> 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-...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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

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.

> 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.

> "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.

> What are we even building?

Caste of trillionaiers who could destroy nations and cultures simply because they feel so.

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

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.

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.

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