| I think people are beginning to see work as a sucker's game. The assets you hold are much more important. You can bust your ass and get a nice little startup exit -- and then look around at what real estate this massive windfall will buy you, only to realize that it's all gone up in price by the same amount. It would have been better to have bought a house, kept the easy job, and gone home at 4:30 each day. People see this. They see that wealth is handed out, arbitrarily, to the people who are connected to the issuance of currency and the banking system. That homeowners make more in a year from asset appreciation than well paid engineers do. At one level, the answer is obvious -- just keep buying assets, any assets. Do not hold cash. The end. And at one level that feels great. You look at your brokerage account and go "I have how much in unrealized gains?!" More than you make in many years working a pretty-good job. But it's precisely this that causes the problem. When "dvalue/dt" >> "salary" for a long enough time, eventually it comes to feel that "salary" is just a bullshit term in the equation that you can neglect. A distraction for the schmucks who don't have their eye on the ball. Every hour I spend debugging something is an hour I haven't spent finding a deal on some asset. This is the source of the vibe shift. There is a growing belief that, well, if money can be handed out arbitrarily in one fashion, then why can't it be handed out arbitrarily in another? This reflects a widespread collapse of belief that things are natural, inevitable, or just. It is a rational change to belief. But it's a slow disease for the society as a whole. Because work is necessary, and we have real work to do. We complain here so much -- that there are not enough houses, not enough walkable cities, problems in healthcare and the environment, too much centralization and bloat in our own software industry. "Be the change you want to see in the world", right? These are things we need to work on, and we don't really have that much time; the decades pass quickly. We do have to work. So, when so much work is necessary, it's a problem when the entire idea of work begins to seem pointless. Maybe the other reason it seems so pointless is that the work we are paid to do so often does not push in the direction we would really like to be moving in. We're doing it for the money, the money-math increasingly makes it look pointless, and it does not have some other deep meaning for us, because what money wants isn't what we want. |
This is an oversimplification naturally but the gist of it is spot on. Based on this dynamic, you should absolutely buy a 2nd home before the first is paid off, assume things continue as they have been so you can contribute to and benefit from rising prices everywhere. One thing leads to another, and that's how most wealth is created by robbing the future. But the future actually arrives some day, and we're seeing some of that now.
There's no exit strategy for this behaviour though. Since so many people did exactly what they were incentivized to do, they of course don't want the rules to change now. The current generation will always need to pay 10x whatever a house is worth, because otherwise all of the people in the last generation can't afford to settle debts / retire / pay unreasonable amounts for healthcare. This puts the current generation in debt, so that they have to rob the next, and so on until there's some collapse. Most millennials have had a rough time waiting for that collapse though, so lots have bought something on credit to build equity rather than continuing to throw away money on rent. Soon instead of cheering on any kind of collapse in the housing market, they also will want it postponed because they will need to rob the next generation. But each iteration of this same game isn't exactly the same, because every generation does a little worse while more wealth gets concentrated in the hands of the already-wealthy.