I'm a new immigrant millennial to the US (from the UK of all places) and for me the American dream is dead.
I know I'm playing the world's smallest violin and I will gather little sympathy since I am one of those tech workers with a big fat paycheck, but the fact that someone like me isn't thriving might be another symptom of how fucked up things are.
It seems that my timing has played a big role. We moved here last year when the tech market was on fire and people were jumping companies getting obscene amounts of money. Things turned south very quickly. Companies stopped hiring and started laying off people instead. My company virtually froze my salary at the same time that inflation was soaring. Combined with a tumbling stock price, I’ll be taking home less money this year than last. Also my wife has been unable to find a stable job, which has further affected our household income.
Buying a home? Give me a break. I love to share the Zillow home price index graph to visually show people how Covid has screwed the housing market [1]. And at least before we had the option to move far from the city to a cheaper location and work remotely, but now employers are forcing us to go back to the office, so the choice is between unaffordable rent or multi-hour daily commutes (I’m in the second camp).
I know this comment sounds whiny but I can’t help to feel that we are just getting dealt a shit sandwich after another. We might be in a world of extravagant productivity but I’m sure as hell not reaping the benefits. I’m supposed to be a top 5% earner and yet I don’t feel my standard of living is much better than my working class upbringing - at least back then we owned our apartment and weren’t told how privileged we were.
I would be cautious how much of your frustration is because of the US changing or not meeting your expectations vs you happening to make major life decision right when there happened to be major world changing events. (Covid, Russia/Ukraine primarily.)
Since you aren’t in your old life anymore, you don’t know exactly how good or bad it would have been had you stayed.
Moving on beyond that, some places are definitely worse off than others within the US. Housing where I live is getting more expensive, but incomes are also going up substantially. And they are building thousands of new housing.
You mention being a top 5% earner. Unless that is top 5% locally, you are probably using up a lot of that top 5% income to live in a top 1% location.
According to the stats, we make top 5% income of our area. It sure doesn't feel like it. Makes me wonder how people in much lower income who hasn't inherited their home can make ends meet here (the answer is probably not very well).
Regarding your first point, you are right, you can't A/B test your life. In any event I'm reporting my current experience, which is both not better than my previous and expected one.
I’m going to assume you live near the coast, probably in the Bay Area or NYC or Seattle?
I think as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized the American Dream has changed. The coastal cities are no longer available even for relatively middle class families, you’ll have to move inland if you want land and property consistently and for relatively cheap.
Yep - was barely scraping by it felt like, while in a coastal city. After we had kids, it was way worse. We moved inland, bought a house, and can afford an in-home nanny. It feels closer to what the cumulative household income we have is supposed to feel like.
I think it was always supposed to be "work hard, adapt, and you'll have a good life." This is out of reach for many, certainly, but it's not so far out of reach that a BLS.gov average tech salary can't live comfortably.
I'm always reminded of my sister in law who, with her husband, has a 5 bedroom house, two kids, brand new cars, hunting land, and a family lake cabin ... off a teacher and electrician salary. Her father has even more and sold cattle feed. The secret sauce was location. They live in southern Minnesota and never bothered to chase the coastal dream.
The coast is only a correlation. There is a direct tradeoff between economic opportunity and cost of living. I live in an East Coast city with a crap local job market and a 2 hour rush hour commute to the high-wage regional economic center. Living here is pretty cheap. Living in Chicago isn't. If you are professionally and financially established enough to pick and choose remote work or have a pied-à-terre, then sure, moving to a less expensive area is a great move. If you're working in a structured trade that will yield work most anywhere, that works too. Beyond that, it just doesn't work. Cost of living is so much higher now than it was 20 years ago that is just not feasible for most young people to build up enough money to break away from professional hubs. Most people's wages are not double what they were 10 years ago, but getting a room in a shared apartment is way more than double, as is health care, and other major expenses— not to mention student loans. The difficulty that imposes when accumulating capital for down-payment is not linear. Hovering around the break-even line is stressful, but falling below it pulls you under fast, like an undertow. A few overdrafts leading to a missed credit card payment plus a broken car or illness can fuck you over for a few years if you're treading water.
>you’ll have to move inland if you want land and property consistently and for relatively cheap.
Except that I live inland and apart from people coming from the coasts, it's gotten too expensive for "local" people. That $500K house is cheap if you've made your money elsewhere (or work remotely), but for anyone working in the limited local industry, it's out of reach.
Also hard to attract doctors / lawyers / professors / other white collar professionals who aren't on the brink of retirement age because they realize that while the cost of living is better here, they are giving up career opportunities and money not being in coastal cities.
Yes, okay, I am on board with leaving the big city for lower cost of living. Where are the tech sector jobs outside of coastal cities? You might find some in Austin or Arizona, but those places are already two feet in the door for a cost of living crisis.
I'm reasonably wealthy and live in a single family home on the coast. (Well 1 mile from the coast.) So this is not about me. But the truth is, I probably couldn't live anywhere else (beyond living a couple hours away and having a horrendous commute) because:
1) My job is here and they won't let me work remotely. While I don't need this specific job, I've lived in cheaper areas and the jobs available were few and far between. You can find them, it's just a huge pain in the ass and they don't treat their employees nearly as well. I've even worked for myself, but it's a lot more work and not everyone is cut out for it. I threw in the towel after 5 years because it was burning me out so much.
2) My spouse has medical issues that even the best doctors in the big cities are having trouble treating. There's no way they'd be able to treat her in the sticks. You just can't get the types of services needed for some things in lower-cost-of-living areas.
"We’ve strayed so far from the original intentions of our economic model..."?
I think this demonstrates that "young people", or at least this author, aren't really participating in "reality" at all.
The economic system is doing exactly what it was intended to do: scrape the financial assetts of the masses of the unwashed herd into the bank accounts of the predetary rich. It's a win-win-win for the rich, the richer, and the richest. Exactly as it was "intended".
As long as "young people" of all ages continue to throw themselves gushingly at every corporate exploit that crawls out from under a rock, expect the expoitation to continue.
Perhaps consider how much your "lifestyle" depends directly on corporate platforms?
... and that's still a better deal than the UK, where the norm is no equity and an capped salaries for "IT personnel" (their words, not mine).
Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Europeans could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?).
Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT.
It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for UK nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US [0].
> Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent.
Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that the UK/Rishi Sunak keeps trying to push the UK as the potential world leader in AI regulation despite the UK having no world leading AI company?
They trot out that shite anytime they can, it doesn't change the economics of "we have a small market mindset and can't value tech from a global perspective". Also eco-classism means tech is surpressed by finance anywhere it can be.
> Buying a home? Give me a break. I love to share the Zillow home price index graph to visually show people how Covid has screwed the housing market [1]. And at least before we had the option to move far from the city to a cheaper location and work remotely, but now employers are forcing us to go back to the office, so the choice is between unaffordable rent or multi-hour daily commutes (I’m in the second camp).
Remote work also screwed a lot of low cost cities as tech workers moved there, outbid everyone, and priced out local residents from housing market.
However, remote work is here to stay. Live where you want and look for remote jobs while working your current job. Recently, two of my friends switched their jobs to fully-remote positions.
(I know in the news it is layoffs all the time but there are still many companies hiring fully remote workers.)
Sure, but why would I move to the boonies in the US to get a remote job? I might as well move back to my home country, with my family, friends, and no worries about immigration status.
If the solution is to move to a rural area, I double down on my point of the American dream being dead.
> I know I'm playing the world's smallest violin and I will gather little sympathy since I am one of those tech workers with a big fat paycheck, but the fact that someone like me isn't thriving might be another symptom of how fucked up things are.
You don't have to preface your struggles and frustrations like this. Everybody's problems are real to them and diminishing them doesn't do anybody any good.
> Buying a home? Give me a break. I love to share the Zillow home price index graph to visually show people how Covid has screwed the housing market [1]. And at least before we had the option to move far from the city to a cheaper location and work remotely, but now employers are forcing us to go back to the office, so the choice is between unaffordable rent or multi-hour daily commutes (I’m in the second camp).
For reference, I purchased a home and I believe it to have been a huge mistake. I'll be looking to sell it basically at-cost in about a year or so. The homebuying gold rush made a lot of people, including me, buy houses because they thought it was their chance, only to then realize that many houses were deceptively priced/kinda shitty. I think your feelings around commuting are valid, and I don't mean to diminish the desire to own a home, I'm just trying to be a voice of "it's not always better". I didn't really have anybody in my life when I bought, saying that type of thing, so I'm trying to advocate for homebuying-realism when I can.
> I know this comment sounds whiny but I can’t help to feel that we are just getting dealt a shit sandwich after another. We might be in a world of extravagant productivity but I’m sure as hell not reaping the benefits. I’m supposed to be a top 5% earner and yet I don’t feel my standard of living is much better than my working class upbringing - at least back then we owned our apartment and weren’t told how privileged we were.
I feel this big time too. I make pretty far above my city's "upper tier" of income for tech workers and still generally feel strapped. I have gotten a handful of bad beats in a row.
Thanks for your comment, I think the HN crowd might be more understanding. In the general population, someone making 6 figures complaining about cost of living (particularly tech workers, since we are usually blamed for the problem) is frowned upon.
> I purchased a home and I believe it to have been a huge mistake. I'll be looking to sell it basically at-cost
If the worst part of the experience was breaking even, you're ahead. You bought at a peak. Refinance every few years and ride it out.
Rent never gets cheaper over time, you get no privacy and own nothing. If shit hits the fan, you're homeless in 60-90 days. By comparison, foreclosure buys you a year.
As a UK person who always dreamed of moving to the US, how have you found it from a social perspective? I always imagined it would be a much friendlier place than the UK and that there were more things to do regardless of whether you had geek or jock interests, does it match that expectation?
I moved from the UK but I'm not british, so not sure how useful my experience will be to you.
Since I am married and an introvert I haven't really socialized that much since we moved. People seem pretty open although it seems to me you need to get into some kind of shared hobby to meet people (isn't that just true about making friends as an adult?). However I never had a bad experience socializing in the UK, in fact I made several good friends there.
Timing is a big deal; the economic system favored those of earlier generations (also when fewer people lived), and now I think we basically have to wait for Boomer generation to cede influence -- they were dealt a nice economic hand and capitalism thrived to where we are now, maybe a variant of "peak capitalism", which younger generations are rebelling against because they can't participate as much and the negative externalities of such a system are apparent (e.g. oligarchic control, regulatory capture, weakening of federal governments, and just plain classic corruption allowed within legal bounds...).
This isnt about generation vs generation. It's elite vs. the proletariat and the pain is just distributed unevenly across generations.
Obviously theyre more than happy with millenials blaming their parents as it exculpates them for turning the crank on the dynastic, parasitic wealth extraction engine.
I have encountered this video and it is worth to take a look. The conditions for living are never going to be the same as they were, but not due to "boomers" or whatever the favorite scapegoat is but... well watch it:
Surprisingly sober and non-bombastic commentary. Does a good job of discussing dynamics but it's hard to see how this doesn't suppress market activity and reduce the tacit value and productivity of the population. Said differently: how we avoid a smaller pie.
It breaks my heart to talk to my mum and have her not understand that I'm over 30 and straight up cannot afford to buy property. "Why don't you sell your car for a down payment?" as if that would be anywhere near enough. I think part of what makes her said, is it felt _so easy_ for folks born in the post-war boom to get in on some of that increased productivity, and she's devastated that I have seemingly missed out on that boat.
It just depends on WHERE you try to buy property. Yes of course it's going to be hard to buy a house in a popular area because you are competing with lots of rich people who also want to live there.
But there are still tons of places with extremely cheap land in the developed world.
Judging by your use of the word "mum" I'd guess you're in the UK. And yes, things are way harder in the UK since people get paid way less than America, the government takes way more from you in taxes, and the cost of basic things like food are higher. But I think you could still do what your mom is suggesting in some places in the UK. I can find plenty of starter homes in Scotland for 80k pounds for example.
I just think it's silly to expect houses to be cheap exactly where you want to live, because odds are tons of people also want to live there too and you have to compete with them. But if you are willing to be flexible, there is still plenty of space for the next generation to own property.
You can find houses for 30K in Liverpool, because the UK outside of London is poorer than a random Eastern European country (which is one of the many reasons why Eastern Europeans are running away from the UK). How much do you think you are going to make in a place such as Scotland or northern England?
Sounds like you live in a privileged environment. Vast majority of people have never owned any property, nor anything else of real value actually. It's perfectly ok to not own.
I don’t think you understand the UK somewhat unusual and reasonably unique relationship with housing property.
Our entire social system is built around the idea that people own property, and that’s the primary driver of wealth generation. Not owning property in the UK means giving up to 70% of your salary each month on rent, and getting a shoe box in return, because renters are second class citizens in the UK with little protection.
It’s simply impossible to build any kind of wealth or security in the UK without owning property. You will forever find yourself living paycheque-to-paycheque, or waiting for the moment you get no-fault eviction which can be served to you after only 6 month from the start of your let. (And it happens, even to those with high earnings).
The UK has a strange, and incredibly unhealthy, obsession with home ownership and property prices. Millennials and GenZ pay every day for this unjust social folly.
If you rent in the UK, you experience a form of poverty that has been unknown in continental Europe since the 60s. Regular evictions and rent hikes, pest infestations, mould, damp, etc…
You would fall under the definition of a homeless person in a more serious country.
I'm an 'elder millennial' and I'm so used to seeing articles about how my generation has been screwed that I have to remind myself I'm not 'young' anymore and we're now talking about a whole new generation that's starting behind the 8 ball.
Some of us (I'm 33, so old-ish millennial here) are doing well, yes, but some of us have been doing terrible. The economy has, overall, not been kind to us.
Boomers need to retire already, because they've held onto the top rung of the ladder for far too long, which has caused severe ripple effects in our economy. Their mentality, while not inherently bad, has not kept up with reality.
I personally have struggled and am extremely fortunate that I've had great parents who were wealthy enough to partially support me. I wasn't able to get into a good company after college and that has absolutely wrecked my career - taking odd jobs and short-term employment to put food on the table and pay rent. As I'm not an engineer, my career prospects are quite dim.
Now that there's an entire new generation entering the workforce, I'm afraid that there's millions of people in my position who simply won't be able to afford anything, much less a home or a family. That's not good for the economy, but the folks at the top don't really care as long as they get paid.
As a fellow millennial I don't know what people are talking about. The world is way better today than when I was a kid:
All sorts of racism and prejudice are at much lower levels than when I was a kid.
I went through two economic crises by the time I was 21.
The US fought two wars in my prime war fighting years. (Though fortunately not me but friends died).
Technology has continued it's steady march.
If you gave me a choice between being born today and being born when I was I'd take today without hesitation. Things haven't become Utopian yet but they are steadily getting better.
Easy: as an engineer, my father in his late 30's could support my mother being a SAHM, three kids, buy a 120m² (IIRC?) small house with a garden, and all the modern commodities (well, safe for electronics that didn't exist at the time).
Nowadays, I'm also an engineer in my mid 30's, and I can just buy a 40m² flat. Never talk about kids.
They are talking about the economic situation. You are a millenial on hn, you are probably doing fine. A lot of your peers otoh are living with their parents still, have a mountain of debt, have put off having kids, aren’t in a career path to change much of this and don’t have the skills or the money or time to switch into a more lucrative field and be competitive relative to new grads.
I'm going to disagree that "the world is way better". Don't get me wrong, there's been progress, but there's also a lot of ways it's objectively worse.
+ Significantly more income inequality than 20+ years ago
+ Stagnated wages relative to inflation for much more than 20+ years
+ Economic mobility is significantly worse
+ The education system is in worse shape than 20+ years ago
+ Higher education is more costly, and no longer improves prospects of gainful employment nor additional earning potential
+ Health insurance costs that significantly outpace inflation
+ Kids today will be living under a surveillance state from day 1
Yes, technology has advanced, and some social issues have made progress, but others have had significant setbacks (rollback of Roe v Wade, uptick in far right ideologies).
Put yourself in the position of your own child, born today. Can you offer them a better start than your parents did you? Without knowing anything about you it's more likely you have more debt, worse housing, and more expensive childcare to deal with.
I mostly agree with these points from a European perspective, but to contrast this: income decreased on average, the gap between rich and poor increased, many markets are not as competitive anymore, owning housing got unrealistic for most working people, ...
The reality is hard, but the expectation half of this balance is getting exaggerated:
> We could be working 15-hour weeks, enjoying our free time, and living like people of the future.
Keynes’ 15-hour workweek essay wasn’t meant to be a rigorous study of how the future was going to look, nor was it representative of a widespread belief. Yet to this day it’s a favorite of journalists looking to anchor economic expectations so far away from reality that no living conditions could sound good by comparison.
More practically, I still see a lot of exaggerated expectations in the juniors coming through my employer. Maybe I’m getting old, but it’s becoming frustrating to watch people get six-figure jobs right out college doing remote coding work from the comfort of their homes with ample mentoring, only to complain because Reddit and Blind led them to believe they’d be earning $300K at FAANG jobs while working 20 hours per week. I know that’s not the focus of this article, but I do think it’s representative of how the gap between expectation and reality is being stretched wider and wider as people fall deeper into the internet/social media reality distortion field.
> More practically, I still see a lot of exaggerated expectations in the juniors coming through my employer. Maybe I’m getting old, but it’s becoming frustrating to watch people get six-figure jobs right out college doing remote coding work from the comfort of their homes with ample mentoring, only to complain because Reddit and Blind led them to believe they’d be earning $300K at FAANG jobs while working 20 hours per week
This, my friends, is an example of corporate speak. What this statement misses, is that, you NEED $300k salaries to buy houses in places where you get said salaries.
What's more? The average new grad is NOT starting at zero. They are starting at negative. So, the $300k salaries are required to get to zero first. By the time these graduates get to zero, house prices have increased substantially. So they will likely need $400k salaries to afford houses by then.
What's more, the execs and upper management are making a HELL LOT MORE every passing year, without adequate checks on their productivity. At the same time, the new grad must grind to keep making them richer.
The gen Z new grad understands this predatory exploitation very well. That's why people are complaining. Reddit and Blind are merely the channels by which the complaints are happening.
Stop this corporate-speak. Let profits got to employees, not just the shareholders passively earning income. The world will be a happier place with this small change.
> it’s becoming frustrating to watch people get six-figure jobs right out college doing remote coding work from the comfort of their homes with ample mentoring, only to complain because Reddit and Blind led them to believe they’d be earning $300K at FAANG jobs while working 20 hours per week
How many people are actually doing this? These people are a vocal minority. Do not fall into the "millennials are entitled" trap because a few spoiled knuckleheads posted some stupid stuff on Reddit.
Look at what's actually happening in the economy and you'll see that the expectations are not any higher than they were for older generations going back at least a few decades, but that there's a growing divide between the millennials who are doing well and those who are not. As one of those who is doing pretty well, I am incensed on behalf of my friends and peers who are doing less well through no fault of their own.
are their expectations unreasonably high, or are yours too low?
last year a junior on my team worked with a few other juniors and a PM to implement a straightforward automation project. their system saved about $50mm last year, and that number is projected to increase as the company grows. you don't necessarily find such low hanging fruit every year, but would he really be wrong to think his contribution is worth more than $150k?
>Between 2022-2023, £4.8 billion was added to UK student debt in interest alone. Students incur debt in order to pursue an education which will further their career prospects, then find themselves trapped by the interest – often necessitating more loans just to keep afloat.
A very strange lie to encounter. In the UK, student debt repayment is linked to income (something like, 9% of all your income above £21k). If you don't earn, you don't pay. The interest accrues yes, but again, if you lose your job, you pay nothing. If you earn less than £21k, you pay nothing. It's nothing at all like a loan, and is more accurately, a income tax for graduate. Although, regressively, those who earn the most will pay the least. Those on modest salaries post university might pay it for their whole working lives. (one more thing, it's automatically written off after 40 years or so).
I was refused a mortgage because of my student loan payments. The articles point is not that having a student loan ruins your life, it is that it makes it harder to do things like access housing (true) and that that means education is for many a net negative for their other all wealth (true for at least some people).
It's oversold, but it's still true when you get past the oversell...
Also, the opportunity cost of student loan interest is absolutely enormous. Imagine if you graduated college in 2014 with no loans and started investing your excess earnings in the stock market instead of paying off student loans.
I’d also note that this is how it works in the US as well for loans provided by the federal government. In addition, as long as you make payments, excess interest will not accrue and your principal won’t increase. They’re also written off in 20 years.
It’s mostly with private student loans that people go completely underwater in the US
I'm not sure how it works in the UK, but in the US at least this extra debt is negatively factored into things like credit scores.
And regardless of the payment, it takes a bite out of income. I couldn't afford a PPACA medical plan for a few reasons, but partly because I was paying for loans. None of these repayment plans factor in affordability for the payee, they are a straight percentage of income basis or treat the payee as some sort of national average in terms of expected affordability.
I feel like there's an issue with the crystallization of popular destinations that means that regardless of policy, in 2020 we have a different benchmark than 1960.
For example, when London was cheaper, it was a very different place to today. Pollution, lots of areas that regular people wouldn't want to go to, generally just a less global city and less developed.
Moving there or living there now is different to how it was. There's a ton more competition. There's more people in the entire country, "everyone" wants to go to University, etc.
I feel like we need to go back to basics, like the social housing boom, and say - what do we need for people to settle down, feel ownership over their communities, raise families and get married, etc.
I don't think that "people can afford to rent in huge cities" is sustainable as a goal.
Perhaps leaving aside today's problems in US West Coast cities, Western cities (certainly in the East Coast of the US but more broadly) 40 years or so ago were a lot grittier, more dangerous, less desirable, and yes cheaper than they are today. If I look at my cohort from grad school in the Boston area, I don't think anyone lived in--or even especially near--the city. And it wasn't because of cost. The city was still losing population well into the 90s.
These conversations never seem to mention what seems to me a relevant and related problem: the growth in commuting time during the rush hour.
Yes, there are cheaper places to move. Yes, the price of my parents' home roughly matched inflation. Yes, after inflation, I earn about what my parents did at this stage of their life.
So, why not just buy a home like my parents' in my hometown? The commute time into the city (Boston) has gone from ~45 minutes when my parents bought in the 80s to 90 minutes today, with high variance. That's 1.5 additional lost hours per day with no compensation in inflation-adjusted salary, home price, or cost of education.
My father made roughly the same as me, inflation-adjusted, without a college degree or the associated costs. In comparison, I started my working life with ~100k in debt (they couldn't afford to help me pay).
It's all very frustrating because it feels like we have the technology to solve these problems and yet we're hung up on non-technological problems.
The US has chosen to pursue population growth, largely through immigration, as a route towards short-term economic growth. Things like overloaded infrastructure (more expensive housing, longer commutes on overcrowded streets, etc) are some of the consequences of that choice.
The article says that young people are poor, old people are rich.
Parent comment claims that young people are not having kids because poor.
Your graph says that richer people had fewer kids (in the last 12 months).
Your graph would only refute the parent comment if you could show that people have fewer kids because they're richer, not because they're older (confounding factor) and/or people with more kids don't have to sacrifice an income to look after said kids (reverse causation)
Readit News
I know I'm playing the world's smallest violin and I will gather little sympathy since I am one of those tech workers with a big fat paycheck, but the fact that someone like me isn't thriving might be another symptom of how fucked up things are.
It seems that my timing has played a big role. We moved here last year when the tech market was on fire and people were jumping companies getting obscene amounts of money. Things turned south very quickly. Companies stopped hiring and started laying off people instead. My company virtually froze my salary at the same time that inflation was soaring. Combined with a tumbling stock price, I’ll be taking home less money this year than last. Also my wife has been unable to find a stable job, which has further affected our household income.
Buying a home? Give me a break. I love to share the Zillow home price index graph to visually show people how Covid has screwed the housing market [1]. And at least before we had the option to move far from the city to a cheaper location and work remotely, but now employers are forcing us to go back to the office, so the choice is between unaffordable rent or multi-hour daily commutes (I’m in the second camp).
I know this comment sounds whiny but I can’t help to feel that we are just getting dealt a shit sandwich after another. We might be in a world of extravagant productivity but I’m sure as hell not reaping the benefits. I’m supposed to be a top 5% earner and yet I don’t feel my standard of living is much better than my working class upbringing - at least back then we owned our apartment and weren’t told how privileged we were.
[1] https://www.zillow.com/home-values/102001/united-states/
Since you aren’t in your old life anymore, you don’t know exactly how good or bad it would have been had you stayed.
Moving on beyond that, some places are definitely worse off than others within the US. Housing where I live is getting more expensive, but incomes are also going up substantially. And they are building thousands of new housing.
You mention being a top 5% earner. Unless that is top 5% locally, you are probably using up a lot of that top 5% income to live in a top 1% location.
Regarding your first point, you are right, you can't A/B test your life. In any event I'm reporting my current experience, which is both not better than my previous and expected one.
I think as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized the American Dream has changed. The coastal cities are no longer available even for relatively middle class families, you’ll have to move inland if you want land and property consistently and for relatively cheap.
I think it was always supposed to be "work hard, adapt, and you'll have a good life." This is out of reach for many, certainly, but it's not so far out of reach that a BLS.gov average tech salary can't live comfortably.
I'm always reminded of my sister in law who, with her husband, has a 5 bedroom house, two kids, brand new cars, hunting land, and a family lake cabin ... off a teacher and electrician salary. Her father has even more and sold cattle feed. The secret sauce was location. They live in southern Minnesota and never bothered to chase the coastal dream.
Except that I live inland and apart from people coming from the coasts, it's gotten too expensive for "local" people. That $500K house is cheap if you've made your money elsewhere (or work remotely), but for anyone working in the limited local industry, it's out of reach.
Also hard to attract doctors / lawyers / professors / other white collar professionals who aren't on the brink of retirement age because they realize that while the cost of living is better here, they are giving up career opportunities and money not being in coastal cities.
1) My job is here and they won't let me work remotely. While I don't need this specific job, I've lived in cheaper areas and the jobs available were few and far between. You can find them, it's just a huge pain in the ass and they don't treat their employees nearly as well. I've even worked for myself, but it's a lot more work and not everyone is cut out for it. I threw in the towel after 5 years because it was burning me out so much.
2) My spouse has medical issues that even the best doctors in the big cities are having trouble treating. There's no way they'd be able to treat her in the sticks. You just can't get the types of services needed for some things in lower-cost-of-living areas.
I think this demonstrates that "young people", or at least this author, aren't really participating in "reality" at all.
The economic system is doing exactly what it was intended to do: scrape the financial assetts of the masses of the unwashed herd into the bank accounts of the predetary rich. It's a win-win-win for the rich, the richer, and the richest. Exactly as it was "intended".
As long as "young people" of all ages continue to throw themselves gushingly at every corporate exploit that crawls out from under a rock, expect the expoitation to continue.
Perhaps consider how much your "lifestyle" depends directly on corporate platforms?
Anecdotally, seems there's a lot of British and European expats here in the Valley and they don't seem too keen on returning. We've been getting a lot of international applicants (but work from home was supposed to mean Europeans could avoid moving to the "dangerous" US but work for American companies?).
Post 2016 the messaging from most commonwealth countries (UK, Canada, Australia) seemed to be that they were going to be the ones benefiting from a brain drain of Americans leaving the country. Canada was supposed to become an "AI Superpower" and Universities in the UK were supposed to be where innovation was going to happen next due to the perceived hostility of the United States to foreign talent. I recall someone pitching the "Silicon Roundabout" and that Cambridge and Oxford were going to be the new Stanford and MIT.
It's interesting, in retrospective, to see how wrong these predictions were. Top destination for UK nationals in Academia was, and still is... the US [0].
[0] http://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/the-global-bra...
Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that the UK/Rishi Sunak keeps trying to push the UK as the potential world leader in AI regulation despite the UK having no world leading AI company?
Remote work also screwed a lot of low cost cities as tech workers moved there, outbid everyone, and priced out local residents from housing market.
However, remote work is here to stay. Live where you want and look for remote jobs while working your current job. Recently, two of my friends switched their jobs to fully-remote positions.
(I know in the news it is layoffs all the time but there are still many companies hiring fully remote workers.)
If the solution is to move to a rural area, I double down on my point of the American dream being dead.
You don't have to preface your struggles and frustrations like this. Everybody's problems are real to them and diminishing them doesn't do anybody any good.
> Buying a home? Give me a break. I love to share the Zillow home price index graph to visually show people how Covid has screwed the housing market [1]. And at least before we had the option to move far from the city to a cheaper location and work remotely, but now employers are forcing us to go back to the office, so the choice is between unaffordable rent or multi-hour daily commutes (I’m in the second camp).
For reference, I purchased a home and I believe it to have been a huge mistake. I'll be looking to sell it basically at-cost in about a year or so. The homebuying gold rush made a lot of people, including me, buy houses because they thought it was their chance, only to then realize that many houses were deceptively priced/kinda shitty. I think your feelings around commuting are valid, and I don't mean to diminish the desire to own a home, I'm just trying to be a voice of "it's not always better". I didn't really have anybody in my life when I bought, saying that type of thing, so I'm trying to advocate for homebuying-realism when I can.
> I know this comment sounds whiny but I can’t help to feel that we are just getting dealt a shit sandwich after another. We might be in a world of extravagant productivity but I’m sure as hell not reaping the benefits. I’m supposed to be a top 5% earner and yet I don’t feel my standard of living is much better than my working class upbringing - at least back then we owned our apartment and weren’t told how privileged we were.
I feel this big time too. I make pretty far above my city's "upper tier" of income for tech workers and still generally feel strapped. I have gotten a handful of bad beats in a row.
If the worst part of the experience was breaking even, you're ahead. You bought at a peak. Refinance every few years and ride it out.
Rent never gets cheaper over time, you get no privacy and own nothing. If shit hits the fan, you're homeless in 60-90 days. By comparison, foreclosure buys you a year.
Since I am married and an introvert I haven't really socialized that much since we moved. People seem pretty open although it seems to me you need to get into some kind of shared hobby to meet people (isn't that just true about making friends as an adult?). However I never had a bad experience socializing in the UK, in fact I made several good friends there.
Obviously theyre more than happy with millenials blaming their parents as it exculpates them for turning the crank on the dynastic, parasitic wealth extraction engine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXP8gH0wddE
But there are still tons of places with extremely cheap land in the developed world.
Judging by your use of the word "mum" I'd guess you're in the UK. And yes, things are way harder in the UK since people get paid way less than America, the government takes way more from you in taxes, and the cost of basic things like food are higher. But I think you could still do what your mom is suggesting in some places in the UK. I can find plenty of starter homes in Scotland for 80k pounds for example.
I just think it's silly to expect houses to be cheap exactly where you want to live, because odds are tons of people also want to live there too and you have to compete with them. But if you are willing to be flexible, there is still plenty of space for the next generation to own property.
Our entire social system is built around the idea that people own property, and that’s the primary driver of wealth generation. Not owning property in the UK means giving up to 70% of your salary each month on rent, and getting a shoe box in return, because renters are second class citizens in the UK with little protection.
It’s simply impossible to build any kind of wealth or security in the UK without owning property. You will forever find yourself living paycheque-to-paycheque, or waiting for the moment you get no-fault eviction which can be served to you after only 6 month from the start of your let. (And it happens, even to those with high earnings).
The UK has a strange, and incredibly unhealthy, obsession with home ownership and property prices. Millennials and GenZ pay every day for this unjust social folly.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United...
You would fall under the definition of a homeless person in a more serious country.
Hidden in those statistics are also some burgeoning equity issues which are only beginning to show their face with GenZ.
Boomers need to retire already, because they've held onto the top rung of the ladder for far too long, which has caused severe ripple effects in our economy. Their mentality, while not inherently bad, has not kept up with reality.
I personally have struggled and am extremely fortunate that I've had great parents who were wealthy enough to partially support me. I wasn't able to get into a good company after college and that has absolutely wrecked my career - taking odd jobs and short-term employment to put food on the table and pay rent. As I'm not an engineer, my career prospects are quite dim.
Now that there's an entire new generation entering the workforce, I'm afraid that there's millions of people in my position who simply won't be able to afford anything, much less a home or a family. That's not good for the economy, but the folks at the top don't really care as long as they get paid.
All sorts of racism and prejudice are at much lower levels than when I was a kid.
I went through two economic crises by the time I was 21.
The US fought two wars in my prime war fighting years. (Though fortunately not me but friends died).
Technology has continued it's steady march.
If you gave me a choice between being born today and being born when I was I'd take today without hesitation. Things haven't become Utopian yet but they are steadily getting better.
Easy: as an engineer, my father in his late 30's could support my mother being a SAHM, three kids, buy a 120m² (IIRC?) small house with a garden, and all the modern commodities (well, safe for electronics that didn't exist at the time).
Nowadays, I'm also an engineer in my mid 30's, and I can just buy a 40m² flat. Never talk about kids.
+ Significantly more income inequality than 20+ years ago
+ Stagnated wages relative to inflation for much more than 20+ years
+ Economic mobility is significantly worse
+ The education system is in worse shape than 20+ years ago
+ Higher education is more costly, and no longer improves prospects of gainful employment nor additional earning potential
+ Health insurance costs that significantly outpace inflation
+ Kids today will be living under a surveillance state from day 1
Yes, technology has advanced, and some social issues have made progress, but others have had significant setbacks (rollback of Roe v Wade, uptick in far right ideologies).
The teen suicide rate has increased 35% since 1999. [0]
Also, baby formula shortages are now a routine thing here; this would have been unthinkable for Americans 30 years ago for a non third-world country.
>The US fought two wars in my prime war fighting years. (Though fortunately not me but friends died).
And is now entirely reliant on the use of foreign proxies because its will to fight is exhausted (for better or worse).
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/08/health/us-suicide-rate-trnd/i...
> We could be working 15-hour weeks, enjoying our free time, and living like people of the future.
Keynes’ 15-hour workweek essay wasn’t meant to be a rigorous study of how the future was going to look, nor was it representative of a widespread belief. Yet to this day it’s a favorite of journalists looking to anchor economic expectations so far away from reality that no living conditions could sound good by comparison.
More practically, I still see a lot of exaggerated expectations in the juniors coming through my employer. Maybe I’m getting old, but it’s becoming frustrating to watch people get six-figure jobs right out college doing remote coding work from the comfort of their homes with ample mentoring, only to complain because Reddit and Blind led them to believe they’d be earning $300K at FAANG jobs while working 20 hours per week. I know that’s not the focus of this article, but I do think it’s representative of how the gap between expectation and reality is being stretched wider and wider as people fall deeper into the internet/social media reality distortion field.
This, my friends, is an example of corporate speak. What this statement misses, is that, you NEED $300k salaries to buy houses in places where you get said salaries.
What's more? The average new grad is NOT starting at zero. They are starting at negative. So, the $300k salaries are required to get to zero first. By the time these graduates get to zero, house prices have increased substantially. So they will likely need $400k salaries to afford houses by then.
What's more, the execs and upper management are making a HELL LOT MORE every passing year, without adequate checks on their productivity. At the same time, the new grad must grind to keep making them richer.
The gen Z new grad understands this predatory exploitation very well. That's why people are complaining. Reddit and Blind are merely the channels by which the complaints are happening.
Stop this corporate-speak. Let profits got to employees, not just the shareholders passively earning income. The world will be a happier place with this small change.
How many people are actually doing this? These people are a vocal minority. Do not fall into the "millennials are entitled" trap because a few spoiled knuckleheads posted some stupid stuff on Reddit.
Look at what's actually happening in the economy and you'll see that the expectations are not any higher than they were for older generations going back at least a few decades, but that there's a growing divide between the millennials who are doing well and those who are not. As one of those who is doing pretty well, I am incensed on behalf of my friends and peers who are doing less well through no fault of their own.
last year a junior on my team worked with a few other juniors and a PM to implement a straightforward automation project. their system saved about $50mm last year, and that number is projected to increase as the company grows. you don't necessarily find such low hanging fruit every year, but would he really be wrong to think his contribution is worth more than $150k?
Our generation gets none of that. You have to change jobs to get a nontrivial raise, no matter how valuable you are.
A very strange lie to encounter. In the UK, student debt repayment is linked to income (something like, 9% of all your income above £21k). If you don't earn, you don't pay. The interest accrues yes, but again, if you lose your job, you pay nothing. If you earn less than £21k, you pay nothing. It's nothing at all like a loan, and is more accurately, a income tax for graduate. Although, regressively, those who earn the most will pay the least. Those on modest salaries post university might pay it for their whole working lives. (one more thing, it's automatically written off after 40 years or so).
It's oversold, but it's still true when you get past the oversell...
It’s mostly with private student loans that people go completely underwater in the US
Only if you switch to the income-based repayment plan, which has to be reverified every year.
Prior to December 2020 taxes were owed on forgiven debt the year it was finally forgiven. Which could be very harsh if the debt was large. https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/student-loans/how-t...
I'm not sure how it works in the UK, but in the US at least this extra debt is negatively factored into things like credit scores.
And regardless of the payment, it takes a bite out of income. I couldn't afford a PPACA medical plan for a few reasons, but partly because I was paying for loans. None of these repayment plans factor in affordability for the payee, they are a straight percentage of income basis or treat the payee as some sort of national average in terms of expected affordability.
For example, when London was cheaper, it was a very different place to today. Pollution, lots of areas that regular people wouldn't want to go to, generally just a less global city and less developed.
Moving there or living there now is different to how it was. There's a ton more competition. There's more people in the entire country, "everyone" wants to go to University, etc.
I feel like we need to go back to basics, like the social housing boom, and say - what do we need for people to settle down, feel ownership over their communities, raise families and get married, etc.
I don't think that "people can afford to rent in huge cities" is sustainable as a goal.
One wonders, then, what cities are for, exactly?
The ones that people _move continents_ to live in.
I don't think it's feasible any more in the internet age for popular places like that to remain accessible to all.
Yes, there are cheaper places to move. Yes, the price of my parents' home roughly matched inflation. Yes, after inflation, I earn about what my parents did at this stage of their life.
So, why not just buy a home like my parents' in my hometown? The commute time into the city (Boston) has gone from ~45 minutes when my parents bought in the 80s to 90 minutes today, with high variance. That's 1.5 additional lost hours per day with no compensation in inflation-adjusted salary, home price, or cost of education.
My father made roughly the same as me, inflation-adjusted, without a college degree or the associated costs. In comparison, I started my working life with ~100k in debt (they couldn't afford to help me pay).
It's all very frustrating because it feels like we have the technology to solve these problems and yet we're hung up on non-technological problems.
Fertility rate is inversely correlated with income.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
Parent comment claims that young people are not having kids because poor.
Your graph says that richer people had fewer kids (in the last 12 months).
Your graph would only refute the parent comment if you could show that people have fewer kids because they're richer, not because they're older (confounding factor) and/or people with more kids don't have to sacrifice an income to look after said kids (reverse causation)
fertility is inversely correlated with price of living
That explains why poor countries have high birth rates and rich countries have low birth rates