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The earlier NYT article on the topic was interesting: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/26/opinion/economy-attitudes-republicans-democrats.html https://www.nytime

• lotsofpulp 6mo ago
  Happiness = Reality minus Expectation (and sadness is the negative values). For example, if you expected your country to have checks and balances and not empower people who tried to damage the democracy, the reality would sadden you. If you expected to be able to have 2 kids, afford healthcare, not worry about loss of income, live near family in a 2k+ sq ft home, and fly to Disneyworld and Hawaii for vacation, then chances are reality would not have met your expectations. Perhaps TV shows/movies gave you those impressions? Or seeing others' instagram posts? But if you expected a smaller home, not eating avocados everyday, driving a few hours for your vacations, limited amounts of healthcare, etc, then maybe reality would exceed expectations for more people.
  • nyeah 6mo ago
    Right. We just need to kill off three key unrealistic expectations: democracy, medical care, and avocados. Once we relax and give up on those three things, we'll be happy again.
  • wat10000 6mo ago
    I wonder how avocados became the poster child for unreasonably expensive food. They're not actually that costly.
    • deleted 6mo ago
      [deleted]
    • lotsofpulp 6mo ago
      I'm in Washington, and they're usually at least $1 each in season, and even close to $2 out of season at Costco. Factor in some amount not being good, 20% at least, and I probably spend at least $1,000 per year just on avocados for a family of 4. I imagine they are just as, if not more expensive, in places further from Mexico.
    • cucumber3732842 6mo ago
      Because all the boomers and a lot of genX grew up with them being something that was ludicrously expensive due to rapid transit costs that now no longer exist now that we know how (other than sheer speed) to keep them from spoiling between tree and grocery store and around the same time that we got good at that we lifted a ban on mexican imports. It used to be oranges that were the luxury fruit.
      • gavinray 6mo ago
        My grandfather told me that for Christmas one year as a child, he got a fresh orange.
        • ButlerianJihad 6mo ago
          Only one year? And was that his only gift? My sister and I received fresh oranges in our Christmas stockings every year. Along with nuts and chocolate and goodies like that. Of course, the "Christmas stocking" event was tied with St. Nicholas' Day on December 6, where it was traditional to place our shoes on the fireplace overnight, but the stockings were stretchy and higher-capacity than children's shoes! Also, the fresh oranges were sort of ironic, because a tangerine tree grew in our backyard. I've always preferred tangerines. Mom always packed fresh fruit with my school lunches. I had never heard or experienced the trading of food at lunch, and so I resorted to discarding the parts of lunch which I didn't want to eat. Oranges were the first to go. It wasn't the taste of oranges that I disliked, it was the stickiness and the labor involved in peeling them and getting past the rind and pith.
  • anovikov 6mo ago
    What the hell is wrong about avocados really? They are a cheap staple food.
    • cjs_ac 6mo ago
      The avocado meme started in Australia, where avocados are expensive due to their water requirements, and where there’s been a housing crisis for at least twenty years.
      • bigfatkitten 6mo ago
        It wasn’t the cost of avocados as a raw ingredient. An opinion columnist for one of Rupert Murdoch’s ‘newspapers’ blamed the decline in home ownership amongst millennials on excessive spending on discretionary food, specifically avocado on toast in cafes. He suggested that if they cut back on such minor luxuries, they could afford to buy houses. https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/bernard-salt-says-his-smashed-avo-column-was-all-one-big-stitch-up/ https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/bernard-salt-says-his-smashed...
        • Danox 6mo ago
          The United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the UK all have housing and affordability problems, out of the five I can understand the UK but the other four countries I absolutely do not… What do they all have in common English similar economies and relatively similar governments.
          • defrost 6mo ago
            In Australia the root cause is likely policy that rewards rather than penalises multiple home ownership as investment, leading to flow on effects that raise prices and doesn't boost building. However not all would agree with that and each stake holding group has a different take on things. eg: The Australian home builders industry group, the HIA, throw shade on increased costs and government fees and push back on other hot takes here: https://hia.com.au/our-industry/newsroom/economic-research-and-forecasting/2025/02/australias-housing-crisis-is-driven-by-lip-service-hypocrisy-and-an-investment-culture https://hia.com.au/our-industry/newsroom/economic-research-a... I lived through my peers struggling to get a single house built or rennovated in early 80's and later and watched finnancial incentives made it easier and easier to get a second, a third, a fourth house just as happens in Monopoly Hand in hand with that, those people with houses as assets could afford to bid higher against each other for that fifth house .. pushing out those younger and just entering the scene. It's hard to discount the rapid rise of a landlord class as being a significant factor.
• abirch 6mo ago
  I would add in social media. It's a huge cancer on happiness.
  • toephu2 6mo ago
    Yup, it's digital fentanyl.
• everdrive 6mo ago
  I'd like to see a spending breakdown. I wonder just how much of that 50% of spending is stuff that the bottom 90% would actually be competing for -- eg: an expensive bathroom remodel, a luxury car, etc, vs something basic such as tennis shoes or groceries from the local market.
  • anonu 6mo ago
    Does it matter? Most people need a car in the US. But if cars are marketed and designed for the 10%, this squeezes out everyone else.
    • fuzzfactor 6mo ago
      Very good observation. Remember, entry level cars never generally had air conditioning even in Florida, until the Nixon Recession got underway. A/C had always remained a distinctly luxury option until "nobody could afford anything any more", then the car companies had to not only cut back plus have layoffs but also target a higher-dollar price point. Where significantly more costly (sometimes nice) options are included, and a bare bones version is no longer an option on the car lot. Just to survive themselves. That's what that kind of Presidential malfeasance will do. Somebody who's getting the most out of a rich country is going to be getting richer even under the worst of conditions, but when the zero-summing comes home to roost, everyone else has to pony up in some way or another to make it come true for the mostly undeserving elites, because of the underlying structure.
  • lamasery 6mo ago
    We're in the lower half of that top 10% by household income. Our money, aside from basics on which we don't spend so differently from when we made a lot less money, mostly goes to: 1) Optional but advantage-conferring or life-improving things for our kids. This is probably the biggest single category, by a long shot. This takes the form of lots of stuff. - Mental health care that we'd have had to forego or spend a whole lot less on when we had lower income. YMMV but this one has hit us hard and we'd feel awful if we couldn't afford to at least try all reasonable options—which has been goddamn expensive. Guessing it's similar for anyone with a kid with chronic physical issues, too. There are things you can spend money on above what insurance will pay for, or to get way faster than the months it might take to work through processes insurance is happy with. If you can, you'll feel like you must. If you can't, you just... can't. - Taking the kids to the doctor or urgent care just about every time they probably ought to go but it's not strictly necessary ("this laceration ain't gonna kill them... but if they get stitches, it won't scar nearly so badly, so let's take them in" or "I bet that's a hairline-fractured finger bone, and we can do just as well splinting that at home with like $30 or less in supplies... but let's go let them x-ray it just in case it's something worse" or "they might get over this infection but it's trending worse and I'm starting to see red lines in the skin... so instead of rolling the dice, let's go pay the gatekeeping fee to get the antibiotics I'm 100% sure they'll be prescribed after a 5-minute chat with a nurse practitioner, and that'll clear this up in 36 hours flat even though it'll cost us a few Benjamins since we haven't hit our deductible for that kid yet"). - Spending on optional education stuff. - Spending on lots of activities that might cost as much as $200/wk or require a couple hundred dollars up-front in equipment, giving the kids a broader set of experiences without having to go "no, you can't try all three of those, you just have to guess which one you'll like and then that is what you do for at least a few years" or just "no, that's too expensive" (though, to be clear, many things still are. Most of the more-interesting summer camps still give us pause, by which I mean we have yet to send any of our kids to any of those because they're so friggin' expensive, though it's not quite out of reach of even being a discussion. Though, if we had only one kid to pay for on the same income, that'd be another matter...). 2) Spending at local businesses of a kind and degree we definitely didn't engage in when we had lower incomes, earlier in our life. Gives a feeling of satisfying a kind of noblesse-oblige to help keep local businesses alive, and we get really nice chocolates or great pastries or whatever in exchange. 3) House improvements or repairs that we'd have never done or have tried to defer as long as possible when we were poorer. Sometimes, paying to have a thing done that we'd have DIY'd before. This can be a really big category some years. 4) We don't do a ton of traveling, and don't do any remotely luxury-tier stuff (I think a $150 hotel room is expensive no matter where it is or how nice the room, LOL) but we rarely decide we want to take some kind of trip and then have to abort because we can't find any route to doing it at a price we find tolerable. So we do travel more (mostly stuff like visiting family and friends, or little weekend get-aways in the summer) and spend more on it than we probably would if had a significantly lower household income, though it's a relatively small proportion of our spending. 5) A couple summers when we had a frustratingly-healthy lawn and a goddamn HOA we paid someone to mow our lawn. We definitely wouldn't have done this when we made less money. Tiny amount of spending in the scheme of things, and not something we kept doing, but an example of the kind of little service we occasionally splurge on. Some people spend on this sort of thing basically full-time (or house cleaners, say—we've done that, too, though only occasionally, and wow does that feel weird and uncomfortable to someone who came from a sub-upper-middle-class midwestern background... actually, so did the lawn mowing, and so does hiring e.g. plumbers, I always feel like I ought to be helping them) but we just keep it in mind as something we can periodically pay for to make our lives a little easier for a while, in some circumstances. Damn nice to be able to, but not a big-ticket spending thing for us. It is a category of thing that sees almost zero spending under that 90th percentile mark, though, I bet, is why I bring it up. 6) When basic consumer goods break we usually replace them basically instantly (maybe used if we can, not new, but still). Even if the cost is in the hundreds of dollars. No delays or long stretches of going without like when we were poorer. I'm sure this causes a higher overall rate of spending. Minor, compared to some of the above, but it's a thing. No clue if we're representative. We spend like we're fairly poor on stuff like cars, and lots of people in our income-range definitely spend way more on that than we do. Ditto the travel thing, I think we probably spend less overall on that than many folks with similar household incomes. No hugely-expensive hobbies, which is where some folks' money goes I think. None we couldn't have supported about as well when we were at more like the 60th percentile, none that we've opened up the money-spigot on just because we can. We cut down or eliminate collections of stuff we accumulated in earlier years far more than we accumulate that sort of thing, having almost-but-not-quite no active collecting habits between us. Not big collectors. We thrift clothes, still, a lot. I buy most of mine aside from socks, underwear, and knits on ebay, LOL. A lot of our money also goes to paying for a house in a nice school district (file under: "technically-optional spending on the kids to improve their life prospects") without compromising tremendously on size or house quality, but I don't think that counts as "consumer spending".