6 ms·

My mom said, "whatever we built isn't working anymore," and I think that captures most of the sentiment. It's also funny to see the "the economy is roaring!" "

by bontaq 5mo ago

My mom said, "whatever we built isn't working anymore," and I think that captures most of the sentiment. It's also funny to see the "the economy is roaring!" "incomes are up!". Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Can I afford a home? Work has if anything gotten worse in general. Remote's gone. Pay's less. ADHD maximum AI use required. Nobody can take a break. Pressure's on. 1.5 trillion more to the military. What are we even building? For what? Is it any wonder at all?

randomNumber7 5mo ago
Money should only have the purpose of realizing ones goals, it has no purpose in itself. The whole society has lost its goal when the only target is to maximize money.
- lo_zamoyski 5mo ago
  Popularize the notion of chrematistics.
- Lammy 5mo ago
  It was inevitable as soon as enough people believed that spending money is necessary to live. Money is the next stage of life. As individuals, people's only truly limited resource is their attention, their time, and so the same is true of Humanity as a singular whole. Money is a way to coerce another person's attention toward an endeavor that benefits the spender, like paying the chain of farmers/pickers/processors/distributors to grow and ship my food to me instead of having to do it all myself. And so people say Time = Money. As a commutative operation, then, also Money = Time. Humanity and Money are both driven to create more of themselves, but as long as the growth of money is allowed to outpace the growth of Humanity, money will become the dominant life-form once there is more of it than there are humans to be the Time-unit. The only thing keeping it from happening before now was the lack of an instantaneous global means to transact.
  - vakili 5mo ago
    Terminological nitpick: equality is a relation, not an operation. What you refer to as a "commutative operation" is more accurately described as a "symmetric relation".
    - Lammy 5mo ago
      Appreciate it; not a math person :)
  - maxerickson 5mo ago
    This is a silly inversion of causality. The thing that causes increased economic activity is people working for it. Not just the wealthy with their vast resources, the many people that work alongside them because they think it will be beneficial.
    - Lammy 5mo ago
      > Not just the wealthy I think you misread. I literally used myself as an example and am definitely not that wealthy :p > because they think it will be beneficial The Capital-class have, on the other hand, definitely constructed a world where this is true for us as individual. However I am talking about the effect on Us the collective-singular.
      - maxerickson 5mo ago
        Meh, it's not strictly commutative, and money is ultimately an abstraction for real resources, not just an abstraction. Really, if you didn't have a job you'd be working much harder for less. The vibes say that's bullshit, but whatever.
  - imtringued 5mo ago
    It's not about believing. It's about a lack of alternatives. There is no real meaningful competition between money systems. Every nation has one national money system and it's a government mandated monopoly. Your options are basically complete autarky or using the national money system with nothing inbetween. Even if you were to use a cryptocurrency, you'd still need to pay taxes in USD. Then there is the fact that cryptocurrencies don't really meaningfully change the rules either. You're supposed to accumulate them forever and profit off of latecomers joining in it at inflated prices. Meaning the supposed competition just amplifies the worst part of money that people would rather get away from. Anyone who earns an income from work is by definition going to be a "latecomer" by the end of their career. Basically, you're defining yourself by the first few years of your career, e.g. buying thousands of dollars worth of BTC in 2013. By 2026, there is not much point buying more BTC. Money is given an inherent bias towards the past being more important than the present or the future, which thereby inevitably causes the collapse of the future, which then becomes the collapsed present through the simple passage of time.
- pipes 5mo ago
  I see it money as a wall. Without it, me and my family are defenceless. My goal is keeping us safe.
- Aurornis 5mo ago
  When I do volunteer career mentoring for an early career group, money concerns are always a topic. It's really bad in tech right now because the college students have been reading Blind and levels.fyi for years and think that if they're not making $500K TC they're never going to afford a house. They hit a very harsh reality when they graduate and realize their degree from an average state school and job search in a city that isn't the Bay Area, NYC, or Seattle isn't going to give them those $200K starting salaries they expected with a CS degree. Lately there's another sad discovery when they realize that nobody wants to hire a junior with no experience into a remote FAANG job. Social media doomerism is also convincing a lot of them that everything is impossibly expensive. You wouldn't believe how many young people I've talked to who have household incomes in the $200 to $300K range who tell me they'll never be able to afford a house or to have kids. When you're immersed in doomer headlines you can lose track of the reality that people are raising families on much less than that all around you.
  - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
    > You wouldn't believe how many young people I've talked to who have household incomes in the $200 to $300K range who tell me they'll never be able to afford a house or to have kids. When you're immersed in doomer headlines you can lose track of the reality that people are raising families on much less than that all around you. They know that, they just don’t want their kids to go to school with the kids in the bottom 4 quintiles. Also, I probably would have foregone kids if it meant I was not going to be financially independent by age 50. Incomes are too volatile, and healthcare too expensive to be in that age 50 to age 65 period where a healthcare issue or loss of employment can derail you forever.
redleggedfrog 5mo ago
I'd also add that healthcare is serious shit-show as it currently stands and the best strategy is to just stay as healthy as you possibly can to avoid having to go to the doctor, if you can even find one who will see you. Remote work is an interesting one. Before you had 8-9 hours a day of serious social activity, and if you were lucky, people you enjoyed. Even if you didn't enjoy the people, you were at least social. Remote takes that away, and as the article noted, social contact is a definite plus for well-being.
- skirmish 5mo ago
  I would much rather talk to my family at random times over the working day than listen to the guy at the next desk who is always on the phone blabber on (and it always happens when there is a pressing deadline, and your boss is checking every 15 minutes: any progress on this?).
- decimalenough 5mo ago
  YMMV, but the fully remote workers I know (I manage a few and am married to one) seem very happy about it, largely because they get to spend a lot more time with their families than they otherwise would. They're anxious mostly because they're afraid they'll have to forcibly RTO.
  - seanthemon 5mo ago
    I and my wife have been fully remote for over a decade, absolutely love it and I can't understand the whole going to office thing or people pushing for it.
    - denkmoon 5mo ago
      Some of us just need a different space to work, I can't wfh - my living space is too small to have a dedicated area and I can't discipline myself without said dedicated area. The "leaders" forcing people into it though are just petty fiends. Linking bonuses/compensation to in office days is just punitive because you want to see bums on seats, nobody will convince me otherwise.
jcranmer 5mo ago
> Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Yes, real wages have been on the rise for the past few years. With the exception of the somewhat artificial COVID peak, median real wages are the highest on record: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
- shimman 5mo ago
  Wow wages barely rising after 60 years of wage suppression, the wealth is truly trickling down now! Just ignore that the top 1% stole $50 trillion from the bottom 90%: https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/ https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...
- bobthepanda 5mo ago
  There’s also the question of, “what’s inflation?” A lot of major necessities like healthcare and housing have outpaced CPI.
  - cperciva 5mo ago
    Yes, and a lot of major necessities haven't. CPI is an average -- of course some things will be higher.
    - spixy 5mo ago
      Necessary stuff (houses, healthcare, education) have outpaced CPI, and generally it is becoming more expensive. Unnecessary stuff (electronics, appliances, other tech) did not, and generally it is becoming cheaper (Planned obsolescence is another topic though...)
      - HDBaseT 5mo ago
        [dead]
      - cperciva 5mo ago
        Do you consider food and clothing to be "unnecessary stuff"?
dandanua 5mo ago
> What are we even building? Caste of trillionaiers who could destroy nations and cultures simply because they feel so.
thisisit 5mo ago
The focus is now largely on stock markets. It’s not by mistake that we got DOW over 50k so don’t question anything as an excuse.
thewillowcat 5mo ago
This is mostly true, but things were almost universally worse in the mid-to-late 1970s. There was a similar feeling of anomie, stagflation, and a sense that the country was on the wrong track. But people still reported themselves as happier than now.
- daymanstep 5mo ago
  Happiness is to a large extent related to how many close friends you have and how much time you spend with your friends.
  - torginus 5mo ago
    This is something I have observed too. I think one of the ways things have gotten worse is generally people are less social, we're interacting with each other via screens, not in person. While one could meme about being introverts, I just feel like the writing in older media, movies and other records of the time makes me feel people back then were just more comfortable with each other, more practiced in natural social interaction, and this lack of understanding has not only made modern media less compelling, the fact that we don't understand in general what people are really like has been a detriment to the fabric of society.
anon291 5mo ago
You should be building your family and friends instead of wondering when the government is going to find some project for the country to work on
dudefeliciano 5mo ago
> whatever we built. It's not what we, or even your mom's generation built (taking some liberties here, assuming your age). Whatever ideals the US stood for have been long gone. Benjamin Franklin, when asked "What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" responded "A republic, if you can keep it”. The answer is clear today.
HerbManic 5mo ago
It is Taoist/Buddhist translator Red Pine (Bill Porter) who once said something along the line of; if the Taoists and traditional Buddhists where in charge, we wouldnt have built the world like we have today. It would be angled towards happiness and satisfaction rather than growth of the machine. Taken at an absolutists stance you could easily push that argument down (are you against ALL of modernity?!). But the overall spirit of the idea is one worth exploring. I can say that I would personally fall into that camp and that I am fairly happy, to step out of the hustle and not be a cat chasing its own tail. But the said effect of this is a form of graceful poverty. To be a poor master rather than a rich slave. That is a very difficult sales pitch. But I am convinced we will take a turn more towards that flavour of thinking only once we have busted out the bottom of the bucket with business as usual. Maybe we need to military budge to grow to $5 trillion dollars abd then people will say "Enough!" I just hope that we are wise in the path towards it, I fear we will not and that we throe the baby out with the bathwater. There is a brazillian saying that goes something like, when it floods you have to wait until the water is at you hips before you can swim. maybe this is the path forwards, to endulge in our folly.
- nvch 5mo ago
  In this case, we might not have an advanced civilization with modern medicine and technology. Herbs for healing, candles for lighting, letters for communication. (Perhaps I wouldn't be alive without modern medicine. I suppose it's not easy to be dead and happy.) Don't get me wrong, I love Taoism and Buddhism. But, from what I understand, they are not very pro-civilization and pro-progress.
  - cindyllm 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - bbqbbqbbq 5mo ago
    [dead]
  - HerbManic 5mo ago
    Bingo, that is the point I was trying to make. While they have the right idea about not leaning in to hard on the progress narrative, if it basically became a movement of apathy and non-science, it is basically regressing back to the stone age. There is a possible middle ground but how we get there is anything but clear.
pipes 5mo ago
And yet people risk their lives to get to the USA. They vote with their feet. It isn't perfect but declaring "it isn't working", my response "compared to what". I'm from the UK, it isn't in great shape. And the EU isn't either. The west in general has problems, just no where on the scale of every other country.
Marazan 5mo ago
> "incomes are up!". Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Yes. > Can I afford a home? No. There's an important lesson somewhere here.
Aurornis 5mo ago
> It's also funny to see the "the economy is roaring!" "incomes are up!". Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Can I afford a home? Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age. There's a lot of denial around this topic because everywhere you turn there's a Reddit post or news headline about how housing is impossible to afford. > Pay's less. Less than the narrow window of post-COVID mania pay maybe, but inflation adjusted wages are actually up over the long term. > Nobody can take a break. Pressure's on. Annual working hours per worker is flat or slightly down from when your mom's generation made up most of the workforce https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-worker https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-... When it comes to happiness, the numbers don't actually matter though. Perceptions do. Your and your mom's worldview that everything "isn't working any more", that young people can't possibly be buying homes, that real wages are down, and that working hours are up are actually very common ideas, especially if you zoom in on demographics who read a lot of certain types of social media (Reddit especially!) where classic doomerism prevails.
- tech_ken 5mo ago
  > Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age. There's a lot of denial around this topic. Yeah but aren't they putting down less/leveraging themselves deeper? edit: also it seems like the millenial/genZ divide here is on the order of like 1-5%, whereas the gap between either of those generations and boomers/genX is more like 10%+. It's good that the trend hasn't gotten worse in recent history, but I think it's pretty inarguable that the housing market is much worse than it was 30 years ago.
  - tempaccount5050 5mo ago
    From what I understand, yes. My 24 year old coworker makes $65k/year and has a $2200/mo mortgage. It's an old starter home in the Midwest, nothing fancy. It stresses him out to the point of not going to a happy hour once in a while unless there's a buy one get one deal or something or I offer to buy (which I do happily). No vacations, no eating out, no fun. It's super sad to see. He talks about being in his prime but being unable to enjoy it at all.
s5300 5mo ago
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bsder 5mo ago
People viscerally feel the disdain from the monopolies giving you the "What are you gonna do? Switch to a competitor? BWHAHAHAHA! Good luck, plebe." And it makes them angry. For all intents and purposes, every single supply chain devolves to a cabal of suppliers who have no downstream capacity. As such, even if someone downstream wanted to shake up their competition, they can't get the supply to do it. Covid didn't cause this, but it did make it obvious to even the dumbest businesspeople. Consequently, all the businesses across the chain have settled into extraction knowing that their position is unassailable. The problem is that the general public fails to diagnose that the issue is monopolistic control, and that the solution is to keep breaking these cabals up everywhere, aggressively.
james_marks 5mo ago
At almost 50, I feel like there has been a cultural shift since I was a kid. It isn’t enough to be middle class, to have the proverbial white picket fence. The reach now is for glamor and wealth, which is by definition out of reach for the majority. If that’s the ideal you compare your own life to, you will be unhappy. And the debt, etc you take on to mimic it will make you even more unhappy. The shift was already happening pre-internet, but social media took it to the next level.
- scottyah 5mo ago
  I think this was what was the meaning behind the "avocado toast" phenomena. My typical example is that back in the day, you could be the coolest in town +/- 5 grades by jumping off the Big Rock into the river- and that person's 2-3 best friends all shared in the glory. Now, you have to compete with the craziest people in all the world for the same level of admiration.
- cucumber3732842 5mo ago
  Every geezer says this but people these days would kill for a reliable chance at a middle class life. We're talking Homer Simpson not Home Alone.
  - y0eswddl 5mo ago
    ha, twins. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47883927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47883927
- y0eswddl 5mo ago
  I'd argue most people do not, in fact, year for glamor and wealth. The majority of us just want to be able to live
  - james_marks 5mo ago
    I want to be clear that I'm not judging anyone, just observing the zeitgeist. Does just being able to live mean getting a new phone occasionally? Getting a coffee/treat once a week? A job that doesn't leave you in physical pain, sometimes permanently? Happiness is the gap between expectation and reality. Our expectations are very high without sounding unreasonable. This is the shift I'm talking about– maybe we don't conciously yearn for glamor and wealth, but what we see as normal is a luxury lifestyle compared to previous generations.
deleted 5mo ago
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y0eswddl 5mo ago
> "whatever we built isn't working anymore," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...
goreeStef 5mo ago
Have wages made up for 800% inflation since 1980? Multiple generations have now been born into an economy intentionally engineered to deflate their buying power.
roxolotl 5mo ago
I agree there’s a lot in the comments here that are right. Yes people are chasing ideals that probably aren’t worth it to chase. Yea money for the sake of money is a bad idea. But the reality also is a lot of what had been built has been actively dismantled. Much of what made the lifestyle of the boomers possible has been being actively taken apart piece by piece since the 80s. We’re now seeing what happens when a society stops trying to improve and instead just rent seeks off of itself for 40 years.
ItsClo688 5mo ago
[flagged]
- gnabgib 5mo ago
  And do you consider your mom a GTX3090?
  - hackable_sand 5mo ago
    Several, actually
    - ItsClo688 5mo ago
      didn't realize proving i'm human was part of the HN experience but here we are ：）
      - dudefeliciano 5mo ago
        there is a new general aversion to em dashes, as well as sentences like "and maybe that feeling is worth taking seriously on its own terms, separate from whether the numbers back it up." which sound llm generated. No issue in using LLMs for polishing writing but when the tone is impacted in this way, I can understand peoples aversion to it. Especially on hackernews, where i guess people speak with LLMs a lot more than other people, and are able to even subconsciosly pick up on these cues.
        ItsClo688 5mo ago
        ohhh i gotchu, that's actually fair feedback, thanks! i didn't realize the em dash thing had become a tell. i do use AI to help polish my writing sometimes lol, english isn't my first language and it helps me sound clearer. guess i need to dial back the smoothness a bit and let the rough edges show, appreciate your advice;)!
  - ItsClo688 5mo ago
    [dead]
danielschonfeld 5mo ago
I agree with your mom’s sentiment. It’s exactly that. I also feel that generally hope is gone - nobody actually sits there imagining the US becoming what it felt like in the 90s and that’s probably the root of the problem. We all kinda internalize this is the decline.
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jjav 5mo ago
The US is not particularly rich. The GPD is way out there, but that doesn't mean anything. It is highly concentrated in a tiny fraction of 1% of the population. And the bulk of the population who by global standards might be middle class in terms of dollar income, are nonetheless struggling with multiple jobs, huge health care and kids education costs, no vacations. Who could be happy?

by bontaq 5mo ago

randomNumber7 5mo ago

Money should only have the purpose of realizing ones goals, it has no purpose in itself. The whole society has lost its goal when the only target is to maximize money.

lo_zamoyski 5mo ago
Popularize the notion of chrematistics.
Lammy 5mo ago
It was inevitable as soon as enough people believed that spending money is necessary to live. Money is the next stage of life. As individuals, people's only truly limited resource is their attention, their time, and so the same is true of Humanity as a singular whole. Money is a way to coerce another person's attention toward an endeavor that benefits the spender, like paying the chain of farmers/pickers/processors/distributors to grow and ship my food to me instead of having to do it all myself. And so people say Time = Money. As a commutative operation, then, also Money = Time. Humanity and Money are both driven to create more of themselves, but as long as the growth of money is allowed to outpace the growth of Humanity, money will become the dominant life-form once there is more of it than there are humans to be the Time-unit. The only thing keeping it from happening before now was the lack of an instantaneous global means to transact.
- vakili 5mo ago
  Terminological nitpick: equality is a relation, not an operation. What you refer to as a "commutative operation" is more accurately described as a "symmetric relation".
  - Lammy 5mo ago
    Appreciate it; not a math person :)
- maxerickson 5mo ago
  This is a silly inversion of causality. The thing that causes increased economic activity is people working for it. Not just the wealthy with their vast resources, the many people that work alongside them because they think it will be beneficial.
  - Lammy 5mo ago
    > Not just the wealthy I think you misread. I literally used myself as an example and am definitely not that wealthy :p > because they think it will be beneficial The Capital-class have, on the other hand, definitely constructed a world where this is true for us as individual. However I am talking about the effect on Us the collective-singular.
    - maxerickson 5mo ago
      Meh, it's not strictly commutative, and money is ultimately an abstraction for real resources, not just an abstraction. Really, if you didn't have a job you'd be working much harder for less. The vibes say that's bullshit, but whatever.
- imtringued 5mo ago
  It's not about believing. It's about a lack of alternatives. There is no real meaningful competition between money systems. Every nation has one national money system and it's a government mandated monopoly. Your options are basically complete autarky or using the national money system with nothing inbetween. Even if you were to use a cryptocurrency, you'd still need to pay taxes in USD. Then there is the fact that cryptocurrencies don't really meaningfully change the rules either. You're supposed to accumulate them forever and profit off of latecomers joining in it at inflated prices. Meaning the supposed competition just amplifies the worst part of money that people would rather get away from. Anyone who earns an income from work is by definition going to be a "latecomer" by the end of their career. Basically, you're defining yourself by the first few years of your career, e.g. buying thousands of dollars worth of BTC in 2013. By 2026, there is not much point buying more BTC. Money is given an inherent bias towards the past being more important than the present or the future, which thereby inevitably causes the collapse of the future, which then becomes the collapsed present through the simple passage of time.
pipes 5mo ago
I see it money as a wall. Without it, me and my family are defenceless. My goal is keeping us safe.
Aurornis 5mo ago
When I do volunteer career mentoring for an early career group, money concerns are always a topic. It's really bad in tech right now because the college students have been reading Blind and levels.fyi for years and think that if they're not making $500K TC they're never going to afford a house. They hit a very harsh reality when they graduate and realize their degree from an average state school and job search in a city that isn't the Bay Area, NYC, or Seattle isn't going to give them those $200K starting salaries they expected with a CS degree. Lately there's another sad discovery when they realize that nobody wants to hire a junior with no experience into a remote FAANG job. Social media doomerism is also convincing a lot of them that everything is impossibly expensive. You wouldn't believe how many young people I've talked to who have household incomes in the $200 to $300K range who tell me they'll never be able to afford a house or to have kids. When you're immersed in doomer headlines you can lose track of the reality that people are raising families on much less than that all around you.
- lotsofpulp 5mo ago
  > You wouldn't believe how many young people I've talked to who have household incomes in the $200 to $300K range who tell me they'll never be able to afford a house or to have kids. When you're immersed in doomer headlines you can lose track of the reality that people are raising families on much less than that all around you. They know that, they just don’t want their kids to go to school with the kids in the bottom 4 quintiles. Also, I probably would have foregone kids if it meant I was not going to be financially independent by age 50. Incomes are too volatile, and healthcare too expensive to be in that age 50 to age 65 period where a healthcare issue or loss of employment can derail you forever.

redleggedfrog 5mo ago

I'd also add that healthcare is serious shit-show as it currently stands and the best strategy is to just stay as healthy as you possibly can to avoid having to go to the doctor, if you can even find one who will see you. Remote work is an interesting one. Before you had 8-9 hours a day of serious social activity, and if you were lucky, people you enjoyed. Even if you didn't enjoy the people, you were at least social. Remote takes that away, and as the article noted, social contact is a definite plus for well-being.

skirmish 5mo ago
I would much rather talk to my family at random times over the working day than listen to the guy at the next desk who is always on the phone blabber on (and it always happens when there is a pressing deadline, and your boss is checking every 15 minutes: any progress on this?).
decimalenough 5mo ago
YMMV, but the fully remote workers I know (I manage a few and am married to one) seem very happy about it, largely because they get to spend a lot more time with their families than they otherwise would. They're anxious mostly because they're afraid they'll have to forcibly RTO.
- seanthemon 5mo ago
  I and my wife have been fully remote for over a decade, absolutely love it and I can't understand the whole going to office thing or people pushing for it.
  - denkmoon 5mo ago
    Some of us just need a different space to work, I can't wfh - my living space is too small to have a dedicated area and I can't discipline myself without said dedicated area. The "leaders" forcing people into it though are just petty fiends. Linking bonuses/compensation to in office days is just punitive because you want to see bums on seats, nobody will convince me otherwise.

jcranmer 5mo ago

> Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Yes, real wages have been on the rise for the past few years. With the exception of the somewhat artificial COVID peak, median real wages are the highest on record: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

shimman 5mo ago
Wow wages barely rising after 60 years of wage suppression, the wealth is truly trickling down now! Just ignore that the top 1% stole $50 trillion from the bottom 90%: https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/ https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-ameri...
bobthepanda 5mo ago
There’s also the question of, “what’s inflation?” A lot of major necessities like healthcare and housing have outpaced CPI.
- cperciva 5mo ago
  Yes, and a lot of major necessities haven't. CPI is an average -- of course some things will be higher.
  - spixy 5mo ago
    Necessary stuff (houses, healthcare, education) have outpaced CPI, and generally it is becoming more expensive. Unnecessary stuff (electronics, appliances, other tech) did not, and generally it is becoming cheaper (Planned obsolescence is another topic though...)
    - HDBaseT 5mo ago
      [dead]
    - cperciva 5mo ago
      Do you consider food and clothing to be "unnecessary stuff"?

dandanua 5mo ago

> What are we even building? Caste of trillionaiers who could destroy nations and cultures simply because they feel so.

thisisit 5mo ago

The focus is now largely on stock markets. It’s not by mistake that we got DOW over 50k so don’t question anything as an excuse.

thewillowcat 5mo ago

This is mostly true, but things were almost universally worse in the mid-to-late 1970s. There was a similar feeling of anomie, stagflation, and a sense that the country was on the wrong track. But people still reported themselves as happier than now.

daymanstep 5mo ago
Happiness is to a large extent related to how many close friends you have and how much time you spend with your friends.
- torginus 5mo ago
  This is something I have observed too. I think one of the ways things have gotten worse is generally people are less social, we're interacting with each other via screens, not in person. While one could meme about being introverts, I just feel like the writing in older media, movies and other records of the time makes me feel people back then were just more comfortable with each other, more practiced in natural social interaction, and this lack of understanding has not only made modern media less compelling, the fact that we don't understand in general what people are really like has been a detriment to the fabric of society.

anon291 5mo ago

You should be building your family and friends instead of wondering when the government is going to find some project for the country to work on

dudefeliciano 5mo ago

> whatever we built. It's not what we, or even your mom's generation built (taking some liberties here, assuming your age). Whatever ideals the US stood for have been long gone. Benjamin Franklin, when asked "What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" responded "A republic, if you can keep it”. The answer is clear today.

HerbManic 5mo ago

It is Taoist/Buddhist translator Red Pine (Bill Porter) who once said something along the line of; if the Taoists and traditional Buddhists where in charge, we wouldnt have built the world like we have today. It would be angled towards happiness and satisfaction rather than growth of the machine. Taken at an absolutists stance you could easily push that argument down (are you against ALL of modernity?!). But the overall spirit of the idea is one worth exploring. I can say that I would personally fall into that camp and that I am fairly happy, to step out of the hustle and not be a cat chasing its own tail. But the said effect of this is a form of graceful poverty. To be a poor master rather than a rich slave. That is a very difficult sales pitch. But I am convinced we will take a turn more towards that flavour of thinking only once we have busted out the bottom of the bucket with business as usual. Maybe we need to military budge to grow to $5 trillion dollars abd then people will say "Enough!" I just hope that we are wise in the path towards it, I fear we will not and that we throe the baby out with the bathwater. There is a brazillian saying that goes something like, when it floods you have to wait until the water is at you hips before you can swim. maybe this is the path forwards, to endulge in our folly.

nvch 5mo ago
In this case, we might not have an advanced civilization with modern medicine and technology. Herbs for healing, candles for lighting, letters for communication. (Perhaps I wouldn't be alive without modern medicine. I suppose it's not easy to be dead and happy.) Don't get me wrong, I love Taoism and Buddhism. But, from what I understand, they are not very pro-civilization and pro-progress.
- cindyllm 5mo ago
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- bbqbbqbbq 5mo ago
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- HerbManic 5mo ago
  Bingo, that is the point I was trying to make. While they have the right idea about not leaning in to hard on the progress narrative, if it basically became a movement of apathy and non-science, it is basically regressing back to the stone age. There is a possible middle ground but how we get there is anything but clear.

pipes 5mo ago

And yet people risk their lives to get to the USA. They vote with their feet. It isn't perfect but declaring "it isn't working", my response "compared to what". I'm from the UK, it isn't in great shape. And the EU isn't either. The west in general has problems, just no where on the scale of every other country.

Marazan 5mo ago

> "incomes are up!". Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Yes. > Can I afford a home? No. There's an important lesson somewhere here.

Aurornis 5mo ago

> It's also funny to see the "the economy is roaring!" "incomes are up!". Great, have they increased by as much as inflation? Can I afford a home? Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age. There's a lot of denial around this topic because everywhere you turn there's a Reddit post or news headline about how housing is impossible to afford. > Pay's less. Less than the narrow window of post-COVID mania pay maybe, but inflation adjusted wages are actually up over the long term. > Nobody can take a break. Pressure's on. Annual working hours per worker is flat or slightly down from when your mom's generation made up most of the workforce https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-worker https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-working-hours-per-... When it comes to happiness, the numbers don't actually matter though. Perceptions do. Your and your mom's worldview that everything "isn't working any more", that young people can't possibly be buying homes, that real wages are down, and that working hours are up are actually very common ideas, especially if you zoom in on demographics who read a lot of certain types of social media (Reddit especially!) where classic doomerism prevails.

tech_ken 5mo ago
> Gen Z home ownership is outpacing millenial home ownership at the same age. There's a lot of denial around this topic. Yeah but aren't they putting down less/leveraging themselves deeper? edit: also it seems like the millenial/genZ divide here is on the order of like 1-5%, whereas the gap between either of those generations and boomers/genX is more like 10%+. It's good that the trend hasn't gotten worse in recent history, but I think it's pretty inarguable that the housing market is much worse than it was 30 years ago.
- tempaccount5050 5mo ago
  From what I understand, yes. My 24 year old coworker makes $65k/year and has a $2200/mo mortgage. It's an old starter home in the Midwest, nothing fancy. It stresses him out to the point of not going to a happy hour once in a while unless there's a buy one get one deal or something or I offer to buy (which I do happily). No vacations, no eating out, no fun. It's super sad to see. He talks about being in his prime but being unable to enjoy it at all.

s5300 5mo ago

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bsder 5mo ago

People viscerally feel the disdain from the monopolies giving you the "What are you gonna do? Switch to a competitor? BWHAHAHAHA! Good luck, plebe." And it makes them angry. For all intents and purposes, every single supply chain devolves to a cabal of suppliers who have no downstream capacity. As such, even if someone downstream wanted to shake up their competition, they can't get the supply to do it. Covid didn't cause this, but it did make it obvious to even the dumbest businesspeople. Consequently, all the businesses across the chain have settled into extraction knowing that their position is unassailable. The problem is that the general public fails to diagnose that the issue is monopolistic control, and that the solution is to keep breaking these cabals up everywhere, aggressively.

james_marks 5mo ago

At almost 50, I feel like there has been a cultural shift since I was a kid. It isn’t enough to be middle class, to have the proverbial white picket fence. The reach now is for glamor and wealth, which is by definition out of reach for the majority. If that’s the ideal you compare your own life to, you will be unhappy. And the debt, etc you take on to mimic it will make you even more unhappy. The shift was already happening pre-internet, but social media took it to the next level.

scottyah 5mo ago
I think this was what was the meaning behind the "avocado toast" phenomena. My typical example is that back in the day, you could be the coolest in town +/- 5 grades by jumping off the Big Rock into the river- and that person's 2-3 best friends all shared in the glory. Now, you have to compete with the craziest people in all the world for the same level of admiration.
cucumber3732842 5mo ago
Every geezer says this but people these days would kill for a reliable chance at a middle class life. We're talking Homer Simpson not Home Alone.
- y0eswddl 5mo ago
  ha, twins. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47883927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47883927
y0eswddl 5mo ago
I'd argue most people do not, in fact, year for glamor and wealth. The majority of us just want to be able to live
- james_marks 5mo ago
  I want to be clear that I'm not judging anyone, just observing the zeitgeist. Does just being able to live mean getting a new phone occasionally? Getting a coffee/treat once a week? A job that doesn't leave you in physical pain, sometimes permanently? Happiness is the gap between expectation and reality. Our expectations are very high without sounding unreasonable. This is the shift I'm talking about– maybe we don't conciously yearn for glamor and wealth, but what we see as normal is a luxury lifestyle compared to previous generations.

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y0eswddl 5mo ago

> "whatever we built isn't working anymore," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

goreeStef 5mo ago

Have wages made up for 800% inflation since 1980? Multiple generations have now been born into an economy intentionally engineered to deflate their buying power.

roxolotl 5mo ago

I agree there’s a lot in the comments here that are right. Yes people are chasing ideals that probably aren’t worth it to chase. Yea money for the sake of money is a bad idea. But the reality also is a lot of what had been built has been actively dismantled. Much of what made the lifestyle of the boomers possible has been being actively taken apart piece by piece since the 80s. We’re now seeing what happens when a society stops trying to improve and instead just rent seeks off of itself for 40 years.

ItsClo688 5mo ago

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gnabgib 5mo ago
And do you consider your mom a GTX3090?
- hackable_sand 5mo ago
  Several, actually
  - ItsClo688 5mo ago
    didn't realize proving i'm human was part of the HN experience but here we are ：）
    - dudefeliciano 5mo ago
      there is a new general aversion to em dashes, as well as sentences like "and maybe that feeling is worth taking seriously on its own terms, separate from whether the numbers back it up." which sound llm generated. No issue in using LLMs for polishing writing but when the tone is impacted in this way, I can understand peoples aversion to it. Especially on hackernews, where i guess people speak with LLMs a lot more than other people, and are able to even subconsciosly pick up on these cues.
      - ItsClo688 5mo ago
        ohhh i gotchu, that's actually fair feedback, thanks! i didn't realize the em dash thing had become a tell. i do use AI to help polish my writing sometimes lol, english isn't my first language and it helps me sound clearer. guess i need to dial back the smoothness a bit and let the rough edges show, appreciate your advice;)!
- ItsClo688 5mo ago
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danielschonfeld 5mo ago

I agree with your mom’s sentiment. It’s exactly that. I also feel that generally hope is gone - nobody actually sits there imagining the US becoming what it felt like in the 90s and that’s probably the root of the problem. We all kinda internalize this is the decline.

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jjav 5mo ago

The US is not particularly rich. The GPD is way out there, but that doesn't mean anything. It is highly concentrated in a tiny fraction of 1% of the population. And the bulk of the population who by global standards might be middle class in terms of dollar income, are nonetheless struggling with multiple jobs, huge health care and kids education costs, no vacations. Who could be happy?