I’d like to offer an alternative explanation than AI to this. Shit is just too damn expensive. If you want to go hang out with friends it will cost you $4-8 for a cup of coffee. A dinner starts at $50/person. A trip to an amusement park is over $100 easily. The median individual income in the US currently is just over $65k/year or about $32.50/hour. That means half the workforce makes less than that. When an 8oz cocktail costs you an hour of your life because you work for minimum wage, you’d rather stay home and watch TikTok.
But it’s not about the price of going out. It is about the crushing stress of surviving in this economic climate that is leaving people absolutely no energy to go and socialize. Whenever the average personal economy swings back towards “can afford to live in this country” again, people will socialize again. Until then everything will be in decline except stock trading and investment in AI projects.
In my state is the federal minimum of $7.25/hr. You're looking at two hours of work for one cocktail.
And my state is addicted to alcohol. The overwhelming majority of people I know in this state won't even meet up with you if there's not a beer waiting for them. People work all week and then spend half their paycheck in one night, then rinse, wash, repeat.
I consider the state of affairs here to be nothing short of abject poverty.
I look around at the declining, unmaintained infrastructure, I hear youth talk about how so many establishments have closed and how if you don't have money there is nothing to do, and you get harassed at parks (I have personally had the police pull up and accost me for just existing at a park) so the only thing left to do is get into mischief, unless you just don't want social contact with your peers. I tell people it looks and feels worse than post-Soviet Eastern Europe out here in Louisiana.
This idea of pretending that your only option is $15 cocktails really makes this argument look lame. Not to mention that the federal minimum wage is basically irrelevant in most places - where I live starting entry level pay at McDonald's is $17/hr.
Cocktails were expensive when I was young, too. We just hardly ever drank them. We went to the liquor store and bought the cheapest shit we could that probably had a 50/50 chance of making us go blind.
The beers here are $5-12 per beer if you go out. All I did was describe factual information: my local minimum wage, how things to do that don't cost money and are accessible to the average youth here are becoming increasingly rare, how much it costs to drink vs. minimum wage. None of this is an argument, it's a fact.
And yes I know, people could and should be more frugal: I only even drink more than single cocktail at a time 0-3 times a year on average, so my personal financial frustrations lie elsewhere. I guess it's just important because we're comparing lifestyles from different points in history, and in the old days, going out drinking with your pals was a cheaper affair, and it still is the usual activity chosen for socializing where I live.
The margaritas at the places I go to are often $3 for a large. Lots of places will have cheap "domestic" beers for $2. Fancy craft beers can be had for $7-10. And that's after COVID price hikes. Less than a decade ago I'd get $2 craft pints often if you knew where to go.
I'm in one of the largest metros in the US.
Yes, there are plenty of places that will charge $12 for a beer. I don't go there. I can get the same beer cheaper down the street and have a more entertaining crowd.
I don't live in one of the largest metros in the US, and we don't have many places like that. There are none that I know of. Not every place is the same.
Things were better pre-COVID, I had a spot I could get $2 pitchers of bud and 50 cents an oyster on Monday nights at a local watering hole. Weekends, not so much, you get overcharged. But, COVID did away with that and now my city is almost as expensive as major metros in California while having absolutely none of the benefits those cities offer.
Who cares what the federal minimum wage is if anyone who walks in to get a job at McDonald's can make twice as much? Who cares if beers are $5-12 at some places if they're much cheaper elsewhere?
The entire point I was making, and the which you are trying to deny by your argument (you may have quoted some factual info, but you're putting it together to make a specific argument to back up your opinion), is that it's actually not that hard to go out and entertain yourself, in person, with friends, for cheap or free.
> Who cares what the federal minimum wage is if anyone who walks in to get a job at McDonald's can make twice as much?
You need to read more carefully and make less assumptions. My state has no minimum wage. We never gave up slavery, instead becoming a prison state with more prisoners per capita than any single country in the world. We only have an effective minimum wage because of the federal minimum wage. You walk into McDonald's here without experience and you're getting paid $7.25. McDonald's does not do twice that much here.
> The entire point I was making, and the which you are trying to deny by your argument (you may have quoted some factual info, but you're putting it together to make a specific argument to back up your opinion), is that it's actually not that hard to go out and entertain yourself, in person, with friends, for cheap or free.
I'm aware you'd like to make that point, and while focusing on this is moving goalposts/ceding parts of your argument, it's still entirely ignoring everything I explained to you.
I barely drink, and my girlfriend and I do all sorts of things that are cheap or free in addition to things that aren't. But that is not the culture in my state. The entire state suffers from alcoholism, and traditional third spaces are harder and harder to come by. The average person simply does not do anything other than go out and drink and eat. Ask anyone who lives here. It's a seriously depressing state of affairs and for most people, there is not another solution waiting. It's self-reinforcing; I just made plans to catch up with an old high school buddy and the only way I'm going to be able to do that is by meeting him somewhere for some drinks and going to see a movie. And all of his friends are the same, and once most of your friends are at the bar, why wouldn't you be? Almost all of us have been bartenders at one point or another. One of my friends even bought a bar in order to provide a third space to our community (we come from a small town and we all know each other).
My girlfriend and I wanted to go swimming two weekends ago. We tried going to the local community center's swimming pool, but it's now closed indefinitely because some black kids broke in just to swim, but one of them had a weapon on them, presumably for protection (my city floats around the top 5 highest homicide rates in the US[0]) and so the racist community center operators took it as an excuse to close the pool indefinitely and temporarily shut down another of the very few third spaces we have.
Instead, my girlfriend and I had to rent a hotel room just to use their pool for the evening.
The bottom line is you are not from here, you have no idea what it's like living in Louisiana, and you frankly have no idea what you are talking about. Instead, you should listen to what I'm trying to explain to you about an extremely dire, worsening situation that is continuing to erode whatever sense of community we have left here. And it's no accident, this is engineered by an owner class interested in squeezing every last nickel and drop of blood out of our citizenry.
The wealth gap here is just frightening, we're running out of places to go, and the average social pipeline for inner-city youth here typically involves committing crimes and putting yourself in danger. Especially when there are purposefully designed prison funnels intended to bring in profit for the private prison industry and businesses that exploit cheap inmate labor instead of providing those jobs to free citizens.
Consider yourself blessed and privileged to not understand what it's like here.
I worked at McDonald's in the 1980s. Started at $3.25/hr never made more than about $5/hr before I moved on. Cocktails at a bar were about the same price relative to that as they are now. We drank the cheapest swill beer they had on draft. It was about being there with your friends, not drinking some froo-froo cocktails.
My take on this: life is actually a lot harder for young people than when we were kids. There is less opportunity for upwardly mobile advancement, and social media has essentially wrecked people's brains (adults included). I complained that I think it's sad that a lot of young people don't just see "going over to friends' houses to hang out" as a primary option - it just doesn't occur to a lot of young people, but in many respects a lot of them never learned this skill as kids. Tons of studies have shown kids have a lot less "unstructured play" time than they used to.
But then given that stuff is actually harder, I think blaming "stuff is just too expensive" is simply easier. Otherwise it forces you to confront the fact that a lot of this stuff is in your control.
Again, I have to chuckle when I hear these excuses. When I was young in mid 90s we would all pile in to someone's 400 square foot studio apartment.
I'm not blaming young people today for not seeing this as an option. But it is the case that lots of folks have/had a lot less space and didn't see that as any barrier to hanging out.
So many excuses. You don't even need someone with an apartment. Just pick an out of the way location and converge. Went to many a party back in the day out on an untraveled road. We didn't even have mobile phones to coordinate.
In high school we regularly threw 100+ person parties under bridges and along the river, in random lots, wherever we could, really. However, it required a lot of coordination and trust between a lot of people to avoid surprise police encounters, and the local police personally had me and some of my associates on their shitlist which further complicated things. It was an environment I thrived in, but I wouldn't want my child to have to encounter the same level of risk and paranoia just to hang out with their friends.
I hear you, the police were often an issue once the party got to a certain size. But throwing a rager will always have some risk, and seems far beyond just hanging out with friends.
Does working at McDonalds for $17 pay the rent/bills and still give you enough spending money to live a decent lifestyle?
I make $20/h as a cleaner but after bills etc, I don’t have the money for fun events, dining out or socializing beyond hanging out on discord and playing games.
Thank you so much for this comment, because it perfectly highlights the point I was trying to make.
When I was a young person in the mid 90s, I (and most of my friends) made the equivalent or less of what you make now. But we also didn't have discord or Internet multiplayer games, so we were basically forced to go hang out in person and find other cheap stuff to do.
You have to take into account the fact that rent and other necessities have exploded in relative cost.
In the eighties I might save up months or even 1-2 years for a nice television set, but my rent/mortgage, food, etc. was relatively inexpensive. Now, I can go buy 15-20 decent televisions a month for the same amount it costs me to pay my rent or mortgage here on a 0-2 bedroom place, and I live in a shithole backwoods state, not San Francisco.
> In the eighties I might save up months or even 1-2 years for a nice television set
I remember times from the late 80s and early 90s where my parents would have to save up to repair the VCR, or that time we had to get the PC Monitor repaired; back then the 100-200$ in repair costs was way cheaper than 'buying a new one'.
First house I rented starting in 2007 was 500 a month [0]. Our first Flatscreen TV that we got in 2008 was somewhere between 700-800$ (37 inch 720p).
Then, in 2015 I bought a 40(?) inch 4K tv to celebrate a promotion for myself. Since that was the 'new-ish tech' I spent about 500$, vs the 425$/mo I was paying for a room that could barely fit a Queen bed in a 'shared household' [1]
In 2017, I was able to rent an 800 sq foot apartment for I think about 900$ a month. The 50 inch 1080P TV for the living room was somehow only 200$ tho, I guess that was a plus...
... As an odd contrast to the thought about repairing versus replacing earlier... a colleague recently asked me for some advice; His wife's iPhone screen was cracked. He was wondering of good shops to check out, because the labor cost in the US dwarfs the shipping cost of him sending it back to India and having family get it fixed there and shipping back to the US.
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I think COVID really fucked a lot up in the US, vis a vis the unemployment stimulus. People got 600$ a week on top of normal state unemployment; I remember White Castle was offering 15$/hr base (I say that because some fast food restaurants would say '15/hr' with a little star saying that was only for management/etc) to get workers in the door.
I suppose it was an interesting experiment in trying out UBI, on one hand people seemed 'happier', on the other hand it probably contributed to the influencer epidemic since suddenly a bunch of people had nothing better to do.
I also think at least in the US, the fast whiplash of interest rates has had a profound impact on a lot of companies balance sheets and pricing in some cases has been adjusted to avoid borrowing more money or pay off existing debts.
It also provided terrible signalling/forecasting for manufacturers of certain goods; I know specifically for vehicles, far too many people just went along with stupid 'market adjustments' from dealers because the at or near 0% financing 'softened the blow'. Then the manufacturers themselves decided they wanted more of that pie and started raising prices too... Or at best bought into the 'look at EV Margins' while forgetting the point that EV prices need to drop for mass adoption.
There's also the challenge of this 3.5+ year Russian invasion shitshow; It puts an impact on a lot of pricing both directly (e.x. grain but also wiring harnesses for cars, go figure) and indirectly (countries having to send support, even if frequently half-assed and thus prolonging the problem, that diverts money from other things.)
And we haven't even gotten into the impact on tariffs yet... not really anyway...
[0] - Although, that was at a bit of a 'discount' since the landlord knew us for years and that we would be good tenants. Also that 800 sq foot house ironically cost more to heat in the winter than any other place I lived since...
[1] - Other people in the house later informed me I was paying 200$/mo more than them for less space than they got, so not that good a deal TBH, but was cheaper than other options...
Interesting anecdata, thanks for sharing that. I'll contribute some as well.
I paid $700 for a two-story, 2bed/2bath unit in a quadplex in 2013 in this city. Last year, when I moved back, I was paying $750 for a tiny 400sqft studio apartment the size of my old apartment's living room.
My landlord was lagging on getting me my new lease to sign for another year. Turns out, I was a bargaining chip. A new landlord just bought the building at the beginning of this year and raised the rent to $850, out of the blue a month before my old lease expired. This was a ~13% sudden increase in expenses, and we do not have rent control.
He said, and I quote, "I like the community you have helped build here[0], I don't want everyone to run off, so I don't want to increase rent too high, too fast." (He wanted to boil the frog)
Our immediate response was to find a home in our neighborhood and purchase it. The median price is around $380-550k in this neighborhood, and that nets you almost no yard and maybe 700-1800sqft in living space on average. This is the oldest neighborhood in the city. It has a long, colorful history, and was originally settled by ex-slaves.
Today, when a home goes on the market in this neighborhood, it is usually snapped up by either private equity or rent-seeking landlords within 1-2 weeks, renovated and either flipped for way more to a gentrifying population, or most-often leased out to younger people who are then priced out of owning their own property.
We found one which was considerably cheaper than the average, but have to put in about $50k worth of work for it to be up to code, fix the foundation, the roof, completely rewire the home, repairing and refinishing the floors, repainting, and more. It's a great home, a good deal for the area, but it is very old, badly-maintained and has a lot of serious problems.
And much of this has to be done now, right after purchasing and before we can even move in, for safety and practical and scheduling reasons, and also because our insurance suddenly dropped us without warning until we prioritize the $13k in electrical work that needs to be done, meaning we have to also maintain rent and utilities at another dwelling while also paying this mortgage and tens of thousands to contractors.
This, in addition to the large up-front deposit for such a large home price, and an insane mortgage rate, means we are paying an exorbitant amount of money, over half a million dollars to own a home in a shithole, run-down state with zero economic opportunities, compared to the local median wage. This kind of money would have bought you a small mansion out here when I was younger.
A few years ago, I moved into a neighborhood in Fort Worth. I couldn't find a house with a reasonable mortgage, almost none for sale at all, and so I rented a home instead through a corporate property management company. The sinking foundation was causing the roof to cave in and there were humongous cracks across every wall and ceiling. The fan was so loud it sounded like you were next to a jet, and there was a huge lack of insulation in the walls. The roof needed replacing. There was water damage. There were a million other issues with the place, and all in all it was a dump which I should have been able to buy for a great price if it was on the market and not being used as an investment vehicle for private equity.
I appraised all of the issues and offered to buy the place from them at a reasonable value. They wouldn't even entertain the conversation, even though I persisted. Resigned, I finally forced them to carry out the repairs anyway after making arguments about it being uninhabitable and not even close to being worth the $1800 a month in rent. They probably spent $30k repairing the foundation alone. They also replaced A/C components, replaced the roof, landscaped, did a bunch of other things. All the while refusing to just sell me the place and let me fix it up and live in it. I'm sure they put it back on the market for even more after I left.
It sure feels like late-stage capitalism is progressively getting harder to prop up. And we're seeing that it only accelerates at the very end, with a far-right, populist sentiment sweeping the globe under the guise of economic redemption, and the accompanying policies having disastrous economic effects on the middle and lower classes.
[0] I got two other people to move into other units, and am long-time friends with another dweller, and have made an effort to meet the other tenants and establish some level of social interaction between us
We also lived with roommates in small shitbox apartments. Very basic, old appliances. Cheap shag carpet. No other real amenities. We'd still have friends over to just hang out, drink some beer, play card games, listen to music, stuff like that. Didn't have to be anything fancy, in fact it almost never was. Just being together was the point.
> If you want to go hang out with friends it will cost you $4-8 for a cup of coffee. A dinner starts at $50/person. A trip to an amusement park is over $100 easily. The median individual income in the US currently is just over $65k/year or about $32.50/hour. That means half the workforce makes less than that. When an 8oz cocktail costs you an hour of your life because you work for minimum wage, you’d rather stay home and watch TikTok.
These comments are so strange to read. There’s an entire world of people out there doing things and socializing without buying cocktails or $100 amusement park tickets to do it.
You don’t need to pay anything more than what it takes to get you to someone else or a common meeting spot like a walk through the park.
In the fitness world there’s a never ending stream of people who complain that they want to get in shape but can’t afford a $100/month gym membership. When you explain to them that the $20/month budget gym is fine or you can buy some $30 quality running shoes on clearance, they either disappear or get angry because you’ve pierced their excuse for avoiding the activity. I tend to see something similar when you explain that you don’t need to buy $8 coffees or $100 amusement park tickets to socialize with people.
> You don’t need to pay anything more than what it takes to get you to someone else or a common meeting spot like a walk through the park.
You also need somone to go take that walk with you and the social skills to organize it
Yes, it is possible to hangout without spending money. That said, the kind of activities it tends to be easier to get people to agree to go do also tend to cost money. As those activities cost more and more, that decreases the amount of socialization that happens. Sure, some of that shifts to lower cost activities and perhaps that shift increases over time as culture changes. That doesn't mean that rising prices don't explain some of the measured decrease in social activity.
I agree with this wholeheartedly, but those 100$ amusement parks have a lot of budget to advertise and make it seem like they’re the only place to go on your free time.
No body is putting up billboards for silent reading clubs so they get drowned out making it appear as if those options aren’t there. Advertising works.
> It is about the crushing stress of surviving in this economic climate that is leaving people absolutely no energy to go and socialize.
The past 2-years have been some of the most difficult of my life (for a number of non-work reasons). After work, family, and household tasks, I have often been left with little energy in the evenings (and no real desire to socialize). And yet, as a part of a church men's group I attend weekly, I have had the opportunity to engage with others going through similar things. How do I know that they are going through similar things? Because it's come out when as I've consistently engaged with the same group of people.
It's very easy when you're tired and stressed to “turtle” and internalize everything; I've done it more times than I can count. And yet this is the time when I most need others. These guys are not in my friends group, and yet the struggles (and successes) that are shared are sometimes more than I hear from close friends. The result of hearing others' struggles is the realization that a) I am not the only one going through hard stuff, and b) focusing on others' struggles makes dealing with my own easier.
“Socializing” with others may cost money, but connecting with them doesn't have to: I spend $0/week meeting the guys in my group for an hour or two. In reflecting on my own attitudes towards socializing in the past, I've come to realize that it can be very self-focused: How can _I_ feel better? How can _I_ have fun? What can _I_ get out of going out?
I am, by no means, the arbiter of selflessness (not even close, ha!), but I have learned that connecting with others' with their good in mind has had the incredible effect of giving me energy where there was very little before.
I don't buy this explanation. There are plenty of things you can do together that don't cost very much - or anything at all. You can go take a hike. You can go to the park and hang out, or play a board game. You can go to a court and play pickleball. Heck, go to the library! All these things are free and many people do them.
Or even just...call a friend for a chat. Few people are interested in that these days. A few decades ago, you'd even see media where people were chatting on house phones so much that different people in one house would fight over the phone. "Get off the phone" used to mean "stop talking to your friend on the phone."
Here's an article from 1999[1]:
> Although you may think your parents are unreasonable when they tell you to get off the phone after you've "only" been talking two hours, it doesn't have to turn into a big blow-up.
It honestly feels like a lot of people are trying to find excuses to be anti-social these days.
That's another thing. People have less in common with each other than they used to. People consume different media, pursue different specialized careers, and so on.
In conjunction with the fact that people (or bots) you do share interests with are available in a second with the device in your pocket. Such as posting here.
I totally agree, though I'd like to frame OP's argument a little differently in a way that makes more sense I think.
I agree the "shit is just too expensive" is a pretty lame excuse. I think to back when I was a poor ballet dancer around college age, and we always found lots of cheap things to do - a lot of it was like you said, usually just going over to people's houses to hang out, or doing stuff in the city that was cheap or free. Going out to restaurants was a rare treat, and it was almost always a cheap dive place. I had to laugh about the comment about the expense of "8 oz cocktails" - we weren't drinking cocktails, we were drinking 6 packs of Natty Light in someone's studio apartment.
But what I think has changed is that it's so much easier to not be bored with modern tech, even if it makes you lonely. There is TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, multiplayer gaming, etc. It's just a lot easier to sit at home with these kinds of entertainment, so the "activation energy" required to go get up and plan things with friends just feels a lot higher.
> It's just a lot easier to sit at home with these kinds of entertainment, so the "activation energy" required to go get up and plan things with friends just feels a lot higher.
Ding ding ding!
> There is TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, multiplayer gaming, etc.
With the one caveat that 'multiplayer gaming' can indeed be a proper socialization experience if you're playing with friends/etc (vs say just YOLOing in something like FPS lobbies etc.)
Or, at bare minimum, it's still more effort than the other options you mention.
In the last few weeks I've tried to be extra mindful about being more 'interactive' with other things in my free time. It's shocking how easy it gets to just fall into a Youtube video rabbit hole. It reinforces how sad I get about my partner's constant scrolling through Facebook.
Heck even now I feel guilty about just doing HN, on the other hand I am still recovering from a good proper bike ride this morning so I guess there's that.
You also can't separate the social media part of this. An expensive cocktail is a cool social media post, Natty light is not.
It is just a much more postmodern world than when I was young. There is a whole level of digital simulation on top of the activity that I never had to think about. The post about the expensive cocktail is the real social activity now.
We may as well be comparing dating on tinder to a rural barn dance in the 1950s. Technology has moved faster than our language as these aren't even the same activities but the words are the same. "Dating", "socializing".
Gas costs money. The car costs money. You can only do the same hike that's an hour away so many times, before you're traveling to go to new places, and hotels cost money at that point. Pickleball courts cost money. The pickleball equipment costs money. People do go to the library, and then they go home and don't interact with other people.
Then go for a walk in the closest park instead of a hike an hour away.
Play volleyball on the free net at the local park instead of signing up for pickleball and buying great.
The people who want to avoid activities and socialization will always pick the more expensive activities so they can dismiss them. Yet go into the real world and people have no problem finding ways to socialize and have fun without spending much money.
That’s unfortunate. Generally the poles are metal and permanent. It’s common for people to bring their own net when they bring their own ball. A basic net is cheap
Gas is at worst 6 bucks a gallon, which gets you 30 miles on a bad car. That’s enough for like 5 hikes; if you can’t afford a single dollar split across all your friends for multiple hours of entertainment and exercise then I do concede that you are in a bad spot; but I think most of us are not quite so destitute. (Also, my friends and I do the same hikes all the time.)
Pickleball courts do not cost money, they are freely provided by the state. I go to free pickleball courts every week in SF, and I bike there for free. You can buy 4 paddles for $20 at sports basement and get literally hundreds if not thousands of hours of entertainment just on that.
I dunno, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this perspective. Almost everything I do with friends isn’t particularly expensive - if you can’t find cheap things to do you just aren’t even looking.
The fact that many young people don't seem to think that "Hey, we'd just go over to someone's apartment/house to hang out and have a meal or drink" as a primary form of entertainment (vs. some "activity") makes me realize how much we have fucked over many young people as a society in general.
I did that as a kid and I loved it, but it made sense when everyone was in bicycling distance.
Then one by one, we got cars and the friend groups shuffled from "Who is in bicycling range" to "Who is in driving range", and driving range is so big that it's not practical to drive 4 miles to my closest friend, knock on her door, hope she isn't having sex with her husband, and ask if she wants to chill
> and driving range is so big that it's not practical to drive 4 miles to my closest friend, knock on her door, hope she isn't having sex with her husband, and ask if she wants to chill
Does she not have a phone? Calling someone up and saying "hey, let's hang out" and then driving over to hang out was literally how most of suburban social interactions happened in the 90s.
I don't think the issue is that they are naive or lack social skills, I think they just choose against it, and then lie about the motivation for their choice. It's all over this thread: "No time and no money!" But you know it's false. I think they know it's a lie too they just don't want to admit to themselves and others that they like TikTok more than people. Being a lame couch potato is socially acceptable if and only if you connect it to the big class-based social cause. They relished in the COVID lockdowns for similar reasons.
This is true where I live also. This feral subset of the homeless are ruining every nice public space that we used to have. Libraries, parks, trails. Patience and tolerance is wearing thin; everything that is tried to help them is just abused and shit on (often literally). More and more people are starting to say no, we don't want to tolerate this behavior here, if that's how you want to live then do it somewhere else.
If my fellow Americans hated the rich people that are responsible for all of these homeless individuals half as much as they do said homeless then American wouldn't be half as fucked as it is right now.
The homeless problem is all downstream of shit like the Sacklers pushing opioids and creating millions of addicts for profit. Yet they avoided jail and even can start up new businesses.
My nihilism is exacerbated by the people who are actively making the problem worse and viciously attacking anyone who criticizes the problem or proposes solutions.
IMO some activists are exploiting homeless people and drug addicts for power and profit.
You are right, the people being exploited are human beings, and rather than working to end the suffering, some people end up prolonging the suffering and creating more of it, because fixing problems ends the flow of funds and power.
You aren't refuting what I am saying, you only seem to justify corruption and incompetence because the apparent intention is noble.
What I'm saying is whatever "activists" are doing or saying is often an excuse for others to continue to ignore the ugly problem. This is not limited to one locality.
What I am interested in is long term support and funding for workable, humane solutions.
These things require bipartisan support at the state and federal level (rooting out many of the causes and aiding homeless prevention), and I'm pretty sure that's fucking toast.
What I am saying is is there is part of the activist movement (at the top) that is either incompetent or corrupt and have no interest in solving problems efficiently and often make them worse, because the incentives are not aligned. Problem solving would cut off revenue and salaries.
A side note, but I don't think all homeless are helpable. Some just have some kind of self-destruction about them and are beyond helping, unless they really want to start living differently. I personally know one such guy - a combination of bad upbringing, big ego, a defiant character (that got him fired from every job) has set him on a path that ultimately made his own family kick him out to the streets.
There's a lot of this. Seattle's main library was explicitly built with the awareness that libraries are one of the few places homeless people can get out of the weather for a while, and has an entire floor full of public-use computers with a lot of pointers to what little social safety net remains.
The depressing part isn’t that it’s happening, but that it continues to occur despite objections, because the “progressive” activists shame any objects and stop any plans or discourse to rectify the problem.
The activists should be blamed for causing disruption at the local level for a problem that can only be solved at the federal level.
There isn’t a thing Seattle can do to fix drug addiction/mental health/housing costs (it will remain a high priced local for the foreseeable future). So why should the people of Seattle fall on their sword because the rest of the country won’t get their act together?
In fact, the rest of the country loved that activists in certain cities take on the brunt of the problem, as it lowers their costs.
What do you propose locally instead of "falling on the sword"? Unless the city council purposely makes the library a drug den there is no easy cheap solution. Especially since the symptoms are an indication of a malfunctional city in the first place in which I wouldn't trust them with some sort of radical endouver.
Coal miners in 1890s appalachia had healthier and more active social lives than american white collar workers. This does not have anything to do with economics.
I am not saying you are wrong but from what I understood that alcoholism and depression were quite prevalent in those times. Do you have sources for what you are saying?
I was just using coal miners in Appalachia as a widely known example of poor people. I’m not familiar with those specific folks, but from personal experience, fisherman in Oregon, immigrant service workers in Queens, and farmers in Bangladesh have active social lives. My aunt and uncle live in Canadian high-rise housing projects and they have multiple large gatherings every week.
Aside from the drinking, what is wrong with the social activity you just mentioned? Or was your point that they only used it as an excuse to drink? Cause it would have surely been easier & cheaper to just drink at home on their own.
It's hollow and doesn't lead to any kind of friendship or bond. You might as well walk around blazed out of your mind and saying hello to everyone you pass on the street. It feels friendly but no connections are made.
I don't think leading to long term connections (although a big bonus) is a requirement for socialization to be positive. The alternative we discuss in this context is to being home alone.
But then, what is really the difference between chatting with a person on the street without a connection, vs an LLM without a connection? I guess I've had enough of the former to value it not much differently.
Whenever I visit a “chatty” country like the US or UK I enjoy the small talk and casual chit-chat and really miss it in grumpy and silent Central Europe :)
My dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh with no electricity, no telephones, little modern medicine. He remembers his childhood as a happy one, even though one in every four kids died before age 5. He’s materially better off in every way here in the U.S. But as to the specific point being discussed here, he had a richer social life with more and more frequent contact with friends and family than most americans I know.
The 1890s were the launching point for widespread unionization among coal miners in places like my home-state of Kentucky. Company towns were increasingly common, and major motivations for unionization were to combat things like being paid in company skrip or letting neighborhood kids ("breaker boys" as young as 8) work in the mines. Their social lives--from their neighborhood, to their social "clubs", to the literal currency they were able to use--were entirely defined by their job and the company they worked for.
Tough to use them as proof that this "doesn't have anything to do with economics" when their entire social life was defined by the economics of coal mining.
Unless socialization activities like bars or athletics are major outliers, it seems likely that in income-relative terms, the average American has much cheaper access to social activities.
(Unrelated, but if you squint at that chart you can see why Trump got elected, almost & then actually reelected.)
That graph starts 70 years after the aforementioned coal miner scenario...
And yes, in the 1800s housing was comparatively cheap because land was close to free and you built your own home. Same goes for booze and venues to drink it because you made your own and there was zero regulation.
Today everyone is being choked by the relatively high cost of real estate (inflation looks ok because we have cheap durable goods like electronics). The death of 3rd spaces is well documented.
Oh, I missed that you didn't use a number divided by expenses because I just assumed you'd use a relevant number. And "real" income isn't great because again, tons of durable goods are incredibly cheap these days, but real estate/food and drink isn't.
Absolute numbers are completely worthless because of the price level of the goods we're talking about in the first place. They could make a dollar a week and it's fine if a drink costs a penny and housing is free, for the purposes of this discussion.
Price level aka inflation of real estate and drinks/food is literally the most relevant number here.
Edit - I did some napkin maths. A beer in 1890 was about 3 times cheaper than today relative to income, assuming Google's numbers are somewhat accurate.
Also, anecdotally, food and drink in North America are expensive. We have a second home in Czech Republic, and beer is about 4-5x cheaper there than in Canada, while incomes are only about 30% less, and for young people the gap is even less.
I went to dinner with a friend last night and my meal was $22. I go to lunch with coworkers and often only spend ~$15-ish.
One also doesn't need to do activities that cost money in order to hang out with people one knows. Get together and play board games or cards. I hung out with my friends last weekend - we brought our records over and DJ'd, someone brought some frozen burgers, I supplied some THC tincture I've had for months, another person brought a cheap bottle of wine they also already had. We had a blast for like seven hours.
And that’s my second point. Even if you do things that don’t cost money, the stress of living paycheck to paycheck is going to sap any will to live from most people experiencing it.
Yup! We went walking through a nearby nature preserve, then went to a fast-casual poke spot. $16 for a large bowl (damn tasty, too!) and a can of green tea, plus 10% tip. It's Oregon, so no tax.
This isn't really borne out by the statistics. Real median personal income has been trending up for a century now, the longest dips (before an upwards trend would ensue) were periods of 5 years of mild deterioration. [0]
It also doesn't sit well with my personal anecdata. My life and that of my friends is way better than their parents. I've literally travelled to all major continents in the world for recreational travel by the time mom had only left her village at around 20 years old, for example.
Cocktails is just an absurd standard for anything. It's the one item you can buy that is completely and utterly divorced from its costs, its price is a function of how rich people are that this thing is being sold, not how expensive it is to produce a cocktail. 2 cents of sugar and 30 cents of liquor and $15 of branding being sold for $15.50 doesn't mean life is expensive, it means people in this neighbourhood are pretty rich and can throw away money. My mom literally has never had a cocktail in her life yet has had a very socially rich life.
Yesterday I spent the day with my brother, we rented a car for $50, drove to another town, had some sandwiches and drinks, we spent $100. Today a friend is coming over to my house and I'll pour him a 20 cent coffee and I'll probably make a snack as well, then we'll go for a walk around town while catching up, maybe grab a $2 beer from the supermarket and some fruit and sit by the water. Total cost <$10 for 6 hours of hanging out for two people. You make about $20 in a supermarket per hour here, so we'd have made $240 of wages in the same six hours. These experiences are mostly similar for me and just as fun, the cost factor is purely a choice. If I didn't have any money they'd all be cheap.
> I think most people dont meet in houses anymore.
Even if that was true (no data offered), that's a choice, not some kind of economic inevitability...
And again even if it was true, no it's not because of roommates, the number of people per household has gone down over time, not up, for decades.
And no it's also not because we live in smaller homes, the average size of homes has gone up also, for decades. We now have about 2.5x more square footage per-person in our homes than 50 years ago.
And we all know that are homes are way more equipped with entertainment than ever before (internet with the world's content at our fingertips, home cinema, home libraries, home music sets etc).
As for the 600k FAANG, I've never earned more than 100k, never worked in tech, and grew up on welfare. I've been a bottom 10% of the economic ladder for about 80% of my life, and a top 10% (not top 0.1%) for about 20% of my life. Regardless of background, I think we can speak about facts borne out by the data.
This excuse is so tiresome. Generations before you lived through far worse than whatever supposed hell you doom scrolled your way into believing. The world is literally better than it’s ever been. Go experience it instead of complaining about vibes.
The world might be better than it has been throughout most of history, but the trend seems to be pointing downward, and to me it seems like we are steering towards several tipping points (or cliffs, phrased more dramatically), and the people in power seem to have little interest in changing course.
This drags me down immensely, even though economically, I am doing alright.
It seems like short/mid term economy/GDP is all that governments are optimizing for - actual well-being of the average citizen seems pretty far down on the list.
Directionally correct. But not better in terms of security or privacy. Life expectancy has decreased for American born persons. Housing is now impossibly unaffordable, and to find a mate you need to use tech products that increasingly only serve to hurt users (tea) and sow discord between those either differing views (x/facebook). Yes, glorious times for some, but not for the average American born person.
If you can’t afford to not work something like 60-70 hours a week because your corporate own house rent is sky high you aren’t doing much exploring. This argument that you just need to take off and go experience the world is so tiresome because it is so privileged. It means you have no ties, no responsibilities, no family who rely on you.
The problem is that people immediately think that socializing is consuming. It’s always an option to chat with people sitting on a park bench. Or at one’s home in a kitchen. Coffee can be home-made in both cases.
In my smaller city, parks and benches are populated with homeless people of various types. At minimum, the benches are used.
Worse off, a significant minority are actively violent with a good dose of various untreated mental illnesses. Crossing them is not good for your health. And it also makes kind of a terrible environment to talk with friends, while avoiding drug needles.
Even the public library has similar problems, but at least they have security guards (yes, plural, sigh).
That basically leaves our respective homes/apartments and pay-money-to-consume-and-sit places. And even bars are mostly off limits due to highly acoustic reflective surfaces and overly loud music, to dissuade talking and encourage more drinking.
There's very little places to meet in public that is encouraging and free. Then again, I think that really is by design.
Looks like you guys have bigger issues than socializing and expensive coffee.
Here it’s not uncommon to meet some rowdy people out and about. Not necessarily homeless. But it’s not hard to find some silent corner to enjoy some coffee from a thermos.
Other option… Maybe head out to nature trails? Chat while walking at enjoy some coffee at a rest stop? Even few kilometers from the city homeless are unlikely even whereever you are…?
> Even few kilometers from the city homeless are unlikely even whereever you are…?
Where I am all the nature and bike trails lined with homeless encampments. It's actually been quite a problem. Unless you go out on serious hike type trails you're surrounded by homeless.
And our community routinely clears out encampments every 4-6 months. Makes a big production about it as well.
Sometimes they're on private property, and sometimes they're on public property. Either way, their belongings are confiscated and hailed away to the city garage miles away, with the full intent to destroy. Not like homeless can get transportation there.
The craziest part? 60% of the homeless have actual jobs. These aren't 'lazy' people. In fact, society has slowly priced people out of even living, and criminalized homelessness.
Its bad enough that on sidewalks, they're pitching nylon tents. Its starting to look like LA in some aspects.
There's also state laws felonizing having needles on you. Naturally, they get disposed by being dropped wherever. Bad drug laws created this hazard.
Its just one thing after another. And any community that tries to help gets flooded. Greyhound Therapy is a real thing.
Its bad enough, that sometimes I just want to shut down and just shield myself from the suffering, since I'm damn near powerless in fixing it. Its an abject system failure, and needs systematic changes. And realistically, we're not going to see anything get better for the next 3.5 years at absolute minimum.
These democrat counties usually try to offer better homeless support either at the local government or NGO level. In doing so, all the red/republican counties ship their homeless using Greyhound Therapy.
Helping to make homelessness not suffer as much gets more homeless, thus flooding the system.
We've increased our homeless population by 4x in the last 5 years. It popped up hard after the ban on evictions disappeared. Turns out kicking people out of housing makes them (drumroll)... Homeless.
I'm in California. We have a large "native" population of homeless and have been a popular destination for "Greyhound Therapy" for decades. It's the same where I live in every part of the state I've been through in the past several years. Police tend to clear homeless off main drags and parks so they end up moving to less policed areas like outdoor preserves and trails.
I try not to judge homeless people as it happens for a thousand reasons, many outside peoples' control. That being said having open spaces filled with homeless doesn't make anyone want or even able to use those spaces. It's not just the people but tents, trash, and literal shit.
I kinda see both points. Yes there are things we can do without spending money and at the same time more and more of are social spaces are being commercialized along with the perception that anything that is worth anything to do costs money.
It feels weird to read all these responses from people who think the only way to socialize is to pay high prices at bars and coffee shops.
It’s like how someone who avoids socialization imagines what socialization looks like. I hope some people are reading this thread and realizing it’s not as expensive as they assume to go out and do things. There are many people out there making a fraction of what most readers here do who have no problem finding things to do for socialization.
Yes, money is a huge factor. So is time. You need both. I see these major factors: housing costs, health insurance costs, and the two-income trap. The fact that both people in almost every couple must have a job just to survive and pay for housing makes it so that no one has any time. If couples could survive on a single income, there would be a lot more time to manage the home, support the family, friends, neighbors, and community. Those are social activities that few have time for anymore.
I honestly just think it’s that before there was so little to do at home that you were just bored as hell if you didn’t go out. Now there’s just infinite entertainment of all kinds
Then I have to wholeheartedly disagree, because that's elitist. The 10% of the population will never have problems with information access. Only the poor is affected if you go after information access.
O.k., misled information access...now let me do this for you...
My kinese television-set says: "People are digitally often misled by disinformation."
Have you ever "searchengined" a look for a "lesbian sunset"? The search-engine i used had more than 29,000 search-hits for "lesbian sunset", and i clicked on nearly all of them...but there was none "lesbian sunset" no one, no a single one, none. It showed (for example)...
Lesbian Sunset - Check out our selection of lesbian sunsets to find the most amazing unique or custom-made handmade lesbian sunsets from our stores.
Lesbian sunset: what's going on?
Classic lesbian sunset... Regular special offers and discounts up to 70%
Lesbians on the Beach: Stock video
...and they dance! Sunset as a stage of belonging.
High-quality lesbian sunset-themed items from all over the world. Get out the cylinder and monocle, now it's time
Sunset for Sale
Reel with a feminist touch and sunset golf course.
Lesbian sunset for adults Colorful ...
Lively, inspired by the sunset, expressing identity in style.
Manifesto of the „Lesbian Sunset“
Sunset in red and purple - not just beautiful.
Lesbian sunset in Munich and after-party
A different scene...
I mean, that's a myth.
There is no lesbian sunset for me!
But typed in a search line... over 29,000 hits for "lesbian sunset" (counts)
They don't exist!
You don't even remotely know, even one
not even a single lesbian sunset...
At this point you may ask: "What he/she/it/div was thinking about?" (using an 'AI' to translate and for some 'chars' i forgot the asci-code for - too often...)
A battle-painting is probably the most accurate, i was thinking about 12 x 4 meters, where you've been able to zoom in, if you are at a computerscreen...
I even looked for fresco painters, nothing...!
Not a single lesbian sunset... not one...
(feeling rude about...)
That is what i call a Myth...
...talked too dumb, free!
(explanation: How to set a one topic record for been too relevant OT but still related hahaha?)^^
Finally I find this argument. Agreed, and I'm baffled that people think that AI is what's going to "solve loneliness." Loneliness has already been solved by YouTube/Twitch. The brain is easily tricked into thinking that it is "being social" when it is subject to the effects of the parasocial relationships that are formed by these platforms. People's afternoons are rapidly becoming consumed by hours of YouTube where they come out of it with a brain telling them: "boy, that's enough social interaction for today!" Introversion has become an epidemic as a result.
It's not just streamers - fictional characters are also increasingly engineered to be this way. Besides the loot box aspect, many East Asian gacha games are built with parasocial relationships with the characters in mind, for one.
(See community controversies surrounding Girls' Frontline 2 and Snowbreak for examples.)
Yep, this is it exactly. When I was young TV, including HBO, would go off the air at night. You could not have hours of fun playing an Atari. Having fun at home was cards and board games. Late night fun . . . well that will probably never change.
Everybody is quick to jump the gun and blame the victim, while all this can be easily explained by the insane lifestyle we are forced to subscribe in order to survive in this crazy cut-throat productivist job market.
I wouldn't be so quick to divide the world so neatly into victims and perpetrators. Every FAANG engineer I know, for example, could easily retire by mid-40s by keeping consumption in check. Instead, nearly every single one chose instead to "improve their lifestyles." Not blaming them, either, because it's cultural programming -- but until we all learn to slow down a bit and reflect, the madness isn't going to stop.
Even if you knew every FAANG in existence that would account for a very small fraction of the population. It might be true for this class, but you can't expect everyone to be a able to retire by 40.
Even if everybody could, they wouldn't because they are immersed in a culture that celebrated consumerism at every instance. You can't just turn a switch and now you live self-sustainably.
My assumption here is that FAANG employees are not fundamentally different from the rest of the populace along that particular dimension (desire to inflate lifestyle). I chose them in particular to demonstrate that even when we have the choice, we can easily opt not to take it. Of course many do not have that choice.
And yes, I agree with your second paragraph. "The culture" celebrates it — but that culture is not violently enforced top-down by a handful of people twirling mustaches. We all participate in our own little ways — and the more of us that step off the treadmill, the less those messages find footing, in a virtuous cycle. Again, it's not about blame. But for those of us who have the capacity and desire to decondition ourselves, it's very much worth doing. It can affect the feedback loop more powerfully than we think.
> I chose them in particular to demonstrate that even when we have the choice, we can easily opt not to take it.
I see now. But I still think it's a side effect of what society currently celebrates which is consumerism.
> but that culture is not violently enforced top-down by a handful of people twirling mustaches
That's assuming it's the only way to force a population into a specific behaviour, by force. It's actually the least effective method in my opinion. There is also the digital panopticon.
Blame and victim is just a way to give structure to the world. It's not essential. Not even in violence, in the Roman republic it was very well accepted to put women and children to the sword when pillaging a city.
And sure, all changes start in the private sphere, even if it's a more general movement in society. If people stop buying stuff, there is someone consciously or not choosing not to buy that specific thing.
I just think that it's the same with clothing. If you leave for the people to choose not to buy clothing made by slaving children that's just not going to happen if they cost a fraction of clothing made otherwise. It's also not a matter of prohibition because that goes against people's individual freedom to choose. You just have to give society enough time so that it gravitates towards willing to choose differently, meanwhile advocating for the change you want to see in your immediate community.
Perhaps "retire" is the wrong word. One can still work (whether for pay or not) and improve the lives of the people around them without staying on the consumption treadmill. Very few actually do. Again, this isn't meant as a judgement — it's just highlighting that we each have a role to play in slowing down this insane freight train.
This is completely the wrong approach. You can't dedicate your entire life to one specific task and expect when you retire to suddenly be able to "improve the lives of the people around (you) without staying in the consumption treadmill" because all you know is the consumption treadmill. Thinking otherwise is just wishful thinking.
If you see yourself improving the lives of people around you later in life, which is commendable and the right thing to do, you have to start now, while you are still in your prime years. If you leave it when you are older chances are you'll be just another John waiting in line for the next Black Friday.
Have you tried doing anything other than work that isn't consuming something?
I have, from drawing to music, from writing novels to doing programming projects on my free time.
It's not very fun, you aren't good at most of it and it's very frustrating. It's also very rewarding being able to overcome limitations and building up skills. But it's first and foremost very demanding. You can't expect someone that just got retired to suddenly spark in creative energy, even if they intimately wanted to do everything.
Watching Netflix I suppose. Sleeping (although I'm sure some get paid for that in the right circumstance) ... Even watching Netflix could be a slog if you're doing it for some purpose (e.g. to clue up on cultural references) and it's an exertion of effort.
Don't you agree that this limits a lot the perspective of what you do when you retire, if retiring means not working anymore?
Maybe we agree that it's all work, but there are types of work that even though they're frustrating, they are also rewarding in specific ways that is interesting for those that retire.
Retiring is just retiring from employment. I suppose I'm drawing a distinction between formal employment and all forms of work. Yardwork is a nice example enjoyed by retirees.
Personally if I do anything for 8+ hours a day 5 days a week it starts to feel like a job around 2 or 3 months in no matter how much I love it, and if I do much less than that I start to feel lacking in structure and progress.
I’ve gone through extended periods of unemployment (by choice, not in a stressful way) before, and it’s wonderful but by month 3 I’m always kinda over it.
Retirement for me will probably look pretty much the same as working except I won’t necessarily pick a job that pays well.
I pretty much optimize for PTO when choosing jobs, so I really never have this dilemma. My current job offers 8 weeks PTO (but I make much less than I would at a FAANG). To me, that’s better than retirement.
That explanation makes no sense, obviously. Human beings have been human beings long before things even cost money and will exist long after money is gone.
I'm happy to accept the idea that people are simply brainwashed into thinking they need money and that is the root of their problems, but needing money is not a problem for a human being in and of itself.
Edit: but I think you said it yourself, you seem to think that you're forced to live a certain lifestyle, that's not true. You want to live a certain lifestyle and that lifestyle takes a lot of money.
> Human beings have been human beings long before things even cost money and will exist long after money is gone.
That thinking assumes that money and human behaviour is in a one direction. You first have human behaviour and then you have money, so it would stand to reason that one is subject to the other. However, in reality the relationship is of co-dependency. Human behaviour adapts to the availability of money and what it buys. Have you ever seen trying to reintroduce a wild animal after it's being treated for a long time? You can't just throw it in the jungle and expect them to survive.
> needing money is not a problem for a human being in and of itself.
Which I'm reading that is not essential, following the previous paragraph, which I disagree. Take electricity out, most people wouldn't be able to survive too long. We weren't dependent but we've built lifesyles that are and we are trapped in it. Which doesn't mean we need to return to jungle, it's just that we need to treat the relationship between humans and the economy with much more respect than that.
> you seem to think that you're forced to live a certain lifestyle, that's not true.
I believe you are thinking about a ostentatious lifestyle. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about lifestyle where we are used to electricity and supermarkets. Where everything is taken care of so that we hyperspecialize our skill sets.
But it’s not about the price of going out. It is about the crushing stress of surviving in this economic climate that is leaving people absolutely no energy to go and socialize. Whenever the average personal economy swings back towards “can afford to live in this country” again, people will socialize again. Until then everything will be in decline except stock trading and investment in AI projects.