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These types of articles always try to put a positive spin on life just getting harder for many. Less people are able to move out and start families due to stud

These types of articles always try to put a positive spin on life just getting harder for many. Less people are able to move out and start families due to student loans and wages not keeping up with cost of living. This isn't a matter of 'well , in time you'll have everything you want'. It's more like you may never have what your parents had.

monero-xmr 3y ago
A friend started as a construction worker in the suburbs at 18 right out of high school. Now he is 40 and has a general contracting firm so large he grew out the local bank - they couldn’t write him more loans as it centralized risk. My neighbor was a corporate guy downtown, opened up a brewery as a side hustle in a very run down neighborhood, shortly quit his corporate job and he has 3 locations now. I think there is a failure to think outside the prescribed paths. There are some with disabilities and trauma that prevent them from doing anything but surviving, and I understand that and feel for them. But there are plenty - the majority - of people who are able bodied and need to invent their own futures. Or maybe just be a victim forever but I don’t think that’s a good outcome.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  Can everyone run their own general contracting firm? Both of your examples require workers. Good for the outliers who are doing well, but if their employees can't keep up with the cost of living that's a problem, right?
  - coding123 3y ago
    have you seen the cost to build a building lately?
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      In theory, the underlying land value should go down if only the cost of construction went up.
      - adql 3y ago
        Sounds like baseless theory
        lotsofpulp 3y ago
        The theory requires appropriately high land value taxes. If land owners can simply hold onto land for cheap, and let the rest of society pay disproportionately more for their land’s security via cops and courts, then they are under no rush to sell.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    > but if their employees can't keep up with the cost of living that's a problem, right? The sad truth is that employees that can’t afford the cost of living have little leverage and might be replaceable by employees that will work for even less (because they have to, not because they want to).
    - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
      Well, if you're either a victim or you own the company and make more victims I still think there's a problem.
      - Aerroon 3y ago
        You're not a victim though. That's just nature.
        SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
        I'm using the words of the person I was originally responding to: "Or maybe just be a victim forever".
- KallDrexx 3y ago
  Those two data points are extremely anecdotal and have survivorship bias. According to data I can find online, in 2021 while 549 breweries opened, 319 closed. As the number of breweries has gone up each year, a significant amount of closures also occurred. Your neighbor could have easily been one of those. More than 50% of small businesses fail in the first year of business according to well published and cited industry data. These are all people who tried to "invent their own futures" and it did not work out. That also doesn't mean that the remaining percentage were successful. Many of them have their owners working much more than corporate full time for less money then they'd be working on a cushy 9-5 job. For an opposite anecdote to yours, a family opened up an ice cream shop around the corner. They had good business and made ok money, but closed after 2 years. Why? Not only was the end of the day profit not great, they were heavily sacrificing time with their own family in order to run the day to day operations. They could have hired more people to handle those day to day hurdles, but that would have meant almost no take home pay. We should encourage people to "invent their own futures" but we also have to be realistic, because we don't have good safety nets for what happens when inventing your future fails, which means you have to make your own safety net. It's also not always trivial to re-enter corporate gigs after you've been doing something else for years, especially if closing of your small business has burned you out. It takes much more than just a good idea to make a small business succeed.
  - inconceivable 3y ago
    "yeah but you might fail and then your life is destroyed" is not exactly a new take on the issue. this is in fact what 99% of people will tell you in real life if you try it. 10 years later those same people will either forget they said anything, or pretend they were on your side all along if you make it.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - DangitBobby 3y ago
      They were on your side all along, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered with the uncomfortable conversation about how they don't think your idea is going to be successful.
- ctvo 3y ago
  > Or maybe just be a victim forever but I don’t think that’s a good outcome. Alternatively, recognize that you have two anecdotes of people succeeding. It doesn't mean there aren't systemic issues, and people can both strive to succeed in the current system and push for its change. It's dull reading tl;dr: bootstrap yourself like my friends.
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    Everything starts small and takes time. The moment someone gets successful there is some tendency to try and tear them down, find out why they were privileged, what connections they had, and worst case say they got lucky. If it weren’t for people trying to do something - anything - taking a risk - not knowing if it will succeed but not caring if it goes under or not - there wouldn’t even be anything. No art, no startups, no creative endeavors. Especially among the highly educated in our western system, people desire guaranteed paths. “Check these boxes and get this, get this credential and get that.” Everything in reality is hustle and sales. As another anecdote a former gym trainer is now a firefighter. She tried a long time to be a firefighter but couldn’t break into it despite passing all the tests - there is a whole application process following all the tests and credentials and it’s quite complex. So after a few years she started sniffing out where the firefighters hung out, their bars, and went out there and spoke to them, told them her story, made connections. She did get accepted following that because the people who could make it happen helped her, after she took the initiative to think outside the box and meet them in a unique way. All the successful people have a different story. And your definition of success can vary greatly. But to say society is making success impossible is simply untrue - I see so much opportunity and so many upcoming people all the time. Unless you are disabled or traumatized or have some other issue, I can’t take someone who blames society for their lack of “being where they want to be in life” seriously. Not in America at least.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      > Especially among the highly educated in our western system, people desire guaranteed paths. Yes, guaranteed healthcare and land. Option 1) you can have a likelihood of being able to provide healthcare and decent home for your kids. Option 2) high likelihood of not being able to provide either for your kids. I am not referring to the 0.1% of people who have the option at tech startups paying generous pay and benefits.
- bugglebeetle 3y ago
  50% of small businesses fail within the first five years, so lovely anecdotes and all, but textbook survivorship bias.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    That’s not a new phenomenon. Life has always been hard, the narrative that it’s gotten harder is much more of a survivorship bias.
    - bugglebeetle 3y ago
      Sorry, but statistics don’t care about your platitudes.
      - HDThoreaun 3y ago
        What statistics? All the stats I've seen are that there has never been less poverty in the world.
        winphone1974 3y ago
        Many of the failures in the west are far above what global statistics define as poverty, so this doesn't make much sense
        HDThoreaun 3y ago
        Do you have any statistics saying that the west is poorer than it used to be?
        brnaftr361 3y ago
        Can you transmute qualitative data into quantitative data and reliably measure it?
        bugglebeetle 3y ago
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  That's pretty unusual to graduate college at 18, and then to start as a construction worker with a college degree. But my anecdote would be my uncle who started as a diesel mechanic from a young age. He worked hard all his life but never made a lot of money and then died of cancer at 60.
  - monero-xmr 3y ago
    I meant high school, edited
- HEmanZ 3y ago
  1) there is lots of opportunity in the market 2) the opportunities in the market are less common and more difficult, in labor, luck, or expertise required than the past 3 generations experienced. How are these two contradictory things? Put another way, at the individual level, there is still lots of opportunity. But at the aggregate level there is a squeeze.
- bittercynic 3y ago
  I'm sincerely happy for their success, and it an important feature of the US that some sharp, driven people are able to create a substantial fortune for themselves. In some ways this is in direct conflict with working-class people being able to assemble a stable life where they can depend on being able to work diligently and have some stability in life. I think the total wealth of society could be greater if we adjusted some laws and the tax code to make it more possible for working class people to have a real shot at a stable life through diligent, hard, work.
  - pdonis 3y ago
    > make it more possible for working class people to have a real shot at a stable life through diligent, hard, work The problem with this is that, ultimately, if you view yourself as "working class", as opposed to being an entrepreneur, then your shot at a stable life through diligent, hard work is not dependent on the laws and the tax code, it's dependent on the overall business environment and what kinds of employers you can find. Which means, on luck. If you are a lucky working class person, you will be able to find an employer who (a) recognizes your diligence and hard work, (b) is able to manage the business risks of the company so that they can afford to reward you accordingly, and (c) does in fact reward you as you deserve, i.e., is willing to share the benefits of the business with you even though you're not an owner, you're just an employee. I'm not saying there are no such employers out there; but my description should make it evident that they will be rare. Far too rare for all diligent, hard-working working class people to benefit from them. The diligent, hard-working working class people who aren't lucky enough to find one of those employers will have to live with whatever they can get, which will range all the way from "okay but not great" down to "sweatshop". The only way to escape this crapshoot is to be an entrepreneur--i.e., to own at least a piece of whatever business your livelihood depends on (and in practice it has to be a large enough piece that your voice will carry weight in business decisions). In other words, dealing with unavoidable business risks due to the fact that the world is always changing and businesses have to adjust, is something that, all things considered, you are better off not outsourcing to an employer.
    - andrekandre 3y ago
- yieldcrv 3y ago
  > I think there is a failure to think outside the prescribed paths. because the prescribed paths work for a larger population. it doesn't need ingenuity, and less luck. hence why it is generic advice. economies cannot support everyone being an entrepreneur. if you want to be a go-getter that's fine. you're in like company here. but its dumb or at least disingenuous to think of this as a predictably available example for all.
- rnk 3y ago
  Great that these people had success. But how many breweries are there a town of 10k people, 1 or 2 maybe. These are the 1% success stories. The economics doesn't allow each of us to open businesses that succeed, there just isn't that much demand. Such as amazon wiping out many small stores, before that walmart killing small cities downtowns when they built one of the edge of town. That doesn't mean there were not some other new businesses to be formed, but there's a limit.
- diob 3y ago
  Aren't these just anecdotes though? What was their background? What time period did they do these things? Did they have support growing up? A strong network? How many other friends or neighbors do you have and what are their outcomes? Has anyone failed? Why? Sorry, but I'll trust the data around economic equality above random stranger anecdotes online. Yeah, I myself am doing wonderful as well, but I'm not so narcissistic as to imagine that's some special property of "not being a victim". What a bleak outlook to have of one's fellow man.
- austhrow743 3y ago
  Needing to invent your own future is things getting harder.
- XorNot 3y ago
  What do you do though? Why aren't you those people? Why don't you have their story?
georgeecollins 3y ago
What you might have that your parents didn’t have is a longer life expectancy. Not for sure, but it is a good idea to consider the deadlines in your head.
- vinyl7 3y ago
  Its not worth living longer if life sucks. Deadline is early 30s for kids and 50 to buy a house
  - xwdv 3y ago
    Do not have kids before buying a house. This will almost certainly guarantee you’ll never reach escape velocity to buy a house if you have standard income levels. Also, it doesn’t actually matter much when you have kids. As long as you have a fertile partner and sufficient resources you can basically have them whenever. The time to have kids depends on what parenting style you want. If you want a more hands off approach where you mostly just prevent kids from making stupid decisions while they decide their own course in life, it’s fine, perhaps advantageous being an older parent. If you prefer though to micromanage your kid and learn about life with them as you go along and get in arguments with them about the best way to do things, being younger is better.
- WalterSear 3y ago
  Fwiw, life expectancy is dropping in the US, in part due to lifestyle choices, but also due to deaths of despair. The increase in deaths of despair is indicative of adversity in the greater population - not just those who essentially commit suicide via drugs or alcohol. It's dropped by much yet, but I anticipate life expectancy to drop further - and become more significant in relation to previous generations as economic adversity increases, also making adequate medical care harder to come by.
darkclouds 3y ago
A positive spin but arguably deceitful spin on the state of affairs in the US and UK. https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2023/uk-drops-new-global-ranking-life-expectancy https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2023/uk-drops-new-gl... "A new analysis of global rankings of life expectancy over seven decades shows the UK has done worse than all G7 countries except the USA." "According to the OECD, state the researchers, the UK recently became the second most economically unequal country in Europe after Bulgaria." Me personally, I dont even think I'll be reaching retirement age if I continue to live in the UK, and thats not through not wanting to work, but thats because of the how the UK has become. Everything has just got too expensive living in the UK now. More people died during the period of time energy prices rose rapidly recently than during the covid pandemic in the UK, but you cant point this stuff out to people in the street because they'll have a go back, a form of denial of the situation in the UK. Its become very dog eat dog, quality of work in decline but costs still going up. Crime in my experience is also off the scale and the attitude of the police now means I no longer report crimes to them. So yes this sort of article is portrayed as positive spin but is in fact deceitful spin.
- 908B64B197 3y ago
  > Me personally, I dont even think I'll be reaching retirement age if I continue to live in the UK, and thats not through not wanting to work, but thats because of the how the UK has become. Everything has just got too expensive living in the UK now. Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Europeans could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?). Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT. It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for UK nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US [0]. [0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-brain-trade http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...
netbioserror 3y ago
Cost of living isn't going up. The value of our money is going down, and real wages are stagnant. Technology is, at it has always been, deflationary, but we see none of those benefits. Basically, the typical process of getting iterative raises has become fighting to tread water. Saving cash or cash-derived assets is somewhat meaningless because you're guaranteed a future where the savings buy a fraction of what they do when you put it away.
- skulk 3y ago
  No. The cost of living IS going up. Corporations bought a huge chunk of the housing stock and have been fixing the prices and squeezing renters. Everything else you said is still true, though.
lumb63 3y ago
I’m not going to argue that reaching traditional life milestones isn’t harder for a lot of young folks today, but that isn’t really the focus of the article in my opinion. A lot of the folks mentioned are from one or two generations prior, and took unconventional paths to get to their present life. A lot of wildly successful people say they didn’t really start to figure life out until their 30s or 40s. I think the spirit of the article is “you never know when your time might come”.
rr808 3y ago
So many people I know in tech have incredibly highly paid jobs, much much higher than their parents. That doesn't even include the immigrants from much less developed countries.
- yodsanklai 3y ago
  The people you know is certainly not a representative sample.
  - ls612 3y ago
    The representative sample also has higher earnings than their parents representative sample did at their age.
sokoloff 3y ago
> It's more like you may never have what your parents had. That’s a natural consequence of economic mobility. It would suck in a different way if everyone always had more than their parents in absolute (inflation-adjusted) amounts and obviously, not everyone can have more in percentile terms.
- WalterSear 3y ago
  Except there's more stuff around, and it's increasingly unevenly distributed, not due to disparate effort or ability.
  - silisili 3y ago
    See also: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/average-net-worth-by-age https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/average-net-worth...
    - frickinLasers 3y ago
      I had some fuzzy concept of wealth inequality in the US, but this is just fucking outrageous.
mancerayder 3y ago
The point of the article.. (the positive spin as you put it) is that one's mental state due to increased wisdom and experienced puts one in a better position to achieve or appreciate the milestones that may have not worked out at a younger age. Fame in the example of the musician, finding appreciation in a partner in the older couple, etc. The message is around things happening in their due course rather than in some sort of age-delimited set of phases. While idealistic, it's more optimistic than the feeling of having failed many of us feel as we compare ourselves to others.
karaterobot 3y ago
It doesn't feel like life is actually getting harder, it feels like people's expectations of what will be given to them is just unrealistic. If you bought into the idea that just getting a college degree would guarantee a dreamlike future with a great job and a house, I don't know what to tell you. There were never any promises made to that effect by people who mattered. Maybe some vague memory of a TV show or an old movie misled you into believing this? In reality, life has always been hard, dreams have always been crushed or deferred. But now we have instantaneous access to all recorded information, are constantly entertained, never get lost, and can travel anywhere on the planet in a day.
- dorkwood 3y ago
  If you live in Australia, it’s hard to disagree with the numbers. The average Australian in 1984 could buy a home that cost 3.3 times their annual income. In 2023, it's 10 times what the average person earns in a year.
neilv 3y ago
I'm repelled by "millennials are choosing experiences over things!" which I perceive as disingenuous and/or vapid. Let people afford a home and family-raising, and without a lifetime of student loan debt required for BS jobs. And stop trying to twist the forced economic exploitation of us, to sell us your avocado mindfulness spa package, like a gratuitous insult thrown on top of everything else.
- spacemadness 3y ago
  Is that angst I’m reading? That’s because you are judging your experiences. Lucky for you we have a corporate sponsored mindfulness bagged lunch that is non-optional. Now be happy and get back to work.
Sophistifunk 3y ago
Aw cummon, I'm finally in a position where we could have kids without ruining all our lives with poverty. Now we're in our mid 40s and it's far too late.
indigoabstract 3y ago
This is conventional wisdom at its best and it appears to be true most of the time. Except when it isn't and we're left wondering "why didn't I think of that?".
freefrog334433 3y ago
While I understand the anger that our parent's generation had an easier life, we have reached limits to growth, like a jar full of bacteria 99% full. Articles like these help reduce people's anxiety over the drop in living standards that will force them to make changes which they would not make voluntarily. Our parent's lifestyles were never sustainable.

monero-xmr 3y ago

A friend started as a construction worker in the suburbs at 18 right out of high school. Now he is 40 and has a general contracting firm so large he grew out the local bank - they couldn’t write him more loans as it centralized risk. My neighbor was a corporate guy downtown, opened up a brewery as a side hustle in a very run down neighborhood, shortly quit his corporate job and he has 3 locations now. I think there is a failure to think outside the prescribed paths. There are some with disabilities and trauma that prevent them from doing anything but surviving, and I understand that and feel for them. But there are plenty - the majority - of people who are able bodied and need to invent their own futures. Or maybe just be a victim forever but I don’t think that’s a good outcome.

SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
Can everyone run their own general contracting firm? Both of your examples require workers. Good for the outliers who are doing well, but if their employees can't keep up with the cost of living that's a problem, right?
- coding123 3y ago
  have you seen the cost to build a building lately?
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    In theory, the underlying land value should go down if only the cost of construction went up.
    - adql 3y ago
      Sounds like baseless theory
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        The theory requires appropriately high land value taxes. If land owners can simply hold onto land for cheap, and let the rest of society pay disproportionately more for their land’s security via cops and courts, then they are under no rush to sell.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  > but if their employees can't keep up with the cost of living that's a problem, right? The sad truth is that employees that can’t afford the cost of living have little leverage and might be replaceable by employees that will work for even less (because they have to, not because they want to).
  - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
    Well, if you're either a victim or you own the company and make more victims I still think there's a problem.
    - Aerroon 3y ago
      You're not a victim though. That's just nature.
      - SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
        I'm using the words of the person I was originally responding to: "Or maybe just be a victim forever".
KallDrexx 3y ago
Those two data points are extremely anecdotal and have survivorship bias. According to data I can find online, in 2021 while 549 breweries opened, 319 closed. As the number of breweries has gone up each year, a significant amount of closures also occurred. Your neighbor could have easily been one of those. More than 50% of small businesses fail in the first year of business according to well published and cited industry data. These are all people who tried to "invent their own futures" and it did not work out. That also doesn't mean that the remaining percentage were successful. Many of them have their owners working much more than corporate full time for less money then they'd be working on a cushy 9-5 job. For an opposite anecdote to yours, a family opened up an ice cream shop around the corner. They had good business and made ok money, but closed after 2 years. Why? Not only was the end of the day profit not great, they were heavily sacrificing time with their own family in order to run the day to day operations. They could have hired more people to handle those day to day hurdles, but that would have meant almost no take home pay. We should encourage people to "invent their own futures" but we also have to be realistic, because we don't have good safety nets for what happens when inventing your future fails, which means you have to make your own safety net. It's also not always trivial to re-enter corporate gigs after you've been doing something else for years, especially if closing of your small business has burned you out. It takes much more than just a good idea to make a small business succeed.
- inconceivable 3y ago
  "yeah but you might fail and then your life is destroyed" is not exactly a new take on the issue. this is in fact what 99% of people will tell you in real life if you try it. 10 years later those same people will either forget they said anything, or pretend they were on your side all along if you make it.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - DangitBobby 3y ago
    They were on your side all along, otherwise they wouldn't have bothered with the uncomfortable conversation about how they don't think your idea is going to be successful.
ctvo 3y ago
> Or maybe just be a victim forever but I don’t think that’s a good outcome. Alternatively, recognize that you have two anecdotes of people succeeding. It doesn't mean there aren't systemic issues, and people can both strive to succeed in the current system and push for its change. It's dull reading tl;dr: bootstrap yourself like my friends.
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  Everything starts small and takes time. The moment someone gets successful there is some tendency to try and tear them down, find out why they were privileged, what connections they had, and worst case say they got lucky. If it weren’t for people trying to do something - anything - taking a risk - not knowing if it will succeed but not caring if it goes under or not - there wouldn’t even be anything. No art, no startups, no creative endeavors. Especially among the highly educated in our western system, people desire guaranteed paths. “Check these boxes and get this, get this credential and get that.” Everything in reality is hustle and sales. As another anecdote a former gym trainer is now a firefighter. She tried a long time to be a firefighter but couldn’t break into it despite passing all the tests - there is a whole application process following all the tests and credentials and it’s quite complex. So after a few years she started sniffing out where the firefighters hung out, their bars, and went out there and spoke to them, told them her story, made connections. She did get accepted following that because the people who could make it happen helped her, after she took the initiative to think outside the box and meet them in a unique way. All the successful people have a different story. And your definition of success can vary greatly. But to say society is making success impossible is simply untrue - I see so much opportunity and so many upcoming people all the time. Unless you are disabled or traumatized or have some other issue, I can’t take someone who blames society for their lack of “being where they want to be in life” seriously. Not in America at least.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    > Especially among the highly educated in our western system, people desire guaranteed paths. Yes, guaranteed healthcare and land. Option 1) you can have a likelihood of being able to provide healthcare and decent home for your kids. Option 2) high likelihood of not being able to provide either for your kids. I am not referring to the 0.1% of people who have the option at tech startups paying generous pay and benefits.
bugglebeetle 3y ago
50% of small businesses fail within the first five years, so lovely anecdotes and all, but textbook survivorship bias.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  That’s not a new phenomenon. Life has always been hard, the narrative that it’s gotten harder is much more of a survivorship bias.
  - bugglebeetle 3y ago
    Sorry, but statistics don’t care about your platitudes.
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      What statistics? All the stats I've seen are that there has never been less poverty in the world.
      - winphone1974 3y ago
        Many of the failures in the west are far above what global statistics define as poverty, so this doesn't make much sense
        HDThoreaun 3y ago
        Do you have any statistics saying that the west is poorer than it used to be?
        brnaftr361 3y ago
        Can you transmute qualitative data into quantitative data and reliably measure it?
      - bugglebeetle 3y ago
hotpotamus 3y ago
That's pretty unusual to graduate college at 18, and then to start as a construction worker with a college degree. But my anecdote would be my uncle who started as a diesel mechanic from a young age. He worked hard all his life but never made a lot of money and then died of cancer at 60.
- monero-xmr 3y ago
  I meant high school, edited
HEmanZ 3y ago
1) there is lots of opportunity in the market 2) the opportunities in the market are less common and more difficult, in labor, luck, or expertise required than the past 3 generations experienced. How are these two contradictory things? Put another way, at the individual level, there is still lots of opportunity. But at the aggregate level there is a squeeze.
bittercynic 3y ago
I'm sincerely happy for their success, and it an important feature of the US that some sharp, driven people are able to create a substantial fortune for themselves. In some ways this is in direct conflict with working-class people being able to assemble a stable life where they can depend on being able to work diligently and have some stability in life. I think the total wealth of society could be greater if we adjusted some laws and the tax code to make it more possible for working class people to have a real shot at a stable life through diligent, hard, work.
- pdonis 3y ago
  > make it more possible for working class people to have a real shot at a stable life through diligent, hard, work The problem with this is that, ultimately, if you view yourself as "working class", as opposed to being an entrepreneur, then your shot at a stable life through diligent, hard work is not dependent on the laws and the tax code, it's dependent on the overall business environment and what kinds of employers you can find. Which means, on luck. If you are a lucky working class person, you will be able to find an employer who (a) recognizes your diligence and hard work, (b) is able to manage the business risks of the company so that they can afford to reward you accordingly, and (c) does in fact reward you as you deserve, i.e., is willing to share the benefits of the business with you even though you're not an owner, you're just an employee. I'm not saying there are no such employers out there; but my description should make it evident that they will be rare. Far too rare for all diligent, hard-working working class people to benefit from them. The diligent, hard-working working class people who aren't lucky enough to find one of those employers will have to live with whatever they can get, which will range all the way from "okay but not great" down to "sweatshop". The only way to escape this crapshoot is to be an entrepreneur--i.e., to own at least a piece of whatever business your livelihood depends on (and in practice it has to be a large enough piece that your voice will carry weight in business decisions). In other words, dealing with unavoidable business risks due to the fact that the world is always changing and businesses have to adjust, is something that, all things considered, you are better off not outsourcing to an employer.
  - andrekandre 3y ago
yieldcrv 3y ago
> I think there is a failure to think outside the prescribed paths. because the prescribed paths work for a larger population. it doesn't need ingenuity, and less luck. hence why it is generic advice. economies cannot support everyone being an entrepreneur. if you want to be a go-getter that's fine. you're in like company here. but its dumb or at least disingenuous to think of this as a predictably available example for all.
rnk 3y ago
Great that these people had success. But how many breweries are there a town of 10k people, 1 or 2 maybe. These are the 1% success stories. The economics doesn't allow each of us to open businesses that succeed, there just isn't that much demand. Such as amazon wiping out many small stores, before that walmart killing small cities downtowns when they built one of the edge of town. That doesn't mean there were not some other new businesses to be formed, but there's a limit.
diob 3y ago
Aren't these just anecdotes though? What was their background? What time period did they do these things? Did they have support growing up? A strong network? How many other friends or neighbors do you have and what are their outcomes? Has anyone failed? Why? Sorry, but I'll trust the data around economic equality above random stranger anecdotes online. Yeah, I myself am doing wonderful as well, but I'm not so narcissistic as to imagine that's some special property of "not being a victim". What a bleak outlook to have of one's fellow man.
austhrow743 3y ago
Needing to invent your own future is things getting harder.
XorNot 3y ago
What do you do though? Why aren't you those people? Why don't you have their story?

georgeecollins 3y ago

What you might have that your parents didn’t have is a longer life expectancy. Not for sure, but it is a good idea to consider the deadlines in your head.

vinyl7 3y ago
Its not worth living longer if life sucks. Deadline is early 30s for kids and 50 to buy a house
- xwdv 3y ago
  Do not have kids before buying a house. This will almost certainly guarantee you’ll never reach escape velocity to buy a house if you have standard income levels. Also, it doesn’t actually matter much when you have kids. As long as you have a fertile partner and sufficient resources you can basically have them whenever. The time to have kids depends on what parenting style you want. If you want a more hands off approach where you mostly just prevent kids from making stupid decisions while they decide their own course in life, it’s fine, perhaps advantageous being an older parent. If you prefer though to micromanage your kid and learn about life with them as you go along and get in arguments with them about the best way to do things, being younger is better.
WalterSear 3y ago
Fwiw, life expectancy is dropping in the US, in part due to lifestyle choices, but also due to deaths of despair. The increase in deaths of despair is indicative of adversity in the greater population - not just those who essentially commit suicide via drugs or alcohol. It's dropped by much yet, but I anticipate life expectancy to drop further - and become more significant in relation to previous generations as economic adversity increases, also making adequate medical care harder to come by.

darkclouds 3y ago

A positive spin but arguably deceitful spin on the state of affairs in the US and UK. https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2023/uk-drops-new-global-ranking-life-expectancy https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2023/uk-drops-new-gl... "A new analysis of global rankings of life expectancy over seven decades shows the UK has done worse than all G7 countries except the USA." "According to the OECD, state the researchers, the UK recently became the second most economically unequal country in Europe after Bulgaria." Me personally, I dont even think I'll be reaching retirement age if I continue to live in the UK, and thats not through not wanting to work, but thats because of the how the UK has become. Everything has just got too expensive living in the UK now. More people died during the period of time energy prices rose rapidly recently than during the covid pandemic in the UK, but you cant point this stuff out to people in the street because they'll have a go back, a form of denial of the situation in the UK. Its become very dog eat dog, quality of work in decline but costs still going up. Crime in my experience is also off the scale and the attitude of the police now means I no longer report crimes to them. So yes this sort of article is portrayed as positive spin but is in fact deceitful spin.

908B64B197 3y ago
> Me personally, I dont even think I'll be reaching retirement age if I continue to live in the UK, and thats not through not wanting to work, but thats because of the how the UK has become. Everything has just got too expensive living in the UK now. Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Europeans could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?). Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT. It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for UK nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US [0]. [0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-brain-trade http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...

netbioserror 3y ago

Cost of living isn't going up. The value of our money is going down, and real wages are stagnant. Technology is, at it has always been, deflationary, but we see none of those benefits. Basically, the typical process of getting iterative raises has become fighting to tread water. Saving cash or cash-derived assets is somewhat meaningless because you're guaranteed a future where the savings buy a fraction of what they do when you put it away.

skulk 3y ago
No. The cost of living IS going up. Corporations bought a huge chunk of the housing stock and have been fixing the prices and squeezing renters. Everything else you said is still true, though.

lumb63 3y ago

I’m not going to argue that reaching traditional life milestones isn’t harder for a lot of young folks today, but that isn’t really the focus of the article in my opinion. A lot of the folks mentioned are from one or two generations prior, and took unconventional paths to get to their present life. A lot of wildly successful people say they didn’t really start to figure life out until their 30s or 40s. I think the spirit of the article is “you never know when your time might come”.

rr808 3y ago

So many people I know in tech have incredibly highly paid jobs, much much higher than their parents. That doesn't even include the immigrants from much less developed countries.

yodsanklai 3y ago
The people you know is certainly not a representative sample.
- ls612 3y ago
  The representative sample also has higher earnings than their parents representative sample did at their age.

sokoloff 3y ago

> It's more like you may never have what your parents had. That’s a natural consequence of economic mobility. It would suck in a different way if everyone always had more than their parents in absolute (inflation-adjusted) amounts and obviously, not everyone can have more in percentile terms.

WalterSear 3y ago
Except there's more stuff around, and it's increasingly unevenly distributed, not due to disparate effort or ability.
- silisili 3y ago
  See also: https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/average-net-worth-by-age https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/average-net-worth...
  - frickinLasers 3y ago
    I had some fuzzy concept of wealth inequality in the US, but this is just fucking outrageous.

mancerayder 3y ago

The point of the article.. (the positive spin as you put it) is that one's mental state due to increased wisdom and experienced puts one in a better position to achieve or appreciate the milestones that may have not worked out at a younger age. Fame in the example of the musician, finding appreciation in a partner in the older couple, etc. The message is around things happening in their due course rather than in some sort of age-delimited set of phases. While idealistic, it's more optimistic than the feeling of having failed many of us feel as we compare ourselves to others.

karaterobot 3y ago

It doesn't feel like life is actually getting harder, it feels like people's expectations of what will be given to them is just unrealistic. If you bought into the idea that just getting a college degree would guarantee a dreamlike future with a great job and a house, I don't know what to tell you. There were never any promises made to that effect by people who mattered. Maybe some vague memory of a TV show or an old movie misled you into believing this? In reality, life has always been hard, dreams have always been crushed or deferred. But now we have instantaneous access to all recorded information, are constantly entertained, never get lost, and can travel anywhere on the planet in a day.

dorkwood 3y ago
If you live in Australia, it’s hard to disagree with the numbers. The average Australian in 1984 could buy a home that cost 3.3 times their annual income. In 2023, it's 10 times what the average person earns in a year.

neilv 3y ago

I'm repelled by "millennials are choosing experiences over things!" which I perceive as disingenuous and/or vapid. Let people afford a home and family-raising, and without a lifetime of student loan debt required for BS jobs. And stop trying to twist the forced economic exploitation of us, to sell us your avocado mindfulness spa package, like a gratuitous insult thrown on top of everything else.

spacemadness 3y ago
Is that angst I’m reading? That’s because you are judging your experiences. Lucky for you we have a corporate sponsored mindfulness bagged lunch that is non-optional. Now be happy and get back to work.

Sophistifunk 3y ago

Aw cummon, I'm finally in a position where we could have kids without ruining all our lives with poverty. Now we're in our mid 40s and it's far too late.

indigoabstract 3y ago

This is conventional wisdom at its best and it appears to be true most of the time. Except when it isn't and we're left wondering "why didn't I think of that?".

freefrog334433 3y ago

While I understand the anger that our parent's generation had an easier life, we have reached limits to growth, like a jar full of bacteria 99% full. Articles like these help reduce people's anxiety over the drop in living standards that will force them to make changes which they would not make voluntarily. Our parent's lifestyles were never sustainable.