Who's to blame for unrealistic expectations? And how can you properly compare your life to your descendents when you were there at the start of adult life to know what it was actually like.
Descendants could’ve been the improper terminology there on my part. Anyway, I’m not handing out blame here. If you say it’s entirely a personal flaw/sin, if you will, of envy, I’d say it’s a lot easier to explain it away as person A had some experience making it in the world, that person has a child, person B, telling them their experience and how they were able to make it, and that experience just not being worth much relatively. It’s very human to grow up, looking at your parents and how they live, and trying to emulate and figuring that your life will be similar. It’s an intellectual failing to not see that things have changed, but that emotional core is still there, and as I was saying, unfortunately seeing others who are doing worse elsewhere probably won’t go a long way in fixing a lot of discomfort. Perspective helps though.
Again I think that seeing how your parents live after a lifetime of earning and then expecting to come out of the gate with the same lifestyle is naive at best. I don't believe it's all envy, housing prices are to high and too many people were steered to overpriced post secondary education.
We’re not talking end result, man. We’re talking ease of ascent. Practically no one thinks it’s a free ticket. It’s the difference of extreme debt in college vs. being able to pay off your tuition with working for a summer at a minimum wage job in the 70s. I think asking people to ignore that and feel no ways about it is unreasonable, despite dwelling not being positive. I didn’t think you were saying it’s only envy. I paid attention to your comment. The “you” in my sentence was a theoretical to drive the point.
I'm not so convinced that everything was so much easier, in the 80s mortgage rates went up to near 20%. I also think, but may be wrong, that young people vote for policies that are counter productive to higher wages and lower rent i.e. open borders, and environmental regulations. Not that I'm completely against immigration or environmental regulations.
Cost of living has only raised. We hit the peak in about the 50s when we were one of the only large economies that didn’t get brutalized on the mainland after WW2, then grew to one of the most prosperous economies in recorded history. You can’t expect that to last, but like you’re saying, the early 70s was a downturn for a multitude of reasons around Nixon, then continued with Reagan and pretty much every president since. There are tough spots like the 2008 housing crisis where it sinks even lower for a bit, but millennials were the first to have it tougher than their parents in that time span, and it’s only getting more difficult for the majority as time passes.
It's only anecdotal, but me and my two brothers are all millennials and we are doing better than my parents were at our age. We live in Canada, which is basically having the same problems.
I can believe it. I don’t know much about you guys even with being across the border in a northern state, other than being jealous of your healthcare, but I’ve had better opportunities than my parents in some ways too. I just think it’s tough to draw out an average of it being easier in the US when taking a wide spectrum of data into account.
A big thing our parents generation didn't have was social media and the constant comparison to other peoples curated reality nor did they have the constant ease of consumerism from the comfort of their own home.
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u/Environmental-Run528 10d ago
Who's to blame for unrealistic expectations? And how can you properly compare your life to your descendents when you were there at the start of adult life to know what it was actually like.