural areas, where your choice of employment is slim, especially if you made the "mistake" of training in any tech sector job.
    • jazoom 10y ago
      You don't need to go rural. Just don't expect to live in a great house in a city. Source: was a uni student for 10 years and survived.
    • nether 10y ago
      Just live in the lame ass suburbs like everyone else. What the fuck is wrong with you people? Are you going to be on your deathbed wishing you had more squid ink pasta and museums in your life? No, you'll wish you spent more time your loved ones, which you can do anywhere.
      • curuinor 10y ago
        Little bit difficult to spend time with loved ones in Korea if I'm in SF, or the converse. I have money, but plane tickets ain't cheap
      • ehnto 10y ago
        My loved ones live in a town with the population of 1000 people and 400km from the city, where the only tech jobs are. Not everyone grew up in the city suburbs. Not to mention, I am talking about the burbs not the CBD anyway. Rent is still %50 of my tech sector wage for an ancient two bedroom unit in the suburbs. Rent sharing is the only sane option, hooray living with strangers. I don't mind, I enjoy and appreciate what I have, but you can't pretend like it's the same opportunity for everyone and the same opportunity as it was a few decades ago. Things are different, and it's different in ways wr can try and fix, hence the conversation on the topic.
• karmajunkie 10y ago
  Yeah, there's definitely a lot of truth in that. Still, the bit about the guy who went to law school and decided not to practice, opting instead to play video games, and for whom finances were no biggie because parents... Jiminy Christmas, WTF is up with that.
  • x0x0 10y ago
    Right, but the author spent three paragraphs on Chris from Ipswitch who's a contractor in the health-sector who rarely gets work and can't get an employer to help train him. It's not exactly like Chris is running away from some lucrative alternative to spend his time playing videogames. I'm sympathetic to the idea that many of these games are skinner boxes that our brains have relatively few defenses against, but Chris is a stupid example. I'd also guess that many people who trash video games would happily say watching baseball, perhaps playing baseball, opera, or chess are somehow superior. It's not like those have much intrinsic value in them besides the enjoyment they may generate for the participant.
    • mos_basik 10y ago
      as far as stupid examples go, I was surprised at how low the quoted hours played were (the couple of times they were mentioned). the largest was 600 hours of KSP. I have more than 1000 hours each in Dota 2 and Eve Online. I'm not sure if I'm significantly more addicted than the interviewees or I play fewer games longer than them. I know I don't game hop much, but still. Worrying. At least I have a dev job I'm happy with that scratches my problem-solving itch and that I partially got because of experience I gained writing tools for Eve. Haven't been playing anything as much these days because when I get home from work, I'm usually ready to take off my thinking cap for a while and most of my games very much require me to keep it on.
  • polm23 10y ago
    America has a surplus of lawyers, which makes running a successful practice or getting a job as a new graduate harder than it's ever been. http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/A-glut-of-lawyers-dims-job-prospects-for-many-7099998.php http://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/article/A-glut-of-l...
• aaron695 10y ago
  > where the boomers and elites have horded everything and fucked future generations Sorry, but this is just bullshit. But if it makes you feel better, it's normal to think this, every generation blames the previous. (And the older generation thinks the latest is lazy)
  • ethbro 10y ago
    I feel like the Boomers were pretty happy with the Greatest. You know, defeating genocide, sowing the seeds for a decades long wave of economic expansion, technological advancement, and peace (albeit by not managing to swap nukes with the Soviets).
    • jraines 10y ago
      "Why don't you all just f-f-fade away / and don't try 'n dig what we all say"
    • aaron695 10y ago
      The generation pre-boomers might have defeated genocide but they also, you know, did a genocide. But true, people don't normally think that.
    • dragonwriter 10y ago
      > I feel like the Boomers were pretty happy with the Greatest. Yeah, there wasn't like a big youth counterculture in the 1960s-1970s rebelling against the previous generation that was then dominant in society and government over major international policy (Hello, Southeast Asia), domestic policy, notions of public and private morality, and, basically, every other aspect of life. You might have a better case with Gen X not particularly blaming the Boomers (and focussing more on the trailing end of the influence of the "Greatest" Generation), and even better with Millenials not even paying attention to Gen X enough to blame them for anything (Boomers, sure, but Gen X? Not so much.)
      • ethbro 10y ago
        Point. Although I'd argue that the economic trends of the 1950s-1970s were in-spite-of rather than because-of the counterculture movement (Piketty, Capital, war being the greatest economic equalizer, etc). But the 60s definitely did hasten the unseating of previous thoughts and people in positions of power. We're probably just starting to tip past Boomer-in-power to GenX-in-power in the upper echelon of power structures. Which incidentally probably explains why older companies finally seem to be starting to "get" the internet, now that I think about it...
• marknutter 10y ago
  So why did the generations before the Baby Boomers do so well despite having a much worse game stacked against them? I think the crisis that Millenials are facing are a case of over-parenting/over-protection, increased secularization, the rise of feminism and demonization of masculinity, and a failed higher education system.
  • robertfw 10y ago
    How exactly does increased secularization and "the rise of feminism and demonization of masculinity" contribute to a crisis for this generation?
    • Endy 10y ago
      Not the OP, but the theory I've seen with those terms posits that the increased upward marketplace pressure toward tech jobs and office work have drastically increased competition for the same jobs which were typically "feminine" roles, or at least "woman-friendly" roles. Meanwhile the masculine role-workers like coal miners are being pushed out due to environmental regulation and manufacturing is currently largely automated - and as the manufacturing becomes more and more automated, the upward pressure on tech increases because we don't need factory workers, we need robotics specialists and skilled machine operators.
    • petre 10y ago
      Socialists screwing things over and keynesian economics at work. Maybe not so much in the US as in Europe, but you were on the right track with your previous administration. Mindless state borrowing without any intent to pay back. Taxes. Then a single salary wasn't enough for a household so why not encourage women to get a job, be independent? Feminism. Then why not encourage immigrants work small jobs for us? Those are nasty/boring jobs anyway. Secularism. Now what? More taxes? Americans' incomes being tracked outside the country. Climate change taxes? The Trump administration is merely a reaction (of the people fed up with this) against just that: political correctness, immigrants, feminism, socialism, taxes taxes taxes.
      • 10y ago
• curiousgeorgio 10y ago
  The "horribly stacked life" card is, in my experience, most often played by people trying to get by in the overly competitive environments of large cities. I know a lot of people don't like to hear it, but I'll let you in on a little secret: if you don't feel like you're getting anywhere trying to work and live in a major city, do yourself a favor and move to a less-populated area. Many cities have become extremely competitive, which naturally selects against all but the few who can manage to work for less (competition in the labor market drives down wages) and pay more to live (that same competitive environment drives the cost of living higher). Get outside those inflated bubbles and life really does become easier for someone who just wants to earn a decent living. Stop blaming other people for your choice to live in a place where the cost of living feels "out of reach".
  • desireco42 10y ago
    This is excellent advice. I do agree with majority that games is rigged agains majority, but your advice is spot on.
  • Chathamization 10y ago
    Part of the issue is that for decades sprawl was preferred by many people and development followed this path while many more dense areas suffered from neglect. Now there's been a strong shift towards density, but the amount of people who want to live in dense areas is greater than the amount of desirable dense areas available. At least around here, I've noticed that developers in the (often cheaper) suburbs are making a push towards building high-density walkable devevolopments. It's worth noting that in many cities, there are still a lot of affordable options (some even cheaper than a few decades ago), but they're often not in the hip areas that people want to live. When people talk about how unfair it is that others got good values in the hip areas, they often don't realize that those areas were once the cheap undesirable areas.
  • lkrubner 10y ago
    If you go to rural Kentucky, you will see how wrong you are. Likewise, if you go to rural West Virginia, you will see that you are wrong. Visit the farms in rural Arkansas, spend a few days, engage some farmhands in conversation. If you talk to at least 4 such people, then at least 1 of them will be addicted to meth. You can often detect this simply by looking at them. Often their teeth give them away. Spend some time in rural Missouri. Go to small diners and try to engage the waitresses in conversation. If you stay a few weeks you will get to know them. You will hear stories about husbands and boyfriends who are unemployed, or who can only get sporadic work. Whole families surviving on what one woman can earn as a waitress at a small diner. I've done a bit of traveling, and I've seen people struggling with hard times all over the USA. And in the examples above, I'm talking about areas that are mostly white. If you really want to feel like Dante, and descend into Hell, go visit the mostly black counties in Mississippi. For many decades now, the interior states of the USA have become increasingly poor. Wealth has been concentrating into the coasts. Farming has been mostly automated. Mining has been mostly automated. The number of coal jobs in the USA peaked in the 1940s and has declined (with some ups and downs) rather steadily over the last 7 decades. As to automation in farming, remember that the novel "The Grapes of Wrath", by John Steinbeck, was published in 1939. The opening scene of that novel shows us a man trying to get home to his farm (after he spent some time in prison) and finding that his family has lost the farm due to the tractors, which both reduced demand for labor on the farms, and also allowed economies of scale that caused a great consolidation of the land into bigger and bigger corporate farms. And remember too, in 1961, Ralph Abernathy (the right-hand man of Martin Luther King) gave a speech in which he warned people "The civil rights movement is in a race with the tractors." He meant that the tractors were rapidly replacing black labor on the farms, but the blacks had been kept out of most other professions, so it was urgent that the Civil Rights movement open up the rest of the economy to black people, before black people lost the last remaining farm jobs. Most historians of agriculture in the USA will point to the 1920s as the era when farms hit their economic peak. The rural areas of the USA have been facing decline for 9 decades now. In observance of the etiquette that is expected on Hacker News, I've tried to stick to the facts in responding to you. But I also want to be clear: your advice is terrible.