If you watch or read older media (fiction or non), or if you lived through it, you regularly see even middle class and professional characters living with sparse conveniences in their home and going on exactly those sort of modest road trips and motel stays you talk about and many of us remember. Trips to faraway lands, were treated as a novelty that you might bucket list once or twice rather than an annual necessity. You didn't buy a new TV until the old one broke. You talked to your neighbors and borrowed each others tools. You ate out as a treat, not because you just didn't feel like cooking that day. You planned your grocery shopping around sales and strove not to deviate from the plan while at the store.
And these expectations shifted for everyone, not just incoming generations. It wasn't a generational divide and I don't mean to stir up boomer/zoomer tension -- it was a dramatic cultural shift that almost everybody seems to have adopted without even noticing.
Exagerrated consumerism and "we are all middle class on the inside" mentality was how the West distinguished itself from its Cold War villian and now we are where we are.
Everybody needs an often-unattainable and generaly-unsustainable amount of money to fulfill a life that few would have taken seriously just a few decades earlier, and the essential dissonance is producing widespread misery and angst.
They did all this solely on his father’s income, which he earned as a public school teacher.
The middle class has been gutted in the past 40 years.
If you're trying to say that workers in vital industries used to have access to a stable, modest suburban lifestyle negotiated by their union and that the same can't be said now, I don't disagree.
But that's a separate and compounding issue, not a competing one.
But I don't even disagree with you, as I already said. Things are hard for many people, and uncertain for many more, and in many different ways.
I was talking about one of them. You're talking about one of them. Neither contradicts the other.
I had high school teachers who worked construction (working class) jobs during the summer, but that wasn't their regular work.
This has more to do with his profession and inflation than anything about halcyon days of the middle class that socialists love to talk about when it's really just a post-war phenomenon.
Your friend's father may have spent 1/10th of his salary on a road trip vacation every year, but that was not typical.
My anecdotal experience growing up in the 70's and 80's matches the parent comment. Vacation meant driving to grandma's house. I did not take a "real" vacation until I was in my 30's. Eating at a restaurant was something you did a few times a year. Lifestyle expectations really have changed.
Same experience here for restaurants, too. We ate boxed macaroni-and-cheese and canned baked beans, alternating every other day. Going to a restaurant to eat was a once-every-two-months luxury.
I still eat boxed macaroni-and-cheese a few times a month :)
Although it's gluten free and I put some bacon bits in it. Fancy!
Objectively, vacation days have declined and home ownership happens later in life and people have fewer children (and more have fewer children than they want).
We're doing the same work and getting less for it.
Source?
>We're doing the same work and getting less for it.
If you're talking about absolute amounts, this is directly contradicted by the BLS data.
So in reality the only people who can afford to have a real vacation are the ultra rich? So people like Elon Musk who feel like the world owes them attention because they are richer than any of us combined and have this constant need to flex that wealth to "own the poor" are okay?
Meanwhile these same rich people will have a heart attack if you so much as dare ask for a living wage that adjusts for inflation. How dare you take away their hard earned money? Right?
If it's laying on the beach for a week in Hawaii, or traveling through France, those are luxuries that should not be annual expectations.
Vacation just means having time to periodically not work for a living. Anything above that historically has been earned as a rare experience, but today is unrightfully expected.
Like OP, we went camping or to visit extended family once a year. Instagram vacations to the beach were what the rich families did.
I do think for some people the number gets too large and it becomes abstract. $100K debt and they think "I'll never pay this off" while they spend $1000 a month across discretionary extras.
Vacations, at least the kind where you travel somewhere, are the definition of luxuries. It's jarring to hear about skipping them adjacent to a paragraph about skipping meals. I went on only a handful of vacations growing up, all of them staycations or domestic road trips with some other reason for going there or with someone else paying.