7 ms·

I can narrow it down to three critical problems with our society. 1. Car dependent cities. 2. Housing crisis 3. Wage suppression Young people can't go anywh

by foxyv 3y ago

I can narrow it down to three critical problems with our society. 1. Car dependent cities. 2. Housing crisis 3. Wage suppression Young people can't go anywhere because they can't afford a car because all their money goes to rent. Even if they WANTED to go somewhere, there isn't anywhere to go because car dependent infrastructure has killed all the places that young people used to hang out. They don't make enough money to survive, much less thrive. I know a lot of GenZ people living in rotting camper trailers, sheds, tents, and cars. Many of my millennial friends are going through the same thing. They have no savings, no house, and they could never afford to start a family. A child is a ruinous event instead of joyous. There is no safety net and the tight rope is made of silly string. But what they can afford are cell phones and Instagram/TikTok where they talk to each other.

stcredzero 3y ago
But what they can afford are cell phones and Instagram/TikTok where they talk to each other. On top of the physical impoverishment, young people are being starved of meaning and face to face social interaction. Online "communities" are not real communities. Hell, many face to face ones aren't either, at this point. Substituting online interaction and faux "community" for the real thing is like giving a baby Karo syrup and water instead of milk. It seems sweet and it's even addictive. Eventually, it will harm or even kill the subject.
- foxyv 3y ago
  > Substituting online interaction and faux "community" for the real thing is like giving a baby Karo syrup and water instead of milk. It seems sweet and it's even addictive. Eventually, it will harm or even kill the subject. Agreed, but what community do they have as an alternative? Especially after they leave school.
toomuchtodo 3y ago
Conversely, here is an example of the concerns of older generations that just happened to strangely present itself in my Google News feed today. https://www.villages-news.com/2023/11/05/do-not-buy-a-home-in-the-villages/ https://www.villages-news.com/2023/11/05/do-not-buy-a-home-i... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida https://www.thevillages.com/ https://www.thevillages.com/
- switchbak 3y ago
  But be fair, he couldn't secure tee time until 4pm! The injustice!
  - mnky9800n 3y ago
    I cried tears for him.
- mikestew 3y ago
  The concerns of older generations that live in The Villages. That's bordering on finding someone that complained about the quality of the wine served at the country club, and then using that as your basis of what "older generations" are concerned about.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    The villages is actually pretty affordable. If you have a nice house, even in a low to medium cost of lviign area you can sell it and buy a place in the villages with the proceeds. It's not like south florida where everything is a million plus. The villages was specifically put inland and designed to be affordable for blue collar workers that have been working for 45 years. Excluding children allows the government to save a bunch of money on schooling and the like.
- jedberg 3y ago
  That post is satire, right? It has to be.
KittenInABox 3y ago
> there isn't anywhere to go because car dependent infrastructure has killed all the places that young people used to hang out. I think it's way more than car dependent infrastructure. It's also the pressures of monetizing everything including social spaces. The only place I know in my town where you will be unharassed for hanging out in the open free of charge for hours out of the weather is the library. The mall will encourage you and your group to leave with security. The coffee shops and lounges require purchases of drink. Even my local makerspace requires at least one purchase to hang out in their scheduled "free" hangout meetups.
- gen220 3y ago
  I think if we fixed the housing crisis and wage suppression, requiring nominal purchases wouldn't be such a significant barrier. Nominal fees are like congestion pricing. If you don't have them, the space loses its ability to fulfill its original purpose.
  - KittenInABox 3y ago
    I strongly disagree with this for children & community buildings. Children shouldn't be subject to congestion pricing. Teenagers should be free to rove a mall and be harmlessly loud and messy without being pressured to buy something-- chances are they will buy something eventually but it shouldn't be a requirement just to participate in community. I also wish my local makerspace didn't require a purchase. They should be funded by a government grant or wealthy donor such that impoverished people can learn skills and find community as equally as those with the spending money to chuck 5$ on a doodaad they'll never use.
xwdv 3y ago
It gets worse: in a society where children are a luxury requiring careful investment and sacrifice to conceive, child abuse will be far more rampant, as there will be growing pressure from parents to make their children some sort of positive ROI, otherwise why even bother having them?
mixdup 3y ago
Did you actually read the article? The three things you cite were literally never mentioned. We've been heavily car dependent since the 50s. Most of the places teens have been hanging out for the past 40 years are built around cars--malls, theaters, etc--you drive to all of them Teens are not sitting around sulking because they can't ride the train somewhere. They're all glued to their phones doomscrolling until they can't take it anymore
- mintplant 3y ago
  foxyv's comment is much closer to how my friends feel about the world than the convenient list of conservative talking points presented in the article.
  - dingnuts 3y ago
    Jon Haidt is a conservative now?? good lord, if that is what you think you must be so far left that anybody to the right of Stalin is a Republican. Jon Haidt is about as even-tempered and desiring of reconciliation as anybody out there. We could all stand to be a little more like him. Please, talk to the people in your lives about politics, or the polarization will only continue to intensify. Common ground is found through dialog, not through cutting everyone in your life out because they fall to one side or another of an arbitrary ideological goalpost that you've decided is the critical opinion everyone needs to agree with in order to be blessed with your presence. I say this because Jon Haidt started this website, among other things: https://civilpolitics.org https://civilpolitics.org If Haidt and those like him are getting lumped in with the MAGA election-denying types, we're all screwed.
    - vore 3y ago
      Are these not literally a laundry list of conservative talking points? And, by the way, you can be conservative without being MAGA. Love — “Monogamy is so outdated.” Community — “I have enough friends online.” Country — “I’m embarrassed to be an American.” Work — “I’m quiet-quitting.” Family — “I’m not bringing kids into this melting world.” Faith — “My parents are such naive Bible thumpers. By the way, what’s your star sign?”
smt88 3y ago
Your list is three angles of the same problem, which is financial insecurity. I'd say it's actually just two things: financial insecurity and climate change. Both feel hopeless and both make them feel like there is no future no matter what they do.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  As a millennial, I'm pretty sure I've only seen those problems get worse; I wonder if it feels like there is no hope because there is in fact no hope.
  - foxyv 3y ago
    I think it's important that we all identify these issues so that, when we have the power to enact change, that we do so. Eventually Millennials will be in the driver seat. Same as the Baby Boomers and eventually Generation Z after us. Just because there is no hope now, doesn't mean an opportunity won't eventually fall into our laps. There is already a lot of change underway in our cities to address these issues because they MUST address them to survive. It will happen, hopefully in time for our children to experience a better society than we did.
- itsoktocry 3y ago
  >financial insecurity I think financial expectations are warped, too. Look at the viral TikTok video from a few weeks ago, where a recent marketing graduate was wondering why she wasn't making $100k right out of school. Or I recently saw a Twitter discussion where someone said, "Sure you can raise a family on a $100k, but you'll have to do it in 1000sqft. Who wants to do that?". We, I am, and I'm as happy as I've ever been. Financial inequality has completely skewed what is seen as "normal". We need to fix both that perception, and the actual inequality.
  - smt88 3y ago
    It's perfectly realistic to want more than 1,000 sqft to raise a family because we live in a country where all previous living generations were able to do that for far less than $100k. It's not the absolute quality of life that's infuriating. It's seeing how previous generations plundered the country and then pulled up the drawbridge behind them.
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
And the three problems are all each exacerbated by the other two. For fuck's sake, there's a complex near me [0] that has STUDIO apartments that start at $1,690. This is a suburb. It's not even close to anything. Even the metro line is about a mile walk. The nearest grocery store is over a mile away. Granted, our minimum wage is somewhat high at $15.45/hr. But even at that rate, it would take 110 hours of pretax wages to pay for it. Post-tax, it'd be at least 75% of your monthly pay. [0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/EYCy2kvXsRYCjz4J7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/EYCy2kvXsRYCjz4J7
- hondo77 3y ago
  > Even the metro line is about a mile walk. The nearest grocery store is over a mile away. The horror.
  - jonwest 3y ago
    You ever walked a mile carrying two armfuls of groceries? That’s brutal without a car, and without public transit nearby, that makes it incredibly inconvenient and difficult to have food in the fridge. Get outta here with your feigned sarcasm, it’s a legitimate problem.
    - hondo77 3y ago
      Yes, I have. That's why I switched over to a foldable shopping cart. Cutting-edge 20th century technology for today's modern problems.
    - SirMaster 3y ago
      Grocery stores? I thought all the young people are doing things like DoorDash, Hello Fresh or Amazon Fresh etc. Not saying they should be doing that so much, but seems like they aren’t interested in shopping at a Grocery store.
      - tyg13 3y ago
        The smart and motivated ones will try to get to the grocery store. Unfortunately, for most, those services do so much more harm than good. What makes sense for a wealthy professional to pay for the convenience of food or grocery delivery ends up being a small fortune for a lot of young people who can't afford a car to go to the grocery store. It's a clear short- vs long-term thinking issue, but the reality is most young people are living with so little hope for the future that denying immediate pleasures in search of a future payoff seems naive and pointless.
madengr 3y ago
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thepasswordis 3y ago
>1. Car dependent cities. Do you think that cities used to be less "car dependent"? What point in American history are you imagining where people weren't taking cars around? You could look back to maybe the early 20th century, but what that meant is that you had to live right next to the factory where you worked, which was obviously terrible. Cars meant that you could have separate areas for living and working, and this was considered a good thing. edit: people keep making the same point, so I'll reply to all of you at once: do you think you could find a single person on any public transportation anywhere in America who wouldn't take a free, brand new Tesla model X with free charging and a free place to park it over riding the bus? Or if they had that brand new Tesla: would any of them trade it straight across for a free lifetime bus pass? Of course not. Having your own car is objectively better in every meaningful way. The reason people take public transportation is because they can't afford a car, and yes owning a house with a garage is part of affording the car.
- lainga 3y ago
  The 1920s?
  - thepasswordis 3y ago
    The cities of the 1920s where absolutely horrific places to live. They were filthy and polluted. People fled them to the suburbs for a reason: because they were terrible.
    - malcolmgreaves 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - thepasswordis 3y ago
        This is…factually incorrect, and honestly insulting. No I mean actual measurable particulate counts in the air around factories, and the industrial vehicles moving goods in and out of those factories. When people talk about “environmental racism”, that is: making poor people live in the worst parts of town, they’re talking about the environmental aspects of those parts of town.
emmet 3y ago
100% correct here. Young people have been robbed of public space, and her solution to them finding even a facsimile of one to replace it is to... rob them of that too.
- thepasswordis 3y ago
  >Young people have been robbed of public space What do you mean "robbed of public space"? What public space was taken away? The only public space which seems inaccessible to me that used to be is: parks and sidewalks, both of which have become open air drug markets/tent cities. The city where I live has no parks I am comfortable taking my children to, and we actively avoid walking on the sidewalks because it's dangerous.
  - fzzzy 3y ago
    Didn't you answer your own question？
    - thepasswordis 3y ago
      No? What does turning my public parks into drug dens have to do with car ownership?
      - emmet 3y ago
        my guy you literally brought up the parks problem unprompted so you clearly understand the issue being presented here
        thepasswordis 3y ago
        No I absolutely do not see a link between turning parks into fentanyl use zones and cars. I live in a super walkable city with two grocery stores and a million restaurants and coffee shops within walking distance. Many many people don’t own cars here. The parks are unusable and the sidewalks are campgrounds for drug addicts. What is the link to cars here?
morkalork 3y ago
Beyond wage suppression, it feels like there isn't competition any more. Instead of one company undercutting another to offer a better deal, both or all just raise prices for maximum revenue extraction. For example telecom companies and cell phone plans in Canada. They know its an essential service and charge exhorbently for access, because what are you going to do, not have a cellphone? If every "mandatory for living" service (housing, medical, food, utilities, telecom,...) does that, what's left?
- emmanuel_1234 3y ago
  I feel Canadians get particularly shafted: lower wage, higher cost of life on essentials, stupid high rent in first tier city (where the jobs are!). On the wages only, I wonder what justifies that Canadians make so little in comparison to their American peers living just an hour away across the border. Taxes alone don't seem enough to justify that gap. My take is that Canadians just... accepted it.
- foxyv 3y ago
  Monopolies and Cartels are definitely a huge contributor to wage suppression and increased cost of living.
lettergram 3y ago
> 1. Car dependent cities. > 2. Housing crisis Ugh… you can improve the situation by spreading out. Cheaper housing requires cheaper, less dense, populations. Using cars enables cheaper housing. If you want cheaper cars and transportation in general, it’s cheaper energy & cheaper vehicles. Both require less regulation. You can’t save in a city, where your paying a landlord and the wages are perfectly at market equilibrium. You can only get ahead by moving out, living cheaper and making decent pay. It’s exactly what the older generations realized.
- Arelius 3y ago
  We've already spread out a lot. Should young people be living acres away from the next house and an hours drive from their friends? I'm not sure that'll solve loneliness and disconnection. Not to mention that these days, even doing that won't save you much, or in some cases, post pandemic you'll be paying a premium.
- throwawayqqq11 3y ago
  Total BS. Cars and their supporting infra take up space. Less regulations will never get rid of increased cost of individual transportation. Public transportion is the only way to push energy demand significantly. Advising your boomer strategy "to just save" in the current era is so ignorant. This ignorance combined with the ever prospect of passive growth is imo the reason why rent extracts much more out of a life since the golden 50s.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  > Cheaper housing requires cheaper, less dense, populations. This could not possibly be more the opposite of the case.
- foxyv 3y ago
  You may want to consider why cities are so unaffordable right now. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/10/21/the-other-reason-freeway-building-hollowed-out-americas-cities https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/10/21/the-other-rea...
itsoktocry 3y ago
>Car dependent cities. This doesn't make sense to me. Generations previous were equally car dependent but got by. The current generations are choosing to not go anywhere because they believe they can get the experience by phone. I think the assumption that "if they could get there, they would" is incorrect; they don't want to.
- marssaxman 3y ago
  > Generations previous were equally car dependent but got by. Only a couple of them! You are aware that the mass adoption of cars was a mid-20th-century phenomenon, yes? US cities were radically reshaped around interstate highways during the '50s and '60s. This car-dependence is quite a recent thing in the human experience.
- foxyv 3y ago
  > Generations previous were equally car dependent but got by. How much more prosperous would our nation be if we had not invested such a significant amount of our time and wealth into cars? We could have built colonies on the Moon with the amount we spent on building more lanes for people to be stuck in traffic.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
next_xibalba 3y ago
When, to your estimation, did cities become “car dependent”? Most cities have been car centric since long before Gen Z. Real wage growth has been stalled out since the 1970s, several generations before Gen Z.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  By my estimation, the problems highlighted by the comment you replied to indeed started around the 70s. I think what happened recently is that the internet and social media came along as the perfect, but also terrible, solution to those problems. I think the couple generations in between experienced the problems more as boredom and ennui. Indeed, "gen x" is pretty famous for this, and I think "millenials" are just a mish-mash of the late stage of "gen x" and the early stage of the "zoomer" generations.
- foxyv 3y ago
  I would estimate that it started with Brown v. Board of Education in the mid 1950s. As racial integration started we saw "White Flight" from city centers. Naturally, those people exiting the cities wanted a way to enter the cities for jobs, education, entertainment, etc... So then we saw the construction of Urban Freeways in the 60s and 70s. Before then, cars were unaffordable for almost everyone. It was kind of like owning an airplane nowadays. It was doable, but most didn't bother unless they really needed one since there were more affordable alternatives and you could walk everywhere you needed to go anyways. Since then, things have only gotten worse as we slowly make cars the only viable method of transportation through land use requirements and neglected infrastructure.
lupyro 3y ago
I'm a millenial myself, and not a parent so parents please correct me. 4. Modern parenting is torture for children. Up until the teenage years kids need to feel useful. They need to be able to help fix things, etc. They need to get into a little bit of trouble and get dinged up a bit. Teenagers need a lot more freedom. Every ounce of their body is pushing them to distance themselves from their family, have sex and take risks. Instead parents insist on this "no drugs, no sex" policy. Of course both of those things can present major problems, which is why they should be discussed but not forbidden. Even sex ed today is maximizing fear and pushing waiting until marriage which is just as bad. As the parent points out, living in a car dependent city with nowhere to go and no way to get there leaves you no choice but to stay home. Staying home means tv, internet and video games. Parents are out on a holy war against that as well. Are you suffocating yet? Now remember that in addition to everything above your texts, location, browsing history, grades, etc. are all being tracked and reported for your parents to further control you. Could you imagine if you were treated like this as an adult. You'd have a civil war. Let them fuck. Let them work. Let them do drugs. Let them make mistakes for christ sake. All of these things have consequences and are worth keeping in mind. But coddling them until 18 and expecting them to be functional is like raising an elephant from birth isolated until adulthood then releasing them to the african savannah. They'll be dead before sunset.
- chlodwig 3y ago
  Instead parents insist on this "no drugs, no sex" policy. Of course both of those things can present major problems, which is why they should be discussed but not forbidden. Even sex ed today is maximizing fear and pushing waiting until marriage which is just as bad. My impression is that there is far less of this now than there was thirty years ago or fifty years ago.
ctoth 3y ago
Remarkably, these issues you've articulated perfectly-capture the progressive bugbear zeitgeist and yet do not seem to have much (if any) support in the original article. Is it possible it actually might be the phones somehow as she argues?
- sanderjd 3y ago
  The comment you replied to agrees that it's the phones (well, the social media accessed by the phones)... But then it asks, why? It's not orthogonal, it's additive. And I might suggest that the author of the essay very likely hasn't considered this next level deeper, because "this is water".
- foxyv 3y ago
  If you think car dependency is an imaginary problem (bugbear), I would invite you to walk or ride a bicycle more. You may find that the bugbear is just a bear. As for housing affordability and wage suppression, these are just established facts. One visit to Zillow to look at a place you used to live is enough. My old apartment that cost $800/month is currently going for $2400/month 8 years later. Minimum wage hasn't changed since 2009 and is currently $7.24/hour.
nunez 3y ago
> Young people can't go anywhere because they can't afford a car because all their money goes to rent. Even if they WANTED to go somewhere, there isn't anywhere to go because car dependent infrastructure has killed all the places that young people used to hang out. This is a big one IMO. We moved to a Northern NJ suburb in the late-90s. However, NYC Metro suburbs are very different from the "suburbs" that are a dime a dozen here in Texas. The town was small --- about a mile in square area. You could walk pretty much everywhere within it, even though some points were far. Almost every street had a sidewalk that was maintained by the city. Since the city followed a grid system, routes from one persons house to another could be done on foot. I spent a lot of time walking in my teens because of this, though not being allowed to have a car played a big part in that. (Walking a lot comes naturally to me because of this; in fact, a big reason why I hated living in these suburbs was because of how difficult it was to walk somewhere interesting instead of "mandatory walking" around a fake pond.) By comparison, suburbs in Texas (or at least here in Houston, and definitely in Dallas) are gigantic. You could walk for miles before you hit literally anything. The nearest business in the suburb we lived in when we moved here was 1.5 miles away on foot. The first 0.5 mile within the neighborhood was fine since the neighborhood had nicely curated sidewalks. Once you left the neighborhood though, you were walking on the 45mph-rated streets that people definitely drive 15+ over on (usually on their phones, since we're on the subject). None of these neighborhoods have a grid system, so going from one house to another within the neighborhood could take a shocking amount of time despite being a short distance away. This design is done on purpose to "increase safety," which is at best farcical considering how unbelievably spread out these communities are and how distant they are from anything. I hope the next generation of parents opt for smaller, more walkable towns with smaller houses and proper city centers instead of gigantic, cavernous and mostly empty sets of endless houses. I think this can be done while also remaining affordable, but we, collectively, have to want it. Otherwise, yeah, the screens will "win" because the Internet is cheap, immediate and has basically anything you can think of.
lamontcg 3y ago
Seems like the problems are more: 1. Phones and social media 2. Anomie

by foxyv 3y ago

stcredzero 3y ago

But what they can afford are cell phones and Instagram/TikTok where they talk to each other. On top of the physical impoverishment, young people are being starved of meaning and face to face social interaction. Online "communities" are not real communities. Hell, many face to face ones aren't either, at this point. Substituting online interaction and faux "community" for the real thing is like giving a baby Karo syrup and water instead of milk. It seems sweet and it's even addictive. Eventually, it will harm or even kill the subject.

foxyv 3y ago
> Substituting online interaction and faux "community" for the real thing is like giving a baby Karo syrup and water instead of milk. It seems sweet and it's even addictive. Eventually, it will harm or even kill the subject. Agreed, but what community do they have as an alternative? Especially after they leave school.

toomuchtodo 3y ago

Conversely, here is an example of the concerns of older generations that just happened to strangely present itself in my Google News feed today. https://www.villages-news.com/2023/11/05/do-not-buy-a-home-in-the-villages/ https://www.villages-news.com/2023/11/05/do-not-buy-a-home-i... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida https://www.thevillages.com/ https://www.thevillages.com/

switchbak 3y ago
But be fair, he couldn't secure tee time until 4pm! The injustice!
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  I cried tears for him.
mikestew 3y ago
The concerns of older generations that live in The Villages. That's bordering on finding someone that complained about the quality of the wine served at the country club, and then using that as your basis of what "older generations" are concerned about.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  The villages is actually pretty affordable. If you have a nice house, even in a low to medium cost of lviign area you can sell it and buy a place in the villages with the proceeds. It's not like south florida where everything is a million plus. The villages was specifically put inland and designed to be affordable for blue collar workers that have been working for 45 years. Excluding children allows the government to save a bunch of money on schooling and the like.
jedberg 3y ago
That post is satire, right? It has to be.

KittenInABox 3y ago

> there isn't anywhere to go because car dependent infrastructure has killed all the places that young people used to hang out. I think it's way more than car dependent infrastructure. It's also the pressures of monetizing everything including social spaces. The only place I know in my town where you will be unharassed for hanging out in the open free of charge for hours out of the weather is the library. The mall will encourage you and your group to leave with security. The coffee shops and lounges require purchases of drink. Even my local makerspace requires at least one purchase to hang out in their scheduled "free" hangout meetups.

gen220 3y ago
I think if we fixed the housing crisis and wage suppression, requiring nominal purchases wouldn't be such a significant barrier. Nominal fees are like congestion pricing. If you don't have them, the space loses its ability to fulfill its original purpose.
- KittenInABox 3y ago
  I strongly disagree with this for children & community buildings. Children shouldn't be subject to congestion pricing. Teenagers should be free to rove a mall and be harmlessly loud and messy without being pressured to buy something-- chances are they will buy something eventually but it shouldn't be a requirement just to participate in community. I also wish my local makerspace didn't require a purchase. They should be funded by a government grant or wealthy donor such that impoverished people can learn skills and find community as equally as those with the spending money to chuck 5$ on a doodaad they'll never use.

xwdv 3y ago

It gets worse: in a society where children are a luxury requiring careful investment and sacrifice to conceive, child abuse will be far more rampant, as there will be growing pressure from parents to make their children some sort of positive ROI, otherwise why even bother having them?

mixdup 3y ago

Did you actually read the article? The three things you cite were literally never mentioned. We've been heavily car dependent since the 50s. Most of the places teens have been hanging out for the past 40 years are built around cars--malls, theaters, etc--you drive to all of them Teens are not sitting around sulking because they can't ride the train somewhere. They're all glued to their phones doomscrolling until they can't take it anymore

mintplant 3y ago
foxyv's comment is much closer to how my friends feel about the world than the convenient list of conservative talking points presented in the article.
- dingnuts 3y ago
  Jon Haidt is a conservative now?? good lord, if that is what you think you must be so far left that anybody to the right of Stalin is a Republican. Jon Haidt is about as even-tempered and desiring of reconciliation as anybody out there. We could all stand to be a little more like him. Please, talk to the people in your lives about politics, or the polarization will only continue to intensify. Common ground is found through dialog, not through cutting everyone in your life out because they fall to one side or another of an arbitrary ideological goalpost that you've decided is the critical opinion everyone needs to agree with in order to be blessed with your presence. I say this because Jon Haidt started this website, among other things: https://civilpolitics.org https://civilpolitics.org If Haidt and those like him are getting lumped in with the MAGA election-denying types, we're all screwed.
  - vore 3y ago
    Are these not literally a laundry list of conservative talking points? And, by the way, you can be conservative without being MAGA. Love — “Monogamy is so outdated.” Community — “I have enough friends online.” Country — “I’m embarrassed to be an American.” Work — “I’m quiet-quitting.” Family — “I’m not bringing kids into this melting world.” Faith — “My parents are such naive Bible thumpers. By the way, what’s your star sign?”

smt88 3y ago

Your list is three angles of the same problem, which is financial insecurity. I'd say it's actually just two things: financial insecurity and climate change. Both feel hopeless and both make them feel like there is no future no matter what they do.

hotpotamus 3y ago
As a millennial, I'm pretty sure I've only seen those problems get worse; I wonder if it feels like there is no hope because there is in fact no hope.
- foxyv 3y ago
  I think it's important that we all identify these issues so that, when we have the power to enact change, that we do so. Eventually Millennials will be in the driver seat. Same as the Baby Boomers and eventually Generation Z after us. Just because there is no hope now, doesn't mean an opportunity won't eventually fall into our laps. There is already a lot of change underway in our cities to address these issues because they MUST address them to survive. It will happen, hopefully in time for our children to experience a better society than we did.
itsoktocry 3y ago
>financial insecurity I think financial expectations are warped, too. Look at the viral TikTok video from a few weeks ago, where a recent marketing graduate was wondering why she wasn't making $100k right out of school. Or I recently saw a Twitter discussion where someone said, "Sure you can raise a family on a $100k, but you'll have to do it in 1000sqft. Who wants to do that?". We, I am, and I'm as happy as I've ever been. Financial inequality has completely skewed what is seen as "normal". We need to fix both that perception, and the actual inequality.
- smt88 3y ago
  It's perfectly realistic to want more than 1,000 sqft to raise a family because we live in a country where all previous living generations were able to do that for far less than $100k. It's not the absolute quality of life that's infuriating. It's seeing how previous generations plundered the country and then pulled up the drawbridge behind them.

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago

And the three problems are all each exacerbated by the other two. For fuck's sake, there's a complex near me [0] that has STUDIO apartments that start at $1,690. This is a suburb. It's not even close to anything. Even the metro line is about a mile walk. The nearest grocery store is over a mile away. Granted, our minimum wage is somewhat high at $15.45/hr. But even at that rate, it would take 110 hours of pretax wages to pay for it. Post-tax, it'd be at least 75% of your monthly pay. [0] https://maps.app.goo.gl/EYCy2kvXsRYCjz4J7 https://maps.app.goo.gl/EYCy2kvXsRYCjz4J7

hondo77 3y ago
> Even the metro line is about a mile walk. The nearest grocery store is over a mile away. The horror.
- jonwest 3y ago
  You ever walked a mile carrying two armfuls of groceries? That’s brutal without a car, and without public transit nearby, that makes it incredibly inconvenient and difficult to have food in the fridge. Get outta here with your feigned sarcasm, it’s a legitimate problem.
  - hondo77 3y ago
    Yes, I have. That's why I switched over to a foldable shopping cart. Cutting-edge 20th century technology for today's modern problems.
  - SirMaster 3y ago
    Grocery stores? I thought all the young people are doing things like DoorDash, Hello Fresh or Amazon Fresh etc. Not saying they should be doing that so much, but seems like they aren’t interested in shopping at a Grocery store.
    - tyg13 3y ago
      The smart and motivated ones will try to get to the grocery store. Unfortunately, for most, those services do so much more harm than good. What makes sense for a wealthy professional to pay for the convenience of food or grocery delivery ends up being a small fortune for a lot of young people who can't afford a car to go to the grocery store. It's a clear short- vs long-term thinking issue, but the reality is most young people are living with so little hope for the future that denying immediate pleasures in search of a future payoff seems naive and pointless.

madengr 3y ago

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thepasswordis 3y ago

>1. Car dependent cities. Do you think that cities used to be less "car dependent"? What point in American history are you imagining where people weren't taking cars around? You could look back to maybe the early 20th century, but what that meant is that you had to live right next to the factory where you worked, which was obviously terrible. Cars meant that you could have separate areas for living and working, and this was considered a good thing. edit: people keep making the same point, so I'll reply to all of you at once: do you think you could find a single person on any public transportation anywhere in America who wouldn't take a free, brand new Tesla model X with free charging and a free place to park it over riding the bus? Or if they had that brand new Tesla: would any of them trade it straight across for a free lifetime bus pass? Of course not. Having your own car is objectively better in every meaningful way. The reason people take public transportation is because they can't afford a car, and yes owning a house with a garage is part of affording the car.

lainga 3y ago
The 1920s?
- thepasswordis 3y ago
  The cities of the 1920s where absolutely horrific places to live. They were filthy and polluted. People fled them to the suburbs for a reason: because they were terrible.
  - malcolmgreaves 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - thepasswordis 3y ago
      This is…factually incorrect, and honestly insulting. No I mean actual measurable particulate counts in the air around factories, and the industrial vehicles moving goods in and out of those factories. When people talk about “environmental racism”, that is: making poor people live in the worst parts of town, they’re talking about the environmental aspects of those parts of town.

emmet 3y ago

100% correct here. Young people have been robbed of public space, and her solution to them finding even a facsimile of one to replace it is to... rob them of that too.

thepasswordis 3y ago
>Young people have been robbed of public space What do you mean "robbed of public space"? What public space was taken away? The only public space which seems inaccessible to me that used to be is: parks and sidewalks, both of which have become open air drug markets/tent cities. The city where I live has no parks I am comfortable taking my children to, and we actively avoid walking on the sidewalks because it's dangerous.
- fzzzy 3y ago
  Didn't you answer your own question？
  - thepasswordis 3y ago
    No? What does turning my public parks into drug dens have to do with car ownership?
    - emmet 3y ago
      my guy you literally brought up the parks problem unprompted so you clearly understand the issue being presented here
      - thepasswordis 3y ago
        No I absolutely do not see a link between turning parks into fentanyl use zones and cars. I live in a super walkable city with two grocery stores and a million restaurants and coffee shops within walking distance. Many many people don’t own cars here. The parks are unusable and the sidewalks are campgrounds for drug addicts. What is the link to cars here?

morkalork 3y ago

Beyond wage suppression, it feels like there isn't competition any more. Instead of one company undercutting another to offer a better deal, both or all just raise prices for maximum revenue extraction. For example telecom companies and cell phone plans in Canada. They know its an essential service and charge exhorbently for access, because what are you going to do, not have a cellphone? If every "mandatory for living" service (housing, medical, food, utilities, telecom,...) does that, what's left?

emmanuel_1234 3y ago
I feel Canadians get particularly shafted: lower wage, higher cost of life on essentials, stupid high rent in first tier city (where the jobs are!). On the wages only, I wonder what justifies that Canadians make so little in comparison to their American peers living just an hour away across the border. Taxes alone don't seem enough to justify that gap. My take is that Canadians just... accepted it.
foxyv 3y ago
Monopolies and Cartels are definitely a huge contributor to wage suppression and increased cost of living.

lettergram 3y ago

> 1. Car dependent cities. > 2. Housing crisis Ugh… you can improve the situation by spreading out. Cheaper housing requires cheaper, less dense, populations. Using cars enables cheaper housing. If you want cheaper cars and transportation in general, it’s cheaper energy & cheaper vehicles. Both require less regulation. You can’t save in a city, where your paying a landlord and the wages are perfectly at market equilibrium. You can only get ahead by moving out, living cheaper and making decent pay. It’s exactly what the older generations realized.

Arelius 3y ago
We've already spread out a lot. Should young people be living acres away from the next house and an hours drive from their friends? I'm not sure that'll solve loneliness and disconnection. Not to mention that these days, even doing that won't save you much, or in some cases, post pandemic you'll be paying a premium.
throwawayqqq11 3y ago
Total BS. Cars and their supporting infra take up space. Less regulations will never get rid of increased cost of individual transportation. Public transportion is the only way to push energy demand significantly. Advising your boomer strategy "to just save" in the current era is so ignorant. This ignorance combined with the ever prospect of passive growth is imo the reason why rent extracts much more out of a life since the golden 50s.
sanderjd 3y ago
> Cheaper housing requires cheaper, less dense, populations. This could not possibly be more the opposite of the case.
foxyv 3y ago
You may want to consider why cities are so unaffordable right now. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/10/21/the-other-reason-freeway-building-hollowed-out-americas-cities https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/10/21/the-other-rea...

itsoktocry 3y ago

>Car dependent cities. This doesn't make sense to me. Generations previous were equally car dependent but got by. The current generations are choosing to not go anywhere because they believe they can get the experience by phone. I think the assumption that "if they could get there, they would" is incorrect; they don't want to.

marssaxman 3y ago
> Generations previous were equally car dependent but got by. Only a couple of them! You are aware that the mass adoption of cars was a mid-20th-century phenomenon, yes? US cities were radically reshaped around interstate highways during the '50s and '60s. This car-dependence is quite a recent thing in the human experience.
foxyv 3y ago
> Generations previous were equally car dependent but got by. How much more prosperous would our nation be if we had not invested such a significant amount of our time and wealth into cars? We could have built colonies on the Moon with the amount we spent on building more lanes for people to be stuck in traffic.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

next_xibalba 3y ago

When, to your estimation, did cities become “car dependent”? Most cities have been car centric since long before Gen Z. Real wage growth has been stalled out since the 1970s, several generations before Gen Z.

sanderjd 3y ago
By my estimation, the problems highlighted by the comment you replied to indeed started around the 70s. I think what happened recently is that the internet and social media came along as the perfect, but also terrible, solution to those problems. I think the couple generations in between experienced the problems more as boredom and ennui. Indeed, "gen x" is pretty famous for this, and I think "millenials" are just a mish-mash of the late stage of "gen x" and the early stage of the "zoomer" generations.
foxyv 3y ago
I would estimate that it started with Brown v. Board of Education in the mid 1950s. As racial integration started we saw "White Flight" from city centers. Naturally, those people exiting the cities wanted a way to enter the cities for jobs, education, entertainment, etc... So then we saw the construction of Urban Freeways in the 60s and 70s. Before then, cars were unaffordable for almost everyone. It was kind of like owning an airplane nowadays. It was doable, but most didn't bother unless they really needed one since there were more affordable alternatives and you could walk everywhere you needed to go anyways. Since then, things have only gotten worse as we slowly make cars the only viable method of transportation through land use requirements and neglected infrastructure.

lupyro 3y ago

I'm a millenial myself, and not a parent so parents please correct me. 4. Modern parenting is torture for children. Up until the teenage years kids need to feel useful. They need to be able to help fix things, etc. They need to get into a little bit of trouble and get dinged up a bit. Teenagers need a lot more freedom. Every ounce of their body is pushing them to distance themselves from their family, have sex and take risks. Instead parents insist on this "no drugs, no sex" policy. Of course both of those things can present major problems, which is why they should be discussed but not forbidden. Even sex ed today is maximizing fear and pushing waiting until marriage which is just as bad. As the parent points out, living in a car dependent city with nowhere to go and no way to get there leaves you no choice but to stay home. Staying home means tv, internet and video games. Parents are out on a holy war against that as well. Are you suffocating yet? Now remember that in addition to everything above your texts, location, browsing history, grades, etc. are all being tracked and reported for your parents to further control you. Could you imagine if you were treated like this as an adult. You'd have a civil war. Let them fuck. Let them work. Let them do drugs. Let them make mistakes for christ sake. All of these things have consequences and are worth keeping in mind. But coddling them until 18 and expecting them to be functional is like raising an elephant from birth isolated until adulthood then releasing them to the african savannah. They'll be dead before sunset.

chlodwig 3y ago
Instead parents insist on this "no drugs, no sex" policy. Of course both of those things can present major problems, which is why they should be discussed but not forbidden. Even sex ed today is maximizing fear and pushing waiting until marriage which is just as bad. My impression is that there is far less of this now than there was thirty years ago or fifty years ago.

ctoth 3y ago

Remarkably, these issues you've articulated perfectly-capture the progressive bugbear zeitgeist and yet do not seem to have much (if any) support in the original article. Is it possible it actually might be the phones somehow as she argues?

sanderjd 3y ago
The comment you replied to agrees that it's the phones (well, the social media accessed by the phones)... But then it asks, why? It's not orthogonal, it's additive. And I might suggest that the author of the essay very likely hasn't considered this next level deeper, because "this is water".
foxyv 3y ago
If you think car dependency is an imaginary problem (bugbear), I would invite you to walk or ride a bicycle more. You may find that the bugbear is just a bear. As for housing affordability and wage suppression, these are just established facts. One visit to Zillow to look at a place you used to live is enough. My old apartment that cost $800/month is currently going for $2400/month 8 years later. Minimum wage hasn't changed since 2009 and is currently $7.24/hour.

nunez 3y ago

> Young people can't go anywhere because they can't afford a car because all their money goes to rent. Even if they WANTED to go somewhere, there isn't anywhere to go because car dependent infrastructure has killed all the places that young people used to hang out. This is a big one IMO. We moved to a Northern NJ suburb in the late-90s. However, NYC Metro suburbs are very different from the "suburbs" that are a dime a dozen here in Texas. The town was small --- about a mile in square area. You could walk pretty much everywhere within it, even though some points were far. Almost every street had a sidewalk that was maintained by the city. Since the city followed a grid system, routes from one persons house to another could be done on foot. I spent a lot of time walking in my teens because of this, though not being allowed to have a car played a big part in that. (Walking a lot comes naturally to me because of this; in fact, a big reason why I hated living in these suburbs was because of how difficult it was to walk somewhere interesting instead of "mandatory walking" around a fake pond.) By comparison, suburbs in Texas (or at least here in Houston, and definitely in Dallas) are gigantic. You could walk for miles before you hit literally anything. The nearest business in the suburb we lived in when we moved here was 1.5 miles away on foot. The first 0.5 mile within the neighborhood was fine since the neighborhood had nicely curated sidewalks. Once you left the neighborhood though, you were walking on the 45mph-rated streets that people definitely drive 15+ over on (usually on their phones, since we're on the subject). None of these neighborhoods have a grid system, so going from one house to another within the neighborhood could take a shocking amount of time despite being a short distance away. This design is done on purpose to "increase safety," which is at best farcical considering how unbelievably spread out these communities are and how distant they are from anything. I hope the next generation of parents opt for smaller, more walkable towns with smaller houses and proper city centers instead of gigantic, cavernous and mostly empty sets of endless houses. I think this can be done while also remaining affordable, but we, collectively, have to want it. Otherwise, yeah, the screens will "win" because the Internet is cheap, immediate and has basically anything you can think of.

lamontcg 3y ago

Seems like the problems are more: 1. Phones and social media 2. Anomie