[pdimitar]

I don't disagree with the article in principle, but to me it seems that us the modern people are pressured much harder than previous generations.

At 41 y/o I have arrived at most of the same wisdom but I can't see how and where can I implement it.

As others commenters said, I wish I could take a pay cut and work on things I love more than my current job. I absolutely can't afford it; not because I can't take the income hit month by month -- I surely can, let's not forget us the programmers are rather privileged -- but I can't afford not saving, especially having in mind where does the world seem to go (potential economical crisis on the horizon).

If I arrive at a point in my life where I can unquestionably abide by the philosophy described in the article, I might cry emotionally, while yelling of pain and happiness at the same time. For now though, it's still not happening.

(And that's leaving aside the fact that I don't necessarily agree that material minimalism leads to happiness necessarily.)

[TimPC]

Financially sure we face more pressure. But let’s be honest that modern society is practically a utopia compared to being drafted into WW2 and facing carnage and death.

[pdimitar]

Cherry picking makes no argument any favours. :P

I agree on WW2, sure, but after WW2? I've spoken with 30+ elders and they all unanimously agree that life in general was much, much better than today. Mostly in terms of upwards social mobility. An insane amount of very regular bank tellers could afford house, two apartments and 2-3 cars. And to put 3 kids in an university.

Nowadays that's a very questionable endeavour.

[groby_b]

I'd strongly suggest looking for supporting data. If you talk to people, you will inevitably hear that "the good old times" were better than what we have.

In the 1950s, the average house was still ~3 years of average income. Cars were about 9 months of income. So the "regular bank teller" with a house, 2 apartments, and 3 cars... there's something missing in the story.

Let's not even get into the fact that life was significantly worse if you happened to be not white or male. Black people didn't have their voting rights significantly curtailed via Jim Crow laws. Married women didn't have the ability to have their own money. Beating your spouse was A-OK.

Yes, social mobility was better (for white men). Universities were cheaper (a year of tuition was still ~1-2 months of income).

Medical care was... not so good. Nutrition a non-existent concept. (And before we go to the "all natural food", quick reminder that the 1950s were the decade of TV dinners and truly atrocious recipes)

The 50's certainly had less of the constant stream of demands that our current time has. It's not like it was purely worse, or the "golden age" image wouldn't hold. But as a net, across the population, we've seen improvement. We are backsliding the last ~20 years, absolutely. But we're still not in 1950.

[pdimitar]

> In the 1950s, the average house was still ~3 years of average income.

Today you'd be lucky if that's 10 years; most likely very well paid too. For most people with well-paid jobs it's 15, and for everybody else it's a lifetime endeavour (20-30).

Not sure how you're contradicting me exactly with this.

I guess we are both showing bias and filter bubble effects. I live in a poor country and even if I am not poor myself, how almost everybody around me lives is sadly too visible.

[sg47]

With WW2, people had a clear goal to look forward to. Ending the war. Today, people are drifting aimlessly and just go through life which causes more dissatisfaction than being in the middle of a war.

[burntoutfire]

For people in occupied countries (Europe and elsewhere), the goal was to merely survive the war and deal with the fallout (death of relatives, destruction of property). Even with drafts, US was a paradise on earth during 1939-1945 compared to much of the world.

[pdimitar]

A ton of people today would work towards very noble goals, if they weren't stuck on a survival hamster wheel.

Lack of clear goal? Talk for yourself.

[UncleOxidant]

> but to me it seems that us the modern people are pressured much harder than previous generations.

I don't think this is even close to true. In fact we've got it pretty soft compared to many earlier eras. Think about having to wake up prior to daybreak to feed the animals, milk the cows, start fires for cooking, heating (a lot of wood chopping), etc. Having to haul drinking water. Scratching out a subsistence living. No or very minimal medical care. Lifespans in the 30 to 40 year range.

I think much of the pressure we feel is self-imposed striving to keep up with a lifestyle fantasy handed down to us by advertising and peer pressure.

[pdimitar]

Factually that's true of course but hey, at least you weren't always in debt like most of the people nowadays are. And you got to live around nature and eat actual organic food.

I am not looking to the past with rose-tinted glasses, mind you -- definitely not all of it. And I didn't mean the farm life in particular. I mostly meant the post-WW2 generation. It's well-documented (but I don't keep link because why would I) that their social upwards mobility actually did exist. Very much not the case for most modern people who are just scratching to have subsistence living as you mentioned.

Theoretically we can stretch this argument to infinity but in practice most people are not going anywhere on the social ladder for their entire lives. Let's be honest and realistic and look at how things are today.

> I think much of the pressure we feel is self-imposed striving to keep up with a lifestyle fantasy handed down to us by advertising.

You might be projecting a bit with your statement?

To me, having my own house, no debts and job / business that does not burn me out on a regular basis should not be in the league of "fantasy lifestyle", no. (Oh, and let's not even mention all technology and bureaucracy that by now it's super clear was never meant to make our lives easier.)

[UncleOxidant]

> I mostly meant the post-WW2 generation. It's well-documented (but I don't keep link because why would I) that their social upwards mobility actually did exist.

A short period of the modern era in which the US was pretty much the only nation with it's manufacturing capability completely intact after the destruction of WWII. The US also realized that funding education was important for a time after the war to retrain veterans. It's how so many people were able to get college degrees essentially for free which helped boost the economy for a generation.

> at least you weren't always in debt like most of the people nowadays are

Since it sounds like you're limiting the modern era to after 2000, it seems we can stretch things a bit and look at the era of The Great Depression as being pre-modern by that definition (I think The Depression falls squarely in Modernity, but for the sake of argument...). Mortgage debt increased 8X from 1920 to 1929. Installment debt increased at similar rates. This is far from the first generation that's taken on a lot of debt.

Yes, I agree that there are forces at work which conspire to keep people in debt, however those forces are not new. Things are made worse by the high cost of housing which is caused by constrained supply (and a greater population now putting more demand on housing), but again, I'm not sure we haven't been here before. Pendulums swing. And why are houses so much bigger now than they were in that postwar era when families were larger? That also leads to higher housing costs (some of it is demand and some of it is perverse incentives for builders to build bigger houses).

[pdimitar]

> Pendulums swing.

IMO that's the key insight in your comment. And the full swing of the pendulum from one extreme to the other can take more than one generation, essentially losing valuable wisdom and letting different generations feeling resentful towards each other.

I never claimed we have it worse in history during all of its recorded parts. I am simply saying that compared to some 60 years ago things are looking quite bleak by comparison, economically and in terms of personal well-being.

[wing-_-nuts]

Happiness and satisfaction are relative to prior experience. I started out my adult life below the poverty line on disability, and small things like fresh fruit and veg or owning my home or car feel like lavish luxuries to me. Someone who was raised with a silver spoon would consider my spartan lifestyle miserly.

[pdimitar]

This is swinging a bit too hard in the other direction IMO.

I too grew up quite poor (although not on the level of those videos about Africa and various isolated Indian villages) and nowadays I am unhappy that I can't replace all Apple tech at home in one fell swoop.

That's an extreme example to illustrate a point: it's OK to change your values and want something more (as long it's not only hedonistic and just a blind greed and hunger for more and more, of course).

[zephyr9]

It's actually a myth that agrarian lifestyle was all that difficult. We have the enduring image of the farmer up at dawn, but the reality was that people completed the day's work in a few hours and didn't do much for the rest of the day.

Capitalism has changed that a bit now though.

That 30-40 year lifespan is also a myth. High mortality brings down the average, but people's lifespan has been around 70 throughout history.

As for whether people face more psychological pressure than previous generations, yeah there are plenty of people whose job it is to record and measure this stuff, and they all seem to say it has increased. This just may not fit with your boomer perspective.

[ridethebike]

As a person who grew up in farmer's family (and who's parents are still farmers) I can attest that that kind of life is way tougher than being office worker in a city .

[supernovae]

How so?

[watwut]

> the reality was that people completed the day's work in a few hours and didn't do much for the rest of the day.

That is not plausible. And that is not what you find where we have written texts about farmers lifestyles. And, if you look in very recent history about lifestyles in behind-the-times villages, you don't find that much slack either.

Also, pretty much all arguments about how little farmers worked I have seen ignored pretty much any work that did not involved food crops directly: making and fixing tools, beds, buildings. Making candles. Raising and spinning flax to make linen. Sewing cloth, bedsheets etc. Chopping wood. Caring about children and animals. All that had to be made at home or at least inside village. In an interview with old lady from such village, I heard her saying that making bedsheets and all that for bride took years. They started making it when girl got born.

> That 30-40 year lifespan is also a myth. High mortality brings down the average, but people's lifespan has been around 70 throughout history.

Yeah, mortality tends to bring down the lifespan average. I don't see how you can meaningfully measure lifespan while removing people who died from the pool. Women dying in childbirths, which was not exceptional at all, should lower the estimated lifespan. People dying from accidents that could be saved today too.

> As for whether people face more psychological pressure than previous generations, yeah there are plenty of people whose job it is to record and measure this stuff, and they all seem to say it has increased. This just may not fit with your boomer perspective.

These statistics don't really exists of old farmer communities. They did not had modern diagnostic criteria, all that was created much much later. We can guess from what people wrote in literature and chronicles.

As for psychological pressures, there was serfdom, slavery, impressment, wars. "Wars" meant armies stealing food from farmers, that is how armies fed themselves. There was poverty too. But of course, a lot depends on which period and which place and which social class you talk about. Nevertheless, generally, people in the past were in fact subjects to stress.

[zephyr9]

>> That 30-40 year lifespan is also a myth. High mortality brings down the average, but people's lifespan has been around 70 throughout history.

> Yeah, mortality tends to bring down the lifespan average. I don't see how you can meaningfully measure lifespan while removing people who died from the pool. Women dying in childbirths, which was not exceptional at all, should lower the estimated lifespan. People dying from accidents that could be saved today too.

Whoops, should be *child mortality. So yeah a lot of kids used to die, but we can't really blame them now can we. The way I've seen it measured is as life expectancy after a certain age, e.g. in preindustrial eras, once a person reached 30 they could expect to live to at least 60.

As for people measuring psychological stressors, yeah that's really only since the inception of the profession. Not too many 12th century psych majors...

[watwut]

> once a person reached 30 they could expect to live to at least 60

First not true. Looking at wikipedia, "If we do not take into account child mortality in total mortality, then the average life expectancy in the 12–19 centuries was approximately 55 years. If a medieval person was able to survive childhood, then they had about a 50% chance of living up to 50–55 years."

Also, 30 is quite a lot. It means, you survived childbirth if you are woman. First one is the most dangerous. It means, you did not got injured in accident with animal or tool in your teens and twenties - when you are at your physical prime and do heavy work the most.

> As for people measuring psychological stressors

I think that child mortality is yet another stressors they faced. But also, if your relative is bipolar or has schizophrenia and whole family lives in one room cabin, I can only imagine things to become super stressful for everyone.

[UncleOxidant]

> Capitalism has changed that a bit now though.

So Capitalism has only recently taken hold of the US?

> As for whether people face more psychological pressure than previous generations, yeah there are plenty of people whose job it is to record and measure this stuff, and they all seem to say it has increased.

Even worse than it was during The Great Depression leading into WWII? Even worse than it was if you were black in the Jim Crow south? Things aren't great now, but let's try to keep things in perspective.

[borroka]

It is a bit naive to think that life was harder (it is generally true of course) 100 years ago, and thus the most common emotional and physical conditions were fatigue, despair, and darkness.

The pressures of life 50-70-100 years ago were very different from what we experience in our time, just as the emotional and physical pressure and fatigue that come from doing manual labor (e.g., moving furniture) is different from the stress of a well-paid white-collar job. Naively, one might assume that manual, back-breaking work is significantly more stressful than a professional job. From a physical, chronic body strain perspective, this is true. Also, the white-collar professional, say a worker in tech, can make 2-3 times to 10 times (and more) than a non-specialized blue-collar worker. As we know, more money in hand never made a life worse.

But I've been around blue-collar and professional environments my whole life, and anecdotally, white-collar workers are much more stressed than blue-collar workers, more frequently in emotional distress, and almost always in-between distressing work issues. And envy and constant comparisons that seemed to be endemic in, say, the tech world, do more damage than one imagines. There may be a former colleague who now has the title of vice president, another who invested in crypto and earned a fortune, yet another who took home a few million dollars when the start-up company he worked for and on which nobody would have bet by hook or by crook was acquired, have ruined more than one existence.

I, a tech professional who is well paid and has no health problems, should be much happier on paper--and I might say more relaxed, satisfied, enthusiastic--than a worker moving cartons back and forth with a forklift and than I was when I had much less money, a less comfortable life, less leisure time and fewer professional and personal opportunities, and an economically uncertain future ahead.

Why am I not then? Is it because of "more money, more opportunities, more problems"? Is it because years ago I had the enthusiasm and arrogance of youth and now the more careful and cynical pace of those who know they have more to lose? Is it because I had that lightheartedness that perhaps those in less intellectually demanding jobs have had fewer opportunities to lose over time?

I lived all of my youth with my grandparents: born before World War II, modest families to be generous, all their lives working in the fields, driving trucks, assembling furniture. However, I saw very few emotional problems (overt, at least), perhaps because they were born and raised in an environment that didn't let them dream much and thus didn't favor disappointment later on. A wife or husband who "just needs to be a good person and work a steady job", a day at the beach that was an event they talked about for months if not years. There was little envy because in the end relatives and friends all lived the same life and the serious problems were those coming from poor health. Work ended at 5 or 6 in the afternoon, and you would arrive home tired, but you would think about work the next day. Dinner and lunch were homemade; during the weekend you did the housework and visited relatives or friends, and maybe you had ice cream here and there.

Would I trade my life for theirs? I wouldn't; I like to have opportunities and I have a lot more ambition than my grandparents. But, would they have traded theirs for mine? I asked my grandfather some time ago, "Would you like to take a plane once in your life ?'' He replied no. Maybe that's part of the secret.

[vlunkr]

I think this attitude, which is becoming increasingly prevalent on the internet, is probably causing tons of unnecessary unhappiness.

How many periods in history have there been where the average person was comfortable taking a pay cut? Even if there was such a period, it would have been true only for a privileged subset of the population.

[volkk]

also hindsight is always 20/20, but if you don't seek to be happier now and this looming economic depression that might happen doesn't happen for another 10-15 years, then you've just spent that much time being unhappy. but on the other hand, if you quit your job now and it happens a month from now then you'd be kicking yourself hard.

so the only solution is to just make a damn decision, and have a plan for either scenario. trying to time unforeseen black swan events, or economic factors seem to be a losing game. if it wasn't, we'd all be billionaires.

[pdimitar]

You all somehow always make happiness about "just be happy, man". No offense to you or the other commenters, I simply can't take people like that seriously, hard as I try.

If the advice is more nuanced and has more details, then I absolutely can respect it and engage with it in an interesting discussion. But when it's framed as "live in the moment" then I can only roll my eyes.

[volkk]

i don't think i wrote anywhere "just go be happy?" are you responding to the right person?

i was just surmising based on extremely limited information that OP would be much less miserable if they weren't at their job, and then provided a scenario where if they try to time the market they might spend years more being miserable vs doing something sooner and dealing with the hopefully planned for consequences if the market were to crash. that's about it.

[pdimitar]

I'm indeed overreacting. My apologies.

[volkk]

no worries

[pdimitar]

And I think your attitude generalizes too much and glosses over way too many things.

We should operate with what can we do realistically . Not what can we do hypothetically.

Hypothetically I can stop working now and have money for 3 months ahead. Realistically, I won't be able to pay rent afterwards, or even have food on the table. So I seriously disagree with your stance -- but I don't expect you to change it.

Modern times are a hamster wheel grind. At one point you just get too tired and die, and then the system yells: "NEXT!"

That's the reality in most of the world. Likely not where you live though.

[Ensorceled]

> but to me it seems that us the modern people are pressured much harder than previous generations.

Both my grandfathers were farmers who also had additional jobs to make ends meet. My paternal grandfather worked 365 days a year with a day off at Easter and Christmas morning in the lumber camps for several years to save enough money to buy his farm.

This was not unusual for my grand parents generation.

When I was younger, my father worked a full time job and then worked in the lumber mill on the weekend and also ran a trap line to afford our house.

[pdimitar]

I've known both extremes. Anecdotes can only take us so far. And I am from a poor country.

Even there, elders regularly say life was easier (even if it was hard before in the first place). Things can go from bad to worse, you know.

[go_elmo]

honestly, its just our fears stopping us. As a programmer you earn enough in 1-5 years to live like a god in parts of the world. To be happy one can also start farming and have a small garden somewhere on this planet, live a decent life and be happy. Its pure fear stopping us.

[pdimitar]

That skips way too many details. I am 41 and I was never able to save a money. Partially because I was stupid, absolutely, but I also came to realize how much we are sheep-herded into consumerism. And many times we don't have a choice.

People's fridges, ovens, air conditioners, dish washers, vacuum cleaners, smartphones etc., nowadays seem to start breaking like clockwork literal weeks to months after the warranty expires.

So while personal financial responsibility and education can and will go a long way, it's important to recognize that we live in a fairly rigged and predatory system as well.

My fear is just that: "will I will be stable financially?". So far I never was so I can't just drop this fear and start breathing freely come tomorrow. These are problems that still need addressing.

[lexapro]

Many programmers can save >50% of their net income. I realize that this is not possible in every part of the world or in every situation, but if anyone is stable financially, it's probably us.

[pdimitar]

Most, yes. I wasn't able to. With any luck, I'll be able to start saving in a few months, after I hit 42.

[go_elmo]

Concluding from your previouw answer it is due to your choices, not possibilities. Financial education should be mandatory, to this day only academics seem to know the basic concept of wealth accumumation => need for investment to build personal wealth...

[pdimitar]

> Financial education should be mandatory

I agree, but say that to my parents. You might as well say it at least 50% of all parents worldwide while you are at it. I personally am very mad at mine for practically not teaching me anything (not even cooking).

I am getting financial education after I hit 40. Pathetic to some but I couldn't have predicted the unknown unknowns. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[lexapro]

>but I can't afford not saving, especially having in mind where does the world seem to go (potential economical crisis on the horizon)

That was always the case in history and I would argue we are living in one of the best periods ever when it comes to that.