I find it odd that for decades, people were shamed for wasting money at cafes ...but then as soon as people stopped going to cafes, it's suddenly an economic disaster?
I think there is some truth to that. My parents went to eat out like once a year for quite a while. They saved as much as they could and succeeded at that.
but the multipliers were also different. with saving a house was realistically affordable for a single income household. today? in many regions not at all unless you save 20 years or have a windfall event like an inheritance
Let's say you and your partner go out to each weekly and spend $100 per dinner. That's $5,000 a year. Cutting this entirely lets you have a loan a little less than $100,000 larger at a 6% rate.
This is a case of eating out a lot, cutting it entirely and the effect doesn't even cover the amount a typical home has appreciated by in the past five years.
Generation of our parents lived much more frugal lives from current perspective. Less traveling, adventures, exciting matters and more grind of work & kids care. I utterly respect them for that, but its not a life I would call ideal and strive to have.
Financials now for buying real estate became ridiculous for many places globally. It can be counted from ie how many salaries of similar jobs you need to buy a house in same place before and now. Not exact, but this shows how things skyrocketed due to cheap debt and speculation.
Is that actually true? Yes people now have less kids, but are they really having adventures more in some large numbers?
I mean, there are regular outrages here over people living frugal - not buying cars, living with parents, generally having less, having massively larger college debt to pay. It is combined with outrage over them not buying this or that subscription someone is pushing. Bycicle transport is cheaper then car and is money saving move for people living at right place too. People watch Netflix rather them going ro movie theater and pay for tickets + popcorn.
They do tons of money saving choices, get blamed for them. And then they get blame for buying anything that did not existed 30 years ago.
There is no epidemic of expensive avocado toasts being bought out in large numbers.
Anecdotally among my peers, we make more money than our parents, yet mostly need two incomes instead of one to have kids and not all of us can buy a house. I'm 40 and can't buy my house but my parents could just get a mortgage in their 20s. I doubt they even considered renting, it was just normal to buy a house if you had a job.
The number of big vacations is similar to our parents (about once in five years). We probably eat in/order from restaurants more than our parents but the high cost of groceries and fact that both parents work means it's not as simple as claiming we are simply not being frugal. We have Netflix and smartphones but these are hardly the reason we can't afford houses.
In terms of adventures, many of my friends' parents had a cabin and boat, and as kids most of our families went on weekend trips skiing, to a lake beach/cabin, camping etc multiple times per year. As middle aged adults now, none of us have cabins and weekend trips might be done 1-2 times per year instead of 5-6 times per year because it's so expensive.
Anyway, it's easy to check inflation and cost of housing vs salaries to verify that the problem is cost of living and wages, not excessive vacationing and avocado eating.
Also note that this website is heavily skewed towards American software developers, so things are generally worse than indicated by the comments here. Even the discussion about remote work is a fairly privileged one, as most workers need to do work at a workplace (factory, warehouse, retail, service, etc).
It's kind of interesting, house prices have exponentially gone up while wages remain stagnant and there's more commodities to spend your money on. I don't necessarily think our parents' generation would've been off much better if we adjusted them for our current conditions now honestly. They had less credit compared to our buying power parity, so I think ultimately down the line we probably represent the same economic spending potential despite having access to a lot more things.
More importantly though, I don't think they were necessarily much happier than us either. "Settling down" essentially meant giving up your life. Nowadays you can go to a geeky renaissance fair and find it packed with all sorts of people with kids of all ages. Same thing with like, anime conventions and whatnot.