Globalisation doesn't help with that. It's now easier than ever to move to a "hot spot", most of the time for work. But no one knows each other, everyone come for "the game" and their career. Social networks and instant messaging gives you the illusion that you still have a community.

It's all good in your 20s, when you're in good health, and when it's easy and cheap to make friends. Then you hit your 30s and find out that you don't have any community, everyone moved somewhere else, the city is too expensive for a 2-3 bedrooms flat, and even if you stayed you'd have to work full time (if not overtime), which means you'd need someone else to bring your kids to school and take care of him/her after work, which isn't free.

It's a lot like the "get a loan to buy a car, buy a car to go to work, work to pay the loan" analogy. It's not a life, you merely exists for work and pay other people to take care of what used to be the core experience. At the end of the day the only thing you're looking for is a meal and this new netflix show your heard about.

The worst part is, as you said, that it's now frown upon to rely on your community because it's "free", and surely you haven't made it if you rely on free things.

I think what's especially twisted about this situation is the two-sided nature of it.

If you come from wealth, it's easy to get into a good school, and your parents can subsidize you while you're launching your career (or outright create a career for you).

If you don't come from wealth, and you get to a city, and you start making over $200k, it's hard to even take advantage of it.

Instead of having parents to subsidize me, I have parents who are pretty broke and in bad health. How can I justify buying a modest house in my area (for $1M), when my parents are piling up debt, struggling to pay rent, and barely able to buy groceries?

Flip that even further to people who come from really poor countries like India. I can't imagine if my parents were working $1 an hour -- how could I pay $3k in rent? How can you invest thousands of dollars in yourself when your parents don't even make that much in a year?

But if you don't make those investments, you're never going to get ahead...

It's not just that wealthy millennials have a huge advantage, but coming from a poor family has a HUGE disadvantage in terms of social mobility as well.

> How can I justify buying a modest house in my area (for $1M), when my parents are piling up debt, struggling to pay rent, and barely able to buy groceries?

Is this a moral conflict, i.e. you don't feel comfortable spending that much money? Or you're actually giving so much money to your parents that you can't afford to buy a house?

I think it's a moral conflict, but not because of the price strictly -- but because of where that money could be used instead.

For example, my down payment could buy my Mom's house, my Dad's house, and my brother's house. The conflict is -- how can I spend that much money on myself? Instead, I could retire both of my parents, and set my brother up for success at the cost of continuing my current life as usual.

It doesn't seem like a huge burden to me to continue my life as usual. And it would be completely life changing to the rest of my family (the people I care most about) to allocate my money in a different way.

On an infinitely smaller scale -- this is similar to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. How much money should you invest now to help people in the future vs giving people money now?

When I was 20, I was giving my family 10s of thousands of dollars a year. The cost of that was that I delayed my career advancement to the point I could be making an extra $100-200k per year now. Sure, I'll get to that point in 2 years time.

But was it really worth it to spend $30k to pay for some weddings and refrigerators and medical expenses 8 years ago to miss out on $300K+ in earning potential over that time period? No. Definitively.

Is it worth it to give my family $200k now when I hope to turn that into a million+ in 5 years? I don't think so. How do they see it? Well, they want the $200k now. Maybe that type of vision is why we're in different situations. Who knows?

It's a very personal choice on how you allocate money. My grandfathers worked in a steel mill and a coal mine. They scrimped and saved for my parents and their siblings to have a better life. My parents were the first generation to go to college and became teachers. They scrimped and saved to give my generation a better life. I'm saving to give my kids a better life. If they needed it, I'd also step up and give money to my parents; fortunately, they don't need it.

If I were in your situation, I'd want to secure my own family's housing and retirement at least as much as your parents' housing and retirement, so as in many things, balance is going to be key. But if you truly value changing their lives at the expense/delay of your own, there's nothing stopping you from doing it and obviously nothing wrong with it. It's a very personal choice.

> But was it really worth it to spend $30k to pay for some weddings and refrigerators and medical expenses 8 years ago to miss out on $300K+ in earning potential over that time period? No. Definitively.

Where exactly are you investing $30,000 that returns more than 100% / year for 8 years?

It's not about "investment".

The opportunity cost of doing things when you're at a low wealth level is enormous.

The obvious example would be to consider the gap between being homeless with $0 and being homeless with $5K.

Your earnings potential just essentially went up by an infinite amount because now you can rent an apartment, get a job, perhaps buy some study equipment like a computer or whatever, and suddenly that $5K can be well north of $50K.

This isn't stock index tracker stuff, this is home economics.

My only guess would be education.

I'm still making the poor choice. I had kids, started raising them in a small town and missed the boat on going out west or wherever to follow they money. About $60k is average software developer pay around here.

I finally break 6 figures and my kids are almost graduated into college. If I left them behind after the divorce I could literally blank check pay for their college.

But I'm deciding to be their dad instead of chasing the money. But 3 more yesterday the last one graduates and I'm ready to go do machine learning and all the fun stuff. So. Sick. Of. Web sites.

I would recommend you let your family be. There earlier stuff in your career was health problems you said and people come first. The houses you talk about now are like gifts. They don't have immediate need so you can get them something better in the future.

And just how hard is it to reach your level btw? I've been programming twenty years... Is it hard to get a job after 40?

Don't think 'if I didn't spend 30k on my family I'd be making six average adult wages more per year' is very common or very realistic to expect.

And if you are making huge amounts of money it's completely reasonable and rational to spend it to actually increase happiness and opportunities, given that one cares about people around them.

In a way, it's easier to support parents in a poor country because everything is cheaper there. Give them $1000/month and they will probably live better than you.

People misjudge entirely the cost of working.

Getting that job in that major metropolitan area and actually going to work every day in that job carries such incredible direct and indirect costs, by the end of the year it’s typical for most people to be worse off than when they started.

This is to say nothing of the opportunity cost of all that time.

Then finally, if you are willing to factor in the societal/cultural pressures that come with the job and the massive costs associated with fulfilling them, as supposed to just calling that weakness on the persons behalf for succumbing to those myriad pressures... well, as you alluded, the tail is most certainly wagging the dog.

"It takes a village" has really bitten for me, I've seen just how bad it is without. Moving to the Bay Area, far away from any parental help, seemed so great when I was 25. Now I have children that I am raising without family help, while trying to do well in my own career, can just be totally emotionally crushing sometimes.

I'm deep in that too, right now. My partner badly wanted one last kid, and knowing we were already resource-tight and having no family around, I was very hesitant. Logistically I knew it would be a disaster but I agreed to it. I love the hell out of this kid, but "totally emotionally crushing" is apt. I'm not new to this, but I can only do so much. Working my job, being a stay at home dad, and having to maintain our relationship (plus my relationship with my son and adopted son) is genuinely outside of my ability. But it's what we have to do here. Expensive city, no connections, 3 kids.

I know it's stupid to go into it knowing it'll be hard, and I can't complain. I'm not. This is just what it takes, and I went into it knowing it would be temporary. Kids get a lot easier as they get older.

A lot of things that are worth it in life take a lot of work. I'll feel better in a few years. At the moment I feel like I'm dying.

At any rate, here's to things getting easier. I'm sure our hard work will pay off soon enough.

It's the relationship with the significant other that suffers the most IMHO, and I think most people ignore that bit. You can just about find hours in the day to work a job and get the kids fed and to bed, but then you have < 1 hr before you have to go to bed and do it all again tomorrow.

It feels like mine is on pause until the kids grow old enough to be left to their own devices, taking their own baths, brushing their own teeth, reading their own bedtime stories etc etc.

> 1 hr before you have to go to bed and do it all again tomorrow

This is very real. Sometimes I sit to do some more work before bed and think wow, I'll finish this... Go to bed... And wake up as early as I can to work some more. Then my son will wake up, and I'll be with him until 6 or so in the evening. While he naps I work more. Rinse and repeat. It's a gauntlet.

Things being on pause isn't really a bad thing at all, but it certainly feels bad in the moment. I have two 9 year olds though, and it's true. Eventually they want to read before bed on their own, they want to play on their own during the day, and the pressure is off. There's a lot more time.

I also have the luxury that on weekends, during the day my older kids will play with the baby and give me a bit of a break. Sometimes even for an hour or so. It's usually an opportunity to catch up on work, but it's often badly needed and a big relief.

>> I know it's stupid to go into it knowing it'll be hard,

It would be stupid going into it thinking it would not be hard. Raising kids is always hard, unless you don't care. And it is always hard in different ways. Kids can see what you can do, and what you can't do; what you can provide and what you can't provide. And as long as you are really trying they will ultimately accept what you have to offer with love.

Thanks, it's nice to be reminded of these things. I try to remind myself partially to ease my mind, but also to take a moment to appreciate how (perhaps subconsciously) grateful kids really are, as you mention. They do accept us (sometimes to my surprise) and they are loving in return. It's part of the 'glue' at times, holding together the structure amongst the chaos a bit. We all do our part. Kids are good people though, regardless of the daily grind.

Children bring happiness, but their costs suppress the effects if one doesn't make "enough":

* https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/02/cost-rais...

On top of that, here you can feel like you are working hard day in and day out, and you meet someone just like you, working just as hard, but they have $5M in stock because they worked for the right company at the right time.

On the other hand, I knew a guy who turned down a job in the Bay Area for family reasons who eventually worked out that the stock he was offered was worth ~$300 million at the peak of the .com bubble.

He was very philosophical about it :-)

To be fair, though, how many people were lucky enough to get out right at the peak of the bubble?

The more likely scenario is you've invested in that relocation, paying the financial and social costs, and then suddenly it's 2001 and you have no job, no stock, and no community to fall back on. So yeah, a philosophical view is probably wise. :)

Mark Cuban.

Well, my wife and I always say that when it came to tech companies, we were "lucky but not that lucky." I worked for one startup whose IPO was filed the day before the bubble burst, and after that had a job offer from pre-IPO Google that I turned down because I figured the stock would be lower than my strike price by the time I could exercise. Oops.

Has anyone worked on creating a 'village' in the bay? Is there any thing like a network where people can watch each other's kids, or take them to activities, to take any pressure off? Like to be a member, you would of course need to have a kid, but instead of payment it's basically a time bartering system. I imagine the kids would benefit from interacting with other kids. I'm sure liability would be a nightmare, but perhaps it could be informal. I myself suffer from this as I have 6 kids, and am thinking about a move to the bay area.

You get this through informal channels - basically this is just a group of friends where someone offers to babysit the kids free-of-charge one day when their friend really needs it, and then the friend reciprocates, and they each bring in a few more friends that they know are trustworthy, and so on. I'd imagine thousands of such groups of friends exist (I suspect this is the primary form of support in many immigrant communities), but you wouldn't really hear about them, because it's all word-of-mouth through social connections. My wife and I have certainly done this for our friends, though, and it's come back to us.

For more institutionalized settings, there's co-op daycares, but we looked into this and they're largely incompatible with having two working parents since the schedule usually requires volunteering in the middle of the workday.

Such villages exist, but honestly probably won't work if you have 6 kids. Every adult who can work works in the Bay Area to get by so there is very little slack time in the system to barter with each other.

What little there is can usually be extended to 1 or maybe 2 kids. We routinely have 4 kids at our house (2 ours), but nobody will be able or want to manage more than that, and not very frequently. Even that sort of arrangement only happens via trusting friendships that are built over time. Distributing the load across multiple arrangements would be logistically daunting.

Perhaps a religious or cultural group would extend their resources in this way, but you would have to belong to those groups, and even there, nothing is free.

And one more thing: any place in the Bay area where you can find a house large enough to comfortably house 6 kids in a relatively safe area is going to be unbelievably expensive. I'd you live in such an area your neighbors will either have many fewer children or be wealthy enough that they hire full time childcare, so they won't have the same needs for village style arrangements as you.

This is very hard to pull off, IME. Even when you have a group of friend who all have children (as opposed to 'we all have children who are friends, so now we are de factor friends') it takes a lot of coordination to keep something like that up. And then someone gets sick and days have to be switched and everyone gets grumpy, or someone's mother moves to the area and now doesn't want to be part of the 'informal daycare' group any more (leading to resentment, because the others are left hanging), etc.

So the problem is a bit of a prisoners dilemma: you need to be able to rely on this group (having to scramble to find another solution is OK a few times a year, but not 3 times a month), but you also don't want to be 'tied down'.

So the alternative is to have lots of rules and required 'volunteering'. Which basically turns into the same as 'real' daycare, except that you have to take the day off to do your 'volunteering' (in the case of 2 working parents). So it's just scrambling to solve all the problems that money is supposed to solve (be a fungible store of value), but while at all costs keeping 'money' out of it.

Having been involved with attempts at systems like this, and having observed the problems in a few others, I no longer think it's feasible, at least not for dual income career oriented people. The places where I've seen it (more or less - it wouldn't work as a lifestyle for me) work are of the type of the mommy group of stay-at-home-parents, but those are hardly comparable to real daycare.

I'm not so keen on the description here, but at the same time it's impossible to deny that there are people who take advantage of the good of society while simultaneously decrying it.

If we want to talk about moochers and deadbeats we need to stop looking at people in poverty who behave in ways we don't like. It's easy to call them names, but they're doing the best they can with the very little they have.

Shift the perspective to huge corps like Walmart, who rake in billions and themselves depend on state welfare to do so.

In the UK we call these people 'benefit scroungers', yet their impact on the British way of life is practically zero compared to what those with money can do, to the point where it's a false problem.

Yeah, I was going to say, my grandmother took care of me & my sister while my parents, in their 30s, were at work, or if they needed a night out. This was in the 80s, so it's not anything "new" to 30-somethings.

One of the new things with grandparents today is divorces.

Because all of my child’s grandparents are divorced they are not able to retire / and have to work. This prevents them from being able to offer the same kind of child raising assistance as grandparents that stay together.

Same here, my grandmothers and great aunt raised me when my parents had to work. In the late 80s...it’s not uncommon, especially in immigrant families. It is seen as a good thing, not something to be ashamed about.

There's some really good work out there by people looking at how to think about and value these things. I particularly enjoyed these two titles:

https://www.amazon.ca/Sacred-Economics-Money-Society-Transit...

https://www.amazon.ca/Wealth-Nature-Economics-Survival-Matte...

The first one is (fittingly) available for free online, though my local library also had a copy: http://sacred-economics.com/read-online/

So I just shouldn't bother having kids if I don't live in the same city as my parents?

That's great. Awesome society.

You can do it, but it will just be a lot harder to do.

Personally I decided to stay in the Midwest and make 170k instead of 300k, but I have my family, and family matters more to me than an extra 130k in salary.

This is why we need more remote work! People need to be able to live where they need (or want) to live for a plethora of reasons ... brains are just as good in the midwest, or in the south, as they are on the coast.

It's a data point you should consider, particularly if baby sitting, nannies, etc. are very expensive in your area.

People underestimate how much help one needs in raising kids because a few decades ago the mom would either not work or work an easier/part time job. This still happens in rural or semi rural areas in the US.

Nowadays in the city both parents are in 8-9 hour day high intensity jobs. You may have time for your kid, but you have less energy.

Inter-generational child rearing is an old tradition, but in recent US history wasn't it the case that your parents help you less but also ask less of you (think retirement homes).

Maybe the trend of adults relying more on their parents is only a failure if adults aren't expected to take care of their parents later on.

> it's more millenials are reaching the age where they understand the whole "it takes a village" folk wisdom

Boy, if it takes until your 30s to understand that "wisdom", then I weep for my contemporaries. In strong nuclear families with inter-generational ties, it shouldn't take longer than your late teens to realize that parental support is normal at least until you have kids of your own.

Having strong ties to your grandparents and parents should be the norm, and I'm very sorry for the Americans that haven't had the peace of mind from having a safety net of their extended families throughout their whole lives. This isn't meant to sound patronizing. Child rearing is one of the most labor intensive activities we have as a species and I for one will be taking all the help I can get.

Well....my mom and grandparents are dead and my dad is worse off financially than me so...not sure what options I really have when it comes to that.

I am in exact same boat as you, it's pretty common I think despite what people are saying here.

> That parent comment is amazing in it’s own sense: how delusional do you have to be to think that what you have there is the norm?

It is the norm. Not having multi-generational family support is a major handicap, but that predicament is not the norm, even among less advantaged people generally.

I know my situation is not the norm and personal experience isn't the best indicator, but I personally know more people with incomplete families and no multi-generational support than those that do. This has also only increased as i've gotten older. Whether it's through death, divorce or distance, estrangement.

I realize my original comment probably doesn't speak for the majority of people's situations, but I think it's not necessarily as much of a norm as people think. I don't disagree with the parent poster, they're right, it should be the norm, I was raised in a family with strong family values but circumstances just kind of made it an impossibility and I think a lot of people and families out there, may not have the same circumstances as my life, but have had things happen that make it difficult or impossible to have close family ties.

> This isn't meant to sound patronizing

How is it meant to sound? Talking about weeping for your contemporaries.