Perhaps the generalized fear is not so much about "coddling", but concrete realities. I do not envy them.
[0] https://www.axios.com/2023/11/20/american-housing-market-old... [1] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/04/20/how-the-a... [2] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for-co... [3] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/brief/how-does-medical-i...
I hope we get a union with a draft and such.
Probably the wrong place to be barking up this tree though.
[0] Poland's entire history.
Are you aware of underground organizations like Żegota? Or Jan Karski who risked his life to document the Warsaw ghetto and providing munitions to the Jewish fighters in the uprising?
Or the thousands of families that helped aid Jews like the Ulma family killed with the family they were hiding, or nun Matylda Getter who rescued hundreds of Jewish children, or Żabiński who hid hundreds in a zoo. Or the 7000+ poles recognized by Yad Vashem, the highest of any nation. Poland was the only occupied country where aiding Jews was punishable by death.
I urge you to look into the following families and their roles in aiding jews in WWII: Ulma, Kowalski, Baranek, Zabinski, Kossak, Podgorski sisters, Wojciechowski, Baranek, Skoczylas, Jarosz, Przybylski, Wolski, Banasiewicz, Bartosiewicz and many others.
Also, I meant more in the general sense of the populace resisting occupation time and time again seeing as we still have a country, which doesn't happen without sacrificing for one another.
What town are you talking about btw?
>Look what Denmark and Bulgaria did in the same situation.
Yes they had much more time to evacuate their Jewish populations. We had the largest population and we were first to be invaded.
https://www.reuters.com/article/lifestyle/film-about-massacr...
It's sickening how they're looking into singular events from the past to explain their current attempts at committing ongoing genocide attempts.
Every generation has challenges and benefits. Framing the narrative can happen in any direction and the variance in group is bigger than the variance between.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2024/09/05/how-gen-z-outpaces-past-...
[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/americans-wages-are...
[2] https://www.protectedincome.org/news/labor-day-peak-65-trade...
[3] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/u-s-spe...
If you’re going to make a claim this bold and this counter to the prevailing narrative, you’re gonna need to cite a better source than an outbrain-riddled webpage that tells me to “watch our video to find the lede we buried”. I’m not saying this isn’t true, but extraordinary claims require good sourcing and explanation.
Redfin did the analysis quoted https://www.redfin.com/news/homeownership-rate-by-generation...
Unless you're specifically 26 years old, I suppose? This analysis seems far from scientific and cherry picks data in strange ways.
What do you see as the prevailing narrative? The one I see is homeownership itself, which suggests that homeownership has been seen as being hotly desirable. I strongly suspect we wouldn't have a homeownership narrative to speak of if ownership was unwanted. When something becomes unusually desirable like homeownership has, it is not unexpected to see an uptick in participation around it; in this case owning a home. Much of the urban age has been marked with the majority of the population being renters. Everyone wanting to own a home with such furor is historically unusual.
I expect homeownership has become so desirable as it has become seen as a way to build wealth. While, historically, housing only kept pace with inflation at best, real home values have risen by unfathomable amounts in the last decade or two. Which, again, attracts people willing to risk it all for a chance at some of that wealth opportunity. It would be unusual if said generational group had comparatively lower ownership rates given the "FOMO" aspect. People run away when prices are falling, not when they are rising.
Given the market we've watched, the extraordinary claim would be that Gen-Z has lower ownership rates compared to previous generations at the same age.
It mathed out about even. I decided to go with renting instead of buying, with the logic that the S&P didn’t need me to buy it a new roof every 15 years or to work in its garden every weekend.
It worked nicely too, growing the money that would otherwise have gone into mortgages and property tax, letting me take some of it out recently and buy a house with cash.
I don’t see much of this attitude in my younger friends now. But living cheap and saving does actually work.
You need very little on hand cash to get a very low interest rate. Much lower than asset loans at equivalent levels of wealth.
And -- options? The most leverage I can think of reasonably getting would be LEAPS (calls) and rolling them. But, even with LEAPS, you have limited timing flexibility, and are forced to realize more gains/losses.
There's nothing on par with a house. They're almost $1M everywhere now. You can't get that much into a retirement account when you're young.
And I’m not sure why you’re talking about LEAPS. Options are naturally leveraged: you have synthetic positions on [complicated Greeks math]*100 shares with every option. Theta is only one of the Greeks. Same with futures contracts re: natural leverage.
I’m also not sure why you’re talking about the full price of a house? A $1MM house with 20% down means the comparator is 200k - you can back door that into a Roth in 3 years, and you have plenty of stock/options/futures setups that will give you leverage to $1MM notional of exposure. And capital gains on that position are actually tax free by the way, no shenanigans required with 1031s and residential conversion or having to wait until you’re dead to get the tax benefits.
The bottom line is that buying property is rarely the best investment decision quantitatively because you can get equivalent (and often better) returns in the market while maintaining liquidity, meaning that you can almost always pivot into a house at a future date for cheaper (on an adjusted basis). But people FEEL good doing it, so the mainstream view is that owning a house should be a goal. Common sense isn’t.
You can only backdoor $7k/year into a Roth IRA. That isn't much.
If you have access to a qualifying 401k plan, you can mega-backdoor $46,000 into a Roth 401k. Many 401k plans do not support this, however. In practice, a plan is unlikely to support it if the company doesn't give a 401k match (it's basically impossible for a plan to meet the "non-discrimination" requirement without matching).
> And I’m not sure why you’re talking about LEAPS. [...] Theta is only one of the Greeks.
Because the effect of theta is least for LEAPS. They're the "most share-like" options.
> Options are naturally leveraged: you have synthetic positions on [complicated Greeks math]*100 shares with every option.
I agree that the "natural leverage" is the reason for the appeal, but the 100x multiplier is priced in.
In practice, IIRC (it's been a while) I've found that, with long-dated calls near the money (ideally a little bit in the money, for lower risk), you end up with about 2x leverage. The "100% loss" downside sort of gets "balanced" (debatable) by "2x upside". In the past I've felt really smart doing this until it's blown up in my face. Given the multiplicative nature of gains/losses, I'm not sure it's a good deal at all.
> Same with futures contracts re: natural leverage.
Curious about this. I suspect that it's a sucker's game, but wouldn't mind learning more.
Debating the availability of a Roth backdoor is something that's orthogonal to the discussion. I agree that your $46k number is the correct number, so adjust the numbers in my prior post as appropriate (e.g., it'll take 5 years to get to $200k in a retirement account). I still assert my primary conclusion: buying property is generally not the best option on a purely financial basis.
>> [Options stuff]
I disagree with your view that LEAPS are the "most share-like" options. Short dated deep in the money calls are essentially a synthetic stock position, and they are the most share-like in that they will move nearly 1:1 with stock price whereas LEAPS do not move 1:1 with stock price fluctuations because of time attenuation. If leverage is what you want then there are probably better options than LEAPS (rolling 3 month to 6 month positions maybe) because you pay out the nose in terms of time value on LEAPS.
I don’t see any data on that page supporting this claim. The current decade is growing much faster than the previous one, and they only show data up to 2023.
> Health spending increased by 7.5% from 2022 to 2023, faster than the 4.6% increase from 2021 to 2022. The growth in total health spending from 2022 to 2023 is well above the average annual growth rate of the 2010s (4.1%).
[1] https://unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com/p/why-i-dont-inv...
They're comparing to hosting dips in the world wars and while I assure you ww3 will have enough loss of life to make houses quite cheap a third time, you still won't want them because they'll be covered in radioactive contamination.
The issue isn't blind supply and demand, it's that we've made construction expensive through code and arbitrary supply chain constraints and we're planning to deport all the construction workers. Even if population grown naturally slows to zero we will simply stop building houses because it won't be profitable. That's what got us here in the first place.
I quite like the parts of the code that prevent random electric shocks, and the parts that keep the roof from caving in, etc. (I assume you meant building codes)
The forthcoming mass deportation will definitely fuck shit up though. UK is having a similar issue due to Brexit. I guess Eastern Europeans are to the UK, as Mexicans/etc. are to the US?
The issue is how local municipalities enforce it along with zoning to make building massively more bureaucratic. Reaching the right people is impossible, everyone has their own agenda and interpretation, and city councils across the country add arbitrary stipulations entirely to reduce construction so line goes up.
This is basically a law of nature. Anything that's done by humans and can't be scaled will necessarily get more expensive in real terms over time. See: Baumol effect.
But high schoolers I know today seem more even keeled about things. They are graduating into a world where fast food jobs start at $17, no one needs to go to college if they don't want to, and they are accustomed to a world where everything is temporary and digital.
I think the strongest evidence of this is the sharp decline in military recruitment.
A fast food job might be $17/hr, but the cost of gas is >2x what it was when that same job paid $8/hr, not to mention other basic costs like groceries, rent, and buckle up if you have to go to the doctor. Pay has simply not kept up with the cost of living for most Americans.
Why would anyone be happy that everything is ephemeral? That implies a lack of stability, more anxiety about the future, less confidence that you can weather bad times.
Humans are tactile creatures, everything being digital leads to a counter-intuitive sense of isolation - more connected, but less personal. There are positives too, but as an older Millennial, it has been interesting to be along for the ride as the potential of the internet and social media went from a superpower, to kryptonite. Who knows where things will be in 5-10 years, but it's hard not to see how some of our greatest tools are being turned against us in the search for more profit.
Millennials are, if anything, brutally realistic - a trait required to navigate the last 16 years. We were forced to watch as the last bit of life in the idea of a strong middle class was snuffed out, and had to enter the workforce right as the GFC hit. Our parents were the last generation where one could reasonably expect to live a life that truly lived up to the ideal of the American Dream - that one could get educated, get a job, buy a decent house and raise a family, without it being especially noteworthy to do so. For many Millennials, if not every generation following, it is essentially nothing more than a dream at this point. Corporate greed, and a government fully captured by it, has all but killed the middle class, and I fully expect that the advent of AI - rather than being a boon for the middle class - will drive a nail in its coffin. Those with the most to gain are already on top, and I've already heard way more people here talk about what they'll be able to do without needing to hire anyone, than I have about how the people left jobless will benefit. It is readily apparent that nobody with any power is going to do anything about it before a significant amount of suffering is felt - maybe not even then. All you have to do is listen to how people talk about it, as if everyone will magically figure out something else to do when every sector starts losing jobs simultaneously. Our society has a greater chance of eating itself alive first.
I consider myself lucky amongst most Millennials - I entered the workforce before the GFC, then joined the military shortly after it (not due to the GFC, but the timing worked out). I was able to get far enough along in my career in those first years though that I never had to struggle with finding a job like many did. I was able to get a house in my 30s thanks to the GI bill. Very few of those I grew up with are in the same boat, many are living much the same as they were 15 years ago - unable to save enough to buy a house, facing reduced job prospects in the future. What reason do they have to be anything _but_ pessimistic?
For me personally, I think we've simply lost the battle against greed, and there is a tipping point after which reigning it back in is impossible without burning it all down. That's something nobody should want, least of all the rich, but it's played out many times in history, and we keep falling into the same trap, just different ways. I think this time it probably was Citizens United where we lost our grip, that decision made it inevitable that corporate interests would be the driving force of government, not the needs of its people. Who can say for sure what will happen, but we're all along for the ride regardless.
This is probably the worst example. In 2008 gas cost as much as it does now and fast food did only pay $8/hr. https://www.creditdonkey.com/gas-price-history.html
> Millennials are, if anything, brutally realistic
No, your entire post is an example of the dramatic doomerism waxing on the anxieties of normal life. Complaining about anxiety is one of the hallmarks of a millennial.
Did you deliberately pick the time where the cost of gas skyrocketed before eventually coming back down to more normal levels? Gas where I lived at the time went from like $2/gal to $4/gal for months, then came back down to ~$2.75 but never fully returned to where it was. You're cherry picking your facts.
> your entire post is an example of the dramatic doomerism waxing on the anxieties of normal life. Complaining about anxiety is one of the hallmarks of a millennial.
Where was I complaining about anxiety? I do think many people are anxious, and have reason to be - but if I'm complaining about anything, it's greed. Dismissing the extensive evidence of its pervasiveness in our society today, and the negative outcomes it is producing, is the mindset of someone that doesn't care about anyone or anything that doesn't affect them personally.
With the increase in fuel economy, the cost of gas as an actual pain point is close to the lowest level it has ever been for the vast majority of the US. The only real exception to this is places like California where additional costs are added for tax revenue or additional emissions controls.
> I do think many people are anxious, and have reason to be
Previous generations had just as many reasons to be anxious, they just didn’t sit around crying about it non-stop in victimhood perpetuity.
I wonder how the economics stack up, because intoxicants aren't free. If the researchers are saying there's X less drug use, then presumably that either implies (a) teenagers are now spending X more on other areas instead (and what are they?), or (b) teenagers now have X less money.
- the TV
- the radio
- board games
- card games
- video games
- theaters
- phones and faxes
- the mail
I still don't think they stand on the same foot as vodka.
Passive consumption of short-form videos lacks that social feedback mechanism that keeps my behavior in check. It’s easy to stay up way later than I meant to and be wrecked the next day.
Consuming by yourself in a dark room is the default consumption mode for Reels/Shorts/TikTok, whereas in my social circles drinking alone is very unusual.
Should we classify these clouds as worse than alcohol because they were looked at alone in a room instead of doing some other work ?
To get more personal, I had a CD player as my alarm in the morning, and a few times skipped worked because I couldn't get myself to stop the playing album. I didn't blame the CD.
That's also how I realized that job was well paying but otherwise really shitty.
There is definitely something different about TikTok, or video games, compared to your examples.
(Wikipedia: HyperNormalisation#Etymology)
The only generation I can think of without a similar formative crisis (in the US at least) is Gen X. Does the death of Kurt Cobain count?
covid was actually something everyone felt personally - not just empathized with through media. I feel like I just started recovering mentally from the lockdowns - all my college years eaten up by them.
when i was a child, there was no security in airports. like literally NONE. you could walk in and buy a flight with physical cash. if you wanted an international flight, there was a metal detector like you might find in a night club
government ID and drivers licence did not have your photograph on it, and some state drivers licenses were printed on non-laminated card. there was also no functional internet surveillance (there were no good search algorithms or tools in the early internet, so the government couldnt search either).
but the real big change, which is kind of what everyone felt i think, is the whole world was celebrating the end of the cold war and so vehemently protested going into the middle east, and the government just did it anyway. the largest protests in the history of the west were against that war and it was all totally ignored https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
then we got the PATRIOT act, NSA/CIA spying on the population, heavily armed police. btw, in the 1990s you would NEVER see police with assault rifles and armoured trucks etc except for swat teams in major cities and the ATF. The idea of your local police department having a heap of military equipment was crazy. a great example of this is the LA riots in '92 - they had to call in the army and the national guard because the police simply werent equipped for it
and they would run these polls on tv, like gallup polls, falsely claiming that 20%+ of people publicly supported the war
even though it didnt affect anyone as much personally, it was the turning point where the gov just started brazenly ignoring people and introducing the heavy duty surveillance state, which was especially painfully felt in aus, canada, new zealand, the us, and the uk. and covid19 tyranny was only possible because of what bush did in response to 9/11 - it physically could not have happened in the 1990s as there were no government agencies that could have done it
AR-15s are more versatile than shotguns, though less powerful they are more accurate. If your going to carry a long gun around, it's probably the most logical option.
Basically anyone who isn't a prohibited person in America can field the same equipment. Though I think police have more access to restricted ammunition.
echoing wat titanomachy said, there was a time where it was unthinkable to see police with anything more than a sidearm. a lot of police still had revolvers into the 90s as well.
In the context of this the GFC was much worse, though. It was entirely avoidable and a direct outcome of extreme greed and extreme incompetence. With Covid/lockdowns all options sucked to one extent or another.
With Covid, the difference is that it came home, for everyone. And not just the US, but globally. Every home was directly affected, for months or years. 9/11 or 2008 didn't lock down entire countries for weeks and months at a time, impose country wide curfews, close all schools, suppress all socialising, impose home schooling, adults/parents working from home or not-at-all, shuttering of global supply lines, increased mortality fears for all older relatives, and constant everyday panic headlines and monitoring for years. We're still working through the aftereffects. So yes, very unique, in its direct effect upon the youth of wealthy countries in modern society.
I dont have a clue what your upbringing looked like, but even up to around age of 25, I never ever expected nor was told to expect any of that. The success despite all that is much sweeter.
Maybe thats some US thing, being raised in eastern Europe you were born to shit, you were considered insignificant shit and that was about it. Thats what being occupied for 4 decades by russians causes to society, on top of other bad stuff they are so natural with.
Maybe stop telling kids how they are all special and great and all will be astronauts and let them figure it all out by themselves? Teenagers being frustrated that they wont be owning some posh expensive house, thats pretty fucked up upbringing and life goals to be polite, thats not success in life in any meaningful way.
I recommend checking biggest regrets of dying people, focus on careers and money hoarding are consistently at the top.
Posh expensive house? Nowhere was that mentioned.
The post-WWII 20th century American social contract was: "You will have the ability to get married, live in a modest home of your own, own a car, raise 2-3 young children, and go on a modest annual vacation even if you work in a factory".
Few under 50 actually want a suburban home in a no-name town with a single domestic holiday a year and a job requiring physical labor (and hard limits on clocking in and out) that feeds your family with industrial calories.
If you do, you can get that with practically zero training in a mid-tier hospitality job (or working as an e.g. bank teller) with an hour commute each way. Small-town suburban homes are cheap.
My dad’s parents owned their own home. The _biggest_ one they owned was 1000 square feet, which they viewed as cavernous. The one my dad lived in as a small child had no indoor plumbing and the heat came from a single wood burning stove. I was alive when my dad first lived in a house with central air.
My mom’s parents never owned a home while she lived with them.
The numbers will back me up that this was a completely typical middle class American experience post ww2.
What seems to have changed is a) the class of housing stock available. b) trends around _where_ people live and c) the narrative about the past.
its just as easy to reach the exact opposite conclusion when everything is so hopeless and nihilistic. you are extrapolating way too much here.
less unsupervised time, location tracking from parents, unregulated dopamine from chatgroups and algorithms in public social media, and the risk of fentany and other poisons in drugs, are much better contributors to extrapolate from
As to why I choose to abstain, I honestly am just not interested in drinking or doing drugs. I don't see any benefit to it socially, since I have more fun with my friends doing things while they are sober, and I don't want to be one of those adults that can't socialize without it. Also, the consequences for getting caught are high.
(He has no desire to start drinking etc early or at all at this point.)
Long term health impacts are high, as someone in my 50s I'm certainly doing better for my choice. And yes, not making stupid decisions under influence also cannot be underestimated.
Could it be that, kids are doing less drugs because they’re more informed, less bored, and less reckless than previous generations?
We all aspire that our kids will do better than we have. We did our best to instill a sense of confidence and worth in them.
What if it is finally starting to just, f’ing work?
Taking this on a bit of a tangent, but as an elder millennial, I recall having been told (by elder relatives in their mid-30s at the time) all about how one day I'd too be an "old fogey" looking down on "teens being teens" and how such progression is just the way of things. Hell, I still hear people preaching such "wisdom" today to their youngers.
Yet here I am, just past the age I'm supposedly meant to start ragging on "kids today", and all I can remark is that this same 16-22 set you speak of are remarkably respectful, polite, and considerate, perhaps more so than my own cohort at that age. I almost worry they're not rebellious enough for their own good.
Teen suicide rates have almost doubled since the iPhone came out, so I think there’s something real going on here even if it’s not visible to us.
They don't? I'm pretty sure I saw unsupervised teens hanging out at a mall even just a few days ago.
Not all locations are the same though, so maybe there has been a noticeable decrease where you're at. Personally, I think I've felt an increase if anything.
At least when I was that age, it was usually the low income people who's greatest achievement in life would be avoiding prison, who usually turned towards smoking, alcohol, drugs and sex. See "Common People" and similar 80s/90s Britpop songs.
What changed?
I grew up in a lower middle class family, and for me the feeling that I could end up like that - as many people I went to school with did - was what pushed me to achieve. My parents could only just afford their bills, so I didn't get any handouts from them. Of course I don't have a Lambo, so maybe I'm considered a failure by Gen Z? Has the boundary of what is considered "successful" shifted?
There's a bigger cultural shift going on where people just don't like hanging out with each other anymore.
It's much more about people ha ing less friends and socializing less
Gen-X felt the same way. The entire youth culture at the time was based around the vibe that the culture sucked and there wasn't a future worth having for younger people. Apathy was the youth cultural vibe of the day.
Then again with older millenials it happened with the great financial crisis. There was a widespread feeling of hopelessness about the future. Outsourcing and trade liberalization (the AI-like job crusher of that period) left the future job market uncertain.
I think what's new now is social media and persistent phones. If you're feeling anxiety about the future you don't escape into wild parties, you escape into your phone and videogames.
Also, you typically need to be unsupervised with friends to get into drugs, something teenagers no longer have access to compared to 10-15 years ago. If we look at the social decline due to the pandemic, what made experts think these kids would bounce back? They are forever changed, and will forever be less social than other generations because they missed out on formative experiences.