[AndrewKemendo]

>five pillars of a stable middle-class existence: education, stable employment, marriage, homeownership, children.

This is cultural bias spoken as though it’s universal

Plenty of fulfilling lives out there that don’t include home ownership, being a parent, having secondary schooling or being partnered with offspring.

[Avicebron]

This is sort of orthogonal to the point though, people who want those things (the author being one of them) aren't able to achieve them.

Plenty of fulfilling lives out there for any conceivable metric, it doesn't mean that the article is incorrect.

[thewebguyd]

I don’t even think there can be an agreed upon metric for life satisfaction, let alone what an ideal “middle class existence” looks like. It’s going to be different for everyone.

For me, home ownership nor children would be part of my “ideal middle-class existence” quite the opposite. I want stable housing, I don’t necessarily want to own it and all the burden that comes with ownership, and I definitely did not and still do not want responsibility over bring a child into the world. Thankfully, my wife agrees.

If we were to even approach a definition it might be something like “Do you have stable housing, access to nutrition, hygiene, transportation, etc. while also having enough capital resources and time to achieve your personal goals?” And that’s going to look different for everyone.

[zeroCalories]

These are not mere personal goals, they provide value back to society, which in turn helps others to achieve these goals. That's why we are concerned with them. We have a generation of leeches and losers that are only concerned with maximizing their consumption, not leaving behind a legacy.

[mindslight]

Regardless of the path you have chosen for yourself, your existence is owed to your parents having had at least some, if not most, of those things.

[grebc]

I’d wager for the majority of human population, present & past, that the opposite is largely true.

Most people are not well off and anecdotally I also don’t know many happily married couples nor happily married parents.

[mindslight]

What would HN be without edgelords going "well akshually..." ? My statement is tautologically true. I don't know anybody whose parents did not have a child. So how much exactly did you "wager" and where do I pick up my winnings?

Directionally, humans want stability before trying to create offspring. This is the whole r/K selection thing. And even though what constitutes stability is going to vary wildly based on culture, expanding the scope to "present & past" is more of an exploration in what constitutes that stability rather than a repudiation of the main point.

[grebc]

You used a lot of big words but nothing repudiates what I said.

Congrats.

[mindslight]

I don't know that I consider any of those big words...

[andsoitis]

You’re saying one can be happy without being bourgeois. I think that’s self-evident.