this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2024
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collapse of the old society
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Young adults didn't have much assets in the past either. I suspect a strong factor here is rather that due to high rents for apartments in population centers, young adults are forced to stay with their parents which can be quite miserable at that age.
People earn more as they age there's no doubting that. However young adults now own less assets overall than their parents or grandparents did at their age. It continues that way for every age cohort too.
The baby boomer generation owns and has owned more wealth than any other generation in US history even when accounting for age.
And the 1% is mostly boomers.
I don't think that's it either. Young adults have been living with their parents for generations and in many parts of the world that is still the norm. You just go from dependent, to independent, to caretaker of your parents as they age. My own opinion on this is 1) social media. Before we only compared ourselves to our immediate peers. Now we are exposed to millions of people online. Especially when combined with the insidious algorithms made to keep you on these platforms. 2) The constant feeling of impending doom that makes us feel like we don't have a future. Makes everything we do feel pointless.
Apples to oranges, no? In many parts of the world gays are executed on sight, doesn't mean it's what the westerners are used to nor does it mean we should adopt it.
This is also massively overblown "oriental medicine" type rhetoric btw, not accusing you of it but traveling to places like Russia, China, Europe etc. it's easy to observe that living with one's parents is the norm only for the poorest of the poor, it's much less cultural and correlates much more with class (Marxist definition).
Or if you don't have parents, or can't move back with them for whatever reason, you just suck it up and remain in the rent poverty trap forever, unable to save up for a downpayment quickly, while house prices get higher faster than you can save otherwise.
I'm not even in a population centre, I work remotely and live in a tiny town rent a shitty mouldy damp basement, but even rent alone for this place alone is higher than what median monthly take-home is for almost half of the population. My neighbours upstairs, who have a hole in their ceiling, pay for an apartment not much bigger than mine as a houseshare of 5-6 people, they're packed in there like sardines.