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Comment by fdgsdfogijq | Hacker News Reader

I think the younger generation, 22-27, has caught on to what a scam working is. By that, they fully understand that getting an office job and a mortgage means they will be chained to a desk with little chance at getting rich or escaping that life.

I am a bit older, but have been seeing this mentality all over the place on the internet, but also in the real world. Its everywhere, young people trying to hustle money through odd job sales, youtube channels, online ecommerce. Whatever they can do to not get started on a career. And its completely rational, money printing has destroyed the value of the dollar, real estate is too expensive, and corporations extract too much value from their workers.

An even more interesting point is the loss of status of having a good job when young. There is absolutely no shame, and its even cheered on to not be working a serious job. Making 200k at 24 is impressive to no one, and is instead met with disdain, "why spend your life working"

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Comments like this are just so far outside the realm of what I am fairly sure is reality.

In the nation called the United States, on the planet Earth, in the prime material plane, the average office worker makes about $40K a year.

And the average rent is about $1100/mo. About a third of the office worker's income. Federal taxes are another 11% or so.

That leaves more than half of an average office worker's income for essentials like food, clothing and utilities. Entertainment is cheap these days. If you budget there's still enough left over for your 401k/IRA/etc. which goes mainly into the stock market and if you stick with that for 40 years you will do pretty well.

Always been the formula, still is.

What is this dimension where 24 year olds are running around earning almost a quarter mil and it's not good enough? Is this Valley talk again? I get that this is HN and rent in the Valley and taxes in Cali are high, but so high that this 24 year old on a quarter mil can't make ends meet? If he can't achieve what the office worker on $40K can, why is he in that job and that city?

It's more likely in my opinion that these people are worth less than they think they are, or don't know how to manage their finances, or both.

Averages lean upwards due to some people making millions.

Federal taxes aren't the only taxes. State and other taxes are factored in.

Rent may average at $1100 in an ideal world, but near cities, $1100 is increasingly rare. Every time this is mentioned someone will chime in and say "yeah but I live in rural Nebraska and pay less than that." Which is fine. But then your employment options are slim, most jobs aren't paying $40k a month, not everyone is a tech contractor making 200k a year from their bedroom on a lakefront, not everyone wants to be or can be a tech contractor, and a lot of jobs performed by "normal" people (people on HN are generally highly paid and anything but typical) will involve long commute times unless they're living in the middle of town... in which case rent prices shoot up fast.

The average person also needs to pay for health care in the US (even if their company provides insurance, they're fucked when they get sick because insurance covers very little for most people not in very expensive programs). They have car loans. They have college loans. They need to pay deposits just to move. 9-5s are being replaced with 9-6s and people have less free time.

When you factor in all of that, the "average office worker" looks like a dream life to a lot of people. What people considered a boring hell of a life in 1965 is a fantasy unobtainable to an increasing number of "average" people. Comments claiming it's "easy" for "average" people here make me think some people live in a bubble detached from all reality.

This most interesting part for me is this "What people considered a boring hell of a life in 1965 is a fantasy unobtainable to an increasing number of >>average<< people". It would be good to analyze what happened between 1965 and 2022, what has changed that instead of progress we see some kind of downward spiral. Or maybe 1965s are idealized? Are there people looking on this? I have zero knowledge to understand all of this, unfortunately.

I was born in '65. My dad had a regular job, mum didn't work and I have 3 siblings. We lived, what would be classed today as, a lower middle-class lifestyle.

Aside from earnings and cost of living, the one thing I believe that has changed is that I don't remember knowing of many people living a much better life than I was at the time.

Now it seems everyone is, even those earning much less than I do. Driving a car you could never be able to buy outright, multiple foreign holidays, fine dining and designer clothing are pretty much the norm these days because, somehow, people feel entitled to such a lifestyle regardless of their ability to finance it.

> somehow, people feel entitled to such a lifestyle regardless of their ability to finance it.

How do you think Google and Facebook are trillion $ companies? They run targeted advertising to induce consumer demand via manipulation-as-a-service ("Hey advertisers, not enough people willingly going out to buy your $70 clothes made for $1? Here's the people susceptible to feeling inadequate when you show them how much sexier they'll be after their purchase). The $ they skim has to come from someone's pockets at the end of the day.

See: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/life-simps...

The Life in The Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable

The most famous dysfunctional family of 1990s television enjoyed, by today’s standards, an almost dreamily secure existence. By Dani Alexis Ryskamp

Updated at 11:10 a.m. ET on February 8, 2021.

> It would be good to analyze what happened between 1965 and 2022, what has changed that instead of progress we see some kind of downward spiral.

Whether you agree with him or not, this video highlights how the 70s changed everything (in the US at least)

The Cardboard Box Reform - Nixon's Ghost Bill & A Crucial Flaw in Democracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gEz__sMVaY

I don't mean to suggest there are no problems with cost of living. In broad strokes here's what happened since '65, or let's go back a little further to the start of the post-WW2 world.

1. Millions of women entered the workforce (started when all the men were overseas fighting)

2. The government went off the gold standard

3. Millions of people in other countries replaced the workforce via globalization

Those are the three biggies. Expanding the number of available workers kicked off the pressure on wages. Going off the gold standard kicked off massive inflation. Globalization shrunk the number of jobs available and was the nail in the coffin.

So that's why we don't have the same economics as a nuclear family in the 60s.

Now in practice a lot of essentials in the US CPI have stayed pretty cheap. Technology enabled a lot of things to stay or become cheap. But a few big ones are a train wreck. Home ownership, health care, education, all skyrocketed.

So when I see someone on the median income say "Man I'm getting older and I don't know how you can afford to settle down and buy a house and start a family" yeah that's a very real problem which is grounded in facts.

But when someone says "life sucks for the 24 year old who has the resume to work in the Valley and pulls down almost a quarter mil," here's what that is: horse shit.

Your premise needs a reality check.

> 1. Millions of women entered the workforce (started when all the men were overseas fighting)

The rate of women in the workplace ticked up slightly during WW1 and WW2, but by no means was it a sea change. That's a narrative pushed by "traditionalist" thinkers that found a simple thing to pin social upheaval on

The real change was accelerated industrialization during the first half of the 20th century. Millions moved from farms to factories, men and women alike.

> 2. The government went off the gold standard

So what?

> Going off the gold standard kicked off massive inflation.

If you call a steady 1-2%/year "massive".

The real effect has been to stabilize the economy. I guess people who like gold standards don't know their economic history. The 19th century, which is arguably a recognizable modern economy (in the West), was punctuated by panics and strong recessions that made the "Great Depression" look tame. (which itself makes the Great Recession look pretty tame.). Getting of the gold standard was key to fixing that.

> 3. Millions of people in other countries replaced the workforce via globalization

I agree with you here, but again I think you overstate the impact. The US was once in the position of SE Asia today: (relatively) educated workforce, cheap labor, lax standards compared to Europe. In it's time, the American South was the jobs-export market for the North. These trends have been happening basically forever.

More importantly, the remaining manufacturing jobs, and there are many, are high wage and high skill. They're also high productivity, so there are fewer.

That leads to another force at work, which is a bigger threat than exported jobs: automation. Most manufacturing jobs didn't leave, they disappeared.

> The real effect has been to stabilize the economy.

The economy only needed stabilization because it was running on usury. If you ban usury, as Islam does, then you wouldn't need fake money that can be printed at will, and these crazy periodic cycles won't happen. It's not like today is stable anyway, I've spoken to several people in finance and they admitted to me these things.

Just to be clear you’re suggesting high/predatory interest rates are the reason that the economy needs stabilization?

If so, my frame of reference for predatory is like 15%, 27%, etc. numbers like that.

Is that what you’re saying? If so can you expand on your thoughts here and link these two elements together better? I generally associate high interest rates with high risk. I’d loan my friend $500 for 0% interest. But some person I’ve never met who is sketchy? That would be a 25% rate with collateral. Ya know?

Are you tying this into the Federal Reserve somehow? Is it interest rates for mortgages that you view as predatory? Small business loans?

I'm suggesting that any non zero rates are predatory. Loans should be reserved as acts of charity, as Islam dictates. Otherwise, it will open up to running the economy on debt, which is exactly what we see today. Debt fuels more debt, more inflation, it's a rolling snowball. It's no wonder we're in the mess we see today. Of course dissociating the currency from gold or other precious metals allows them to print more money to pay off their ever growing debts. This is how all these factors are connected. Not to mention immoral acts like gambling (aka put and call options) and selling what you don't own (shorting), all of which are prohibited in Islam, are contributing causes as well.

Trying to roll back the clock to the golden age of Islam is not something you’d expect to find in HN’s comments section.

Liquidity fits into your world view how? In its most simple form: A business or person needs money to buy resources to make things to earn money. Do they go to the Sultan and beg for a loan based on charity?

> Trying to roll back the clock to the golden age of Islam is not something you’d expect to find in HN’s comments section.

Why, because most people are not familiar with Islamic history? :)

> A business or person needs money to buy resources to make things to earn money.

Engage in a fundrise not dissimilar to what people do today with VCs and startups. The investor(s) contribute money in exchange for a portion of the business. If it succeeds, both parties make money, if it doesn't, the investor loses money, and the business owner loses money and effort he put into it. It's true risk sharing.

Those people are quite wrong. An unstable unit of value like the gold standard makes bans on usury even less meaningful because you can get into deep debt-deflation even with 0% nominal rates (see "liquidity trap" for what that looks like). Investment cycles can be driven purely by equity investment, although there might be an argument that debt-driven cycles are worse. Anyway, the well-known workarounds that spring up when 'usury' is banned - basically ways of rephrasing 'interest-bearing debt' as 'senior equity'- leave you with practically no advantage over simply having well-designed bankruptcy laws.

The fallacy you're committing is not looking at how the Islamic world was run before the Western banks took over post WWI/II, as interest is prohibited in Islam. It is well documented that in Iraq during the Ummayyad period, there were no more people left to accept Zakat because everyone truly paid their fair share (not the trite slogans we hear today).

There can be cycles due to issues beyond our control, however, the cycles we see today are built into the system because of usury and printing fake money to fuel it. As I said, financial folks I spoke with admitted it.

> If you call a steady 1-2%/year "massive".

It compounds. Over the course of 50 years this is ~100% inflation.

> The rate of women in the workplace ticked up slightly during WW1 and WW2, but by no means was it a sea change.

WW2 is just where it started, it went from 28% around then to 47% as a percent of labor force, a huge change.

The male labor force doubled in absolute number since then, but the female one increased almost 4X.

How much of that is child care switching from not counted to being counted? Women were working before that, just in an uncounted way

If it went from 1 provider on 2-3 child care to 1 on 20 daycare, the effect is similar to if it had been counted anyway.

One significant source of uncounted labor was removed with the washing machine. Enormous amounts of time were spent manually washing clothes. But automating this likewise had a similar effect to making child care more efficient and increased downward wage pressure elsewhere by allowing more to enter other parts of the workforce.

If you call a steady 1-2%/year "massive".

I have literally never seen this argument before, and I've been reading economics books for 10 years.

I'm more curious than anything. Please tell me where I can find more.

The US was never a low-wage economy. Sure, there was crippling poverty in places, like the Dust Bowl, but labor has always been the bottleneck in a nation richly endowed with natural resources, which is why American logging practices are much more wasteful than European ones, they are designed to maximize the productivity of the workforce. When the International Watch Company was set up, it was by an American looking for cheap labor in Switzerland.

If you're considering just after WW2, you also have to consider that most industrial countries were in ruins

I'd add that the decades after WW2 were boom times for the Unites States. So many other industrialized nations were reduced to rubble. The effects of having to rebuild lasted decades. Post-WW2 the U.S. made up about half the world's GDP - equal to all other countries and the planet combined.

Things are quite different now. The Unites States makes up less than a quarter of the world's GDP. Those great factory jobs with pensions and benefits are long gone. That dovetails with your #3, globalization.

The apparent "pressure on wages" is broadly a matter of technical change favoring highly skilled occupations over lower-skilled ones. Wages for the former are still comparatively quite high, as we ought to know well here at HN. Of course this is a major source of income inequality, and arguably a social problem because retraining people for these newer jobs only gets harder and harder. UBI can be an elegant approach.

Eh, last place I rented in Portland was $1300. I can hit the gas pedal and make $250k a year if I want, but last year I laid low and tucked in under $100k, took time off, still managed to save a bunch of cash. My GF is a massage therapist and makes $50-60k a year. We've got multiple cars and houses. We're both self-employed so we each pay for our own health insurance out of pocket.

This is the dream to a lot of people... in the third world. The truth is we're both relatively lazy and could easily double our income in this country, tomorrow, if we wanted to.

BUT NOT AS LAZY AS GENERATION TIKTOK.

Cool. Most people aren't given a life that allows them to just make 250k if they want to. As a programmer, tech workers are the laziest people around but incredibly overpaid. The people making 1/4 your pay are busting their asses harder than we can imagine.

I know exactly how hard they're busting ass - I was a cab driver, bus boy, waiter, bartender and minimum-wage graphic designer before I was a coder.

It's not those people I'm worried about. They're all learning more as they go along. It's the ones who disdain work. And use incoherent political talking points to justify laziness and being supported by their parents. They have no pride.

[edit] It's also absolutely natural to me, and a sign of vigor in America, that I should have started at minimum wage in the service industry and now command $200/hr. in my 40s. And it's natural to me that other people should go through the same process. It's good for them. It was good for me. It teaches you hard work and humility; being poor teaches you the value of a dollar. This is the only country in the world where that has been possible for generation after generation. My grandparents were immigrants who came to the US with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Most of my colleagues are of other races, and their parents and grandparents were immigrants too. My grandpa died with $1M or so in savings. This was not a green light to fuck off and not work. It was a dire warning that I had to get a job at 14. So it's not like "some people" auto-magically have this incredible privilege of making $250k a year, you have to work for it, and that's what's expected of you in this country. People everywhere else in the world desperately want the chance to do the shit jobs that our kids think they're too good to do. That's a parenting problem. A messaging problem. A civilizational problem.

[edit2] >> most people aren't given a life

This is an incredibly offensive thing to say to someone if you don't know the specifics of their life. I kind of ignored it, but I shouldn't have. It betrays a very specific flaw in your thinking. You assume that everyone who has things must have had those things given to them. Is that what your parents told you? Is that what you tell yourself when you don't feel like working harder? That everyone else was just given what they have? That just means you were brought up with a poor work ethic. Blaming people who work harder than you or even people who were lucky and born rich doesn't get you anywhere. Good; stay in a gutter, but don't pretend to preach to people who put in the time.

Agreed with most of your post until the end - was being American not given?

Surely your ancestors worked for it, but most jobs you are not even qualified for if you are not American (what you get for granted)

I think you are falling into the fallacy of hard work (which is a responsibility and a must), failing to recognize that these opportunities were given to you in the 1st place, which you rightfully justified with a good work ethic after the fact.

The point is a lot of people will not get a chance, even if they busted their asses. With this said, laziness is not an excuse either so I agree that the anti-work youth sentiment is a virus for economy and the entire country.

>tech workers are the laziest people around but incredibly overpaid

Wage-fixing cartels aside, tech workers are in high demand and are therefore paid exactly what they're worth.

He said he DOESN'T make 250k. He said he and his non-programmer gf make much less than that combined.

And yet they're still doing just fine.

My post has numbers. So does his. They're earnest attempts to show that the numbers can and do work.

You on the other hand, are spitting out one exaggeration after another in bad faith. No, you don't need to move to rural Nebraska to find cheap rent. No, not all tech workers are lazy. Some of them settle for that shitty commute which you call a dealbreaker. Take a hard look at your attitude.

>> Some of them settle for that shitty commute which you call a dealbreaker

Appreciate the support. Also, I did my time as a junior code-monkey in an office with a miserable commute and a tiny half cubicle, and I learned a ton from it. Taking that job didn't stop me from becoming independent later; I just watched what my bosses were doing very carefully when they interacted with clients and realized I could do it at least as well as they did, and that propelled me to doing my own things. It was actually a necessary experience.

My little brother disdained hard work most of his life. He dragged through college for six years to get an undergrad degree (I dropped out after year one). He just got a real estate license. That was the hardest he's worked ever; and I think he's grown because of it. He still has no real work, but he's got two kids now to support. His life has grown a lot harder than mine now; but mine was a lot harder than his for the first 30 years or so. No bad blood or anything. But I do see how funny it is when people call something "privilege" when really, they're privileged to think they don't have to do the hard part themselves.

Doing the hard part is actually the good part of life. The saddest thing about the anti-work movement is that they're missing the experiences that come with committing to something shitty and moving up. Maybe my gen puts too much emphasis on work as a marker of identity; I'm not immune to that criticism. But if you don't even try or you truly believe that the fact that the whole thing being rigged gives you cover to tune out (and yes, it was always rigged) then on what grounds can you lodge a serious complaint against the rest of us?

>Some of them settle for that shitty commute

Perhaps some people don't think a 10 minute commute is possible either because they don't think that a city with a 10 minute radius is a real city, or they think living close to a highway implies an undesirable neighborhood.

Also, there is the option to commute out to the suburbs in a major metro area where the commute inward is hell. Plenty of office parks and such that people work at.

No need to be so angry. I said people can’t just choose to make 250k, unlike privileged folks here. No need to rage about the reality.

I was paying far more than 1200 for a spot in Portland a good 30+ minutes from downtown. A friend was paying around that and having to commute an hour. Not everyone is as lucky as you. Countless Americans are struggling yet people here say “I’m rich so I don’t see the problem.” Cool. You’re rich and privileged. Most people aren’t.

I moved to another country. I pay less and get a higher quality of life. It’s wild seeing the frogs being boiled and getting louder than ever about how there’s no problem because they’re not feeling it yet.

If you were paying beyond $1200/mo for a place in PDX a few years ago, 30 minutes away from downtown, that would certainly be either a freestanding house with at least 2BR/2BA, or a newly constructed amazon box off the MAX line near Hillsboro. I know people here who still pay $700/mo for an apartment and when I was paying $1300 it seemed ridiculous, but it was a furnished ADU off Hawthorne, utilities included.

I hear ya about watching from outside. I left the US in 2006 and ended up sort of stuck back here in 2016 when my dad got sick. There's a twofold great thing when you're outside. You don't have to give a fuck about the internal politics in America, and everyone looks ridiculous (believe me - the shock of coming back and turning on TV here takes years to get over); and also, wherever you're living now, their problems aren't your problems. Even if they're rioting against their government every day. You can stand aloof.

No argument from me. I wish we could get all the other people to experience life outside their little bubbles. They wouldn't act so petty and stupid.

>The people making 1/4 your pay are busting their asses harder than we can imagine.

I obviously haven't worked in every job there is but in my twenties up to early 30s I worked as:

busboy dishwasher painter janitor day laborer construction worker

Now it's true this was not all the time, I had significant breaks for school etc. and obviously my body today could not handle what it handled then, but still my experience is that programming when it is going bad is much worse than anything I had with those jobs.

Things going bad as programmer can just be when you are dealing with a hard to solve problem and it grinds you down over days, but also you can end up in places that for some reason everything goes worse (sure I had bosses who were jerks when I was working, especially as a day laborer, but I never had jobs where the whole processes of the company seemed geared to making everything harder like you can sometimes encounter programming)

The physical work made me tired, but never affected me mentally. Mean bosses didn't matter too much, just keep the head down do the work and get out of there at the same hour every day. And sometimes programming can also be tiring, sitting down all day at the computer.

So I mean I believe that I can imagine to some reasonable degree of accuracy how hard people making 1/4 what I do are busting their asses, but it seems that what I imagine must be significantly less than what you imagine?

on edit: obviously my imagining here is limited to the U.S and Western Europe.

>some people live in a bubble detached from all reality.

It would be helpful (and I think recommended in the HN guidelines) to provide some relatable basis for your opinions from your life experience.

Like for example, your context for normal rents, normal cities, normal commutes, normal states, normal experience with health insurance when you can't get it from your employer, what you think a normal car & car loan is, why "boring" is relevant to "hell" and struggling in life, whether and why rental deposits are an abnormal hardship to you, if you have ever had a proverbial 9-5 job...

I'm not demanding an answer to each specific item above.

But when you casually accuse people of living in a bubble, you should show them a different one even if you only have one or two real data points from experience.

i paid 1K a semester to go to college.

Ok...that doesn't paint much of a picture.

If I could rewind things to when I was 18, and go to community college for two years, transfer to the university for the last two, and live at home, it would be extremely cost-efficient, but we all have to make decisions without hindsight, with perhaps the advice of our elders who grew up in a completely different world.

> And the average rent is about $1100/mo. About a third of the office worker's income. Federal taxes are another 11% or so. That leaves more than half of an average office worker's income for essentials like food, clothing and utilities.

This sounds like math done by someone who has never earned an income as low as $40k.

Some slightly more realistic numbers (rounding to nearest hundred):

Income - $40,000

Federal - $3100

State (variable, this is for CA) - $1000

Social security - $2500

Medicare - $600

Disability (again, CA) - $500

Total tax - $6700 in CA, maybe $5200 in a lower tax state

$13k annually for rent (in CA, that’s very cheap).

How much for health insurance? Probably $1k-$2k.

How much for transportation? That’s car payment/repairs, insurance, and gas in most places. This eats up a lot of disposable income for people.

Cable tv, cell phone, etc. also adds up quickly.

Oh, you better not have student loans. That will eat up more of your disposable income.

I have given some budgeting tips to people who make ~$50k working in California. At best, they can contribute the 5% for matching, but it’s tough. Things like increased gas prices, unexpected car repairs, medical issues, etc. are a huge fear and a major concern.

Sure, $40k is very livable in provincial parts of the US, but there are many many people who do not live in those areas but make that income.

Just trying to keep it real…

Yours is the best rebuttal by far, but I think your reference to "provincial" parts of the US reveals why we arrived at very different conclusions.

My #1 non-negotiable for my first job after college was very contrarian at the time, less so now. I've never budged on it. This is it: "Not in California."

Why? Because I like having money.

If you're making $40k in a dense urban area you're probably sharing rent with someone. It's still tight but that gives you an extra $100-$200/wk in disposable income (or for necessities, as the case may be.)

Yes, this.

Live below your means, invest the difference. Grind for 3 or 4 decades, you end up with a pile of money.

It's not easy, but it's true.

Best hope you don't get sick. And nobody in your family gets sick or dies.

That was my plan until I got MS at 26.

Oh, and hopefully everything progresses as you foresee. For example, I chose a college (back in 2006) and borrowed 2k my freshman year. Senior year I ended up having to take out 30k because 2008 wiped out my dad (who was helping) + his wife cheated on him and froze all their assets while they had a messy divorce.

Or how I went to grad school in Canada because it was cheaper and I calculated whether I should cash out my retirement accounts or borrow more, planned, and managed to live, pay tuition, and save on ~25k/yr in Vancouver, BC. When I was planning my move back, the Canadian dollar crashed literally the week I made the conversion and I ended up 2k short of what I expected (after about a decade of holding steady).

Then throw in kids and spouses and hopefully nothing happens to any of them.

Better hope you accurately predict the rising costs of healthcare, childcare, etc. too, and hope that nothing else pops up and becomes unaffordable. (College used to be affordable, I wonder what's next?)

The idea that you can plan a life out is a nice idea, but things happen, and it's not people's fault.

Sure. Sorry you've had some bad breaks, and some decisions didn't turn out like you'd want.

To be sure, some people have bad luck. Some have good. It's nobody's fault, and nobody's responsibility to fix it all.

Better luck (and better luck with decisions) to you going forward.

I think you're misreading the parent, I read it as more like if you're 24 and make 200K whilst being chained to an office 5 or more days a week, your peers who make 40k doing odd jobs at their own convenience and enjoy a larger portion of their time in freedom will pity you, not look up to you.

The biggest difference from when I was in my early 20s is that I didn't know Mark Zuckerberg's real time net worth loss and it be a constant news story for that day in the news cycle. I knew Bill Gates was the richest man in the world but I couldn't care less.

Actually, I don't think my friends or I even paid attention to the "news" at all in my early 20s. I even worked at an investment firm in college but didn't care at all about investing, the stock market or getting rich.

Ultimately, there was so much going on culturally that I knew I was in the prime of my life and the richest old guy in the world couldn't buy what I had.

Before 2000, everyone wanted to be in the music industry. Whatever business you ran or how much money you had it wasn't as cool as being in the music industry. Now everyone in the music industry wants to be in business.

We have surrendered so much culture to technology that there is just not that much going on at this point besides net worth tracking. There is nothing cool about art besides the net worth value added when it is sold as a NFT or how many views on youtube the piece gets because you know a lot of views add to the person's net worth.

When the culture is mostly net worth tracking then of course working a job is not going to make you happy. You can either be a crypto speculator or youtube celebrity. What matters though is net worth number go up. Net worth number go up is the point of existing as a human. That is a brutal situation as a broke college kid when starting life with a net worth of like -$100k at interest from student loans.

I think you have to expect some kind of hippie dropout thing . Especially if you picture 5 years forward the 18-23 year old generation covid kids are going to reject the system at mass scale.

Edit: I didn't even notice the article is on a site called Making a Millionaire lol. Of course it is.

I am part of this younger generation, turning 29 this year (Jesus Christ!).

Hustle culture is definitely a thing - I personally quit a career in software 2 years ago to sell second-hand video games on eBay (making about double now what I was then, and with the high likelihood that it will increase another 30-50% over the coming 12 months), but based on the people I know IRL I'd suspect it's less than 10% of us that are doing any sort of "hustle" at all seriously.

Earning 200k a year is absolutely not something that people scoff at, either. The "why spend your life working" meme is more about people dedicating a huge part of their week to their work only to barely get ahead. If you're getting a large wage, you can invest a huge amount of what you earn without having to go without anything materially.

The anti-work attitudes and hustle culture that you talk about are definitely there, but exaggerated hugely by reddit and other online forums.

What sucks about hustle culture is that 90% don't make it and they waste valuable time.

When there is an alternative that's been around for decades (centuries?) and it works.

Build skills, work hard, live frugally, invest whatever you can for 40 years, you will end up just fine.

Heck you don't even need to get all of those right, the only mandatory one is the last one, the other three just make it easier.

But this strategy is slow and nobody wants to hear it, it's preached by lame boomers like Warren Buffet and Robert Kiyosaki.

People would rather scroll through the Instagrams of a couple hustlers who are living large and dream. I get it on some level, there's never been a better time in history to get lost in fantasy.

Unfortunately, there are millions and millions of people who build skills, work hard, and live frugally, and still aren't left with enough to invest anything, because the world has shifted in ways that make it impossible.

The idea that this is open to everyone—that working hard will guarantee you a decent income—is the big lie that's being increasingly recognized by young people today.

The underlying here is people don’t want to “work hard” for decades because that is no longer considered a good life.

Not quite. As I said, it is possible to avoid the working hard part. The part you can't avoid is investing for the long term.

So they don't want to do that, or they don't realize how important it is.

On one hand I identify with a lot of the criticisms of "Generation Tiktok" and the anti-work movement and so on.

On the other hand, I didn't appreciate the significance of long-term investing as much in my 20s as I do now, either. And I know plenty of people in their 30s and 40s who still don't.

The only real mistake we make imho is telling these people they're right when they're not.

> Making 200k at 24 is impressive to no one, and is instead met with disdain

I think your bubble is showing. Making $200k at 24 is well out of reach for most Americans in their 20s.

Making $200k is completely out of reach for almost all Americans of all ages.

>Making $200k is completely out of reach for almost all Americans of all ages.

Even ignoring urban areas that run on monopoly money (SF) a heck of a lot of professions will surpass 200k somewhere in middle age if you don't make a career change that sets you back. Not just doctors and lawyers but all sorts of white collar technical professions, managers of those types of workers and people who are the head administrators (but not owners) of all sorts of medium sized businesses will make that kind of money.

Heck, state police officers who are savvy enough to milk the overtime system routinely surpass that.

Those still aren't most Americans. Most Americans, well over 50%, will not see that kind of income at any point in their life.

I never said anything about "most". The ideologue I was replying to said "almost all"

According to

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluence_in_the_United_States...

it seems that more than 99% of individuals (not to be confused with households) earn less than 200k. That's a reasonable definition for "almost all".

You can explain all you want, but if you're pretending we live in a country where earning $200k is common and achievable for most people, you're living in a fantasy land. No wonder people don't support more efforts to address income inequality if they don't even understand what realistic income is for most people.

Yeah no. I graduated college 2 years ago. Pretty much everyone I knew wanted to get (and got) a normal job. Oh, and making $200k at 24 is impressive.

Software is a different bubble

That’s a pretty large bubble.

Even in software, $200k at 24 is pretty impressive. The lucky grinders in America are making less than half that, and most grinders are in the Philippines and Indonesia making $2k a month and able to feed a family on that. I think the word to describe the parent post is "privilege", but I'm not comfortable slinging that around since they're declaiming that $200k/yr is meaningless. (Ostensibly because intangibles like experience are cooler than making enough money to feed several families).

> young people trying to hustle money through odd job sales, youtube channels, online ecommerce. Whatever they can do to not get started on a career. And its completely rational, money printing has destroyed the value of the dollar, real estate is too expensive, and corporations extract too much value from their workers.

But how are the two fundamentally different? It's not clear to me that it's comparatively "easier to make a good living" (by whatever metric) doing YT videos or odd jobs than working a corporate job or similar.

I may be wrong since I've never actually tried it nor do I personally know people who do it, but it seems to me there still is a grind in producing content. Sure, you don't do it sitting on a chair in someone else's office, but you still have to "work" at it. And there's also value extraction done by the "platforms", just as there's value extracted by corporate employers.

> There is absolutely no shame, and its even cheered on to not be working a serious job. Making 200k at 24 is impressive to no one, and is instead met with disdain, "why spend your life working"

I'd say this may be more related to "success porn", where people talk about the long hours they work for their money. But I think there's a huge difference between making 200k and having trouble making ends meet.

There's also the fact that the various content that works never shows people hanging around complaining about being poor and having a hard time making rent for a shoebox. Instead, they're having a good time, filming in picturesque locations, etc. So the perception may be skewed as to what's actually possible for the majority of the people.

This is my opinion as well, only you presented it a lot more clearly and simply. Hustling is now not only socially acceptable, it is an ideal. Children grow up dreaming of this.

It does bring a few questions. Was the previous economy vaporous and thus this hustling as valuable or is the new economy just a temporary parasite leaving on top of "real-er" work. I'm asking semi honestly. I see a lot of fake work in traditional jobs, but I fail to see what value a lot of internet activities are bringing. Reactto videos, influencing..

You're seeing decentralisation at play driven by new technology.

People are tired of making someone's else millions and they want in, risk and money wise.

Especially because with digital media the cost/risk to start a business and enter the creator economy is way lower. There's abundance of information that could potentially help people to be more independent and rely less on apprenticeship to learn a trade.

I think there's a lot of waste in companies, the bigger the company the bigger the waste, so I think this trend is positive.

What we need to fight is the belief that picking a major you like is more important than picking a career the market wants.

You explained this better than I did. People are choosing new routes to make money rather than suffer under the old ones

> People are tired of making someone's else millions

It's not just that. People could start a small enterprise that is not geared towards hustling but they don't want to. That was the point of the original article.

Digital costs less but does it makes anything ?

I have a sad feeling that it's mostly low hanging fruits seen in the light of 'digital = progress = future'

> Digital costs less but does it makes anything ?

Yes. It makes knowledge available cheaply. Someone who works out of a van detailing cars can start doing basic PDR with nothing but YouTube and practice.

That's not value that's potential value, there's a difference in maybe learning and maybe doing it fast / clean / responsibly 4 or 5 days a week.

Everyone has to start somewhere. Even if 1/X people take it far enough to create value that's still more net value being created than before.

Pretty much every product and service has tons of content out there on how to do it and the economics of doing it for money. This is a massive net plus for people who are looking to grow their side gigs or businesses by adding related products/services or going upscale/downscale (e.g. our hypothetical detailer)

> young people trying to hustle money through odd job sales, youtube channels, online ecommerce

Most of these people are working super hard, struggling and will never ever get anywhere close to "getting rich" or "escaping that life".

>> Whatever they can do to not get started on a career. And its completely rational

That was completely rational for me when I was a good enough coder in 2004 to leave America and get on the road. I had a career. It's not rational for them. They don't want to be chained to a desk but they aren't actually qualified to do anything.

Money printing had already destroyed the currency. That started in the 70s. Having value in the workplace lets you stay even with inflation.

You just have to actually work or do something, not sit around "not getting a career" while you wait for one to magically come along because you're so fucking special.

>> Making 200k at 24 is impressive to no one

Really? It's very impressive to me. I think outside of SFBA it would be impressive to almost anyone in America, and certainly anyone outside the first world.

Making 200k at 24 is a sweet deal tho..

I’m not an economist but afaik if minimum wage would have kept pace with productivity it would be at USD ~50k at this point.

So if we talk about skilled labour of any sort USD 200k would be somewhat normal across industries.

US minimum wage reached $1/hour in 1956, or $10.25/h in 2021 dollars

Since 1956, inflation adjusted GDP per capita increased by +218%

All things equal, this would mean ~$66k / year for a 9-to-5 job paying minimum wage

Just wanna point out that you're making points about "the younger generation, 22-27," but the article is lamenting a decline in the workforce participation of millennials. That's 27-41 year olds.

You are spot on. I have observed the same thing both online and offline.

For some reason I suspect the pandemic exposed some truths to many people.

While some points are valid, most are just excuses. You are seeing the manifestation of about a decade of brainwashing by social media, there is no better way to say it.

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