[james_marks]

At almost 50, I feel like there has been a cultural shift since I was a kid.

It isn’t enough to be middle class, to have the proverbial white picket fence. The reach now is for glamor and wealth, which is by definition out of reach for the majority.

If that’s the ideal you compare your own life to, you will be unhappy. And the debt, etc you take on to mimic it will make you even more unhappy.

The shift was already happening pre-internet, but social media took it to the next level.

[scottyah]

I think this was what was the meaning behind the "avocado toast" phenomena. My typical example is that back in the day, you could be the coolest in town +/- 5 grades by jumping off the Big Rock into the river- and that person's 2-3 best friends all shared in the glory. Now, you have to compete with the craziest people in all the world for the same level of admiration.

[y0eswddl]

I'd argue most people do not, in fact, year for glamor and wealth. The majority of us just want to be able to live

[james_marks]

I want to be clear that I'm not judging anyone, just observing the zeitgeist.

Does just being able to live mean getting a new phone occasionally? Getting a coffee/treat once a week? A job that doesn't leave you in physical pain, sometimes permanently?

Happiness is the gap between expectation and reality. Our expectations are very high without sounding unreasonable.

This is the shift I'm talking about– maybe we don't conciously yearn for glamor and wealth, but what we see as normal is a luxury lifestyle compared to previous generations.

[epicureanideal]

> If that’s the ideal you compare your own life to, you will be unhappy.

Most people in this conversation on HN seem to just be talking about a regular house and a lifestyle that would’ve been normal for a manual laborer 60-70 years ago.

[ThrowawayR2]

60-70 years ago would have been the 1950s-1960s, the American post-WW2 economic boom. The rest of the world was rebuilding their cities and mourning their dead.

Sure, you can have another post-war economic boom if you're willing to go through another world war to get to it and a drone doesn't get you. You're in luck, seems like we'll be having one soon.

[mymythisisthis]

I think for me the big difference is in airline travel, it's become ubiquitous for vacationing. At the same time everything in N. America has become a cookie cutter suburb or exurb and drab. Houses have also become bigger, as well as cars. It's a big shift in culture that happened.

[cucumber3732842]

Every geezer says this but people these days would kill for a reliable chance at a middle class life. We're talking Homer Simpson not Home Alone.

[y0eswddl]

ha, twins.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47883927

[diogenescynic]

I think it was boomers who demanded McMansions with 3 car garages and new cars every 4 years and drove lifestyle inflation to a point it's no longer sustainable/affordable for the next generation. Millenials are struggling to afford the bare minimum. Housing used to be 3-5x your salary. Now it's 10-15x in some areas. Meanwhile our taxes are sent to Israel to subsidize genocide and we can't even pave roads in the most expensive zip codes (La Jolla). There's something fundamentally broken with our society at the moment.