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Yeah, lifestyle expectations have shifted dramatically and many people have become strongly attached to consumer luxuries and extravagences. If you watch or re
by swatcoder 3y ago
Yeah, lifestyle expectations have shifted dramatically and many people have become strongly attached to consumer luxuries and extravagences.
If you watch or read older media (fiction or non), or if you lived through it, you regularly see even middle class and professional characters living with sparse conveniences in their home and going on exactly those sort of modest road trips and motel stays you talk about and many of us remember. Trips to faraway lands, were treated as a novelty that you might bucket list once or twice rather than an annual necessity. You didn't buy a new TV until the old one broke. You talked to your neighbors and borrowed each others tools. You ate out as a treat, not because you just didn't feel like cooking that day. You planned your grocery shopping around sales and strove not to deviate from the plan while at the store.
And these expectations shifted for everyone, not just incoming generations. It wasn't a generational divide and I don't mean to stir up boomer/zoomer tension -- it was a dramatic cultural shift that almost everybody seems to have adopted without even noticing.
Exagerrated consumerism and "we are all middle class on the inside" mentality was how the West distinguished itself from its Cold War villian and now we are where we are.
Everybody needs an often-unattainable and generaly-unsustainable amount of money to fulfill a life that few would have taken seriously just a few decades earlier, and the essential dissonance is producing widespread misery and angst.
- babycheetahbite 3y agoVery well put. People simply don't recognize the standard of living they enjoy, because "everybody" has it.
- mullingitover 3y agoCounterpoint: a friend of mine grew up in LA. His family, consisting of his parents and his brother, took a month long road trip vacation every year. They owned a home that is now valued at around $2 million. They did all this solely on his father’s income, which he earned as a public school teacher. The middle class has been gutted in the past 40 years.
- swatcoder 3y agoCounterpoint or anecdote? If you're trying to say that workers in vital industries used to have access to a stable, modest suburban lifestyle negotiated by their union and that the same can't be said now, I don't disagree. But that's a separate and compounding issue, not a competing one.
- mullingitover 3y agoBy today's standards, being able to afford a three bedroom home in the LA metro area and raise two children on a single income, and not merely survive but be financially comfortable, isn't just a 'modest suburban lifestyle', it's an unimaginably rare privilege. Even if teachers are unionized, they aren't on the extreme high end of the income range for working class people.
- swatcoder 3y agoI mean, I personallg know people who live exactly that "unimaginable" life in El Monte and Baldwin Park and Rancho Cucamunga and Van Nuys and Val Verde, so I hope you know you're exaggerating for effect. But I don't even disagree with you, as I already said. Things are hard for many people, and uncertain for many more, and in many different ways. I was talking about one of them. You're talking about one of them. Neither contradicts the other.
- drewcoo 3y agoSince when are teachers working class? I had high school teachers who worked construction (working class) jobs during the summer, but that wasn't their regular work.
- lurking15 3y ago> They did all this solely on his father’s income, which he earned as a public school teacher. This has more to do with his profession and inflation than anything about halcyon days of the middle class that socialists love to talk about when it's really just a post-war phenomenon.
- 3y ago