Good take.

> I spend my "political advocacy" bucks on trying to convince older generations around me just how much they and their peers pulled the ladder up behind them.

Yes. And this takes many forms, whether that's hanging on to property long past you need it, staying in jobs past retirement, or falsely believing the current economic climate is at all like what it was 30 years ago.

> I find conversations about money with younger generations to be very hostile

I can understand how if you grew up around the tech boom years of the 2010s you can believe that a bit of smart gambling is all it takes to generate wealth. In some sense this article is entirely relatable: I once believed if I worked for the right company I could make enough money on my own to buy myself out of the system entirely. This is a conscientious person's version of the gambling fallacy that the article discusses.

Really, any sufficiently simple path to wealth that doesn't involve the capital class gets patched out by the system relatively quickly (see Wall St's furor over FAANG engineer salaries).

>staying in jobs past retirement

Keep in mind that the main reason for today's seniors to continue working after age 65 is because the ladder was already being pulled up when their fathers and grandfathers were in their teens & 20's, by the same forces that are still acting today.

If you do the math you would have to figure that the majority of people working to reduce opportunities for today's young people, are not senior citizens but mainly just a different class of younger people closer in age to their 20's than their 60's.

>Really, any sufficiently simple path to wealth that doesn't involve the capital class gets patched out by the system relatively quickly

So true, but sometimes quicker than others.

It's more like a zero-sum outcome for seekers of a simple path to riches before a certain age, of which there is never going to be enough opportunity to satisfy.

You can't buy yourself out of a financial system by working for money.

You don't stand a chance unless you work for something else more worthwhile.

And why would you want to retire from that?

Hanging onto property long after you need it? Thats crazy. I'm of the belief you should never sell property unless you're in dire straights or you know it's never going to a viable asset (including in this if you have a property in an overheated area that you know is overvalued...then yes, by all means, sell!)

You can always find something to do with property to generate income. Once that property is gone, you'll probably never be able to buy it back for what you sold it for

I've got this situation now, and interested to hear your take.

Primary home with ~400k in equity, 400k loan @ 2.7%. Moving and bought a new house, and deciding what to do.

Market is hot, equity up 300k in 3 years.

I always believed in this "don't sell property, you can always generate income" but now that i'm facing this decision, I don't see how to justify keeping it.

Cashflow (factoring in expenses/maintenance/vacancy) from renting would be ~$400/mo. If you include principal paydown, then it'd be ~$2000/mo.

Selling the property, and taking the equity seems like the best option. Either a) rolling it into the new house or b) investing it in nearly risk free muni's. Both of those would net me more than keeping the property with a significantly better risk adjusted return.

If you live in a place with wild property appreciation over the last 4 years (most of the country), then I don't really see how it makes sense to keep a property. What am I missing?

I was in this same situation a few years ago.

Ultimately what it came down to was my own sanity of managing a rental, and I didn't want to be a leech on society. It is important for people to be able to buy houses. I sold it.

Money from the house went into some vanguard funds, a young family got their first house, and I have a lot less stress in my life.

Made this same decision recently.

Leading up to selling the my previous house I had literally every person I talk to tell me I should keep it as an investment. It's in a HCOL city, but it's a townhouse in a slightly rough neighborhood. Great starter home for my family, but not a rental I wanted to manage. Being a landlord in this city is also fighting upstream against the politics.

The money dropped into my account a few weeks ago from the sale. The profit on the sale was not mind blowing, I bought and sold it for a fair price (2018 -> 2024).

Zero regrets.

I believe in making my own decisions that work for me and my family, not just blindly following the crowd. It's working well so far.

Be glad you managed to buy a property at all and were able to capitalize on this.

As part of not blindly following the crowd, I took a risk on a startup back in 2017 and took a huge paycut in the hopes it would pay off down the road.

Not only did that not happen (which again, was part of the entire point of taking a risk), I had pissed all my retirement away to stay afloat, changed jobs to start making good money again, but not before real estate got out of control and I'm basically worse off now than I was a decade ago in relative terms, especially since I was affected by the mass tech industry layoffs last year, was unemployed for months, and then secured a job for far less than before, going from 120k down to 50k annual income, which is humiliating and awful. And to top it all off... I don't have any major assets to speak of aside from some money in a ROTH. I'm at the mercy of landlords.

I've been applying at stuff for nearly a year and, aside from the job I'm working at now that I got through the unemployment office, I'm getting nowhere on the job hunt.

Your profit might not be mind blowing, but in my mind, you're way ahead of folks like me that took a different path.

You might be better getting into contracting for a while instead of fulltime. It has it's downsides and a feast/famine sort of cashflow, but it's a quick way to earn while building new trusted contacts and networks to help reveal more fulltime opportunities in future.

I personally would stay away from the online platforms (although others may attest differently), as they can be a race to the bottom in terms of price.

Instead hit up tech meetups in your area, give some talks, and let people know you're a gun for hire. Write some linkedIn posts in your area of expertise (yes folks that overdo this can be a bit cringe, but a little high effort content will go a long way).

Sorry for the late reply, but you're correct on all of that. Thanks for your input and suggestions. :)

I'm very curious about this too.

My understanding of it is that you have something of great value right now, which is that 2.7% loan.

I think the conventional wisdom on not selling the property has less to do with the cash flow and more to do with having that very cheap debt leveraged such that you "get" the return on the value of the entire property rather than just your portion of equity in it.

But I think individuals, for pretty good reasons, put a higher premium on cash flows in the shorter than on-paper wealth in the longer term.

But I wish I knew the specifics of how to quantify the value of that fixed loan relative to investment returns.

And even if there is a strong quantitative argument for holding onto the property and renting it, I think there is still a strong qualitative argument for "I'm a person with other things to do, I'm not a rental business proprietor".

If you are doing this sort of evaluation do not forget to consider the taxes, which can shift things remarkably based on your jurisdiction.

If one sold the property and invested the rest you will be paying some sort of taxes on the investment returns (at varying rates depending on the investment), while with the property it may be possible that the taxation could be low to nil. By writing depreciation of the property against your rental income it is possible you could pay no tax at all.

Also do not forget to consider various costs associated with the sale of the property.

Do you feel like the market is going to cool massively in the next few years? If you don't see your equity evaporating in the near term, why would you sell now? Let renters pay off the loan for you, drop the $400/month into a money market. If you need cash in the future, you've got 400k basically sitting there ready to go, and if you don't the cash, you've got a savings account someone else is basically putting money into for you.

> Do you feel like the market is going to cool massively in the next few years? I don't - IMO the weight of held low interest rates is going to keep inventory low for a long time.

We've got to live somewhere, and the new house has a mortgage at 7.65%. The principle decrease + cashflow from holding the existing property barely offsets the interest cost on new property.

So I guess the way to look at it is a zero-cost, but potentially highly stressful, bet on the property market appreciating?

> Hanging onto property long after you need it? Thats crazy.

You're missing the point.

Yes. It's financially suboptimal to do this. But it's destroying society.

And while this requires policy change to fix, policy change is still "SUBOPTIMAL".

How is this destroying society?

Because young people cannot afford a home to raise their families in. Because enormous amounts of wealth from the productive sectors of the economy are being siphoned to the class of the landed gentry in exchange for no benefits to society at large.

People love hating modern tech billionaires or old time industrialists, but this class at least create something and hire people.

Thanks for making exactly the point OP was trying to convey.

> You can always find something to do with property to generate income.

Where do you think that income is coming from? Especially when we are talking about a limited resource like housing, the dollar of your “extra income” is a dollar that a young family could have saved for their future.

Now here's the next step in your small thought experiment. Expand income coming from for everything. Whatever you do now at the company (assuming you are working) where does that money come from? Work through the logic on income.

People love to demonize small property owners who have a rental property and take a moralistic campaign but don't look at how their own lives are funded.

And here's yet another step: most other markets aren't as resource-constrained as housing is. If the Yankees win the world series and more people want Yankees caps, manufacturers can just make more. Demand goes up, supply goes up, everybody's happy.

Housing, at least in the USA, often doesn't work like this. The population grows and more people want to live in place X and the current NIMBY occupants of place X go to the government to make sure more housing can't appear in place X. The current occupants make some arguments about neighborhood character that are really about preserving their own lives and investments and another family goes to a worse district or a worse house or no house at all.

Housing is a unique investment category, pretending it's like everything else is disingenuous.

I agree that housing is a complicated market with a lot of varying factors. It never really fits a simple model that people like to package it in. Each market is regional with some national/international overlays and its tied to the economic power of that market. It is impacted by policies both economic, financial and political.

The origin of all wealth is labour, there are no exceptions. Somebody needs to work to create the resources and do the services that others purchase. There are no exceptions and this is the most fundamental fact of economics.

You are arguing as if workers receive their wages as a gift or some kind of welfare. They receive their wages in exchange for their labour.

If you think that wealth actually comes from the monetary supply, then you'll have to go down the Zimbabwe route and print trillion dollar bills.

I didn't bring in economic money supply to the conversation so your comment is unrelated to mine. You created a strawman.

I didn't argue "workers receive their wages as a gift or some kind of welfare."

And I want to just highlight that "all wealth is labour" is actually not a universally held truth nor a fundamental fact of economics but is the basis for one theory of economics: the Labor theory of value (Smith and Marx).

Build your argument from a solid foundation and not something that is easily picked at apart by inaccuracies if you want to yield influence.

Well, if you go down the route of "where the money is coming from" you arrive at the central bank that creates that money out of thin air. That's why it's fundamental to understand that wealth can only be created by labour. It can then be distributed according to any system imaginable, but it is always created by labour. Wealth as in real physical goods and services, not as in the number in your account.

I'm not saying that all labour creates wealth. That's something else and I don't believe it. Trench warfare is the most laborious thing imaginable and it certainly creates no wealth.

> I didn't argue "workers receive their wages as a gift or some kind of welfare."

You absolutely did not, but I sensed that angle. The difference is that a worker will never receive any wages in exchange of not doing anything, while a landlord will always receive his wages for not doing anything. "How their own lives are funded" are through their labour when it comes to the worker and through the worker's labour when it comes to the landlord.

You are really just trying to get to rent-seeking behavior provides little value. My argument is that a lot of tech companies are providing rent-seeking behavior at a huge scale - and if you work for one of those companies in which you are deriving your income from that very behavior - how can you be so high and mighty about a small time landlord deriving small money from rent-seeking behavior except for, when of course, it hurts your own pocket.

"Small money" is relative. Rent is the largest expense for most workers.

Most tech companies operate on a free market where nobody is forced to pay them if they don't want to. Nobody is strictly dependent on their services, while we are all dependent on having shelter. And painting with a broad stroke you can't say that tech companies are rent-seeking, information technology is highly beneficial for the economy at large, in practical ways that are too numerous to list.

It's not one small-time landlord, it is millions of small time landlords. Just like one small time police officer demanding protection money from local businesses is not a problem for the economy of a nation, but millions of police officers doing that is.

You could say that people can go somewhere else if they don't like it. Don't hate the player, hate the game. And that is true, I think a lot of people will go somewhere else and are already doing that.

With that said, I've never worked for a company engaging in rent-seeking and never done that myself, tech or other industry, so in that aspect I'm completely clean even though I'm a sinner like all of us.

The salaries are high because the number of people who can do the work is so small.

And no I don't mean the JShit we have today. That you need an army of people to keep a gui running is the victory of Wall St over the hackers.

> That you need an army of people to keep a gui running is the victory of Wall St over the hackers.

I'd rather have 90% of a 1 piece pie than 50% of a full pie. 90 > 50

> Yes. And this takes many forms, whether that's hanging on to property long past you need it, staying in jobs past retirement,

You don't get to be upset that someone keeps their property for longer than you deem they need it, or telling people they should stop working to do nothing for their last 20 - 30 years of their life.

I'm not upset. It just causes problems in congested areas that don't build enough housing. Obviously, they should build more houses. :)

And how would forcing people to sell their house when they move out increases the number of houses??? Is still 1 house whether is being rented or owner occupied.

Speaking of hostile... Ironic to be telling people what they can do when you're unhappy about them doing the same!

As for me, I'm absolutely upset. Older homeowners sit on housing with multiple unused bedrooms in major cities (and everywhere else) while wages and construction have stagnated. It's another form of wealth concentration. Two 80-year-olds don't need a 6 bedroom mansion. Meanwhile there's families with kids (who by the way, societies depend on) out there with income to buy a home that are priced out of everything. Meanwhile the generationally wealthy family can continue to leverage their equity to buy up more property, further exarcebating the issue.

Let's not act like there's a moral ground here, it's all in self-interest and greed. And frankly many of us on HN are part of the problem (I know I am).

At least in the state where I live (WA) which is a non-recourse state is very hard (I would say impossible but that is a high bar) for an individual or a family to use existing real estate equity to buy more real estate.

Me and my wife own 4 properties. Each time we bought a property it was through a different lender (the cheapest one with the lowest interest rate). When it came time to existing rentals the paperwork wanted to know the lease agreement for the current tenants, monthly expenses and monthly rental income. There was no question about mortgage principal, nor about market value of real estate.

When we bought (yet) another property, the lender could not (and did not) use the existing real estate assets to secure the new loan. Each loan was secured by its property and nothing else.

For most young people, interest rates on savings accounts have been effectively 0% for most of their lives. That has changed within the last few years but may also be temporary.

Compounding gains in investments still work out in the long run, but an older generation trying to tell the younger one about putting money in a savings account and letting it earn compound interest has been out of touch for a couple of decades now.

> For most young people, interest rates on savings accounts have been effectively 0% for most of their lives. That has changed within the last few years but may also be temporary.

Compounding applies to stock returns as well, which have been on a tear for the past decade. If anything not knowing what to do with your money besides parking it in a bank account is a sign of financial illiteracy, which is what OP was decrying.

> an older generation trying to tell the younger one about putting money in a savings account and letting it earn compound interest

i have not heard a single older person saying this. Every one of them says to invest in assets, not bank interest.

I heard it from parents, grandparents, high school teachers and college professors. And the comment I replied to specifically mentioned "compound interest"

I've heard the savings/bond/CD advice from older people who were working during the Volcker years.

Sure, I started an IRA account in 1985 with CDs paying 10+%

But, I bought my house in 1982 with a 15.5% mortgage, refinanced @ 11.25 after a couple years and again @ 8.5% until it was paid off in 2002

What happened to the value of your home in that time?

The point is that mortgage rates and savings rates move together, so your experience is determined by whether you are a saver or borrower.

All the petty spending is so small in comparison to your rent. Cut out the vape and save $16 a week all you want, thats not making or breaking anything. This is the classic “5 dollar latte” fallacy: that older generations think the youth is foolish for spending $5 on coffee, while not knowing thats an absolute drop in the bucket relative to lifes big costs today, and also probably returning more than $5 in not feeling totally depressed and miserly.

I think that's too defeatist of a view.

The boring reality is that small things done consistently over time seriously add up. It's true for health and exercise. It's true for relationships. It's true for finances. A $5 pick-me-up every now and then isn't a bad thing by itself. But if it becomes a daily habit, then you're missing out on other choices with better long-run returns. The immediate costs are small, but the eventual opportunity costs are huge.

Younger people have a resource older people don't: time. That's time for habits to compound. May as well choose good ones to compound, because you're never getting that time back again.

> if it becomes a daily habit, then you're missing out on other choices with better long-run returns

If you quit that habit, it might make you miserable enough to make even worse financial choices.

These petty expenditures are a tax on misery.

Anecdote: My father's criminal history (racketeering) more-or-less forced him into a career in backbreaking construction in order to support his family when he got out of prison. He would come home after work with burns from creosote and often looked as if he had gone balls-to-the-wall in the gym all day. Back then, I wouldn't dare think to try to separate him from his cigarettes and lottery tickets. It would have been cruel.

> because you're never getting that time back again.

Which can also as easily be used as an argument to actually spend that money and enjoy it. In the end, it's important that the money is well spent: If you enjoy that 10$ coffee or 25$ takeout, it's awesome. If it's a daily habit that you're used to and doesn't give you much joy anymore, it's wasted money.

It's not the $5 latte or $10 avacado toast that's keeping young people broke. I think we can all agree that that number is a drop in the bucket compared to huge expenses they are struggling with.

The problem is the mindset of "I should be able to have a luxury because it makes me feel better" which, if you accept it, starts to pervade all of your spending. It justifies the Netflix subscription. Then it justifies the weekly beer bill and food delivery. Then it justifies a few video game DLCs or virtual items. Then it justifies blowing $500 on a banger birthday party or a nice vacation somewhere. Before you know it, you're buying a new wardrobe and a pickup truck you don't need. All because "You only live once and I deserve those little luxuries that bring me joy."

It's not a point of view, it's just math. $5 every day is $150/month, $1800 per year, save that for 30 years and maybe you can have a down payment on a house (assuming the interest on your savings has kept pace with the increase in housing prices, which is likely but not certain). There's no one weird trick to get rich from no income.

Saving $1,800/yr for 30 years for a down payment is extremely hyperbolic. Loads of people manage to buy a house for far less than 10% down. The average is 8%, and one can get an FHA loan for only 3.5% down. 3.5% of $200,000 is 7,000, which you'll have more than that in under 4 years. For a $300,000 house you'd have that in under 6 years, assuming you only saved that $5/day and ignored any interest or other gains.

Using this as a retort is totally missing the point.

Ok so I only have to save up 7,000 now, so I can do it in 6 years, I guess. But that extra 1800 a month I'm continuing to save each year afterwards by forgoing my late doesn't actually cover the 7% APR on the additional loaned 33,000

(interest rates only high as of recent, but still)

Using this as a retort is totally missing the point.

The person I was replying to was saying it would take 30 years at that savings rate to have enough money for a down payment. You do agree, it wouldn't take 30 years to have a downpayment right? Like, we've now both done the math, and found its significantly less than 30 years, right?

And actually, at 6.96% for a 30 year FHA loan, the added payment for the additional $33,000, is ~$218/mo. $1,800/yr is $150/mo, so it covers 68% of that amount if you're looking at it that way. Cut out another ~$2.26/day or $68/mo and you'll have completely covered it while owning a house. But I'd look at it this way, your mortgage taking out a $293,000 loan is ~$1,950. Property tax rates vary a lot, but we'll add ~$3k/yr to that (250/mo), budget $3k/yr for repairs as well, so $2,450/mo in the end. What are you paying for rent? How much of that are you keeping as equity?

And yeah, property taxes will probably tick upwards a bit, you might need more repairs than budgeted here, but chances are you'll refinance your mortgage and cut that part down to like $1,300/mo or even less in several years if interest rates fall to like 4% or lower. Is your rent going to get lower?

I was almost 30 when I decided to put all my money-flow on paper and discovered that all the savings and spending, compound interested or not, having car problems and being broken for a while, everything up to almost that time meant absolutely nothing for my financial future.

I guess most people just get the signal empirically, so they discover it in real time.

Now, after that time savings started to matter. But must people are completely unable to relate to people that aren't an exact copy of themselves. Even when they once experienced the same thing. And yeah, people tend to get worse on this when they age.

> The boring reality is that small things done consistently over time seriously add up.

~30 years ago the median house price in Toronto (Canada) was 4x the median household income. It is currently 13x the median income.

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFlIfg0XoJk&t=47s

No amount of skipping lattés is going to add to make a dent in that difference. (I say this as someone in participates in /r/PersonalFinanceCanada who helps people educate themselves on living with-in their means and saving for the future (while enjoying the present).)

Each piece is pretty small, but added up it can be pretty significant.

I'll take your $16/wk for vaping costs, I don't have any hard data but I think that's probably a bit low.

$5 for coffee 5 times a week, that's $25/wk.

Looking around me, its hard to get a meal delivered with a food delivery service for less than $18. Making a meal at home, even a frozen pre-cooked dinner, is usually like $5 or less, so we'll say an additional $13 meal 4x a week so $52/wk.

52 + 25 + 16 * 4 weeks in a month is $372/mo. Over $4,400/yr, on just eating out/delivery, one coffee 5 times a week, and vaping. And somehow I doubt its really just 5 coffees a week, its probably not just $13 additional cost per meal only 4 times a week, I doubt a vaping habit is really only $16/wk.

Is an extra $4,400/yr in their budget a big deal to the people in question?

How many people do you know that order from a food delivery app 4 times per week? $4,400/year isn't much to me and I order maybe 4x/month.

Housing is incredibly expensive these days, and there's really no way to make that cheaper other than live someplace terrible or spend hours and hours extra commuting. Both make huge differences in quality of life.

I'm sure there are many people throwing money away for no good reason, in fact many of those people are rich. But at a certain point you just need more income.

$4,400 / year is not much. But accumulate it over 5 years and is $22,000. Take this a step further (like buy groceries in bulk and on sale, never pay full price for clothes, buy used skis, do not lease a car and if you have a friend who is a mechanic ask him for help to buy a used car). It becomes more than $4,400 / year. 6 years later you can put 5% down payment on a 1 bed room condo. 2-3 years later you sell the one bedroom condo and buy a 2 bedroom condo.

From my personal circle of friends, the people that I know that own the most real estate are people who are disciplined (think accountant in a 500 Fortune company, or an engineer working for Boeing, or a web developer slinging some internal Asp.Net website at some company you never heard of). Meanwhile some guy working at my current huge-tech company sold all his stock when it vested and "invested" the proceeds in options... He was taking uber to work even though you can show up anytime you want (maybe take the bus? maybe some days you work remotely?) and he was complaining to me that he will never be able to buy a condo...

I personally know 6 people who order food delivery 5-6 times a week and generally eat out lunch and dinner almost every meal. Another handful of people I know do food delivery 3-4 times a week.

I order my food or go to a restaurant every day.

> Is an extra $4,400/yr in their budget a big deal to the people in question?

Well, since you saved it by excluding a lot of pleasurable spending, you can't really count it as "fun" money and therefore it's not that great, really. With the current market, it's also not nearly enough to get you anywhere near buying a house or an apartment. It can be used for a car, but then again, is a car a better investment than nice coffee and food?

While I do see the value in saving and I get why spending this money looks wasteful, I can also see the other side of not bothering pass on convenience for a bit of extra money. Of course, it all depends on how well you're set up generally (i.e. if you don't have an emergency fund, those 4k$ are a lot more important).

> excluding a lot of pleasurable spending

We're talking about kicking a vaping habit, not eating out or doing food delivery four times less a week and making your coffee at home. Its not like they're now no longer doing anything fun in their lives.

Saving only that for 3 years and you've got over $13,000. While not a ton of money, $13k is more than enough to qualify for a down payment on a small house or condo in many housing markets in the US. Sure, probably not NYC or LA or SF, but doable in DFW, KC, San Antonio, Houston, Oklahoma City, Cleaveland, Rochester, Syracuse, Utica, Philly, Wilmington, Tallahassee, Corpus Christie, Albuquerque, and more.

Minimum wage is netting you nearly $45k a year in some parts of this country. Is a 10% bump in minimum wage going to appreciably change your situation? Hell no. Buy some moments of happiness today, you might get hit by a bus tomorrow.

I think the issue is actually bigger than this. The economy seems to continue to be white-hot despite everyone claiming its doing terrible and everything costs too much etc.

people are eating out more than ever before, getting delivery more than ever before, and vacations are also booming. consumption is up no matter how you slice it.

i think a lot of the younger generation have completely given up on the idea that they are ever going to own a house and instead of saving for that are just blowing it on food, booze, vacations etc.

I'm in the UK and just before the banking crisis you could get a decent house for £50k with a 120% self-certified mortgage. These are the same people who often resort to the coffee/netflix argument.

£50k is now a deposit.

Yes. Managing your budget is important. But it's difficult to manage your budget in a way that "fixes" a huge increase in housing costs even relative to baseline inflation.

> how much money they spend on food delivery, vapes, weed, and booze.

The one that is mind-blowing to me is giving money to streamers. Utterly, utterly wasted money.

I spend as much money on streamers as I would have spent on a cable TV, were I to actually subscribe to cable TV.

It's just an entertainment budget item. If the generation isn't spending that money on traditional forms of entertainment--concerts, cable, movies, sports games--then how is it wasting to spend it on the form of entertainment you don't like?

The money you give to steamers doesn’t enable you to watch them so it’s not exactly comparable to purchasing TV

Well, your individual dollars don't buy access to a controlled resource, but people in general contributing certainly does. That streamer would definitely do something else if there was no income coming in. The younger generations seem less tied to the idea that money must always be part of a quid pro quo transaction, and are more willing to throw money into a pool to support things they really like. Sounds like a pretty solid step forward in human cultural values to me.

Not at all. It's still a transaction. It's sold as a membership in a community, but that's not real. That just means they pay more.

Your criticism would be no different leveled at donating to charity, giving loose change to someone on the street, dropping money on a collection plate, or using the "buy me a coffee" tip like for FOSS projects. What's not real about being part of a community that doesn't have restricted access? Is a community in a FOSS project only real because you need a GitHub account or is that also fake because it doesn't cost money? lThat's a mighty sad outlook on life.

> lThat's a mighty sad outlook on life.

That's not what I said. Paying a streamer to pretend to like you is not being part of a community. There is no community; they just constantly call it a community. A real community wouldn't vanish if one person (the streamer) left. That's a cult.

> Your criticism would be no different leveled at donating to charity, giving loose change to someone on the street, dropping money on a collection plate, or using the "buy me a coffee" tip like for FOSS projects. What's not real about being part of a community that doesn't have restricted access?

Doing none of those things is being part of a community.

Parasocial relationships are monetisable. That's all. I think it's a bad idea to be on the paying end of that transaction.

> Paying a streamer to pretend to like you is not being part of a community. There is no community; they just constantly call it a community. A real community wouldn't vanish if one person (the streamer) left. That's a cult.

I see, so the communities that developer around FOSS projects would continue if the FOSS project disappeared? Do you think having a friendly and personable regular bartender that smiles when you talk to them makes you a cult member? Or is that different because some of your money gets you a beer?

> Doing none of those things is being part of a community. Parasocial relationships are monetisable. That's all. I think it's a bad idea to be on the paying end of that transaction.

Oh, being in a church congregation isn't being part of a community? Or being part of a FOSS user group? Come on now.

> Parasocial relationships are monetisable. That's all.

Any relationship is monetizable, including the ones I listed. Not everybody that chips in for a streamer has an unhealthy parasocial fixation, just as not everybody who plays video games is addicted to escapism, not everybody that drinks is an alcoholic, and not everybody that drops a coin in the collection plate is an obsessed zealot.

> I think it's a bad idea to be on the paying end of that transaction.

Yes, I gathered that, and you're certainly free to spend money on whatever you want. It's your needlessly black-and-white perspective and subsequent judgement of people who disagree that's strange.

If the streamer wasn't making money would they continue streaming?

Most of the ones worth watching, I'd guess.

You don't have to tip your waiter at the restaurant. But their salary is fundamentally dependent on you tipping them ~15-20%, so by not tipping them, you are effectively stealing from them. Similarly, not subscribing to people I watch heavily is in effect stealing from them.

To be clear, I don't actually like this model of payment. I'd much rather there be a system that could automatically distribute a pool of money in terms of how much I watched.

Streamers are making their streams free for the vast majority of the people watching them. Its not stealing when they're producing the content with the expectation most people will watch for free.

If a waiter was expecting only 10% of people would actually tip, its not stealing to then not tip most of the time.

If the streamer didn't want me to watch for free, they should have put up a paywall.

You can say the same thing about Patreon, donations, etc.

Sure, you don't have to pay to watch them but its a way of giving back to them. And on platforms like twitch, being subscribed to a channel does things like remove ads and access to emotes that are part of the live interaction if you want to participate in that.

Paying to remove ads is a bit different though. Paying $100 so a streamer pretends to like you for three seconds is really not healthy.

Leaving aside the multi-millionaire streamers, I do think it is commendable to take care of the long-term sustainability of what you like instead of being a free rider.

Like spending money on other forms of entertainment? Going to the cinema, theatre, a concert, renting a movie, etc. will either cost about the same or more.

I don't watch livestreams but I have Patreon subscriptions to two YouTubers that I enjoy. They focus on fairly niche topics and if everyone thought of paying them as "wasting money" I doubt they'd be able to produce as many good videos as they do just through ad revenue (and since I use adblockers I'm not supporting them in that way).

Streamer are able to entertain you and give you a good mood for a day... Why not to give something back?

It's the same as supporting any artist / performer, IMO.

Agreed. Onlyfans is at least a more honest exchange.

True, and I can't relate directly, but I think part of that is the desire themselves to become streamers with big income streams. If you refuse to support that vision, then that is like admitting it is not possible for yourself?

If it buys happiness, what's the problem?

If.

You've never donated to your local npr/pbs station?

Totally agree. I do feel like younger generations have much more difficult circumstances, especially when it comes to class mobility. Primarily education, housing and healthcare are just much more expensive and out-of-reach if you weren't born to wealthy parents, and the number of jobs where you can "work your way up from the mail room" has drastically shrunk.

At the same time, I see a pretty pervasive attitude among young people that boils down to "if I don't do well, it's society's fault". It's like this overwhelming victim mentality, like a sense of learned helplessness that affects areas of their life even where they are not helpless. Not only is this a bad attitude for society, it also becomes ultimately unhelpful for the individual as well.

Obviously I see where a lot of this attitude comes from (see the first paragraph), and yes, I'm speaking in very broad generalizations that don't apply to everyone. But it just feels like this big shift where a lot of people feel the only path to success is, essentially, luck or some sort of scheme.

> I find conversations about money with younger generations to be very hostile (btw, I still consider myself young). Accusations, assumptions, and name-calling start circulating quickly if you dare to ask 'the youth of reddit' as it were, if they understand compound interest, how much money they spend on food delivery, vapes, weed, and booze.

I’m not young, and if you tried to start a “conversation about money” with me in this fashion it would go poorly. Perhaps you just aren’t giving a clear picture of these attempted conversations, but you come across as rather condescending in your own post.

I'm surprised that "you are not young", because this is the usual attitude I receive from Gen-Z: "you're not telling me in the way in which _I_ want to listen, so I'm ignoring you", rather than a mature: "Help me understand what I change in order to be more effective"

In general, if you start lecturing someone, they are more likely to go to number 1 than number 2. Regardless of generation. Honestly this sounds like more of a 'you' problem, without further context.

Seems reasonable to me. Unless there is a good reason to believe that they have valuable information, ignoring condescending people seems worthwhile. How likely is someone to understand you and your problems when they are condescending? I also have a hard time imagining that this is something limited to Gen-Z.

I don't see myself as a big Gen-Z defender, but I think you can only reasonably expect one. Either I'm having a discourse with you regardless of whether I like your language (no assumptions if we ever agree), or I am looking if I can move towards your position, if you are doing the same.

Both are dependent on good will, even if I think that a not-antisocial person should be open to this in a functioning culture. Demanding both at the same time is assuming some crazy level of authority that you might associate with some figures in your life sometimes. Not some randoms on the internet. Docility is not maturity.

"Help me understand who you are and why you're speaking to me in an authoritative manner on a subject that you may be erroneously attributing to your personal virtues and skills where it could be more attributed to house prices being 5 figures back in your day."

My BIL was pretty outspoken BTC and NFT booster at various times (I’m sure he’s back as an advocate with the recent runup, but he may have liquidated at a slump when they bought a house), so it’s possible the PP wasn’t initiating the conversation, but lacked the wisdom to nod politely and pivot to the weather (though nowadays climate and weather can be contentious conversations too!)

I would certainly be grateful for suggestions or actionable feedback.

When talking about vapes and booze specifically, the defensiveness is a symptom of addiction. Gambling is addictive, too, but unlike with booze and nicotine, you only have to go as far as your pocket & your phone is open for bets 24/7. You phone will also never deny you because it knows you've had enough.

Maybe doom scrolling is addictive to this level too. But the point is, we, and especially young people, are being targeted for addictive substances in a way that Joe Camel could only dream of, and yes, addiction is hard to escape.

I'm reluctant to say this since it's already been suggested once that I'm being condescending, but wrt to food delivery services, I don't know if it's addiction or some form of entitlement but something is going on there. What a phenomena. So many people I know complains about DoorDash, etc, and keep using it, and insist their life demands they use it.

When talking about gambling, whether it's sports betting, robinhood, etc. I have no doubts it is addiction. The article suggests this, too.

I don't personally know anyone who uses doordash regularly, but I've seen a handful of commenters on hn complaining about doordash while pretending there's no possible other way to get their food (even after getting possible alternatives). Just wait for doordash to come up in the news again and see if you can't ask someone anonymously about it here :)

definitely an addiction

I mean it seems a lot better than driving to get takeout while drunk or high. Seems like a real improvement on the past.

The past where you simply called the pizza place directly and you both ended up with more money in your pocket seems better to me. Most people can still do this today, too.

It’s unclear to me if people use Uber eats for places like pizza that already specialize in delivery. I know I wouldn’t, but I do use them for lots of other restaurants that don’t do delivery.

> So many people I know complains about DoorDash, etc, and keep using it, and insist their life demands they use it.

I complain about DoorDash but still use it because around me there's no meaningful alternative for delivery. Even pizza places around here have ditched organic delivery service and just use DoorDash.

I don't use DoorDash all the time, I save it for when I've been busy and don't feel like cooking and cleaning. It's usually a replacement for going out to eat.

I can't understand people that use it all the time though. Even the relative convenience comes at a significant cost. A lot of restaurants have higher prices on DoorDash or have required up-sells be added to meals. With the fees you're spending more than you would if you ate the same meal at the restaurant.

I completely understand the occasional delivery where convenience trumps price but constantly paying a 20-50% markup on meals is ludicrous.

Food delivery, car services, Uber of X — they grew up with an expectation of life easing services that were way underpriced and subsidized by VC money: https://hbr.org/2016/07/the-internet-of-stuff-your-mom-wont-...

But now they took the ball away, and everything is getting suddenly really expensive just as they are moving into independence and need money for housing, marriage, maybe even kids. But the habits of having life greased by all these services is hard to walk away from… how many GenX would give up having a washing machine and microwave?

Vaping and weed, well they are literally addictive and a scourge all around…

> I spend my "political advocacy" bucks on trying to convince older generations around me just how much they and their peers pulled the ladder up behind them.

This generation war thing seems strange. Like, do you accuse the people of wrong things they did personally? Or do you make them responsible for other people's decisions? What's exactly the point? Instill a feel of collective guilt?

Seems like setting ourselves up for the same kind of harsh critique from the coming generations. I doubt they will look upon us (the current young people) kindly, and "boomers did it" likely won't work as an explanation for why we still indulge ourselves in material luxury, airline travel etc.

For the first part, no, it's not about guilt. Er, well, I 'll try to avoid speculating on the psychology on their side, but no matter how much data I show my well-meaning, "liberal" parents, they simply seem unable to accept how different circumstances are facing younger generations compared to them raising a 2-kid, family-vacay-ever year, comfortably middle-class family on one salary.

As for the second paragraph, I guess I'll just say, I think you're probably completely spot on.

> they simply seem unable to accept how different circumstances are facing younger generations compared to them raising a 2-kid...

That's quite a bit different from your original accusatory "they and their peers pulled the ladder up behind them". Kinda makes it difficult to believe it's not about guilt when you're phrasing it like this.

> 2-kid, family-vacay-ever year, comfortably middle-class family on one salary

I think we are kind of looking back decades ago with rose colored glasses, too. I went to a very middle class school in the late 70s, early 80s, and nobody I knew went on a family vacation every year. I don't think I even stepped foot on an airline until I was 16. Nobody went out to restaurants--that was for rare, special occasions. We shared rooms with our siblings, ate boxed macaroni and cheese, played with second hand toys (or went out side and played with sticks and rocks). We had one TV with 13 channels, which we all shared when something was on. I mean at least we had a house, but it had something like a 13-15% mortgage that I'm sure my parents could barely pay.

This idea that middle class boomer parents could afford a luxurious lifestyle for their families is not all that truthful.

> This idea that middle class boomer parents could afford a luxurious lifestyle for their families is not all that truthful.

“Middle class” has a slippery definition, but it is definitely the case that by many measures Millenials are, overall, seeing worse family financial conditions any any given age than Boomers did (e.g., median real wealth is lower for Millenials than it was for Boomers the same age.) There is also indications that this is accompanied by much greater in-generation disparity (e.g., 90th percentile wealth is higher for Millenials than it was for Boomers of the same age, despite the median being lower.)

Particular examples are from https://thehill.com/homenews/4319352-are-millennials-worse-o...

Food is not a luxury anymore. The past couple of decades have seen immense improvement in the food industry as a whole. It was inevitable that those improvements and savings spill over to customers. And since even rich people only have one belly each, eating well became less of a luxury and more accessible to the middle class. The inventory in normal supermarkets have improved astonishingly in the past 15 years. But nobody takes note, because it's a gradual process.

Eating in restaurants is as much a marker of wealth and a luxurious lifestyle as owning a wireless telephone – ie not at all.

But owning your own home has by monetary policy means been turned to something only achievable with huge wealth – or selling the rest of your life to the bank.

>Like, do you accuse the people of wrong things they did personally?

They voted for policies that pulled the ladder up behind them, are they not responsible of their vote?

US is a two-party system. At best you can vote for the lesser evil. Or vote independent, but that's mostly a lost vote. Or not vote at all. How can an individual absolve themselves of this guilt?

This has happened everywhere, not just the US

Compound interest is essentially the mind worm we plant to get people to let us spend their money for them. The problem I see with it fundamentally is interest changes the conversation from "there's a thing that needs to get done" to "lets make some money".

There's a lot of pointless/ultimately destructive ways to make money. Precious few to get dpne what needs to get done. And I wholeheartedly believe much of society has forgotten that "what is profittable" != "What needs to be done".

> Compound interest is essentially the mind worm we plant to get people to let us spend their money for them. The problem I see with it fundamentally is interest changes the conversation from "there's a thing that needs to get done" to "lets make some money".

I'd like to consider myself pretty financially literate and I have no idea what this is supposed to mean.

I think it means something like: instead of taking your money and putting it to work directly by investing in something tangible and important to you (a friend's business, your own startup, etc), you put it in a massive pool with no responsibility for how its deployed.

I get the sentiment and I think it's a socially-conscious investment method, but also a great way to lose all that money and potentially friends when their businesses fail.

You are correct in your assessment of your meaning. Thoughtless indirection and delegation of capital allocation is essentially abrogation of executive agency in a capitalist system. It is, in fact, undermining in every sense to personal determination.

Is it painful? Yes. Does it prevent centralized allocation? Damn straight. Is centralized allocation of capital something to be avoided like the plague? In my opinion, yes. Even at the cost of the inherent pain previously mentioned.