In short, what I want out of life is largely not material things, but just a nice place to exist and pursue my interests.
I realize, of course, that nothing about this is particularly radical, I don't expect this comment to blow anyone's mind. By my estimate a cool 8-10 million would be more than sufficient for me to have basically everything I ever wanted - i.e. buy the aforementioned nice home and then live comfortably off the returns for the rest of my days.
If any recently minted tech billionaires reading this would like to donate to the cause of me fucking off from society to the woods, feel free to shoot me an email ;)
One article I really like from that blog is this one: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2015/08/19/urban-tribe/
It's more than a little bit counter to the idea of "fucking off from society to the woods", though. Still, a man can dream of total independence :)
I'd bet that combination is rare. Especially old growth forest with fiber internet access, but with powerball money I'd bet I could find something.
What did they do to this country?
- when given the choice of oil vs the future of humanity, sided with oil for 5-7 decades
- shipping manufacturing overseas, destruction of the middle class, destruction of unions, free trade agreements
- privatization and deregulation of mass quantities of society and the economy leading to, most prominently in my view, a nonfunctional healthcare system and monopoly/cartel in practically every identifiable market
- deficit spending that essentially enriched their generation at the expense of future generations
- benefited from vast amounts of federally funded education, then underfunded and ruined higher education for future generations
- destabilized society at fundamental levels with the war on drugs when they were the generation that most pervasively used drugs in their formative years
- reaganomics led to the great wealth divide, and those formative economic years were driven by the boomers greed as they moved up the corporate ladder
- the vast expansion of military spending
- the suburbs, while invented by their parents, taken to absurd and destructive lengths
Basically, given the world on a platter from WWII postwar dominance and the greatest technological growth and development ever, they have saddled future generations with debt, a ruined environment, massive corruption, and vast entrenched social and racial problems.
Their final gifts will be bankrupting Medicare and Social Security after politically underfunding them or outright stealing from them for 50-70 years as part of runaway deficit spending and military spending. Which is why I advocate denying them those benefits.
It is a generation obsessed with materialism, hedonism, and selfishness. Now, I'm not going to say that other generations are some saints or won't be corrupted by the materialism of midlife like the 80s/90s of the boomers, but at least there is acknowledgement of global warming, racial strife, the drug war, and having to deal with them rather than push them to future generations.
Boomer will be a bad word here on out.
So we take a generation that has been essentially subjected to the worst generational economic warfare in modern memory (from the boomers).
Where basic subsistence existence while saddled with bloated college loans, no job prospects, inflated housing costs, exhorbitant healthcare, high food and rising energy/fuel costs...
So basically, those who are "buying more" in the millenials aren't doing it by choice... basic living takes up that much more of their income, which is the definition of economic insecurity. They aren't ABLE to save. Another word for those people is "poor".
But those millenials that aren't "buying more" by some relative percentage of their income are probably... more economically secure. Yes, they are saving because the CAN save and they aren't "poor".
Millenials are definitively less consumerist than boomers. That isn't some pop sociology take, it is basic economics: THEY DON'T HAVE MONEY to be consumerists to the standards of the boomers. You don't need to ascribe it to some superior collective ethos, or arbitrary generational trend.
It's the result of boomer economic warfare on all the other generations. The boomers should have their medicare and social security yanked for what they did to this country.
Source: Gen X-ish, not a millenial.