> Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to meet for drinks, work out at the gym, go on dates, muddle through real life.
They actually don't. Everything from dating and fitness to manufacturing and politics is in decline in activities, and more so in effect and understanding. You can't convince (enough) people anymore that it is even important as many don't have capacity to do it. And it isn't even something new at this point.
Though it's popularized to blame social media and phones, economics should not be overlooked. Pay for young generations is lagging and restaurants and bar prices are super high. Public spaces for informal gatherings has shrunk - eg fewer malls
This doesn't match my experience. In fact one thing I noticed living in Japan is how much more willing people are to spend money to meet up. Lots of events costs 3000-7000 yen. Clubs and bar have a cover charge. People will organize parties where they rent a bar and tell their friends it's 4000 yen each (about $27 currently but was closer to $40) in the past. They'll even have house parties and tell everyone to pitch in 1000-2000 yen. In the states, my experience is even a $5 and people will complain.
The point being it's culture not economics. In fact Japanese generally make less money. IT salaries are in the $50k range. Minimum wage is $7.5 Yet they still go out.
Out of all developed nations, Japan is probably the one least affected by housing pricing in the world seeing as though Japanese housing depreciates rather than appreciates over time. Rent prices in America are a staggering 177.4% more expensive than Japan[1]. Ever increasing house prices, caused by the underlying power imbalance between capital and labour, is the root of all evil in the Anglosphere. It will not stop until wages are restored to pre financial crisis levels and assets and wealth are taxed at a level equal to or higher than work. Until that happens, the wealthy will continue to squeeze everybody else out of a life.
It's the land and other non-reproducible privileges, not all form of wealth. The imbalance is not between capital and labor, but land. Land can be in the form of copyright, patents, even domain names, the orbitals in the sky, the electromagnetic spectrum.
Capital can be used to produce more capital, but you cannot produce more land, more electromagnetic spectrum, more orbitals, etc.
The housing crisis is a restriction on what activity are allowed on land, and incentive structure that prioritize hoarding of land over engaging in societal beneficial activities.
I suggest you read up Georgism, the tax ideology that had largely disappeared from political life in the west.
I’m sympathetic to your overall point - I’m not a convinced Georgist but I’m open-minded about the idea - but I’d question some of your specific examples
> even domain names,
With an alternative DNS root, you can have any domain name you like, except for legal constraints such as trademarks, defamation, obscenity, etc. The problem is none of the alternative roots ever took off, in part because the browser vendors didn’t want to get on-board (they saw it as a high risk low reward feature)-and alternative browsers offering that feature failed in the market. This really isn’t comparable to land, in that the scarcity isn’t imposed by the laws of nature or laws written by government, it is scarcity entailed by a (predominantly) private social arrangement where competing arrangements are permitted, but have thus far failed in the market.
> the orbitals in the sky
Orbit is huge and while it is getting more congested, I don’t think that congestion is (as yet) a significant barrier to new entrants. The primary barrier remains the launch costs. The governments of major spacefaring powers don’t see orbital slots as a revenue source, their regulation of them is purely about avoiding conflict, and the fees they charge are about recovering the cost of that regulation, not contributing to general revenue. Some equatorial states tried to claim geostationary orbit slots over their territory as part of their territory, in order to charge for access to them - but the claim failed because the major spacefaring states refused to accept it, and these states lacked the geopolitical power to compel anyone else to take this claim seriously-and, anyway, with the growth of LEO constellations, geostationary orbit arguably isn’t as economically important as it was when those claims were first asserted
> it is scarcity entailed by a (predominantly) private social arrangement where competing arrangements are permitted, but have thus far failed in the market
It's a network effect. The same reason it's easy to build a facebook clone yet nearly impossible to get it off the ground.
I don’t understand what taxing “network effects” has to do with Georgism though - Georgism argues land should be taxed specially because (1) there is fundamentally a finite quantity of it, (2) it is natural not human-made. Network effects don’t seem particularly similar on either front, and hence even if there is an argument for specially taxing them, that argument isn’t clearly Georgist - a Georgist could consistently reject it.
Closer to land are things like mining rights, water rights, fishing rights, pollution rights - taxing them is an obvious extension of the Georgist idea of land taxation, and it would be difficult for a consistent Georgist to oppose them, at least in principle
At some point, I would imagine the distinction between capital and land becomes blurry, though. Economic rent can be had from either if the barrier to competition is high enough.
Domain names are a good example, because as skissane said, you could just make another DNS root. The trouble is convincing people (browsers) to use it. The problem in attempting to overturn Facebook isn't mainly the coding, either, but having a critical mass care. Those barriers don't seem like absolutes the way land is; they're just very high, high enough for those who control them to extract economic rent.
Isn’t the depreciation story kind of an outdated idea? While yes that was the case but it was also true that the 50s-90s comes were generally not very modern, built with not much comfort in mind and so it was expected you would be rebuilding. In most of the larger cities I am not sure that is the case except for severely outdated units.
Not keeping population increasing for as long as you can with migration helps too
People will buffer their prices up often even trough stagnating purchasing power or dips due to construction when land isn't made anymore and the gov will make sure demand keeps growing lest it affect the lines.
Many of us have a vision of Japan from when we were younger. But in modern times their economy is much closer to a developing country. The median income in Japan is $25,313. [1] The median income in the US is $47,960. [2] If we consider only full time year-round employment (which is probably closer to what Japan is measuring), it's $60,070.
Ever inflating house prices are caused by high demand and ease of access of debt. It predictably leads to endless price appreciation until you fill the bubble up enough to burst it, then we simply repeat again. Same thing happened to education. It's a 'commodity' seen as priceless and the government ensured access to endless debt to purchase it. You'll never guess what happened next.
The point of the economic numbers is that what's affordable from a Western perspective is not for a Japanese person. You're talking about a country where 50% of workers earn less than $25,000 per year! A $200k house in the US is generally considered very affordable. In Japan that's 8 years of salary for half the country, and easily a 20+ year mortgage.
Their housing prices are being further depressed by the fact that they're now dying off fast enough that even Tokyo's population is starting to significantly decline. And that, in turn, is further compounded by a prevalent superstition in Japan against living in a house where somebody died, which helps to further reduce demand for many housing units that 'become available.'
We can argue semantics, but I specifically said that "their economy is much closer to a developing country." This contrasts sharply against, what I presume is, our youth - when they were at one point set to become the largest economy in the world, and everything Japanese was state of the art + crazy expensive while quite affordable for Japanese.
Now it's rather the opposite. If you go to Japan on a Western salary (and especially after converting Western currency post ~2022), everything's dirt cheap for a foreigner, yet quite expensive for locals, which is much more akin to the economic state when visiting a developing country.
And so saying housing is cheap in Japan is kind of crass in a way. I mean yeah obviously it is, so long as you don't happen to live and work there.
The analogy of education to housing "bubbles" doesn't work. Housing bubbles are economically destructive because dropping prices induce new sellers to drop their price even further, which reduces the market value for everyone. There is a reinforcement loop.
No such mechanism happens in education, once you have your degree it is yours forever. There is no secondary market. If the value goes down, sure, other people will not pay as much for new degrees, but there's no direct connection between the market value and the tuition. There is no reinforcement loop.
Of course there's a connection. The most realistic reason people go to college is to earn more money later in life. Nobody would ever voluntarily go 6 figures into debt with the understanding that, at the end of it all, the best job they're going to be able to find is to go serve coffee.
And especially in the era of the internet the concept of college being a necessity to educate oneself is rather plainly artificial, and it's also highly debatable whether the current GPA inflated profit motivated degree treadmills that colleges have turned into is even providing a meaningful education.
A connection, yes, but not a feedback loop. A drop in the value of a degree does not lead to everyone panic-selling their degree.
What you're describing is simple ROI---as the return on the education investment declines, people reduce their investment in degrees. But falling tuition does not further reduce the ROI, as in the case of housing where there is a general expectation of appreciation, and therefore, speculation.
Isn't housing exactly the most accessible of all the world save for 2-3 totalitarian countries like Oman, in the United States? According to the Numbeo data exactly.
It also has nothing to do with labor vs capital. Billionaires don't invest (much) in housing. Sometimes they do invest in commercial real estate, but never into housing. It's the middle class who buys up everything - now almost exclusively in cash - and then won't leave those houses till death, as Silent generation currently dies.
Yep. It's kind of like with gas prices: Americans, with some of the world's lowest prices complain the loudest. Which appears to point out that the maladies discussed here have less of an economic nature but more of social/psychological/technological.
Another side of it is that they do indeed spend a bigger fraction of their incomes on both housing and gas. Because they have the biggest houses on biggest plots, plus not just the elite owns separate houses, but most of population - which means they also live very sparsely by necessity, in endless suburbs and exurbs - which in turn means they have to drive a lot - which they do in world's biggest cars. And it's no longer an individual choice because you have to do it to still remain a member of society, and in case of driving, it's either unsafe (too much crime in inner cities) or impossible (no public transport, because dwellings are too sparse making it impractical) to do otherwise.
Thing is, they do it because they can. Because their disposable income is by far the biggest in the world, so their needs in everything else are more than satisified: they already overeat, have full two-car garages filled to the brim with "stuff", have enough of everything that people might want in "multiple" quantities. So what's left to spend money on, is either investments (this is their stock market is so insanely huge), or things one don't really need in more than single units - so they don't have many houses, but single BIG houses, same for cars. Which makes a picture of unaffordability, as natually if people's residual free incomes are so large, so much money is going to be pushed into these, they will indeed become very expensive as a portion of entire income, just because everything else (except healthcare) makes a so much smaller proportion. It's simply that it just means huge houses, a lot bigger than anywhere else except Australia (which is also Anglosphere!).
Want to make housing truly afforable? Make people poor, also make them die off to free up space. Japan does both with great "success".
Our parents did, maybe, but we're doing it because we have to.
Inner cities went from unlivable crime dens to highly gentrified in the span of about a few decades. The moment the crime went away, people moved back in. But most of the people who actually show up to town council meetings are the people who grew up seeing riots in LA and graffiti-covered NYC subway cars. So building any more of the now highly valuable high-density, mixed-use neighborhoods that inner cities have is a drawn out political fight with people who think making their neighborhood more valuable will ruin it.
And this situation also applied before the last major urban crime wave too. The low-density suburban neighborhoods that are also expensive now used to actually be affordable. You could build cheap housing on low-value land at the outskirts of town and sell it for a huge profit, to people who had extremely generous government loans[0]. This is what triggered the white flight[1] that started the inner city crime wave[2] that Americans now cite as why density is always bad.
Problem is, that's unsustainable, there's only so much land that can be near a valuable set of jobs. So now you have cities where both the high-density core and the suburbs are equally as unaffordable. The next rung on the latter would be to move to smaller cities, except then COVID happened, and suddenly the housing market was flooded with people moving out of San Francisco at the same time rich Chinese people were buying up houses to hide their money from the CCP, themselves in competition with hedge funds like BlackRock that want to buy up entire neighborhoods and rent them back to the people who lived there.
America's obsession with single-family home ownership is an unsustainable system, propped up by deliberate market distortions. We don't buy into it because we're so much richer than anyone else, we buy it because the system is built to make it the only option for most people.
[0] To be clear, nobody would loan you money for 30 years, on a fixed interest rate, and let you pay it back early otherwise. The amount of risk shouldered by the bank is insane, but for the fact that the US government pumps money into banks to make this kind of financing viable to offer.
[1] The peak of suburbanization happened before desegregation.
[2] Don't forget leaded gasoline! Once racial minorities were trapped in cities, we made their kids breathe shittons of lead fumes, creating fuel for the crime wave fire.
Generalizing the entire US like that is nonsensical. This place is huge. Would you compare housing prices in the suburbs of Paris to those in a remote part of the Alps?
There's dirt cheap housing in some very rural places and impossibly expensive housing in several of the major population centers where most people actually live.
The elephant in the room is that NIMBYs are powerless in Japan.
In the US, people value individuality. In Japan, they have this saying: If a nail sticks out, hammer it flat. NIMBYs are ostracized for being a burden on society.
No matter if the neighbors like it or not, houses regularly get bulldozed to build new high-rise apartment buildings instead. Replacing a single family home with a 20-floor skyscraper easily 50x-es number of available apartments on the market, thereby massively pushing prices down.
Yes, but what about white Westerners? I considered/am considering doing the whole teaching English/officiating weddings thing, but you hear a LOT of stories of white visitors getting the ol' 'X' when trying to even enter stores....
Of everyone I’ve heard that has done that, it’s rare to find someone who felt so excluded as a gaijin that it wasn’t a net positive experience. Most look back on it pretty fondly.
In terms of solving their population collapse, I think white Westerners aren’t really an important demographic for them to attract though, with our very foreign culture and values on top of our very different language. If Japan can bring itself to stomach the idea of bringing lots of foreigners in to prevent the country from collapsing, they ought to import people from some of their closer neighbors, with which they have more similar language and more collectivist culture.
Why ever would you compare children and immigration? I love my parents and I’d have solidarity for my country fellows (France here).
Immigrants don’t generally earn much, let alone work legally and pay taxes. They are not paying our retirement. They require doctors and produce our “medical deserts” (the name we use in France where social security fails because of lack of practicians). They also wouldn’t fight for us if, say, Islam invaded us — in fact they are fighting full-force against us here.
Immigrants are not de-facto children. They do not love us, and no-one asks them this question on the path to immigration.
> Immigrants don’t generally earn much, let alone work legally and pay taxes. They are not paying our retirement. They require doctors and produce our “medical deserts” (the name we use in France where social security fails because of lack of practicians).
My mother is a doctor and her father was a doctor before, and both are immigrants (from Scotland to Australia) - my grandfather was already a doctor when he immigrated, my mother was only 3 or 4 at the time but she ended up doing medicine too. Our children’s paediatrician did medicine in Sri Lanka and then immigrated to Australia post-graduation; my psychiatrist likewise graduated from medicine in India. My psychologist was born in Czechia, grew up there, moved to Australia as an adult and did his psychology degrees here. My closest personal friend is a lawyer who was born in Peru, grew up in Australia - but he isn’t Peruvian, his ancestry is Argentine-Uruguayan. One of my coworkers I work closely with immigrated to Australia only 2-3 years ago, from Argentina-he already worked for our employer in Argentina, but got an intra-company transfer to here.
I don’t know any poor immigrants-I’m sure they exist, but I just don’t know any of them personally-I know lots of immigrants but they are all university-educated professionals
Of course, I am talking about Australia, you are talking about France - but France has a great many middle class or better immigrants (and their descendants) too. The big difference is France also has huge numbers of socially disadvantaged immigrants, while Australia has significantly less (proportionally speaking). But the problem then isn’t immigration, it is mismanaged immigration-who, not how many
> France also has huge numbers of socially disadvantaged immigrants,
> mismanaged immigration-who, not how many
Until I got here I was going to post to suggest that you were allowing yourself to believe that because some of the immigrants were of the successful type that there wasn’t a vast number of immigrants who are very poor and of the type GP was talking about.
But I, you and GP agree on the “mismanagement of who.”
I believe Western countries, especially the Left in Europe, UK, and US, are in a very awkward state right now because it’s obvious that we are losing the very things that make our countries attractive to these economic immigrants if we keep the de facto open borders policies (meaning most professionals can’t immigrate to the UK without years of paperwork and just the right job offer, but if someone with no marketable skills and a long criminal record and no ID shows up on a dinghy he gets free hotel for several years while they prepare to adjudicate his claim that he faces danger at home).
Anyway anyone not in utter denial knows the above is unsustainable but they also are uncomfortable knowing that the people of hundreds of completely failed countries are suffering, and in theory if we could let one of them come to France, Australia, USA, UK, he/she would be better off. But they don’t know how to reconcile “can save a few” with “can’t literally bring all poor people here without destroying our country.”
== But they don’t know how to reconcile “can save a few” with “can’t literally bring all poor people here without destroying our country.”==
It’s also possible that they hold a fundamentally different view than you and aren’t just naive idiots.
The phrase “destroying our country” is very charged and completely unsubstantiated in your comment. It’s almost like you are falling victim to the same type of emotional reaction you accuse others of holding.
But you don't think that admitting, say, half the populations of all the world's best-known failed countries like Somalia, Haiti, Syria, El Salvador, DRC, etc. would be bad for a Western country? A combination of lack of education, different cultural expectations, normalized crime and corruption, etc. means that the citizens from there would be bringing all of their problems with them. A randomly-selected person from those countries is a poor fit to be productive within our alien societal framework (doesn't speak the language, doesn't understand how Westerners conduct business, doesn't have cultural context in so many things). However the problem is, compared to a random person born into a Western society, such a newcomer is well-suited to get ahead by subverting the Western societal framework, such as by taking advantage of our lax approach to property crimes, or as I pointed out in this thread or another, exploiting Western guilt to land years-long rent-free hotel stays.
==But you don't think that admitting, say, half the populations of all the world's best-known failed countries like Somalia, Haiti, Syria, El Salvador, DRC, etc.==
This has never happened, is not happening now, and has not been proposed by any current political party. Open borders is a falsehood that has never existed in our lifetimes and nobody is proposing today. If we are going to discuss the topic, let's stick with reality.
At the same time, my ancestors who immigrated from southern Italy didn't speak English, were very uneducated, weren't considered "white", didn't have the same cultural expectations, and brought all their problems with them. All of this happened during the golden age of American progress and growth (the exact era we are trying to "make again"). I find that interesting.
==such a newcomer is well-suited to get ahead by subverting the Western societal framework, such as by taking advantage of our lax approach to property crimes==
And yet, study after study shows us that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than American-born citizens [0] [1] [2] [3]. Let's move past the fake hypotheticals and discuss the known facts.
> This has never happened, is not happening now, and has not been proposed by any current political party. Open borders is a falsehood
In the UK, the governments of both parties allow anyone who comes on a boat to remain, and they put them up in hotels until their claims of asylum are adjudicated, which takes years. How is that not open borders? Anyone with access to a dinghy can show up without any ID and not only be allowed to walk free, but to get 100% taxpayer-funded housing, when a ton of their citizens can't afford proper housing.
How is that not open borders? That's a no-questions-asked policy. And while it's "temporary" (A) they're on the honor system to show up to court in several years and (B) the citizens impacted by the crime, the draining of public funds, and the downward pressure on wages don't care, even if each migrant did peacefully walk right out 4 years later upon losing an asylum case. Although there are a ton of ways to guarantee a win, such as having a child during your stay, who would be a UK citizen. The ECHR says you have to let them stay, even if they've also shown themselves to be a criminal. https://www.reddit.com/r/unitedkingdom/comments/1j3zu29/depo...
In America, meanwhile, the orthodox Left viewpoint is that "no one is illegal" and that it's fascist to arrest and deport people for overstaying visas or working in the US without legal status. Does the American Left think we should have the rules saying "the border is not open," yet no enforcement? Because that's how it sounds if you're not willing to actually deport anyone. Personally, I supported DACA (and voted for Obama twice) but I think it's insane to just do what we're doing, which like the UK, is to accept "asylum seekers," releasing them into the US and asking them to promise to show up for their hearings in a few years. Of course, we don't give them hotels, but arguably the impact of a ton of homeless "asylum seekers" every year isn't pretty either. I know Trump has made some changes to the US policies above, but the Left clearly doesn't want to tighten border control, and I'm not making up some strawman here.
> immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than American-born citizens
Even if that's true (I won't be foolish enough to pretend I know better so let's assume they are) we'd be better off with 0 immigrants and 0 crimes than 10,000,000 immigrants and "slightly fewer crimes than 10,000,000 extra native-born citizens would have committed." And the second-order effects of importing as many impoverished people as we can to compete for available housing and jobs is still bad news for the least-wealthy of those already here, which can lead to more crime in that group of people.
Unselective immigration and zero enforcement policies are a major thumb in the eye of poor and working class Americans, but the issue has basically zero negative impact on the elites -- the highly-educated and wealthy people who make up most of the present-day Democratic Party. Hence it's pretty easy for them to overlook the issues. This is why they lost, even to a deeply flawed, corrupt candidate like Trump.
> You answered right before asking, their asylum claim must be adjudicated. If it is denied, what happens?
I just gave an illustration of what happens. In the UK, the ECHR forces them to let the criminals stay anyway. In the US, many just don't show up for their hearings and there's nothing anybody can do about that. And even if they only stay those 4 years, having a constant 4 year revolving door backlog of supposed "asylum seekers" means there is always a ton of people here to compete for either jobs or government benefits (especially in blue states, where they would think it immoral not to include them in healthcare and other expensive welfare).
> Obama (1st term) and Biden both deported more people than Trump did
Pretty sure that's mainly because of a change to count someone turned immediately away at the border as a "deportation" rather than as nothing, as it was before. Obama didn't have lower net immigration than his predecessor, just higher deportations on paper.
> it lets us know where you stand
I don't think any benefits of unselective immigration and the outright asylum fraud outweigh the costs, no. Those costs are overwhelmingly borne by the poorest Americans (including many legal immigrants), and I prioritize their interests above that of immigrants who don't follow the rules. shrug
Part of steelmanning / reading charitably is trying to put aside overly emotive/rhetorical/alarmist presentations of an idea and just concentrate on the facts of the matter.
Suppose that Madeupistan is a wealthy developed country with a population of 1 million. Over the next decade, its government has decided to admit 100,000 immigrants. It is evaluating two plans for doing:
Plan A: Admit 100,000 university-educated professionals with established careers and no criminal records
Plan B: Admit 100,000 people at random from all who apply, with no restrictions on who can apply
At the end of the decade, will the people of Madeupistan be happier under plan A or plan B? Almost surely the answer is A: plan B will admit a lot more socially disadvantaged people, worsening crime rates, poverty, social cohesion, violent extremism, etc, compared to A
Now, plans A and B are “ideal types” which don’t correspond to any real world immigration policy - really they represent extremes on a continuum of immigration selectivity, with A being a super-selective immigration policy and B being super-unselective
In the real world, Australia is significantly closer to A and further away from B than France is; and, unsurprisingly, France has significantly greater immigration-related social problems than Australia has.
And the real tragedy of it, is people end up blaming immigration and immigrants in general, when many of the problems they complain about are not inherent to immigration in itself, just to the mismanagement of it by many (but not all) Western nations
The question then is, do the people who “hold a fundamentally different view” agree or disagree with this argument about mismanagement of migration flows - and if they disagree, what is their counterargument to it?
== In the real world, Australia is significantly closer to A and further away from B than France is; and, unsurprisingly, France has significantly greater immigration-related social problems than Australia has.==
Your example completely ignores the facts of history and geography in favor of simplicity and a narrative.
Australia is a former colony, France is a former colonizer. Australia is an island, France is a small part of a much larger continent. Density is considerably higher in France than Australia.
There is a large immigration blowback happening in Australia today, even with your ideal policies.
> Australia is a former colony, France is a former colonizer
Australia is a "former colonizer" too – the UK transferred the colony of British New Guinea to Australia in 1902; in 1914, Australian troops conquered the colony of German New Guinea to the north; the two thereafter were ruled by Australia until it granted them independence as Papua New Guinea (PNG) in 1975.
One of the major reasons for the British declaring a protectorate over southeastern New Guinea in 1884, and annexing it in 1888, was the British colony of Queensland (now an Australian state) attempted to annex it in 1883 – London opposed that, and declared the annexation attempt unlawful, but felt the best way to respond to Australian demands for colonial expansion to the north was to make the territory a separate British protectorate/colony. In order to convince London to go ahead with the annexation, the Australian colonies had to promise to financially support British New Guinea.
Despite PNG being a former Australian colony, Australia does not give any special immigration preference to people from PNG; so if France has given such preference to people from its former colonies in the past, I think that was a choice France made, not something it was required to do.
> Australia is an island, France is a small part of a much larger continent.
It is true that being an island makes it easier for Australia to have a "hardline" immigration policy, but there are a lot of aspects of Australian immigration policy which could be copied by non-island European nations, except they decide not to – e.g. rebalancing the immigration intake to put more emphasis on skilled immigration and education visas, and less on family reunion or humanitarian/refugee flows; mandatory detention of unauthorised arrivals, including overseas processing; the UK government's controversial Rwanda asylum plan (abandoned by the new Labour government) was in part inspired by Australia's policies.
> Density is considerably higher in France than Australia.
Yes, but what has that got to do with selectivity of immigration policy? Also, population density figures for Australia are somewhat misleading, in that they include massive areas of the country which are borderline uninhabitable; if you restrict yourself to the parts of the country where the vast majority of people live, the density figures are a lot higher, although still lower than much of Europe.
> There is a large immigration blowback happening in Australia today, even with your ideal policies.
Yes, there's an ongoing debate about Australia's immigration levels, but the debate is very different in character from that found in much of Europe. Hard right parties such as Rassemblement national and Alternative für Deutschland both did very well in their respective countries recent national elections, even if RN didn't perform quite as well as many observers had expected – and "immigration blowback" was a big factor in driving that. By contrast, the hard right in Australia (such as Pauline Hanson's One Nation) is in disarray, it had much more success 20–25 years ago, the national government is centre-left and the mainstream centre-right seems to have lost its feet, at least on the national level.
And I wouldn't call Australia's policies "ideal" – very likely there are some areas of immigration policy in which Australia could do better – it is just that on the whole I think it has been more successful than those of many European nations, or that of the US.
In the US, immigrants often do pay taxes, and use up fewer benefits[1]. Moreover, our social security relies on perpetual growth to sustain itself. So if we can't grow our population via children, we must grow it via immigrants, to remain solvent.
I certainly support efforts to shape US society into one where people might want children. Universal healthcare, strong social safety nets, free education, etc. Not to mention one where land is used in a conscientious way to build community, with walkable spaces, public third spaces, and strong public transit.
> Universal healthcare, strong social safety nets, free education, etc.
No such thing as free anything. Somebody's gotta work to pay for it. Those somebodies are the children and young healthy adults who are economically active. They are the ones who will pay the taxes which in turn fund services for everyone else.
So it's impossible to create a welfare system in order to encourage families. People need to have children first so that they can be made to pay for it.
== So it's impossible to create a welfare system in order to encourage families. People need to have children first so that they can be made to pay for it.==
This ignores some important facts. First, lots of immigrants already pay taxes and don’t receive government benefits. Second, we already run a continuous deficit. Third, we could choose to shift existing spending priorities to more pro-family spending.
It would cost about 1/3 of our military budget to pay for universal pre-K 3/4.
Immigrants function as imported children in this context. People wouldn't have the children that would grow into economically active adults, so the country had to import those adults from some other country whose people did have children.
> we already run a continuous deficit
Which is unsustainable.
> we could choose to shift existing spending priorities to more pro-family spending
Absolutely. Protecting and promoting families as a national policy is the right solution in my opinion.
== the country had to import those adults from some other country whose people did have children==
Those people chose to come the US for the opportunity as they have throughout history, even when birth rates were high.
== Protecting and promoting families as a national policy is the right solution in my opinion==
So you agree that we don’t need to wait for more people to have kids to pay for the policy because we could just adjust our spending priorities. Glad we are on the same page.
I'm not comparing children with immigrants. I'm pointing out the demographic fact that Japan has a low birth rate, far below replenishment.
This implies the number of economically active individuals will only ever decrease over time. Without economically active people, collapse is inevitable. Therefore, they must either promote new families or accept immigration.
Attempts to raise birth rates don't seem to be bearing fruit in any developed country. Therefore, acceptance of immigration is merely a matter of time. They have no choice.
Shrinking population only leads to collapse if the economy is built like a Ponzi scheme. This is most Western economies, but it doesn't have to be this way.
Shrinking population leads to zero population. Surely this truth is self-evident.
There is no economy without people. There is no nation without natalism.
> it doesn't have to be this way
Absolutely. If the nation can maintain a proper replacement birth rate, the population will be stable. Decline and uncontrolled exponential growth are both undesirable.
It's balance of forces. The population didn't rise forever, it won't fall forever. Even at 50% replacement that takes decades to manifest. The current conditions (overcrowding and a feeling of 'stress' in the population) are temporary. And besides, what problem is it if there's half as many people in the country 50 years from now? It's more space for everyone else. The Black Death is a historic example; living standards improved drastically after the population fell a bit.
He is not saying immigrants are like children, he means that as the population ages and is not replenished by children, there will be nobody left to work unless the country accepts immigrants.
Living up to your username I see. If you still don't know what it means, or are pretending you don't, that's a major red flag. If you're asking honestly, try reading Soumission by Houellebecq.
If it's so obvious and simple you should be able to sum it up instead of telling me to read a crackpot book about it. The fact that you can't is telling.
I think you’re missing the point. Modern societies with things like welfare, free healthcare, the concept of “retirement”, etc. require a growing population in order to function. But if the natives aren’t reproducing, either the natives have to accept a lower standard of living (ha ha) or you need to import warm bodies to keep the game going. We’re assured, of course, that importing anyone and everyone has absolutely no negative effects, but, well, we’ll see.
The US was built by immigrants. Before our slow slide toward christofascism it was on our money. Out of many, one. The reason we work as a society is that we take strength from the many varied cultures and experiences throughout the world. The most bold, the most focused, the most daring have always come to America with a dream of making it big.
We destroy that at our own peril. Break that down far enough and we'll become a culturally inbred irrelevant backwater. If you want to become the UK, that's how you do it.
You sound like a reasonable and good faith person. I want to ask you in particular to consider engaging with the people you disagree with (in this case the Right). Try to understand what exactly it is they’re trying to do when they oppose unlimited open borders immigration. It’s true that 100+ years ago they were trying to bring in warm bodies, there was plenty of opportunity then and it was a great thing to bring in 1,000,000 people to start new farms and work in factories. The immigrants learned the language and customs and followed the rules, and everybody benefited. That isn’t the way it’s working now though. The “asylum” process that was created to help a small number of political dissidents who would be killed or persecuted for unjust reasons, is being abused by shoving a million people into it whose main reason for coming here is “my country’s economy sucks due to gross incompetence of our government.”
We can’t accept every single person who would rather live in the US or UK than El Salvador or Lesotho, unless we want our country to be like those countries, and according to the people who constantly try to come here, those countries are much worse than ours. That’s what the people who disagree with you are trying to say.
None of this has anything to do with disliking immigrants themselves. I know people of many different races and national origins and I like and respect them all. But just as I don’t think France deserves to have 10,000,000 Americans show up, not learn any French, and just import American culture and customs, I also think immigrants here should be expected to assimilate. That basically worked well for hundreds of years.
Do you think immigrants now have different rates of assimilation than they did 100 years ago? What do you base that on? Because they don't. Immigrants have always formed ethnic groupings because that's how you stay safe. You build Chinatown or little Havana or whatever. At first these places are for 'undesirables' outside the proper good mainstream, but over generations they become a part of the fabric of society and ideas and culture percolate out. It's literally how it's always worked. For some reason there is a new wave of pampered jackboot hopefuls that think this wave of immigrants is somehow uniquely outrageously different from mainstream white culture and so must be prevented from modifying our precious sacred culture.
Pro tip: we are a culture of mutts. We draw strength from constant change. That's why we've been successful. And it's been dragging the right wing kicking and screaming the whole time. The things your great grandfather cried outrage about are now your treasured culture that must be protected.
It would be a little comical how little perspective the right wing has, if it wasn't a bit sad.
> In fact Japanese generally make less money. IT salaries are in the $50k range. Minimum wage is $7.5 Yet they still go out.
What's their healthcare like? If something bad happens, do they need to rely on savings to pull through, or does their society have stronger social safety nets that allow them to spend their money with less concern?
You know people who regularly say on a weekend evening "Sorry, I can't come, I need to put the $34 I'd have spent into my HSA" ?
It's not really about safety nets since most people don't discount (or account) for them (they're in the future). It's about disposable income, and for huge numbers of Americans, that's in short supply due to the exorbitant cost of housing, college education and health insurance & care.
That's precisely what I meant about disposable income.
Safety nets in my mind are what kick in after a person has no way to pay for necessary stuff by themselves.
Disposable income is what gets cut down by the costs of necessary stuff.
Very few people are going to not go to dinner because they are aware that if they become indigent US society will not pay, and thus feel an obligation to save.
Lots of people will not go to dinner because they've already had to pay for (... you name it ...)
The overwhelming majority of Americans have health insurance which (at least theoretically) covers most of their health care costs.
Way too many (many millions) have no insurance or inadequate insurance, but that's a problem we need to fix, not a description of the country as a whole.
The problem for most Americans is that what is not covered by insurance is still too expensive for them, but that's a subtly different problem than "no socialized healthcare => everyone has to pay out of pocket for any healthcare they receive"
This is more a function of dense population centers. Having lived in many places, I went out more in the denser areas. There are more options and they are all up and down the price spectrum.
In sparse areas, going to the same few options over and over again isn't fun, and they tend to be more expensive, maybe due to lack of competition.
Don't underestimate the lack of functioning public transport.
I always considered trains, tram slow teleporters.
A functional rail network allow the public to move with much less restraint. Think about it.
A highly car dependent society which much of the world unfortunately still is, will make going to 3rd places much less attractive. Easier to sit at home, doom scroll and watch Netflix.
Inter city trains should run at least every half hour, reliably.
Fully agree. The MRT in Singapore means you can invite people for a drinking party pretty much anywhere and you know that they'll all be able to attend both cheaply and safely.
Very importantly, with public transport, you don't have to lug this huge metal box around with you, remember where it is, and be sober enough to safely operate it.
You can just go where you like, and if you want to go somewhere else, sure it might not be the strictly fastest option, but it sure is convenient. You can go from A to B to C to D to A without having to go back to B to grab your elephant box and bring it to D.
It's a result of mix-use neighborhoods. In Tokyo your house is usually in the middle of a neighborhood that includes restaurants, shops and other businesses rather than a suburb completely devoid of everything except single-family homes.
>Not many cheap hangout options in a lot of places.
When I stayed in the US for a while, I'm from Germany, what I noticed was is that there's an extreme "upward striverism" when it comes to going out. In most places I stayed you could find dirt cheap bars and clubs (although maybe clubbing overall in the US is worse), but people in their 20s and 30s just seemed to be reluctant to go in a way they're not in Europe or Japan.
I noticed it more with Gen Z than with American millennials, there seems to be an extreme Great Gatsby-ish fake richness.
A bartender in Copenhagen had a long rant about “nowadays, kids look at themselves as brands”, and it’s been stuck in my head. I’m not even that old, but noticed more people think how everything is “cringe”, and wouldn’t want to be seen while doing that activity.
It’s an eventual conclusion of everything having cameras, and thinking of being caught in a TikTok drama. This also tracks how most of the kids nowadays want to become a YouTuber. Which is, basically, being their own brands.
I’m painting with a broad brush here, and there are certainly exceptions, but in my experience what you described has resulted in the only people left patronizing those dirt cheap bars being people who don’t make for good company and not always very pleasant to be around. Which then feeds back into the original issue.
On the other hand those kinds of bars tend to be pretty enjoyable in neighborhoods that are above poverty-stricken but not yet gentrified. Basically a working class neighborhood of old, which rarely exist anymore - or not for long.
I think a lot of this conversation is centered in the US, most other countries haven't been through a suburbanization at the rate and size the US has gone through. It is very easy for you to be disconnected from reality living in the suburbs in florida (where I live, for instance) than it is to do the same in a city like Barcelona or São Paulo.
I don't know of any other country were living in the burbs is desirable, everyone wants to be close to where the action and the businesses are.
You drive everywhere, so it's optimized for drive-through experiences, so you don't have to interact with people. Third places are hard to find, and when they exist, they're paid (movie theaters, restaurants, bars, museums, gyms) and they're not necessarily good places to make friends.
There aren't natural places where you see the same people as the communities are very dispersed, with mostly single-family homes in large lots. So it takes a lot of effort not to be lonely. I've seen many people that moved here from other states/countries and now regret the decision as building community is incredibly hard.
> Third places are hard to find, and when they exist, they're paid
I see this claim a lot but I don't understand it. Can you give me some examples of common third places in other countries that aren't paid that don't exist in US suburbs?
The front stoop/street/sidewalk where everybody hangs out? The public square? The park? The market—not to buy or sell necessarily, but because everybody’s there? The library? The public pool/baths? The house of worship in walking distance?
> The front stoop/street/sidewalk where everybody hangs out?
My kids and other kids in the neighborhood close by play around in the cul-de-sac quite often. Lots of people are out walking around. A lot of neighbors have patio furniture in their front yard and can be found out there, at least when its not 100F+ outside.
> The public square?
The downtown area nearby has lots of events going on.
> The park?
My suburban town has 42 of them. Almost 2,000 acres. They're mostly connected by dedicated bike paths. There's a city park attached to nearly every neighborhood area. Down the street from me there's a park with multiple playground areas, walking path through some small woods, a fishing pond, some basic sports areas (fences and graveled areas for baseball/softball, space for soccer, etc). So yeah, plenty of parks to be had. And there's usually a good bit of people at these places.
And that's before getting into the public sports facilities and other recreation facilities.
> The market—not to buy or sell necessarily, but because everybody’s there?
I hung out at the farmer's market this morning that's routinely held in town most weeks on Saturday mornings. Lots of people walking/biking to it.
> The library?
Excellent library with lots of events going on. They're rebuilding the main building after a fire, but even in their temporary space its great. Its usually pretty busy. It has excellent transit and bike paths to get to it, even in its temporary location.
> The public pool/baths?
Lots of city pools. Even one with a lot of water slides, its like a small water park.
> The house of worship in walking distance?
There are plenty of churches in Texas, trust me.
So once again, what's missing? And I'm not in an absurdly wealthy place, my suburb has a pretty average average household income. And its been roughly like this for most places I've lived or stayed at for significant periods of time. Maybe a bit less on transit, that is something my current place is probably a decent bit better than the average US suburb there.
Houstonian here. I’m guessing you’re in Plano. I’ve been all over Texas: cities, suburbs, small towns and many relatives’ and friends’ farms. I’ve also been to most U.S. states and several continents. What you’re describing is such an outlier that’s it literally sounds like a diamond in the rough. While there is hopefully a new trend among American planners to make this more of a reality for more Americans in the decades to come, for many years to come not more than a tiny fraction of Americans will experience what you’re enjoying. Until then, the most common American experience will be to hop in a car to do almost anything. And again, in most corners of Texas and the country, I have rarely seen people sitting on their front porches talking to people passing by - that seems to be a relic of stories I’ve read taking place in certain towns in the early 20th century. But I should come check out your area!
I grew up in Houston (ish, Clear Lake). I've lived in Plano, Far North Dallas, now Richardson. I had friends over a large chunk of the South side of Houston. Pearland, Alvin, The Woodlands, Spring, Friendswood, etc. Their experiences weren't too far off, save for the fact there's practically no transit (same for Clear Lake). Visiting friends inside the loop today, I have pretty similar experiences to what I'm talking about. In the end, still lots of free third places around.
And when I visit friends in San Antonio and Austin, I get pretty similar experiences. Neighborhood grill outs. People chilling in the parks. Excellent libraries around.
> the most common American experience will be to hop in a car to do almost anything
The question was, what were those non-profit/free public third spaces that are allegedly missing. I do agree, in many places there's probably a drive to those things, but they do still exist. And from what I experienced, they're busy.
I’ve lived on both sides of this in different areas of the US. Overall I’d say there’s a lot of places that have what you’ve described, but there are many that don’t, even in more urban locations. Sometimes roads lack sidewalks, parks/skateparks/etc close for repairs but never reopen, local events stop getting funded for one reason or another, or high crime rates make people weary about leaving patio furniture out. All of those contribute to a lack of stable third spaces and associated connections with people.
Other countries have similar issues, of course, but often (not always) they have more cultural factors keeping third spaces alive. In my experience traveling Europe and Africa, community and familial ties generally have a more active role, so there’s just more opportunities for stable third places to develop. It’s not that the spaces are different, imo, but they do seem more common.
This is speaking from my experiences when I was young.
> My kids and other kids in the neighborhood close by play around in the cul-de-sac quite often. Lots of people are out walking around. A lot of neighbors have patio furniture in their front yard and can be found out there, at least when its not 100F+ outside.
How big is the cul-de-sac? When I was a kid, my 'local neighborhood cul-de-sac' was about 50 kids playing around, forming their own little cliques, learning how to interact with a lot of other different kids. The actual cul-de-sac was more like 200-300 families with kids of varying ages, all interacting with each other
>The downtown area nearby has lots of events going on.
How many are spontaneous and unorganized? How often does the local band drop by for an impromptu performance that you didn't need to plan for, find parking for...that you could just be out walking your dog and stop by for a half hour?
> I hung out at the farmer's market this morning that's routinely held in town most weeks on Saturday mornings. Lots of people walking/biking to it.
How much of the market is just your average stay-at-home that is selling their extra produce to make some extra cash and avoid it going to waste? Do you need to sign up to be a seller, or can you just show up, set up at an empty stall and sell your stuff?
> My suburban town has 42 of them. Almost 2,000 acres. They're mostly connected by dedicated bike paths. There's a city park attached to nearly every neighborhood area. Down the street from me there's a park with multiple playground areas, walking path through some small woods, a fishing pond, some basic sports areas (fences and graveled areas for baseball/softball, space for soccer, etc). So yeah, plenty of parks to be had. And there's usually a good bit of people at these places.
Wow, 2000 acres...thats, not a whole lot. My hometown had something like 200mi^2 of public land around it that you could just go and make use of. And that's just in easy walking distance.
> Pools, farmers stands, churches, library...
My hometown had all of these a plenty too, and they weren't all heavily regimented. And by most measures, you probably lived in what was an ivory palace compared to where I came from. Yet, from your descriptions, you can't even manage the most destitute period of the post-soviet-collapse period.
We had plenty of third places to gather around with other people. Parks, beaches, forests. The biggest difference to me was that our experiences weren't sanitized. They weren't regimented to respond to certain rules, to be calendarized to occur on certain days or times. Our parents didn't need to plan play dates, or so schedule time off to make sure their kids could experience certain things. Those were just a given. The American experience with this is, speaking from 30-ish years of experience, is very lacking, and the saddest part is that most don't realize that.
> My hometown had something like 200mi^2 of public land
The city I live in is less than 30 square miles. Hard to have 200 square miles of parks when the town is only 30. And it's entirely surrounded by other cities and towns.
And are you just talking undeveloped woods or something? I'm talking parks, as in playgrounds, soccer fields, baseball fields, water fountains, stocked fishing ponds, etc.
But I do get that. Where I grew up (another US suburb), walking out my back gate connected to loads of creeks and bayous and woods and ranches.
Still though, goal posts moved even more than 200mi. We went from "there are no parks" to "there are no forests".
> They weren't regimented to respond to certain rules, to be calendarized to occur on certain days or times
Neither are mine. I didn't arrange a play date. My kids just went outside and played with the kids out there. We just go down to the park and play on the playgrounds with the other kids. We just hop on the bus and head to the downtown and see what's happening. We just go to the library. We just stopped by the farmers market. We just go to the pool. Maybe shoot some messages to some friends we're heading that way, but not necessarily something planned well ahead of time.
> you probably lived in what was an ivory palace compared to where I came from
I don't know where you came from. But where I'm from, the average household income isn't too far off from the current national average. This isn't some ultra wealthy place.
> And are you just talking undeveloped woods or something? I'm talking parks, as in playgrounds, soccer fields, baseball fields, water fountains, stocked fishing ponds, etc.
All of the above. Well, maybe swap baseball fields to basketball courts.
> Neither are mine. I didn't arrange a play date. My kids just went outside and played with the kids out there. We just go down to the park and play on the playgrounds with the other kids. We just hop on the bus and head to the downtown and see what's happening. We just go to the library. We just stopped by the farmers market. We just go to the pool. Maybe shoot some messages to some friends we're heading that way, but not necessarily something planned well ahead of time.
If it's anything like my experience in the US, the other side -- hosting such events, is regimented and calendarized.
> I don't know where you came from. But where I'm from, the average household income isn't too far off from the current national average. This isn't some ultra wealthy place.
When I was a kid, $3000/annum would have put you in the upper 2-3%.
I've since lived in places with very nice public spaces, what most would consider to be enviable 3rd places. Yet it all still feels so artificial, so made up. It feels designed, not organic, and the behaviours that I observe follow that.
My neighbours are my 'reality'. My local plays a big part in connecting me with them. Never seen a newer suburb with a good local. A 'local' in newer suburbs tends to be like other suburban businesses - lacking foot traffic and spontaneity.
Only slightly related, but I've just found out about Japanese bars nomihodai, or "all you can drink for 2 hours" pricing scheme, and I'm flabbergasted by it. It sounds like it'd lead to incredibly dangerous behavior. I wonder if there's some Japanese cultural thing that makes it safer than it sounds.
> Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to ...
I just don't get this part in the article and GP. Everyone in the developed country has instant access to ice cream. We don't say "people manage to enjoy $ICE_CREAM despite disgusting abundance of cold desserts". More supply only drives consumption and accelerate consumerism.
And I'm replying here because I have relevant, though anecdotal, memory. Social media is detoxifying Japanese communication at an unbelievable pace over the past decade or two. Japanese lack of social skills and proficiency in verbal abuse used to be otherworldly. Little Sgt. Hartman was just ubiquitous. Not nearly as much as it used to be.
All while mobile televisions, gambling, pornography etc had grown massively, which implies, though not proves, causality. How is that relationship between those supposed to be a "despite"? It just doesn't make any sense. Doing more is learning more.
To some degree yes, since they don't reflect unpaid overtime, much less de facto overtime (the boss is going out drinking until 1AM, so we're all going out drinking until 1 AM).
The average age of first home owners has risen to 38. In another decade or two the American dream will probably be to buy a house when you're 50 and then settle down, get married, and have a family. I wonder how that's going to work out?
Part of this is simply a function of the average age. There's a much bigger squeeze of life events when everyone dies at 60 instead of 90. We become older, meaning our life events are stretched out further, we leave school later, begin work later, buy a house later, have kids later, retire later, die later. Secondly, within the population the share of old is becoming bigger, meaning the average buyer is older, and also the average age of first buyers is older.
If you look through the statistics we are actually richer in terms of housing than ever before. There's two stats: home size, and persons-per-house. In the past half century or so, home size doubled while persons-per-house dropped by 25%. So we live in bigger homes and share them with fewer people, housing-per-person has been increasing decade after decade to the point it's almost 3x what it was since the war.
This ignores many things. Legal requirements have pushed up home and lot sizes. In the suburbs of NYC a drive will take you from 1910 era suburbs with 800 square foot homes where 80% of the lot is building or useful infrastructure that are now illegal to build, to just built 4000 square foot mansions on lots large enough for apartment buildings with a mandated 20-30% lot coverage maximum. You are also ignoring the fact that even with modern power appliances and automation it takes a lot of time money and people to maintain those new lager homes.
Yes it does, women have been getting children later and later. There is a natural limit to this of course, but that's true for everything and everyone.
Ironic that the US is embracing Middle Eastern culture (specifically the Gulf countries). Honestly it's funny when Americans criticize cities like Doha and Dubai for being lacklustre and cultureless when most American tier-2 cities and towns are boring af. I've been told in some towns and suburbs that the best thing to do for leisure was to visit the local Walmart.
I don't know if all places are the same but one time when we were working on laptops at a mall in a common area we were told by security guards 1 hour later to leave so not sure if they can be considered public areas.
We have an economic system that is actively hostile to new generations because the idea behind neoclassical economics is that you have an endowment you turn into money to buy things, but that very endowment isn't passed onto younger generations in a guaranteed fashion due to rising inequality.
As a member of the younger generations you notice that everything is owned by the older generations, which means you have to beg the older generations to let you live in dignity.
But this doesn't end once the younger generations turn into the older generations, because their parents also suffered the same problem, which means they might have enough for themselves, but they didn't have enough to pass down for you, leading to a spiral of immiseration.
Smart parents notice this pattern and decide "If I was unwanted and my children are or will be unwanted, then how about I don't have any at all?"
Parks and trails are/were non commercial meeting spaces.
City recreational parks in America used to have water fountains and cool stuff like climbable sculptures for kids and decommissioned Korean War era fighter jets in sand pits. That all went away with the helicopter parents.
I think a culture which views suing for everything as legitimate and the very peculiar and frankly weird specificity which enabled it to - the existence of punitive damages and them going to the other party - has a lot more to do with it than helicopter parenting.
I always find it surprising that American lament the death of shared spaces - because that’s what public spaces are - when it’s pretty obvious that they don’t actually want to spend time with each other. I mean two comments under this one you will find a commenter explaining that the situation is to be blamed on the other half of America they dislike. Well, that’s not very conductive to an environment where public spaces thrive.
Yes, fear of being sued was the ultimate death of all that stuff, but, to be fair, helicopter parenting is a manifestation of what is the same fear (e.g. "What if someone calls CPS?"). You are ultimately talking about the same thing.
> when it’s pretty obvious that they don’t actually want to spend time with each other.
Which too no doubt stems from the very same fear again. Hard to want to spend time with other people when you have to continually look over your shoulder. Most people show love, compassion, and kindness, but there is always that one person who is ready to go atomic at the drop of a hat that ruins it for everyone else.
It seems in many places that are free or cheap, there are many more types of people that show up and it sometimes gets weird.
This has led to less women and children going to open spaces, which leads to less men in my observations.
This varies greatly depending on the exact neighborhood, and it may not be obvious if you spend most time in a wealthier or more homogeneous part of a city/town. Although they are not immune, it strongly depends on the forces allowed to keep the others away.
They definitely didn't all go away. My kids still play on a tank in the middle of the playground nearby.
And I can't imagine any parks around me without water fountains.
Where are these places where playgrounds don't have climbable structures and parks don't have water fountains? Maybe you should vote differently or move.
I want you to complete that thought. Stay with it. Explain exactly how the helicopter parents are responsible for removing the things you liked in American city recreational parks.
Housing, transportation, TIME and energy to even go and do things. Let alone the insane costs of gathering.
Even solo hobbies are in decline. The war on attention that began with mass media and has accelerated through Television and the Internet to Smartphones has not been good for a society not ready for it.
None of those TOOLS are evil things. It's how they're allowed to be used by corporations who bombard people's attention all the time.
Parks, libraries are cheap and free and they're dead where I live, a metro area of 2+ million
The only people I see out are families with grandpa in tow to pay for a mediocre overpriced wood fired pizza.
No one has analog skills. Just social analysis skills. Very briefly dated a 39 year old who admitted she had never baked, boiled, or microwaved her own potato. Already got 2 kids.
We reach endgame sooner in life. We grind all the content immediately because we aren't growing the potatoes and sewing the clothes, weaving textiles.
That 39 year old woman anecdote is a strange addition. I know many 20-to-30-somethings that know how to cook. It's far too expensive to constantly eat out nowadays so people know how to provide for themselves in other ways. It sounds like you met a woman that didn't know how to cook and extrapolated that experience into thinking society is over and we're all helpless.
The number of US libraries going back to the 90s is basically flat while the population has kept growing over 35 years, around 38% for the same time period
Unless you're a big city you probably only have one library. At least by me municipalities have occasionally built new, bigger libraries and/or put additions onto existing ones in the last 30 years. The number of libraries would remain flat in those cases even if they have actually expanded.
Parks, public pools, libraries and museums are the main things we do as a family. We also live in a metro of about 1.5 M. Maybe other metro areas charge for parks, libraries and museums?
Especially museums now I think about it? Museums in small metro areas can be free. Likely because there's nothing in them. (Still fun, just not as many exhibits as museums in large metro areas.) I mean, just imagine trying to run something like the Museum of Science and Industry, Museum of Natural History, or the Field Museum for free. I'm thinking at some point they would break down and have to start charging?
It really depends on each neighborhood these days from what I have seen.
Parks around here, one is safe during the day with many people, it is divided up in many sections well, and you don't notice the drug dealing and needles until the ratio changes after dark.
Most of the other parks, I'd say a majority of women do not feel comfortable, which leads to less use by women and men, which changes the ratio of people that do go there. Some of the parks have been charging and increasing the fees to try to reverse that.
Libraries are the only real bastion of third space that seems to have a mostly neutral vibe imho. Although the downtown libraries have had to change some of what they allow to try to stave off the changing ratio of unshowered, just as several of the starbucks now have number pads on the bathrooms to access.
Libraries are not the best place for socializing as they normally have a keep it quieter vibe in my experience, but it's still doable to meet someone. The lack of open hours is a real limiting factor. I'd like to open a library that is more like a social club and open 24 hours.
Museums have gotten pretty expensive around here, and I don't see them as a great place to socialize. I imagine it's great to bring a family, but replacing the social connect that malls and bars at once had, not really. I also can't imagine people going to the local museum every friday night.
> I mean, just imagine trying to run something like the Museum of Science and Industry, Museum of Natural History, or the Field Museum for free.
While it is possible they'll get gutted and/or forced to charge admission in the current craze to cut government funding, by far the best museums in the country -- the Smithsonian ones in DC -- are absolutely free to visit.
> Very briefly dated a 39 year old who admitted she had never baked, boiled, or microwaved her own potato. Already got 2 kids.
>
> We reach endgame sooner in life. We grind all the content immediately because we aren't growing the potatoes and sewing the clothes, weaving textiles.
this is a bit extreme..you don't need to go back 100+ years to know how to cook your own food. And plenty of people do cook their own food now despite having grown up on YouTube.
same here. The problem in this region is that they are too restrictive. Libraries have strict rules like not making noise in some areas and being told by security guards to take feet off low tables (which was impractical for reading), parks have so many rules including which sports can be played and not. At least in the region where we live its not the lack of facilities but a culture and rule system that makes public areas useless.
The problem is the people who don't like that policy debating it on social media isolated in filter bubbles owned by the rich who benefit from such isolation
We're the adults now but prefer the responsibility of kids still
Young people in US consume much more of those things you listed than people over 40 did at the same age. Young people have more purchasing power than previous generations.
EDIT: Data from the fed and payroll providers show this overwhelmingly to be the case, but just to add some color/anecdote.
I found all of the first jobs I had in highschool and just after.
3/3 of my first roles now advertise a minimum salary over twice what I was paid 14-18 years ago. Prices have gone up around 20-30% since then overall so I would have had 40% more purchasing power today with the same jobs.
A 20-30% increase in prices does not match what I've observed.
Restaurant prices are up 50-100% over the past decade. This isn't hard to check: look at old and new menu photos on yelp. Banh mi have gone from $3 to $6 in less than ten years.
My local gas station mexican place (which has excellent food) has seem a price increase of 50% since 2019 and more like 100% since 2016. Coffee ditto, but luckily I don't buy coffee out. Fast food is actually the worst offender of all, with fast food prices up more like 3-5x over ten years.
Grocery prices are similar:
Meat prices are up roughly 50% in ten years or more from my perspective. Googling, it's actually worse: chicken is up almost 100%, beef is up 45%.
To be fair, most of the current economic growth in the US in dollar terms is the result of inflationary growth and price-gouging in traditional industries. So it makes sense that basic necessities would follow the same trends and cost more.
I've seen the same effect happen like a mirror in all dollar-pegged economies I've visited since COVID.
I think you are right but the expectations of young people are up much more.
These are all relative valuations with your pears and expectations. No one cares we are all vastly more wealthy than people living a 100 years ago.
People know how much Jamie Dimon is worth. No one cares they basically have more abundance today than JP Morgan himself.
It is also the difference that when I was in my 20s I had no illusions that I was going to become Michael Jackson or a popular TV sitcom actor since I never danced, sang or acted. Now though you do have that anxiety since people your own age are famous and wealthy from nothing more than network effects.
When I was in my 20s the only people that seemed to have disposable income were drug dealers lol. It was easy to not feel anxiety that I wasn't as well off as a drug dealer.
If you look up data, you will see my observations matched by readily-available data, other than the claim about fast food prices. Fast food prices have still risen much faster than inflation, but 5x is only true if you examine the cheaper menu items and becomes more obvious when you pay attention to menu item replacements and changes.
On the other hand, your claim that prices have risen 20-30% since 14-18 years ago doesn't even hold up to BLS inflation numbers. Try 46-59%.
edit: I'm also wrong about rice. Rice commodity prices are the same as 2015, retail price is up 15%. I will say that if you don't shop at the right places, though, you're now getting gouged on the rice.
Are you taking into account the biggest drain on young people's finances, accommodation? I would be amazed if young people today had as much disposable income as they did 20 or 30 years ago.
That is because there has been tremendous stagnation in wages outside of software in the middle. Huge compression between the middle and min wage.
My first job as a cook pays basically the same as what my first processional job pays now. It was a huge win for me at the time and now would have been no raise at all.
I think this is expressed in the jump in housing prices since covid too. So young people have better purchasing power besides for the one thing everyone wants.
> I found all of the first jobs I had in highschool and just after. 3/3 of my first roles now advertise a minimum salary over twice what I was paid 14-18 years ago. Prices have gone up around 20-30% since then overall so I would have had 40% more purchasing power today with the same jobs.
If the cost per hour to say, go to the movies has tripled, but attendance has gone down by half, then by cost, more movie entertainment is being consumed than ever before, but the number of people and number of hours participating in the activity has actually gone down
The best data I could find shows a decline of around 25% from 2006 to 2023 in restaurant visits. However, a big portion of this is because of meal delivery which is more expensive than restaurants, so the cause is probably not mostly increased cost.
Other related things like concert attendance have gone up.
My take is that the main reason young people don't go out is not price, they often seem to be making choices that cost more when they avoid going out
First, young people make a lot more than they did 10 years ago (both nominally and inflation adjusted).
Second, no it does not cost 5x as much, closer to 15-20% more based on all the data I could find. Anecdotally in San Francisco, NYC, and Austin it is maybe 2x more at the most expensive places.
Drinks are like $15-20 now. 15 years ago I was getting double wells for like $2-5. Bars had actual legit specials too like dollar beers. Uber 10 years ago would be like $7 at the most.
Uber basically didn't exist 10 years ago and was insanely VC subsidized. Compare cab prices.
Drinks in some places are more, other places have not increased as much. You basically couldn't find a $5 drink in SF in 2015. You can still find $2 drinks in Austin today
The CPI is misleading because it does silly things such as counting increases in CPU speed as “getting more computing for your money.” If all you use your computer for is word processing then you’re really not getting 1000x “more computing” for your money today than you were in the 1980s, you’re getting only minor increases in productivity.
If all you use your computer for is word processing then you can buy a low-end desktop for very little money. Computers (and other consumer electronics) are cheaper now than they have ever been. Uninformed whining about hedonic adjustments in CPI is so tiresome.
How many average home computer users are 1000X more productive with a computer today than they were with a 1980s computer? The CPI is the consumer price index. It doesn’t cover business uses of computers which take more advantage of the improved performance.
No it measures CPU speed, memory, etc under the assumption that scaling these provide some kind of tangible benefit to warrant the idea that we’re getting “more computer for less money” but these benefits are clearly nowhere even close to a linear relationship with CPU speed.
Productivity was an example of a benefit I chose off the cuff but you could choose others. Are today’s video game consoles 1000X more fun than a NES? Given that many people actually prefer old NES games and are even willing to pay inflated prices to collect them suggests the answer is a resounding no.
You are getting more computer for your money. And only a tiny niche of collectors are foolish enough to waste a lot of money on old video games. You can find the same hobbyist collectors for anything: figurines, model trains, coins, etc. Collectors are economically meaningless.
The question is not: "are you getting more computer for your money?"
The question is: "are you getting (anywhere near) a linear scaling of computer for your money?"
Because to me the answer to the second question is a resounding "no" and the strongest evidence of that is all the people walking around with high-end iPhones who can barely afford rent on tiny single-bedroom apartments.
>"First, young people make a lot more than they did 10 years ago (both nominally and inflation adjusted)."
I need a source on this, like [1], and I need you to also share the cost-of-living average increases, which PLAINLY show that despite wages increasing, the increasing costs for goods and services within that same time period have outpaced wage increase percentages [2][3].
And don't be a typical HN-crowder and say ANYTHING about wages in our industries — it's white-collar work, and a functioning society sees to accomplishing an ever-progressing standard of living for members in ALL sectors of the status-quo 'bell curve'.
Shit, even average household income is down 2k from 6 years ago [4]
EDIT: the data you shared is not specific to "young people", that's why it's different. While everyone's wages are up over the last 10 years relative to prices (according to the data you shared), young people have gained much more
Rent, household items, cost of external activities, and health insurance (sometimes, see parents' insurance plans) are still subject to that group - which my sources show clear outpacing for - even with youth's increase in wages.
For someone that lives with their parents and works full time, yeah - they've probably never had it better. But a lot of youth right now have expenses drawn out in such a way where, even if they're making more than their predecessors, they have less upwards mobility for today, let alone any potential to invest in assets that afford them any upwards mobility in the future.
But what you are claiming is contradicted by the data you shared. When you weight the categories you listed by how much that age group spends, they still have more money (young people spend much much less on healthcare, you'd be shocked at how little they actually spend. You have to look at out of pocket costs, not provider charges which mostly not paid in full)
It doesn't, and you’re slicing a narrow cohort and using a generic basket. Under-25/25-34 spend a much bigger share on housing, and rents ripped; that combo compresses “real” gains even when wages tick up. If you match the cohort to the basket, the situation looks tighter for young renters. Unless you'd want to come from the position or angle that young people AREN'T renting or buying groceries that these data points support?
I don't think what you're saying is true actually, do you have data? I assume young people actually spend a smaller proportion on rent because older people spend a very large portion (65+ spend around half)
I mean partly, but it's because you’re mixing up aggregate vs within-group numbers. In this BLS table [1], the housing tenure lines do the work: 85% of under-25s rent, 58% of 25-34 rent, and only 22% of 65+ rent, while 53% of 65+ own outright. That’s exactly the exposure I’m talking about: young adults are mostly renters, so the rent surge bites them first.
You're going to have to share with me what that means. Are you using GPT to come to your conclusions? Did you read the BLS table and literally CTRL+F the data percentages I gave?
While correct, CPI-U is still an average. The spending mix of a young adult runs differently, and recent Fed work shows inflation isn’t uniform by group, with younger age groups often higher post-2021. So CPI-adjusted can still overstate how far a young renter’s paycheck goes.
I don't see how. You are engaging in a discussion about what is generally happening, meaning aggregating data is required.
If you want to have a conversation about specific people, then yes, you can find some young renter that is having problems. But that does not make it generally true.
That's because the night starts way earlier than it used to. The data is abundantly clear about that.
Back in my day you didn't even leave home for a night out before 11PM. You couldn't spend that much even if you tried before everything was closed and there was nowhere left to spend. Young people today, on the other hand, are favouring starting the night out in the early evening, even the afternoon.
A night out may cost 5x more, but the same night out doesn't.
The night started as soon as you were able to drink back then. It was college. Some bars had specials starting at 1pm. People would be there with their backpacks on still straight from class. People would get off work and immediately drink. We’d usually be drinking for at least 5 hours before we started crawling bars. On weekends we’d drink literally the entire day. We’d duct tape cases of beer to our chest and wouldn’t remove them until they were all drank or stolen from us.
> The night started as soon as you were able to drink back then.
The drinking started much earlier. Typically you'd drink at home first so that you were already drunk on cheap liquor. Sure, if you had a place nearby that had specials that could compete with the cost of drinking at home, you might opt for that instead, but there is no material difference found in that. What is key here is that people did everything they could to keep the cost down, limiting the high cost experience associated with going out to just a couple of hours before everything closed down.
The "YOLO youth" of today don't care. Some researchers have suggested that because they feel they have no future they have no qualms about spending today, but whatever the exact mechanics of are it is clear that they aren't trying to pinch pennies like previous generations did. They are almost certainly spending 5x more, but that is buying them an entirely different night out as compared to what people were accustomed to in the past. The same night out isn't 5x more expensive. Not in any way, shape, or form.
In 90s in Europe, my socializing was predominantly "walk down to the pedestrian zone and meet your friends for a walk". Not sure how it is there these days - Canadian social life today is indeed highly correlated with movies / restaurants / expenses.
I'm one of the people who do that nowadays (I'm also from Europe). I've friends who find no problem with just sitting in a public park / square, but the amount of other young people I see doing that seems to be going down year by year. Slightly, but steadily. Same with bars, at least in my city, most bars have raised prices significantly due to tourism. Wages for student jobs have gone up (the minimal student wage almost doubled in the last 5 years), but not at the same rate as prices at bars, restaurants, and cinemas.
We have eliminated the ability to discriminate against those displaying anti-social behaviors or commons damaging externalities in the name of fairness, leaving monetary discrimination the only remaining legally viable recourse and are destroying every other form of commons.
It's probably a role that varies by location or group. There are cheaper ways to hangout and be social. A 30pk and garage/basement/woods can usually be had for pretty cheap. College students are notorious for being cheap and also social.
(Scene: People meeting on an "internetscreen" and bs'ing around)
So if any type in just some big names... like that with the madonna true blue CD selling 1986 for US$40,- per CD, how do you think her and the studio label became richier, and specially founding a Copyright-war just after the ridigious pricedrops (around 2001/-2)?
+++
Ask: Do you made the populous take from you?
Mark?
> You virtually starve them doing so.
Oh.
> Muahahaha!
+++
Now let me disturb You,
1st:) You consumed content, you have created content, now the machine kicks in creating content consuming you.
2nd:) Machines programming kicks in while consuming you - just a random guy on the internet said: "App deals are the way to go if you are 'cheap' and wanting to die fast."
Conclusion: Many can't pay for anything anymore, cos no work left via been consumed by AI (-absorbing), so even changed in-app-advertising for "better products" will result in prices no one in the masses may be able to pay anymore. And quality of "food" ('stuff for thought' you may think) needed for experience so (tough capitalistic view, as before in the scene told above) may sank more and more, to meet ends, prices...
And no, it wasn't my intention to write something that damned mixed up dark-and-ugly-thinking...but ...yet i did, or consumed it, hey there it was... and sure, "via easy distractions!" ^^
> Most people can afford grabbing a beer in a supermarket and going to the park.
This is illegal in almost all of the USA. Sometimes you can get away with it, but if the cops decide to enforce the law on a particular day you’ll get a ticket.
These are not made up fears, this is illegal behavior and breaking the law means risking hefty fines and a criminal record. Drinking beer in a park is not worth the possible consequences
It also varies wildly by jurisdiction and local attitudes towards alcohol.
I’ve lived in places where it’s basically tolerated so long as everyone is civil and discrete. I’ve also lived in places where they enforce it to the letter and they’re not messing around.
I think people forget how big and messy the US can be.
You either live in an extremely privileged and wealthy area or have not dealt with US police before. You don't get 25% of the world's prison population by being "quite reasonable"
Oh not my joy, back during Covid I must’ve done this dozens of times over the course of a year so I could hang out with my friends. However I’m pretty sure we only got away with it because cops just weren’t looking at all since aside from us, the park was fully empty.
On the whole I would not use the term “reasonable” to describe police. They’re power tripping infants who love to lord authority over people, and to the extent we get away with things it’s because they’re also lazy.
You might be surprised to learn that many people in public parks are not, in fact, drinking water out of their water bottles or La Croix out of their La Croix cans.
Also, drinking in public is not allowed in much of Europe. Don’t go there and assume it is.
There are also many US locations and parks where alcohol is allowed.
> Also, drinking in public is not allowed in much of Europe. Don’t go there and assume it is.
I live and have traveled a lot around Europe, and have never ran into that rule, but have almost always seen people drinking alcohol in public parks. From what I could find online it's only Norway, Ireland, and perhaps Poland, plus a few places in cities in other countries (Vienna, Milan, Barcelona, Riga...) which is far from "much of Europe".
Drinking in public here in Romania might get you fined, and for sure you’ll be viewed by those around you on the street as either a known-nothing tourist or a degenerate drunkard, or both.
That's only a few people. The culture where there's literally a throng of hundreds of people sitting and drinking in the park on any random Satuday afternoon is very much a European thing.
Edit: Wikipedia page on drinking in public:
"In some countries, such as Norway,[1] Poland,[2] India and Sri Lanka[3][non-tertiary source needed], some states in the United States,[4] as well as Muslim-majority countries where alcohol is legal, public drinking is almost universally condemned or outlawed, while in other countries, such as Denmark, Portugal, Spain, Germany,[5][6] the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Japan, Finland, and China, public drinking is socially acceptable."
Poland lives in the era of fight against pathological alcoholism. With the advent of modern heavy machinery like forklifts (as opposed to truck beds and strong arms and backs), many workplaces became hostile towards alcohol where previously alcohol was just part of workplace culture. This lead to a huge fallout of people who either became functional alcoholic outside of work or became jobless and miserable.
Despite often being against the rules this is absolutely a thing all over Chicago during the warmer months.
Boozy picnics at the beaches, wine in plastic cups at the parks, etc. And fully sanctioned alcohol at the dozens of neighborhood street fests held throughout the year.
And it’s also a thing in suburbia, where backyard coolers full of beer are common at weekend gatherings.
It is definitely a thing here in Louisiana. Drinking in public or while driving is a proud tradition.
Take a trip to New Orleans for the extreme end of it, but we have drive-through Daiquiri shops all over and at least half of the people I grew up with have at least one DUI and I've never thought twice about being outside with a drink in my hand, as rarely as I do drink (I do refuse to drink and drive and am constantly lecturing others about it out here)
where is it illegal in Europe? I've not encountered this yet and I've lived here my whole life. It's always struck me as a weird puritanical American thing
Looked online and found maps suggesting eastern Europe has more laws relating to it, although many of them in practice don't apply
Russians drink anywhere and everywhere. Including cops themselves. Polish and Slovaks too. Ukraine has war related prohibition, other then that? Where exactly eastern is it not allowed (or not completely normalized to the point locals would be surprised there is such law)?
Maybe they just don't follow that law, but public drinking is apparently illegal in Poland, Romania, even some cities in Slovakia apparently. Supposedly the police in Poland take a strict approach? (See wiki article "Drinking in public / By country")
Which "eastern parts"? I've never seen that rule here, but have seen people drinking in public. Do you know that or are you just asking AI to confirm your biases?
Well, at least the Finnish laws against it aren't enforced at all and public drinking is very common. Judging by what I've seen, it seems to be the case in Sweden too.
Replace alcohol with whatever is more culturally appropriate and you can definitely include a strict superset of europe in the statement where it definitely happens. The thing discussed is hanging out, not alcohol.
I would be more concerned about lack of accessible public spaces.
I live in the Midwest US. The city government sponsors floating (as in they move around, not that they're in water) beer gardens across public parks in the summer, and our local Lutheran and Catholic churches will run outdoor beer gardens and barbecues as a way to enjoy the nice weather and bring in a little money. The various state fairs also sell beer, and a local outdoor, public music festival goes through a staggering amount of alcohol consumed in public.
People are out in public, often with the authorities around, drinking beer and mixed drinks out of clear plastic cups (usually) and nobody cares. It's just a summer thing.
* Drinking in public is illegal (strictly enforced)
* Drinking in public is illegal (give cops discretion to arrest intoxicated troublemakers who are hollering, pestering people, or otherwise engaging in mild antisocial behavior)
We’re also talking about our perception of the law here, not the actual thing. So, the third case might include people that are worried (justifiable or both) that they’ll be more likely to get the bad side of that discretion.
Barton Springs in Austin is always brimming with people and Shiner Bock makes a frequent appearance.
Dolores Park in SF never has a dull moment and you can buy shrooms or edibles from vendors walking around.
Golden Gate Park in SF is massive and there are tons of clusters of people socializing and drinking throughout the park (especially near the Conservatory of Flowers!)
Central Park in NY in many ways mirrors Golden Gate Park only its way busier. Good luck finding a spot near the south side of the park on a sunny day. You might spot a mimosa or two, three…
Life is about gathering resources and using them to reproduce. Humans like being social because for thousands of years it was more efficient to do that socially. Nowadays it's not.
My point more broadly is that it doesn’t make sense to frame this as merely a matter of efficiency, nor was my claim that one can just ignore efficiency.
Humans need a variety of things to live happy lives. Strong social connection is as important as food in the long run when considering the overall health and survival of the species.
Clearly not everyone has the same access to resources and there’s a spectrum of experiences available as a result. I think this lack of resources at the bottom is an existential risk.
But what I find interesting is that people with resources are just as lonely as people without in many cases. Almost everyone in my extended circles laments the decline of social connection in their lives, and many of these people certainly have the resources.
I think we’ve gotten lulled into a stupor by the social media / internet content drug, and it takes just enough of the edge off of our need for social connection they we don’t properly feed it anymore. In the short term, we kinda survive living “meh” lives. What worries me is the long term impact on social cohesion.
For sure. As others mentioned some locals have gone so far as to make drinking in public illegal.
Now in your example, suppose you’re a lonely stranger. Do you just nudge in on a circle with your beer and “Hi I’m Shawa” ?
Your answer may be yes, but in other cultures that’s going to get the police called, or maybe end in a stabbing. Which is why society is in the state it’s in
The same people with who I drink in pubs in other times. Which happens quite frequently because it’s completely legal where I live. Also almost everybody does it.
So nothing extra compared to people who are drinking in pubs.
They go unenforced unless your party looks like a pack of belligerent teenagers. I drink in public all the time. Cops don’t like doing paperwork unless their hand is forced.
You end up on video for drunkenness with police, and assuming they don't shoot you or beat the fuck out of you, the video still ends up on the internet.
The next day at work, you quickly get called in to talk to your manager and HR, and now you have to find a new job.
Time to find a new job! And in this market? Not worth the risk. Now companies are searching for New Hires on social media, and guess what? Your video pops up.
This is why people stay at home. Nobody trusts one another, or most of the institutions.
I was going to disagree with you as that hasn't been my experience, but I think you're actually on to something. The younger generation doesn't drink as much as they used to. I'm sure I would have thought twice about some of the things I did in college if every person present had the potential to film me and post it on the internet, ending my career before it even started. It's better prevention than DARE or prohibition could ever be- the risk of having one single mistake recorded and available for everyone to see for the rest of your life.
> Bullshit. Most people can afford grabbing a beer in a supermarket and going to the park. They just choose not to.
In the UK, most councils have made parks alcohol-free zones. Also, the parks are only nice about 3 months a year. The rest of the time it's damp and miserable.
Most of the UK has laws or bylaws at least against antisocial drinking e.g. if you're being a twat, violent, homeless, etc you will be asked to pour it out and leave, in incredibly rare cases I guess you might be fined but probably not.
Just having a beer in public at a picnic with friends is fine and is a national pastime.
I go out and do different activities that involve socialization. There are more people than ever going to the climbing gyms, meeting at the hiking trailhead, hanging out in the ski lift lines, and so on. All of the social places I’ve been going and activities I’ve been doing since a teenager are more crowded than ever, at a rate far faster than the local population growth.
Many of the people doing these activities discovers them online or met others to do it online.
I don’t buy the claim that everything social and in-person is in decline.
Though I could see how easy it would be to believe that for someone who gets caught in the internet bubble. You’re not seeing the people out and about if you’re always at home yourself.
You're basically saying that people who aren't social mistakenly view the rest of the world as not social because of their specific experience, but doesn't that effect also cut the other way? You're seeing people being social because you're going to those situations.
But there are time use surveys etc which provide a quantitative view of a lot of people. Because they're voluntary, they can't be a perfect representative sample of the overall population. But I think the broad, systematic view is still the best view we have of the overall trend. Also note that the scale and pace of the trend is slow enough that any individual _can't_ really provide an anecdotal view of it, because their own life is in a different place.
E.g. one source [1]:
> Atalay reports that, between 2003 and 2019, people spent an increasing amount of time alone. Over this 16-year period, the portion of free time people spent alone increased, on average, from 43.5 percent to 48.7 percent, representing an increase of over 5 percentage points.
Any given individual's time-use would probably change over 16 years regardless of what the population-level trends were just because that duration might also be the difference between e.g. being in school vs being married with young children or from being a busy professional to being a retiree.
> You're seeing people being social because you're going to those situations.
No, I’m saying the same social activities are more popular now than they were 10-20 years ago.
I’ve been doing some of the same activities and going on some of the same hikes, bikes, runs, trails, and parks on and off for two decades. The popularity of these activities has exploded.
Even previously hidden trails and hikes are now very busy on Saturdays and Sundays because so many people are discovering them via social media.
If you’re just staying home and consuming doomerism news you’d think everyone else was doing the same.
> Over this 16-year period, the portion of free time people spent alone increased, on average, from 43.5 percent to 48.7 percent, representing an increase of over 5 percentage points.
That’s hardly equivalent to the claim above of a collapse of socialization.
What you're missing is that the activities you're doing were not the activities people were largely doing 10-20 years ago to be social. Going to bars was probably at least 100x more popular than hiking, so even if you see a 10x growth in hiking, if going to bars goes down even 10%, it dwarfs hiking's contribution to overall social activity of the population.
More than half of the office buildings downtown are empty, and the ones that do have something only have a business in a handful of offices on a handful of floors.
Because of that, people started moving away because of lack of nearby jobs.
As people moved away, rents increased in both commercial and residential spaces to cover losses.
Library attendance and checkouts are way down.
Public transportation use is down.
Tax revenue in the city is down, which means less support for public services.
Landlords don't increase rents to "cover losses". That's not a real thing that happens. Rents are set at the market rate, with some variance and time lag for price discovery.
No, that's not how it works. You're just making things up. There's no such thing as a "silent understanding" with a bank. Either that's a covenant in the loan terms or it's not.
I spent 3 years renting a commercial property that subsidized the rest of the property locations. As soon as my business left, the building and rest of the tenants were gone within 3 months.
Cities wax and wane. A commenter a couple posts up in this chain (fwiw, they were arguing on the “there is a decline” side) shared a story with a 5% decrease. That’s not nothing, but it isn’t an extreme decline.
This largely isn't true. If you talk to people who work in nightlife and have for a while, they will tell you that patronage is down significantly over the past couple decades.
If you do actually go to a bar or club, you'll even notice nobody is dancing. People don't even dance anymore.
But if you don't want to believe me, we do actually have statistics. Young people are drinking less than ever and having less sex than ever. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe not, but if people aren't fucking and drinking - why would they be going to bars? To play Scrabble?
What social venues? We don't have clubs anymore. There's no young men's club I can go to like my grandfathers.
Where I'm sitting, there are no social places, just corporate hellscapes. You're correct, mom and pop is gone. But it's replaced by big chains, who want you in and out and give nothing to their community.,
Restaurants, cafes, bars and night clubs, courses, all styles of workout places to name a few.
Personalized and interesting is the name of the name of the game. Big chains have been stagnant or even reducing for a while now here.
There’s also an endless list of non profit organizations where a good cause and the social interactions are the goal.
But I can very much see that the old school genderized social clubs are dying. That niche is dead with our less segregated modern generations, and it is good that it is.
I feel like some of the cultural outrages and doomerism are getting ridiculous. People do not drink as much alcohol as they used to, we are doomed! People actually avoid situation that make them drink and drive, we are doomed! Teenagers have less sex then before, take less drugs, commit less crime, we are doomed!
Cant wait for "kids play less videogames, we are doomed!" round.
The two of you might simply talking about different locations. This article seems very US focused, but in europe third places still exist, and it seems the US is having a severe decline in those.
> I’ve been doing some of the same activities and going on some of the same hikes, bikes, runs, trails, and parks on and off for two decades. The popularity of these activities has exploded.
Ok, interpreting "everything ... is in decline" literally by pointing to specific deviations from the broader trend is pointlessly correct. Lots of activities experience transient surges in popularity.
But also regarding the popularity of hikes/trails etc, for basically the same statistical reasons, how would you distinguish how much of this effect is due to concentration? If people gravitate towards the trails that have high ratings on AllTrails etc, because it's easier to find out about them now, even if the same proportion of the population were hiking, you'd expect to share the trail with more people. Do you ever pick a running route because it's got a lot of popular segments on Strava? Possibly that route is more pleasant than some other streets nearby ... and it's also easier for runners to discover than it used to be. I don't know whether more people are actually running than 15 years ago, but I know I'm running on routes with more other runners.
> That’s hardly equivalent to the claim above of a collapse of socialization.
I do think the overall trend gets both overstated, and also that the impacts on age-bracketed cohorts have been more substantial. Also, the study discussed is stale already and doesn't really cover post-pandemic shifts.
You’re missing the biggest problem with the statistic you quoted: Discussing percentage changes in free time spent seems misleading without also explaining how overall free time has changed. Do people have more free time now? With the rise of remote and hybrid work it’s expected that less time on average would be spent commuting. A percentage change in free time use seems intentionally misleading.
I can't link to specific query results from the American Time Use Survey, but from this page [1], you can check "Avg hrs per day - Socializing and communicating", click "Retrieve Data", then adjust the time range using the dropdowns at the top, to be up to 2003 - 2024. In absolute terms (hours, not percent) there are declines both for the whole period, and from from 2003-2019 (i.e. before the pandemic).
And you can look at the series for "Avg hrs per day for participants - Working at home" and confirm that as expected it is relatively stable through 2019 and jumps in 2020, so the decrease in socializing through 2019 is not about WFH.
>from 43.5 percent to 48.7 percent, representing an increase of over 5 percentage points.
Honestly not that big of a change.
Insofar as people online talk about a big shift towards loneliness, I suspect that Aurornis is correct that self-selection has a lot to do with it.
I wonder if that small change in the average is masking a larger change in the variance. Perhaps we have more hypersocial people and more hyposocial people.
I do also think that any such summary statistic can only show a small part of the picture.
Of the time _not_ spent alone, how much is with a single other person as you look at different screens? Of time spent not alone and outside of the home, how many people are we with at any one time? How many different people do we have social interactions with per month? I.e. is the quality of our social interaction getting worse, are we with smaller groups, do we have sparser social graphs?
I could believe that you're right that the variance has increased, but is that driven by a growing share of shutins who only interact online and who are shifting to LLM friends?
One thing that not enough people realize is that the gap between haves and have-nots widen in almost everything when technology advances, and I don't mean just wealth (that is one too), but also knowledge (LLM/AI widens knowledge gap between the curious and not-curious by a lot), and in this case socialization -- the availability of technology (in both organizing activities like your example and in AI loneliness like the article) widens the socialize and not-socialize people.
In the old days, not-socialize people tend to be forced to socialize anyway; but techonology enables them to not-socialize 99% of time now. Likewise, socialize people needed to put in more effort to socialize in the old days, but now it's easier than ever.
When more people realize this, the discourse should shift from "technology creates this trend" to "technology widens the gap between X and not-X".
> In the old days, not-socialize people tend to be forced to socialize anyway; but techonology enables them to not-socialize 99% of time now. Likewise, socialize people needed to put in more effort to socialize in the old days, but now it's easier than ever.
This is my favorite point from the whole thread.
It has never been easier for someone to stay home, get a remote job, and even order grocery delivery to their door if they want.
A couple of my friends started going down that path unintentionally. Once you have a well paying remote job and your city makes it easy to get groceries and food delivered, combined with the infinite availability of entertainment on Netflix or from games, social skills and relationships can start to atrophy rapidly.
It’s even worse for people who never had much of a social life. When there are so many paths forward to continue avoiding a social life, it takes a lot of effort to break free and change your routines.
Depends on where you live. Areas that have a culture of outdoor activity and strangers talking to one another is a requirement. Here in MN, for example, outdoor activity does exist year round but strangers talking to one another is not.
People who live on the internet assume this is true because they only deal with people who also live on the internet. Just because we're not all documenting everything that we do to a nebulous public doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Much of what happens in the social world isn't articulated or available for scientific study. You might be surprised to know that bars, clubs, gyms, concerts, trivia nights aren't empty. "In decline" is the sort of state that's can only be articulated in abstract terms. Stop rationalizing your loneliness as a societal ill. Getting to know people is your problem and society offers many solutions.
> In the UK, for example, there's a well documented trend of pubs and clubs shutting as business declines.
Just to be clear, this is a sign of a cultural shift. Pubs are an old English tradition that people aren't interested in as much anymore. They would rather go to a sushi restaurant or go get curry. Same thing has happened with fish and chips shops.
Pubs and clubs are declining due to a cultural shift amongst the young. Alcohol isn't cool for the younger generations and a larger cohort of young people can be found in the gym and running around than ever before.
If I was an investing man I'd stick all of my money into Garmin, running shoe companies, gyms and the like.
I’d like to offer an alternative explanation than AI to this. Shit is just too damn expensive. If you want to go hang out with friends it will cost you $4-8 for a cup of coffee. A dinner starts at $50/person. A trip to an amusement park is over $100 easily. The median individual income in the US currently is just over $65k/year or about $32.50/hour. That means half the workforce makes less than that. When an 8oz cocktail costs you an hour of your life because you work for minimum wage, you’d rather stay home and watch TikTok.
But it’s not about the price of going out. It is about the crushing stress of surviving in this economic climate that is leaving people absolutely no energy to go and socialize. Whenever the average personal economy swings back towards “can afford to live in this country” again, people will socialize again. Until then everything will be in decline except stock trading and investment in AI projects.
In my state is the federal minimum of $7.25/hr. You're looking at two hours of work for one cocktail.
And my state is addicted to alcohol. The overwhelming majority of people I know in this state won't even meet up with you if there's not a beer waiting for them. People work all week and then spend half their paycheck in one night, then rinse, wash, repeat.
I consider the state of affairs here to be nothing short of abject poverty.
I look around at the declining, unmaintained infrastructure, I hear youth talk about how so many establishments have closed and how if you don't have money there is nothing to do, and you get harassed at parks (I have personally had the police pull up and accost me for just existing at a park) so the only thing left to do is get into mischief, unless you just don't want social contact with your peers. I tell people it looks and feels worse than post-Soviet Eastern Europe out here in Louisiana.
This idea of pretending that your only option is $15 cocktails really makes this argument look lame. Not to mention that the federal minimum wage is basically irrelevant in most places - where I live starting entry level pay at McDonald's is $17/hr.
Cocktails were expensive when I was young, too. We just hardly ever drank them. We went to the liquor store and bought the cheapest shit we could that probably had a 50/50 chance of making us go blind.
The beers here are $5-12 per beer if you go out. All I did was describe factual information: my local minimum wage, how things to do that don't cost money and are accessible to the average youth here are becoming increasingly rare, how much it costs to drink vs. minimum wage. None of this is an argument, it's a fact.
And yes I know, people could and should be more frugal: I only even drink more than single cocktail at a time 0-3 times a year on average, so my personal financial frustrations lie elsewhere. I guess it's just important because we're comparing lifestyles from different points in history, and in the old days, going out drinking with your pals was a cheaper affair, and it still is the usual activity chosen for socializing where I live.
The margaritas at the places I go to are often $3 for a large. Lots of places will have cheap "domestic" beers for $2. Fancy craft beers can be had for $7-10. And that's after COVID price hikes. Less than a decade ago I'd get $2 craft pints often if you knew where to go.
I'm in one of the largest metros in the US.
Yes, there are plenty of places that will charge $12 for a beer. I don't go there. I can get the same beer cheaper down the street and have a more entertaining crowd.
I don't live in one of the largest metros in the US, and we don't have many places like that. There are none that I know of. Not every place is the same.
Things were better pre-COVID, I had a spot I could get $2 pitchers of bud and 50 cents an oyster on Monday nights at a local watering hole. Weekends, not so much, you get overcharged. But, COVID did away with that and now my city is almost as expensive as major metros in California while having absolutely none of the benefits those cities offer.
Who cares what the federal minimum wage is if anyone who walks in to get a job at McDonald's can make twice as much? Who cares if beers are $5-12 at some places if they're much cheaper elsewhere?
The entire point I was making, and the which you are trying to deny by your argument (you may have quoted some factual info, but you're putting it together to make a specific argument to back up your opinion), is that it's actually not that hard to go out and entertain yourself, in person, with friends, for cheap or free.
> Who cares what the federal minimum wage is if anyone who walks in to get a job at McDonald's can make twice as much?
You need to read more carefully and make less assumptions. My state has no minimum wage. We never gave up slavery, instead becoming a prison state with more prisoners per capita than any single country in the world. We only have an effective minimum wage because of the federal minimum wage. You walk into McDonald's here without experience and you're getting paid $7.25. McDonald's does not do twice that much here.
> The entire point I was making, and the which you are trying to deny by your argument (you may have quoted some factual info, but you're putting it together to make a specific argument to back up your opinion), is that it's actually not that hard to go out and entertain yourself, in person, with friends, for cheap or free.
I'm aware you'd like to make that point, and while focusing on this is moving goalposts/ceding parts of your argument, it's still entirely ignoring everything I explained to you.
I barely drink, and my girlfriend and I do all sorts of things that are cheap or free in addition to things that aren't. But that is not the culture in my state. The entire state suffers from alcoholism, and traditional third spaces are harder and harder to come by. The average person simply does not do anything other than go out and drink and eat. Ask anyone who lives here. It's a seriously depressing state of affairs and for most people, there is not another solution waiting. It's self-reinforcing; I just made plans to catch up with an old high school buddy and the only way I'm going to be able to do that is by meeting him somewhere for some drinks and going to see a movie. And all of his friends are the same, and once most of your friends are at the bar, why wouldn't you be? Almost all of us have been bartenders at one point or another. One of my friends even bought a bar in order to provide a third space to our community (we come from a small town and we all know each other).
My girlfriend and I wanted to go swimming two weekends ago. We tried going to the local community center's swimming pool, but it's now closed indefinitely because some black kids broke in just to swim, but one of them had a weapon on them, presumably for protection (my city floats around the top 5 highest homicide rates in the US[0]) and so the racist community center operators took it as an excuse to close the pool indefinitely and temporarily shut down another of the very few third spaces we have.
Instead, my girlfriend and I had to rent a hotel room just to use their pool for the evening.
The bottom line is you are not from here, you have no idea what it's like living in Louisiana, and you frankly have no idea what you are talking about. Instead, you should listen to what I'm trying to explain to you about an extremely dire, worsening situation that is continuing to erode whatever sense of community we have left here. And it's no accident, this is engineered by an owner class interested in squeezing every last nickel and drop of blood out of our citizenry.
The wealth gap here is just frightening, we're running out of places to go, and the average social pipeline for inner-city youth here typically involves committing crimes and putting yourself in danger. Especially when there are purposefully designed prison funnels intended to bring in profit for the private prison industry and businesses that exploit cheap inmate labor instead of providing those jobs to free citizens.
Consider yourself blessed and privileged to not understand what it's like here.
I worked at McDonald's in the 1980s. Started at $3.25/hr never made more than about $5/hr before I moved on. Cocktails at a bar were about the same price relative to that as they are now. We drank the cheapest swill beer they had on draft. It was about being there with your friends, not drinking some froo-froo cocktails.
My take on this: life is actually a lot harder for young people than when we were kids. There is less opportunity for upwardly mobile advancement, and social media has essentially wrecked people's brains (adults included). I complained that I think it's sad that a lot of young people don't just see "going over to friends' houses to hang out" as a primary option - it just doesn't occur to a lot of young people, but in many respects a lot of them never learned this skill as kids. Tons of studies have shown kids have a lot less "unstructured play" time than they used to.
But then given that stuff is actually harder, I think blaming "stuff is just too expensive" is simply easier. Otherwise it forces you to confront the fact that a lot of this stuff is in your control.
Again, I have to chuckle when I hear these excuses. When I was young in mid 90s we would all pile in to someone's 400 square foot studio apartment.
I'm not blaming young people today for not seeing this as an option. But it is the case that lots of folks have/had a lot less space and didn't see that as any barrier to hanging out.
So many excuses. You don't even need someone with an apartment. Just pick an out of the way location and converge. Went to many a party back in the day out on an untraveled road. We didn't even have mobile phones to coordinate.
In high school we regularly threw 100+ person parties under bridges and along the river, in random lots, wherever we could, really. However, it required a lot of coordination and trust between a lot of people to avoid surprise police encounters, and the local police personally had me and some of my associates on their shitlist which further complicated things. It was an environment I thrived in, but I wouldn't want my child to have to encounter the same level of risk and paranoia just to hang out with their friends.
I hear you, the police were often an issue once the party got to a certain size. But throwing a rager will always have some risk, and seems far beyond just hanging out with friends.
Does working at McDonalds for $17 pay the rent/bills and still give you enough spending money to live a decent lifestyle?
I make $20/h as a cleaner but after bills etc, I don’t have the money for fun events, dining out or socializing beyond hanging out on discord and playing games.
Thank you so much for this comment, because it perfectly highlights the point I was trying to make.
When I was a young person in the mid 90s, I (and most of my friends) made the equivalent or less of what you make now. But we also didn't have discord or Internet multiplayer games, so we were basically forced to go hang out in person and find other cheap stuff to do.
You have to take into account the fact that rent and other necessities have exploded in relative cost.
In the eighties I might save up months or even 1-2 years for a nice television set, but my rent/mortgage, food, etc. was relatively inexpensive. Now, I can go buy 15-20 decent televisions a month for the same amount it costs me to pay my rent or mortgage here on a 0-2 bedroom place, and I live in a shithole backwoods state, not San Francisco.
> In the eighties I might save up months or even 1-2 years for a nice television set
I remember times from the late 80s and early 90s where my parents would have to save up to repair the VCR, or that time we had to get the PC Monitor repaired; back then the 100-200$ in repair costs was way cheaper than 'buying a new one'.
First house I rented starting in 2007 was 500 a month [0]. Our first Flatscreen TV that we got in 2008 was somewhere between 700-800$ (37 inch 720p).
Then, in 2015 I bought a 40(?) inch 4K tv to celebrate a promotion for myself. Since that was the 'new-ish tech' I spent about 500$, vs the 425$/mo I was paying for a room that could barely fit a Queen bed in a 'shared household' [1]
In 2017, I was able to rent an 800 sq foot apartment for I think about 900$ a month. The 50 inch 1080P TV for the living room was somehow only 200$ tho, I guess that was a plus...
... As an odd contrast to the thought about repairing versus replacing earlier... a colleague recently asked me for some advice; His wife's iPhone screen was cracked. He was wondering of good shops to check out, because the labor cost in the US dwarfs the shipping cost of him sending it back to India and having family get it fixed there and shipping back to the US.
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I think COVID really fucked a lot up in the US, vis a vis the unemployment stimulus. People got 600$ a week on top of normal state unemployment; I remember White Castle was offering 15$/hr base (I say that because some fast food restaurants would say '15/hr' with a little star saying that was only for management/etc) to get workers in the door.
I suppose it was an interesting experiment in trying out UBI, on one hand people seemed 'happier', on the other hand it probably contributed to the influencer epidemic since suddenly a bunch of people had nothing better to do.
I also think at least in the US, the fast whiplash of interest rates has had a profound impact on a lot of companies balance sheets and pricing in some cases has been adjusted to avoid borrowing more money or pay off existing debts.
It also provided terrible signalling/forecasting for manufacturers of certain goods; I know specifically for vehicles, far too many people just went along with stupid 'market adjustments' from dealers because the at or near 0% financing 'softened the blow'. Then the manufacturers themselves decided they wanted more of that pie and started raising prices too... Or at best bought into the 'look at EV Margins' while forgetting the point that EV prices need to drop for mass adoption.
There's also the challenge of this 3.5+ year Russian invasion shitshow; It puts an impact on a lot of pricing both directly (e.x. grain but also wiring harnesses for cars, go figure) and indirectly (countries having to send support, even if frequently half-assed and thus prolonging the problem, that diverts money from other things.)
And we haven't even gotten into the impact on tariffs yet... not really anyway...
[0] - Although, that was at a bit of a 'discount' since the landlord knew us for years and that we would be good tenants. Also that 800 sq foot house ironically cost more to heat in the winter than any other place I lived since...
[1] - Other people in the house later informed me I was paying 200$/mo more than them for less space than they got, so not that good a deal TBH, but was cheaper than other options...
Interesting anecdata, thanks for sharing that. I'll contribute some as well.
I paid $700 for a two-story, 2bed/2bath unit in a quadplex in 2013 in this city. Last year, when I moved back, I was paying $750 for a tiny 400sqft studio apartment the size of my old apartment's living room.
My landlord was lagging on getting me my new lease to sign for another year. Turns out, I was a bargaining chip. A new landlord just bought the building at the beginning of this year and raised the rent to $850, out of the blue a month before my old lease expired. This was a ~13% sudden increase in expenses, and we do not have rent control.
He said, and I quote, "I like the community you have helped build here[0], I don't want everyone to run off, so I don't want to increase rent too high, too fast." (He wanted to boil the frog)
Our immediate response was to find a home in our neighborhood and purchase it. The median price is around $380-550k in this neighborhood, and that nets you almost no yard and maybe 700-1800sqft in living space on average. This is the oldest neighborhood in the city. It has a long, colorful history, and was originally settled by ex-slaves.
Today, when a home goes on the market in this neighborhood, it is usually snapped up by either private equity or rent-seeking landlords within 1-2 weeks, renovated and either flipped for way more to a gentrifying population, or most-often leased out to younger people who are then priced out of owning their own property.
We found one which was considerably cheaper than the average, but have to put in about $50k worth of work for it to be up to code, fix the foundation, the roof, completely rewire the home, repairing and refinishing the floors, repainting, and more. It's a great home, a good deal for the area, but it is very old, badly-maintained and has a lot of serious problems.
And much of this has to be done now, right after purchasing and before we can even move in, for safety and practical and scheduling reasons, and also because our insurance suddenly dropped us without warning until we prioritize the $13k in electrical work that needs to be done, meaning we have to also maintain rent and utilities at another dwelling while also paying this mortgage and tens of thousands to contractors.
This, in addition to the large up-front deposit for such a large home price, and an insane mortgage rate, means we are paying an exorbitant amount of money, over half a million dollars to own a home in a shithole, run-down state with zero economic opportunities, compared to the local median wage. This kind of money would have bought you a small mansion out here when I was younger.
A few years ago, I moved into a neighborhood in Fort Worth. I couldn't find a house with a reasonable mortgage, almost none for sale at all, and so I rented a home instead through a corporate property management company. The sinking foundation was causing the roof to cave in and there were humongous cracks across every wall and ceiling. The fan was so loud it sounded like you were next to a jet, and there was a huge lack of insulation in the walls. The roof needed replacing. There was water damage. There were a million other issues with the place, and all in all it was a dump which I should have been able to buy for a great price if it was on the market and not being used as an investment vehicle for private equity.
I appraised all of the issues and offered to buy the place from them at a reasonable value. They wouldn't even entertain the conversation, even though I persisted. Resigned, I finally forced them to carry out the repairs anyway after making arguments about it being uninhabitable and not even close to being worth the $1800 a month in rent. They probably spent $30k repairing the foundation alone. They also replaced A/C components, replaced the roof, landscaped, did a bunch of other things. All the while refusing to just sell me the place and let me fix it up and live in it. I'm sure they put it back on the market for even more after I left.
It sure feels like late-stage capitalism is progressively getting harder to prop up. And we're seeing that it only accelerates at the very end, with a far-right, populist sentiment sweeping the globe under the guise of economic redemption, and the accompanying policies having disastrous economic effects on the middle and lower classes.
[0] I got two other people to move into other units, and am long-time friends with another dweller, and have made an effort to meet the other tenants and establish some level of social interaction between us
We also lived with roommates in small shitbox apartments. Very basic, old appliances. Cheap shag carpet. No other real amenities. We'd still have friends over to just hang out, drink some beer, play card games, listen to music, stuff like that. Didn't have to be anything fancy, in fact it almost never was. Just being together was the point.
> If you want to go hang out with friends it will cost you $4-8 for a cup of coffee. A dinner starts at $50/person. A trip to an amusement park is over $100 easily. The median individual income in the US currently is just over $65k/year or about $32.50/hour. That means half the workforce makes less than that. When an 8oz cocktail costs you an hour of your life because you work for minimum wage, you’d rather stay home and watch TikTok.
These comments are so strange to read. There’s an entire world of people out there doing things and socializing without buying cocktails or $100 amusement park tickets to do it.
You don’t need to pay anything more than what it takes to get you to someone else or a common meeting spot like a walk through the park.
In the fitness world there’s a never ending stream of people who complain that they want to get in shape but can’t afford a $100/month gym membership. When you explain to them that the $20/month budget gym is fine or you can buy some $30 quality running shoes on clearance, they either disappear or get angry because you’ve pierced their excuse for avoiding the activity. I tend to see something similar when you explain that you don’t need to buy $8 coffees or $100 amusement park tickets to socialize with people.
> You don’t need to pay anything more than what it takes to get you to someone else or a common meeting spot like a walk through the park.
You also need somone to go take that walk with you and the social skills to organize it
Yes, it is possible to hangout without spending money. That said, the kind of activities it tends to be easier to get people to agree to go do also tend to cost money. As those activities cost more and more, that decreases the amount of socialization that happens. Sure, some of that shifts to lower cost activities and perhaps that shift increases over time as culture changes. That doesn't mean that rising prices don't explain some of the measured decrease in social activity.
I agree with this wholeheartedly, but those 100$ amusement parks have a lot of budget to advertise and make it seem like they’re the only place to go on your free time.
No body is putting up billboards for silent reading clubs so they get drowned out making it appear as if those options aren’t there. Advertising works.
> It is about the crushing stress of surviving in this economic climate that is leaving people absolutely no energy to go and socialize.
The past 2-years have been some of the most difficult of my life (for a number of non-work reasons). After work, family, and household tasks, I have often been left with little energy in the evenings (and no real desire to socialize). And yet, as a part of a church men's group I attend weekly, I have had the opportunity to engage with others going through similar things. How do I know that they are going through similar things? Because it's come out when as I've consistently engaged with the same group of people.
It's very easy when you're tired and stressed to “turtle” and internalize everything; I've done it more times than I can count. And yet this is the time when I most need others. These guys are not in my friends group, and yet the struggles (and successes) that are shared are sometimes more than I hear from close friends. The result of hearing others' struggles is the realization that a) I am not the only one going through hard stuff, and b) focusing on others' struggles makes dealing with my own easier.
“Socializing” with others may cost money, but connecting with them doesn't have to: I spend $0/week meeting the guys in my group for an hour or two. In reflecting on my own attitudes towards socializing in the past, I've come to realize that it can be very self-focused: How can _I_ feel better? How can _I_ have fun? What can _I_ get out of going out?
I am, by no means, the arbiter of selflessness (not even close, ha!), but I have learned that connecting with others' with their good in mind has had the incredible effect of giving me energy where there was very little before.
I don't buy this explanation. There are plenty of things you can do together that don't cost very much - or anything at all. You can go take a hike. You can go to the park and hang out, or play a board game. You can go to a court and play pickleball. Heck, go to the library! All these things are free and many people do them.
Or even just...call a friend for a chat. Few people are interested in that these days. A few decades ago, you'd even see media where people were chatting on house phones so much that different people in one house would fight over the phone. "Get off the phone" used to mean "stop talking to your friend on the phone."
Here's an article from 1999[1]:
> Although you may think your parents are unreasonable when they tell you to get off the phone after you've "only" been talking two hours, it doesn't have to turn into a big blow-up.
It honestly feels like a lot of people are trying to find excuses to be anti-social these days.
That's another thing. People have less in common with each other than they used to. People consume different media, pursue different specialized careers, and so on.
In conjunction with the fact that people (or bots) you do share interests with are available in a second with the device in your pocket. Such as posting here.
I totally agree, though I'd like to frame OP's argument a little differently in a way that makes more sense I think.
I agree the "shit is just too expensive" is a pretty lame excuse. I think to back when I was a poor ballet dancer around college age, and we always found lots of cheap things to do - a lot of it was like you said, usually just going over to people's houses to hang out, or doing stuff in the city that was cheap or free. Going out to restaurants was a rare treat, and it was almost always a cheap dive place. I had to laugh about the comment about the expense of "8 oz cocktails" - we weren't drinking cocktails, we were drinking 6 packs of Natty Light in someone's studio apartment.
But what I think has changed is that it's so much easier to not be bored with modern tech, even if it makes you lonely. There is TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, multiplayer gaming, etc. It's just a lot easier to sit at home with these kinds of entertainment, so the "activation energy" required to go get up and plan things with friends just feels a lot higher.
> It's just a lot easier to sit at home with these kinds of entertainment, so the "activation energy" required to go get up and plan things with friends just feels a lot higher.
Ding ding ding!
> There is TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, multiplayer gaming, etc.
With the one caveat that 'multiplayer gaming' can indeed be a proper socialization experience if you're playing with friends/etc (vs say just YOLOing in something like FPS lobbies etc.)
Or, at bare minimum, it's still more effort than the other options you mention.
In the last few weeks I've tried to be extra mindful about being more 'interactive' with other things in my free time. It's shocking how easy it gets to just fall into a Youtube video rabbit hole. It reinforces how sad I get about my partner's constant scrolling through Facebook.
Heck even now I feel guilty about just doing HN, on the other hand I am still recovering from a good proper bike ride this morning so I guess there's that.
You also can't separate the social media part of this. An expensive cocktail is a cool social media post, Natty light is not.
It is just a much more postmodern world than when I was young. There is a whole level of digital simulation on top of the activity that I never had to think about. The post about the expensive cocktail is the real social activity now.
We may as well be comparing dating on tinder to a rural barn dance in the 1950s. Technology has moved faster than our language as these aren't even the same activities but the words are the same. "Dating", "socializing".
Gas costs money. The car costs money. You can only do the same hike that's an hour away so many times, before you're traveling to go to new places, and hotels cost money at that point. Pickleball courts cost money. The pickleball equipment costs money. People do go to the library, and then they go home and don't interact with other people.
Then go for a walk in the closest park instead of a hike an hour away.
Play volleyball on the free net at the local park instead of signing up for pickleball and buying great.
The people who want to avoid activities and socialization will always pick the more expensive activities so they can dismiss them. Yet go into the real world and people have no problem finding ways to socialize and have fun without spending much money.
That’s unfortunate. Generally the poles are metal and permanent. It’s common for people to bring their own net when they bring their own ball. A basic net is cheap
Gas is at worst 6 bucks a gallon, which gets you 30 miles on a bad car. That’s enough for like 5 hikes; if you can’t afford a single dollar split across all your friends for multiple hours of entertainment and exercise then I do concede that you are in a bad spot; but I think most of us are not quite so destitute. (Also, my friends and I do the same hikes all the time.)
Pickleball courts do not cost money, they are freely provided by the state. I go to free pickleball courts every week in SF, and I bike there for free. You can buy 4 paddles for $20 at sports basement and get literally hundreds if not thousands of hours of entertainment just on that.
I dunno, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for this perspective. Almost everything I do with friends isn’t particularly expensive - if you can’t find cheap things to do you just aren’t even looking.
The fact that many young people don't seem to think that "Hey, we'd just go over to someone's apartment/house to hang out and have a meal or drink" as a primary form of entertainment (vs. some "activity") makes me realize how much we have fucked over many young people as a society in general.
I did that as a kid and I loved it, but it made sense when everyone was in bicycling distance.
Then one by one, we got cars and the friend groups shuffled from "Who is in bicycling range" to "Who is in driving range", and driving range is so big that it's not practical to drive 4 miles to my closest friend, knock on her door, hope she isn't having sex with her husband, and ask if she wants to chill
> and driving range is so big that it's not practical to drive 4 miles to my closest friend, knock on her door, hope she isn't having sex with her husband, and ask if she wants to chill
Does she not have a phone? Calling someone up and saying "hey, let's hang out" and then driving over to hang out was literally how most of suburban social interactions happened in the 90s.
I don't think the issue is that they are naive or lack social skills, I think they just choose against it, and then lie about the motivation for their choice. It's all over this thread: "No time and no money!" But you know it's false. I think they know it's a lie too they just don't want to admit to themselves and others that they like TikTok more than people. Being a lame couch potato is socially acceptable if and only if you connect it to the big class-based social cause. They relished in the COVID lockdowns for similar reasons.
This is true where I live also. This feral subset of the homeless are ruining every nice public space that we used to have. Libraries, parks, trails. Patience and tolerance is wearing thin; everything that is tried to help them is just abused and shit on (often literally). More and more people are starting to say no, we don't want to tolerate this behavior here, if that's how you want to live then do it somewhere else.
If my fellow Americans hated the rich people that are responsible for all of these homeless individuals half as much as they do said homeless then American wouldn't be half as fucked as it is right now.
The homeless problem is all downstream of shit like the Sacklers pushing opioids and creating millions of addicts for profit. Yet they avoided jail and even can start up new businesses.
My nihilism is exacerbated by the people who are actively making the problem worse and viciously attacking anyone who criticizes the problem or proposes solutions.
IMO some activists are exploiting homeless people and drug addicts for power and profit.
You are right, the people being exploited are human beings, and rather than working to end the suffering, some people end up prolonging the suffering and creating more of it, because fixing problems ends the flow of funds and power.
You aren't refuting what I am saying, you only seem to justify corruption and incompetence because the apparent intention is noble.
What I'm saying is whatever "activists" are doing or saying is often an excuse for others to continue to ignore the ugly problem. This is not limited to one locality.
What I am interested in is long term support and funding for workable, humane solutions.
These things require bipartisan support at the state and federal level (rooting out many of the causes and aiding homeless prevention), and I'm pretty sure that's fucking toast.
What I am saying is is there is part of the activist movement (at the top) that is either incompetent or corrupt and have no interest in solving problems efficiently and often make them worse, because the incentives are not aligned. Problem solving would cut off revenue and salaries.
A side note, but I don't think all homeless are helpable. Some just have some kind of self-destruction about them and are beyond helping, unless they really want to start living differently. I personally know one such guy - a combination of bad upbringing, big ego, a defiant character (that got him fired from every job) has set him on a path that ultimately made his own family kick him out to the streets.
There's a lot of this. Seattle's main library was explicitly built with the awareness that libraries are one of the few places homeless people can get out of the weather for a while, and has an entire floor full of public-use computers with a lot of pointers to what little social safety net remains.
The depressing part isn’t that it’s happening, but that it continues to occur despite objections, because the “progressive” activists shame any objects and stop any plans or discourse to rectify the problem.
The activists should be blamed for causing disruption at the local level for a problem that can only be solved at the federal level.
There isn’t a thing Seattle can do to fix drug addiction/mental health/housing costs (it will remain a high priced local for the foreseeable future). So why should the people of Seattle fall on their sword because the rest of the country won’t get their act together?
In fact, the rest of the country loved that activists in certain cities take on the brunt of the problem, as it lowers their costs.
What do you propose locally instead of "falling on the sword"? Unless the city council purposely makes the library a drug den there is no easy cheap solution. Especially since the symptoms are an indication of a malfunctional city in the first place in which I wouldn't trust them with some sort of radical endouver.
Coal miners in 1890s appalachia had healthier and more active social lives than american white collar workers. This does not have anything to do with economics.
I am not saying you are wrong but from what I understood that alcoholism and depression were quite prevalent in those times. Do you have sources for what you are saying?
I was just using coal miners in Appalachia as a widely known example of poor people. I’m not familiar with those specific folks, but from personal experience, fisherman in Oregon, immigrant service workers in Queens, and farmers in Bangladesh have active social lives. My aunt and uncle live in Canadian high-rise housing projects and they have multiple large gatherings every week.
Aside from the drinking, what is wrong with the social activity you just mentioned? Or was your point that they only used it as an excuse to drink? Cause it would have surely been easier & cheaper to just drink at home on their own.
It's hollow and doesn't lead to any kind of friendship or bond. You might as well walk around blazed out of your mind and saying hello to everyone you pass on the street. It feels friendly but no connections are made.
I don't think leading to long term connections (although a big bonus) is a requirement for socialization to be positive. The alternative we discuss in this context is to being home alone.
But then, what is really the difference between chatting with a person on the street without a connection, vs an LLM without a connection? I guess I've had enough of the former to value it not much differently.
Whenever I visit a “chatty” country like the US or UK I enjoy the small talk and casual chit-chat and really miss it in grumpy and silent Central Europe :)
My dad grew up in a village in Bangladesh with no electricity, no telephones, little modern medicine. He remembers his childhood as a happy one, even though one in every four kids died before age 5. He’s materially better off in every way here in the U.S. But as to the specific point being discussed here, he had a richer social life with more and more frequent contact with friends and family than most americans I know.
The 1890s were the launching point for widespread unionization among coal miners in places like my home-state of Kentucky. Company towns were increasingly common, and major motivations for unionization were to combat things like being paid in company skrip or letting neighborhood kids ("breaker boys" as young as 8) work in the mines. Their social lives--from their neighborhood, to their social "clubs", to the literal currency they were able to use--were entirely defined by their job and the company they worked for.
Tough to use them as proof that this "doesn't have anything to do with economics" when their entire social life was defined by the economics of coal mining.
Unless socialization activities like bars or athletics are major outliers, it seems likely that in income-relative terms, the average American has much cheaper access to social activities.
(Unrelated, but if you squint at that chart you can see why Trump got elected, almost & then actually reelected.)
That graph starts 70 years after the aforementioned coal miner scenario...
And yes, in the 1800s housing was comparatively cheap because land was close to free and you built your own home. Same goes for booze and venues to drink it because you made your own and there was zero regulation.
Today everyone is being choked by the relatively high cost of real estate (inflation looks ok because we have cheap durable goods like electronics). The death of 3rd spaces is well documented.
Oh, I missed that you didn't use a number divided by expenses because I just assumed you'd use a relevant number. And "real" income isn't great because again, tons of durable goods are incredibly cheap these days, but real estate/food and drink isn't.
Absolute numbers are completely worthless because of the price level of the goods we're talking about in the first place. They could make a dollar a week and it's fine if a drink costs a penny and housing is free, for the purposes of this discussion.
Price level aka inflation of real estate and drinks/food is literally the most relevant number here.
Edit - I did some napkin maths. A beer in 1890 was about 3 times cheaper than today relative to income, assuming Google's numbers are somewhat accurate.
Also, anecdotally, food and drink in North America are expensive. We have a second home in Czech Republic, and beer is about 4-5x cheaper there than in Canada, while incomes are only about 30% less, and for young people the gap is even less.
I went to dinner with a friend last night and my meal was $22. I go to lunch with coworkers and often only spend ~$15-ish.
One also doesn't need to do activities that cost money in order to hang out with people one knows. Get together and play board games or cards. I hung out with my friends last weekend - we brought our records over and DJ'd, someone brought some frozen burgers, I supplied some THC tincture I've had for months, another person brought a cheap bottle of wine they also already had. We had a blast for like seven hours.
And that’s my second point. Even if you do things that don’t cost money, the stress of living paycheck to paycheck is going to sap any will to live from most people experiencing it.
Yup! We went walking through a nearby nature preserve, then went to a fast-casual poke spot. $16 for a large bowl (damn tasty, too!) and a can of green tea, plus 10% tip. It's Oregon, so no tax.
This isn't really borne out by the statistics. Real median personal income has been trending up for a century now, the longest dips (before an upwards trend would ensue) were periods of 5 years of mild deterioration. [0]
It also doesn't sit well with my personal anecdata. My life and that of my friends is way better than their parents. I've literally travelled to all major continents in the world for recreational travel by the time mom had only left her village at around 20 years old, for example.
Cocktails is just an absurd standard for anything. It's the one item you can buy that is completely and utterly divorced from its costs, its price is a function of how rich people are that this thing is being sold, not how expensive it is to produce a cocktail. 2 cents of sugar and 30 cents of liquor and $15 of branding being sold for $15.50 doesn't mean life is expensive, it means people in this neighbourhood are pretty rich and can throw away money. My mom literally has never had a cocktail in her life yet has had a very socially rich life.
Yesterday I spent the day with my brother, we rented a car for $50, drove to another town, had some sandwiches and drinks, we spent $100. Today a friend is coming over to my house and I'll pour him a 20 cent coffee and I'll probably make a snack as well, then we'll go for a walk around town while catching up, maybe grab a $2 beer from the supermarket and some fruit and sit by the water. Total cost <$10 for 6 hours of hanging out for two people. You make about $20 in a supermarket per hour here, so we'd have made $240 of wages in the same six hours. These experiences are mostly similar for me and just as fun, the cost factor is purely a choice. If I didn't have any money they'd all be cheap.
> I think most people dont meet in houses anymore.
Even if that was true (no data offered), that's a choice, not some kind of economic inevitability...
And again even if it was true, no it's not because of roommates, the number of people per household has gone down over time, not up, for decades.
And no it's also not because we live in smaller homes, the average size of homes has gone up also, for decades. We now have about 2.5x more square footage per-person in our homes than 50 years ago.
And we all know that are homes are way more equipped with entertainment than ever before (internet with the world's content at our fingertips, home cinema, home libraries, home music sets etc).
As for the 600k FAANG, I've never earned more than 100k, never worked in tech, and grew up on welfare. I've been a bottom 10% of the economic ladder for about 80% of my life, and a top 10% (not top 0.1%) for about 20% of my life. Regardless of background, I think we can speak about facts borne out by the data.
This excuse is so tiresome. Generations before you lived through far worse than whatever supposed hell you doom scrolled your way into believing. The world is literally better than it’s ever been. Go experience it instead of complaining about vibes.
The world might be better than it has been throughout most of history, but the trend seems to be pointing downward, and to me it seems like we are steering towards several tipping points (or cliffs, phrased more dramatically), and the people in power seem to have little interest in changing course.
This drags me down immensely, even though economically, I am doing alright.
It seems like short/mid term economy/GDP is all that governments are optimizing for - actual well-being of the average citizen seems pretty far down on the list.
Directionally correct. But not better in terms of security or privacy. Life expectancy has decreased for American born persons. Housing is now impossibly unaffordable, and to find a mate you need to use tech products that increasingly only serve to hurt users (tea) and sow discord between those either differing views (x/facebook). Yes, glorious times for some, but not for the average American born person.
If you can’t afford to not work something like 60-70 hours a week because your corporate own house rent is sky high you aren’t doing much exploring. This argument that you just need to take off and go experience the world is so tiresome because it is so privileged. It means you have no ties, no responsibilities, no family who rely on you.
The problem is that people immediately think that socializing is consuming. It’s always an option to chat with people sitting on a park bench. Or at one’s home in a kitchen. Coffee can be home-made in both cases.
In my smaller city, parks and benches are populated with homeless people of various types. At minimum, the benches are used.
Worse off, a significant minority are actively violent with a good dose of various untreated mental illnesses. Crossing them is not good for your health. And it also makes kind of a terrible environment to talk with friends, while avoiding drug needles.
Even the public library has similar problems, but at least they have security guards (yes, plural, sigh).
That basically leaves our respective homes/apartments and pay-money-to-consume-and-sit places. And even bars are mostly off limits due to highly acoustic reflective surfaces and overly loud music, to dissuade talking and encourage more drinking.
There's very little places to meet in public that is encouraging and free. Then again, I think that really is by design.
Looks like you guys have bigger issues than socializing and expensive coffee.
Here it’s not uncommon to meet some rowdy people out and about. Not necessarily homeless. But it’s not hard to find some silent corner to enjoy some coffee from a thermos.
Other option… Maybe head out to nature trails? Chat while walking at enjoy some coffee at a rest stop? Even few kilometers from the city homeless are unlikely even whereever you are…?
> Even few kilometers from the city homeless are unlikely even whereever you are…?
Where I am all the nature and bike trails lined with homeless encampments. It's actually been quite a problem. Unless you go out on serious hike type trails you're surrounded by homeless.
And our community routinely clears out encampments every 4-6 months. Makes a big production about it as well.
Sometimes they're on private property, and sometimes they're on public property. Either way, their belongings are confiscated and hailed away to the city garage miles away, with the full intent to destroy. Not like homeless can get transportation there.
The craziest part? 60% of the homeless have actual jobs. These aren't 'lazy' people. In fact, society has slowly priced people out of even living, and criminalized homelessness.
Its bad enough that on sidewalks, they're pitching nylon tents. Its starting to look like LA in some aspects.
There's also state laws felonizing having needles on you. Naturally, they get disposed by being dropped wherever. Bad drug laws created this hazard.
Its just one thing after another. And any community that tries to help gets flooded. Greyhound Therapy is a real thing.
Its bad enough, that sometimes I just want to shut down and just shield myself from the suffering, since I'm damn near powerless in fixing it. Its an abject system failure, and needs systematic changes. And realistically, we're not going to see anything get better for the next 3.5 years at absolute minimum.
These democrat counties usually try to offer better homeless support either at the local government or NGO level. In doing so, all the red/republican counties ship their homeless using Greyhound Therapy.
Helping to make homelessness not suffer as much gets more homeless, thus flooding the system.
We've increased our homeless population by 4x in the last 5 years. It popped up hard after the ban on evictions disappeared. Turns out kicking people out of housing makes them (drumroll)... Homeless.
I'm in California. We have a large "native" population of homeless and have been a popular destination for "Greyhound Therapy" for decades. It's the same where I live in every part of the state I've been through in the past several years. Police tend to clear homeless off main drags and parks so they end up moving to less policed areas like outdoor preserves and trails.
I try not to judge homeless people as it happens for a thousand reasons, many outside peoples' control. That being said having open spaces filled with homeless doesn't make anyone want or even able to use those spaces. It's not just the people but tents, trash, and literal shit.
I kinda see both points. Yes there are things we can do without spending money and at the same time more and more of are social spaces are being commercialized along with the perception that anything that is worth anything to do costs money.
It feels weird to read all these responses from people who think the only way to socialize is to pay high prices at bars and coffee shops.
It’s like how someone who avoids socialization imagines what socialization looks like. I hope some people are reading this thread and realizing it’s not as expensive as they assume to go out and do things. There are many people out there making a fraction of what most readers here do who have no problem finding things to do for socialization.
Yes, money is a huge factor. So is time. You need both. I see these major factors: housing costs, health insurance costs, and the two-income trap. The fact that both people in almost every couple must have a job just to survive and pay for housing makes it so that no one has any time. If couples could survive on a single income, there would be a lot more time to manage the home, support the family, friends, neighbors, and community. Those are social activities that few have time for anymore.
I honestly just think it’s that before there was so little to do at home that you were just bored as hell if you didn’t go out. Now there’s just infinite entertainment of all kinds
Then I have to wholeheartedly disagree, because that's elitist. The 10% of the population will never have problems with information access. Only the poor is affected if you go after information access.
O.k., misled information access...now let me do this for you...
My kinese television-set says: "People are digitally often misled by disinformation."
Have you ever "searchengined" a look for a "lesbian sunset"? The search-engine i used had more than 29,000 search-hits for "lesbian sunset", and i clicked on nearly all of them...but there was none "lesbian sunset" no one, no a single one, none. It showed (for example)...
Lesbian Sunset - Check out our selection of lesbian sunsets to find the most amazing unique or custom-made handmade lesbian sunsets from our stores.
Lesbian sunset: what's going on?
Classic lesbian sunset... Regular special offers and discounts up to 70%
Lesbians on the Beach: Stock video
...and they dance! Sunset as a stage of belonging.
High-quality lesbian sunset-themed items from all over the world. Get out the cylinder and monocle, now it's time
Sunset for Sale
Reel with a feminist touch and sunset golf course.
Lesbian sunset for adults Colorful ...
Lively, inspired by the sunset, expressing identity in style.
Manifesto of the „Lesbian Sunset“
Sunset in red and purple - not just beautiful.
Lesbian sunset in Munich and after-party
A different scene...
I mean, that's a myth.
There is no lesbian sunset for me!
But typed in a search line... over 29,000 hits for "lesbian sunset" (counts)
They don't exist!
You don't even remotely know, even one
not even a single lesbian sunset...
At this point you may ask: "What he/she/it/div was thinking about?" (using an 'AI' to translate and for some 'chars' i forgot the asci-code for - too often...)
A battle-painting is probably the most accurate, i was thinking about 12 x 4 meters, where you've been able to zoom in, if you are at a computerscreen...
I even looked for fresco painters, nothing...!
Not a single lesbian sunset... not one...
(feeling rude about...)
That is what i call a Myth...
...talked too dumb, free!
(explanation: How to set a one topic record for been too relevant OT but still related hahaha?)^^
Finally I find this argument. Agreed, and I'm baffled that people think that AI is what's going to "solve loneliness." Loneliness has already been solved by YouTube/Twitch. The brain is easily tricked into thinking that it is "being social" when it is subject to the effects of the parasocial relationships that are formed by these platforms. People's afternoons are rapidly becoming consumed by hours of YouTube where they come out of it with a brain telling them: "boy, that's enough social interaction for today!" Introversion has become an epidemic as a result.
It's not just streamers - fictional characters are also increasingly engineered to be this way. Besides the loot box aspect, many East Asian gacha games are built with parasocial relationships with the characters in mind, for one.
(See community controversies surrounding Girls' Frontline 2 and Snowbreak for examples.)
Yep, this is it exactly. When I was young TV, including HBO, would go off the air at night. You could not have hours of fun playing an Atari. Having fun at home was cards and board games. Late night fun . . . well that will probably never change.
Everybody is quick to jump the gun and blame the victim, while all this can be easily explained by the insane lifestyle we are forced to subscribe in order to survive in this crazy cut-throat productivist job market.
I wouldn't be so quick to divide the world so neatly into victims and perpetrators. Every FAANG engineer I know, for example, could easily retire by mid-40s by keeping consumption in check. Instead, nearly every single one chose instead to "improve their lifestyles." Not blaming them, either, because it's cultural programming -- but until we all learn to slow down a bit and reflect, the madness isn't going to stop.
Even if you knew every FAANG in existence that would account for a very small fraction of the population. It might be true for this class, but you can't expect everyone to be a able to retire by 40.
Even if everybody could, they wouldn't because they are immersed in a culture that celebrated consumerism at every instance. You can't just turn a switch and now you live self-sustainably.
My assumption here is that FAANG employees are not fundamentally different from the rest of the populace along that particular dimension (desire to inflate lifestyle). I chose them in particular to demonstrate that even when we have the choice, we can easily opt not to take it. Of course many do not have that choice.
And yes, I agree with your second paragraph. "The culture" celebrates it — but that culture is not violently enforced top-down by a handful of people twirling mustaches. We all participate in our own little ways — and the more of us that step off the treadmill, the less those messages find footing, in a virtuous cycle. Again, it's not about blame. But for those of us who have the capacity and desire to decondition ourselves, it's very much worth doing. It can affect the feedback loop more powerfully than we think.
> I chose them in particular to demonstrate that even when we have the choice, we can easily opt not to take it.
I see now. But I still think it's a side effect of what society currently celebrates which is consumerism.
> but that culture is not violently enforced top-down by a handful of people twirling mustaches
That's assuming it's the only way to force a population into a specific behaviour, by force. It's actually the least effective method in my opinion. There is also the digital panopticon.
Blame and victim is just a way to give structure to the world. It's not essential. Not even in violence, in the Roman republic it was very well accepted to put women and children to the sword when pillaging a city.
And sure, all changes start in the private sphere, even if it's a more general movement in society. If people stop buying stuff, there is someone consciously or not choosing not to buy that specific thing.
I just think that it's the same with clothing. If you leave for the people to choose not to buy clothing made by slaving children that's just not going to happen if they cost a fraction of clothing made otherwise. It's also not a matter of prohibition because that goes against people's individual freedom to choose. You just have to give society enough time so that it gravitates towards willing to choose differently, meanwhile advocating for the change you want to see in your immediate community.
Perhaps "retire" is the wrong word. One can still work (whether for pay or not) and improve the lives of the people around them without staying on the consumption treadmill. Very few actually do. Again, this isn't meant as a judgement — it's just highlighting that we each have a role to play in slowing down this insane freight train.
This is completely the wrong approach. You can't dedicate your entire life to one specific task and expect when you retire to suddenly be able to "improve the lives of the people around (you) without staying in the consumption treadmill" because all you know is the consumption treadmill. Thinking otherwise is just wishful thinking.
If you see yourself improving the lives of people around you later in life, which is commendable and the right thing to do, you have to start now, while you are still in your prime years. If you leave it when you are older chances are you'll be just another John waiting in line for the next Black Friday.
Have you tried doing anything other than work that isn't consuming something?
I have, from drawing to music, from writing novels to doing programming projects on my free time.
It's not very fun, you aren't good at most of it and it's very frustrating. It's also very rewarding being able to overcome limitations and building up skills. But it's first and foremost very demanding. You can't expect someone that just got retired to suddenly spark in creative energy, even if they intimately wanted to do everything.
Watching Netflix I suppose. Sleeping (although I'm sure some get paid for that in the right circumstance) ... Even watching Netflix could be a slog if you're doing it for some purpose (e.g. to clue up on cultural references) and it's an exertion of effort.
Don't you agree that this limits a lot the perspective of what you do when you retire, if retiring means not working anymore?
Maybe we agree that it's all work, but there are types of work that even though they're frustrating, they are also rewarding in specific ways that is interesting for those that retire.
Retiring is just retiring from employment. I suppose I'm drawing a distinction between formal employment and all forms of work. Yardwork is a nice example enjoyed by retirees.
Personally if I do anything for 8+ hours a day 5 days a week it starts to feel like a job around 2 or 3 months in no matter how much I love it, and if I do much less than that I start to feel lacking in structure and progress.
I’ve gone through extended periods of unemployment (by choice, not in a stressful way) before, and it’s wonderful but by month 3 I’m always kinda over it.
Retirement for me will probably look pretty much the same as working except I won’t necessarily pick a job that pays well.
I pretty much optimize for PTO when choosing jobs, so I really never have this dilemma. My current job offers 8 weeks PTO (but I make much less than I would at a FAANG). To me, that’s better than retirement.
That explanation makes no sense, obviously. Human beings have been human beings long before things even cost money and will exist long after money is gone.
I'm happy to accept the idea that people are simply brainwashed into thinking they need money and that is the root of their problems, but needing money is not a problem for a human being in and of itself.
Edit: but I think you said it yourself, you seem to think that you're forced to live a certain lifestyle, that's not true. You want to live a certain lifestyle and that lifestyle takes a lot of money.
> Human beings have been human beings long before things even cost money and will exist long after money is gone.
That thinking assumes that money and human behaviour is in a one direction. You first have human behaviour and then you have money, so it would stand to reason that one is subject to the other. However, in reality the relationship is of co-dependency. Human behaviour adapts to the availability of money and what it buys. Have you ever seen trying to reintroduce a wild animal after it's being treated for a long time? You can't just throw it in the jungle and expect them to survive.
> needing money is not a problem for a human being in and of itself.
Which I'm reading that is not essential, following the previous paragraph, which I disagree. Take electricity out, most people wouldn't be able to survive too long. We weren't dependent but we've built lifesyles that are and we are trapped in it. Which doesn't mean we need to return to jungle, it's just that we need to treat the relationship between humans and the economy with much more respect than that.
> you seem to think that you're forced to live a certain lifestyle, that's not true.
I believe you are thinking about a ostentatious lifestyle. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about lifestyle where we are used to electricity and supermarkets. Where everything is taken care of so that we hyperspecialize our skill sets.
You're both right, it is in decline and it does still happen. Which is why it's not hopeless, and we really can't have AI as a force multiplier accelerating the decline.
A good fitness membership is outside of the reach of many young people. Not that they could not afford it at all, but it would be a serious expense not taken lightly.
Same for restaurant and bar bills, or catching a film. Not like the old days where you could go out drinking with your friends each evening by just having a light student job and some summer work.
What's happening is a gap - people are becoming more bimodal with respect to these things.
There are lots of people who live pretty normal lives (by the standards of the last 20-40y) but there are also so many people who have nihilistic views of it all and are left behind.
Society just feels hollowed out, puppeteered, constantly acting against itself and the interest of the people, nice faces, nice gestures, nasty acts and in the end just happy, friendly enemies with enemies on top.
I know, the e-destructions are there to make a society of 8billion "happy" as can be without ravaging the planet, but the life this creates is absolute misery. I rather prefer death or war to that.
But these social third places have also shifted. Younger generations aren't going out as much but e.g. playing video games specifically with other close friends is very popular.
I'm a 44 yo Xenial, not too old, not young. That is, I'm part of the "walkman generation" .
It surprises me how people are less and less open to socialize, to the point that some even see you with disgust if you DARE to interrupt them from.their mobile phone trance.
Society nowadays is pretty ugly. Younger generations seem very isolationist to me.
Same gen (42). I feel like we have a really unique lens on all of this, too: old enough to remember being in a smoky bar, socializing (not healthy, but fun as hell), but also young enough to have had some technological exposure at a crucial time of our youth. We _leveraged_ technology for socializing in person. Our online pursuits were around organizing lighthearted social goofiness like "getting iced", LARPing, and flash mobs. All of which would probably make younger generations eye roll to death out of secondary cringe.
I guess at some point people started taking themselves way too seriously. Worrying about what others think, or something, I don't know. In a way, social interaction is kind of like a standoff in the dusty streets of an old west town. Someone has to make the first move to expose themselves, and it doesn't seem like anyone wants to be that person anymore.
I'm about to be 41 and likewise very distinctly remember a time when cell phones were a vehicle for organizing the evening or weekend's plans, quickly making a connection with someone you met ("let me get your number"), whatever, buying weed or something. The point was to make friends, get laid, network without calling it that. The idea was that some of those random people would become your crew of friends, one of those girls would become your wife, and you'd end up settled down to kick off the next generation. And I know some people who did end up settled dowm...but not that many, not like the generation right before mine. Kind of hit or miss in my cohort.
Near as I can tell that was still roughly the model on paper if less and less until COVID and lockdown and all that. Something snapped, you can see it walking down the street of any city you knew well before. People never came back outside with the same vigor.
I don't claim to understand the causal structure between all the various factors: the bleak economic prospects, the decline in institutions, the increasingly rapacious and cynical Big Tech cabal, there are a ton of factors.
But COVID before and after, that's when it collectively became too much to easily bounce back from.
> I guess at some point people started taking themselves way too seriously. Worrying about what others think, or something, I don't know.
When I was a teenager, precisely one guy had videoed his teenage self waving around a broomstick like a lightsaber, and had it end up online. Video cameras and editing equipment were rare and expensive. And that one man was a cautionary tale, not to wave a broomstick like a lightsaber anywhere there are video cameras.
Now the video cameras are in everyone's pockets 24/7, and with the internet connection built in. Is it any wonder nobody's waving a broomstick like a lightsaber?
A look on TikTok for "lightsaber duel" draws me to the opposite conclusion. Yeah, lightsaber kid was cringe worthy; I'm glad it wasn't me. But in the meantime, Star Wars got cool, After Effects went subscription, and there are some really cool videos of fan-made lightsaber duels up on the Internet now.
A friend of mine had passes to Rage Against the Machine with Run the Jewels at MSG a couple years ago and brought me. A few songs into the RATM set I realized there weren't that many young people in the stadium, because there wasn't a sea of phones recording everything for social media. Just tens of thousands of people pretty locked in to the moment. A younger act and all you see are thousands of screens glowing.
I've always felt that we (older millennials) sort of hit a sweet spot technology wise. We pretty naturally straddled that analog to digital world.
I notice when just out and about other people my age and older still have the familiar vibe. Young people are in another universe and it doesn’t seem like a more pleasant one.
I'm sure this is more a reflection on me but I try to go out to meet strangers at meetups and I find I quite often don't like the people.
You might get the random ultra woke person who makes it impossible for others to have a conversation because they're just waiting to be triggered by anything anyone else says and find a way to spin every comment into an offence.
If anyone brings up politics then the meetup is over, at least for me.
I struck up a conversation with the person setting next to me at an outdoor cafe. He was probably 84-ish. He'd married someone from Japan he'd met there in the 60s. They had not had any children. I brought up the population issue in a light way (Japan's population is declining), something like making the joke that they didn't help Japan's population decline. He replied something like "anyone who tells you there's an underpopulation issue is lying. The planet has 8 billion people which is way too many". And that was when I knew I wasn't going to continue the conversation.
Perhaps it is more a reflection of you, or of US (?) attitudes.
This 3,000 person study [1] in Germany matched pairs of strangers for private face-to-face meetings to discuss divisive political issues. It found asymmetric effects: conversations with like-minded individuals caused political views to become more extreme (ideological polarization); by contrast, conversations with contrary-minded individuals did not lead to a convergence of political views, but significantly reduced negative beliefs and attitudes toward ideological out-group members (affective polarization), while also improving perceived social cohesion more generally. These effects of contrary-minded conversations seem to be driven mostly by positive experiences of interpersonal contact.
> You might get the random ultra woke person who makes it impossible for others to have a conversation because they're just waiting to be triggered by anything anyone else says and find a way to spin every comment into an offence.
> If anyone brings up politics then the meetup is over, at least for me.
> I brought up the population issue in a light way (Japan's population is declining), something like making the joke that they didn't help Japan's population decline. He replied something like "anyone who tells you there's an underpopulation issue is lying. The planet has 8 billion people which is way too many". And that was when I knew I wasn't going to continue the conversation.
You brought up an intensely political issue (population decline), they responded, and then you got mad at them and felt like they brought up a political issue?
It sounds like you are doing exactly the thing you are complaining about "ultra woke" people doing.
And why shouldn't they be? The Xenials and late boomers intellectual chops got funneled into an industry specifically intended to attack and monopolize their attention loops and data. To their credit, they're probably having a healthier response to the entire thing than I do by pushing back against further unwelcome intrusion even if it's still pretty subconscious for a lot of them at this point.
> It surprises me how people are less and less open to socialize, to the point that some even see you with disgust if you DARE to interrupt them from.their mobile phone trance.
Have you considered that maybe it's you, and you're just interrupting at the wrong time? Imagine someone's reading a book and you interrupt them and then you blame them for getting annoyed?!
I’m not OP but similar in age and remember when it wasn’t always like that. You could talk to someone who was reading the paper on the bus, they wouldn’t be annoyed. Being in public it was fair game. There would be conversations happening between strangers. Now it’s silent on the bus and everyone is on their phones nobody is chatting up strangers.
Can confirm. Also of the same age, and if I was at a cafe reading a book or doing my math homework when I was younger, it was totally fair game for someone to ask me something or engage me in random conversation. If I was really on a deadline and couldn't be interrupted I wouldn't have been at the cafe in the first place.
A lot of people are simply insufferable so I dont even try to make new friends. I've got a relatively big circle of old time friends and I'll keep it at that. Im a lot younger than you but I cant deal with TikTok brains same goes for right wing retards or people who believe in religions or other esoteric stuff. It's not easy to meet people with actual intellect
I don't agree with you. I am as leftist as it gets, but I don't let my political beliefs get in the way. I subscribe to r/ccw (gun subreddit) and some conservative subs because I want to understand where the right wing people is coming from.
I think younger generations have lost Nuance, in the University I had several good friends who had very opposite political views from me. Still we could sit down and play a D&D round.
They actually do. Might be less people than before, but plenty still do. I live in a moderately cool neighborhood in Brooklyn. It's crazy Thursday through Saturday. Bars, parties, everyone everywhere, parks full. Baseball, run crews, volleyball and slack-liners. There was a hacky-sack club. Outdoor farmers market, packed. Tiny little street-corner vintage flea, packed. Restaurants spilling out everywhere.
Maybe get outside if you really think that people "actually don't" or that there aren't "enough" of them. Society is right here, chugging along.
uhhh, while covid affected things this certainly has not been the case for my life at all.
the last 7 years of my life have been filled with nothing but community. from skate diys and meetups, and other outdoor activities to, skate diys, bars, live music, and gym communities (once regular programming resumed post covid).
if you feel this isolated i am inclined to ask -- what is it about your life that seemingly lacks these things? i have somehow managed to find community wherever i go and wherever my interests guide me.
what experience of yours caused you to arrive at "they actually don't"?
people in my city are always out and about and socializing and walking their dogs or getting drinks or coffee or working remotely or at work spaces or in offices or whatever. they go out on weekends and drink and eat and hang with friends.
i recently went to berlin and as an american i could not get enough of the summer vibe, the sparkaufts and casual communal hangs and byob bars.
I agree that socializing and so-called "third places" are in decline but we have to ask why. I'll spoil it for you: it's capitalism.
Where once a family could easily be supported on a single income and you could afford to send your kids to college, real wages have been stagnant for decades and people now need 5 jobs between 2 people to not be homeless. Why? Student debt, medical debt, mortgage debt.
The time we spend not working is time we spend not making someone else slightly wealthier.
So people don't have the time nor the disposable income to socialize. And even if they did those activities continue to get more expensive because housing specifically and property generally gets more expensive and that's an input into the cost of every real world activity.
But again, somebody is profiting from that.
Additionally people are in for a rude shock. They see light at the end of the tunnel when their parents or grandparents pass and they inherit housing or sufficient wealth for housing. But many of these people won't see a dime thanks to draining long-term elderly care, particularly with Medicaid funding being stripped.
The capital-owning class wants you in debt. They don't want you owning anything. They will want us in worker housing. We are becoming South Asian brick kiln workers with nicer TVs.
People who downvote this need to think very hard about whether their preferred solution is workable, or if they are simply ignoring the problem because they can.
It’s unpleasant to say that people actively desire the current outcomes, but nature does not care how people feel. It is valid to say the purpose of a system is what it does.
> For years, i tried to lose weight with gym and dieting. I failed, and now i know i probably never had a chance to, it was a scam all along.
> lost all weight i wanted with Wegovy
It’s not a scam. The trick is that you probably weren’t dieting aggressively enough before Wegovy. All diets and GLP inhibitors work on the same principle: Caloric restriction.
It is simply impossible to stay fat without eating enough calories. But that’s really really hard to do without help. I have friends and family on GLP and they regularly eat less than 800 calories per day. You can’t do that on your own, the willpower it would take is hard to imagine.
Conversely when I’m marathon training it’s almost impossible to eat enough calories to avoid losing weight. Eating itself becomes a huge chore. Run 10mi/day and I promise you’ll lose weight the old fashioned way.
Idk man, I find it pretty easy to eat any amount of calories. I actually gained weight when burning around 1500kcal/day on a bike during one month - way more than running 10mi/day would burn.
That you find it difficult to eat enough during marathon training means your body is at least decent at regulating itself. For some people it's very easy (my gf stays at her very lean weight even when injured and doing 0 sports and then still stays there when burning 1000kcal/day) while for some it's very hard without help (my experience above).
Yeah totally. Eating less than you feel like is hard and GLP is great for that.
I was fat as a kid and then lost it all in high school (and got too skinny). Maybe as a result of that it’s easy for me to not eat. I kinda don’t even realize I’m hungry. Had to start tracking calories to ensure I eat enough.
One thing I am wondering about is that if months on GLP drugs is going to help with self-regulation. Maybe if you force yourself to eat less for a prolonged time (2-3 years) with the help of drugs then the body internalizes eating less as the norm.
We will see in a few years I guess. I am hoping for at least weak effect like that.
I know people who had that experience. They describe it as a total reset of their relationship with food. Even when pausing GLP after just a few months.
Americans believe diet and exercise "doesn't work". The reasons are twofold: on one hand, this is coming from the fat acceptance / body positivity movement, which needs people to believe that diet and exercise are futile, and being fat is just a fact of life, like being tall or short. They want people to believe that being fat is a disability, or even an attribute of diversity that we ought to accept and celebrate. On the other hand, American food products make it unnecessarily hard to consistently meet your caloric deficit, which makes people wrongly conclude that diet and exercise just doesn't work.
> On the other hand, American food products make it unnecessarily hard to consistently meet your caloric deficit, which makes people wrongly conclude that diet and exercise just doesn't work.
As an American who lost 100+ pounds & kept it off for more than a decade ... this x1000. It is extraordinarily difficult to maintain a healthy diet in the US.
This comes up a lot, and exercise and diet surely do work. But the notion of set points is also real and well studied. Once you become overweight and especially obese, your body does all sorts of crazy things to try and maintain that weight. Modulating the metabolism, sleepiness, energy levels etc. The percentage of people who have been obese and returned permanently to a healthy weight through diet and exercise is small enough that if it were a drug, people wouldn't even try it.
People talked about glp drugs moving the set point, I don't know of any research supporting that. It seems like stopping the drug usually adds the weight back. And they are not without risks. But obesity is worse.
You are spot on about American food products. They are calorie rich and nutrient poor. But the obesity problem has spread outside America now. I read one journal article suggesting the spread pattern was more like what you see with the introduction of an unrecognized dangerous chemical, or even a mildly contagious pathogen. Whether it is some odd gut biome pathogen, a weird food additive, or if the chemical is how we grow food itself, the problem isn't contained.
> on one hand, this is coming from the fat acceptance / body positivity movement, which needs people to believe that diet and exercise are futile
I think it's much more about people not really understanding how their bodies work. Losing the first few pounds on a diet is easy because it's water weight you drop as soon as you stop constantly eating sugar (soda, snacks, etc). Actually losing fat is much harder because it requires actual caloric reduction in your diet.
Many people starting diets have no idea how their body will lose weight and get disheartened when the second ten pound loss is way harder and takes longer than the first ten pounds. People will justify all sorts of things when they're desperate and disillusioned.
Also: the human body does not want to lose weight.
You get more hungry after exercise.
People also are bad at calorie counting because they forget about so many sources of calories (milk/sugar in coffee, snacks, etc).
Let's say you figure all that out - keeping to a consistent diet and exercise regime is hard without some structure to maintain it. Example: I was in super good shape when my gym was next to my office, and lots of coworkers would go work out with me.
All this before we get to the as-yet-not understood effects of ultra processed foods and microplastics.
The body positivity movement I would give next to 0 blame here. May as well blame wokeism.
>Also: the human body does not want to lose weight.
Sure. The human body doesn't want a lot of things. The human body doesn't want to go to school, and yet we do. The human body doesn't want to go to work, and yet we do. The human body doesn't want to hold back farts in the office, and yet we do.
Many things require willpower. Life is not a gradient descent.
I have yet to meet a single person that doesn't lose weight steadily but surely down to a healthy level by even just _attempting_ 16/8 intermittent fasting combined with at least 30 minutes of cardio every day -- even a brisk walk will do as long as it makes you warm and sweat. Even if you miss some days with cardio and only manage 12/12 with intermittent fasting some days, it's literally impossible for the body to gain weight this way. I'm sure there's one medical outlier among ten thousand or something, but in my 39 years I've never met a single one. Cardio is tougher the more you weigh, and intermittent fasting restricts carbs naturally.
I tried 20/4 with 90 minutes every other day. It got me from obese to merely overweight, but stuck there. My doc told me to stop with the IF, that while it worked, it wasn't ideal nutritionally, and had me eat healthy meals three times a day with a high protein snack. Weight still isn't quite into my healthy range, but I feel way better and all my numbers are better.
20/4 is way too extreme, and I'd never recommend it. In that case one would probably have better luck with fasting one or two days a week, but that would have to be under supervision of a professional. The reason 16/8 has become the "baseline" for IF is that it's enough time for 3 proper meals a day, and maybe even a snack in between if you're active. It's what works the best for most people, but of course outliers always exist. Some might be able to do more or less.
Myself and people I've helped all have better effect from a minimum of 30 min cardio every day, than prolonged cardio every other day or fewer. It might seem counterintuitive but the body is all about "use it or lose it" (and don't abuse it, I like to add) and it tries to optimize for the stresses it's commonly exposed to. So if you do a lot of cardio every other day combined with extreme IF but do cardio on rest days, it's probably not going to prioritize the breakdown of fat the same and might even "store" it for the tough work coming the next day.
Yeah 16/8 isn't even an effort because I like my breakfast late. But I'm double fast twitch so my chosen form of cardio is weights. I keep it above 90% max for about 90min three times weekly, but I need the off days for recovery. Happy where I am, numbers are good, wife likes how I look, good enough for me. I put on both fat and muscle easy so being 5% above max healthy weight while eating right amd lifting probably isn't that far out of whack.
It’s not about fasting or even cardio, it’s about caloric restriction. Fasting reduces the calories you eat, and cardio increases the calories you burn.
Fasting also leads to breaking down fat via lipolysis during ketogenesis. Burning calories via exercise, including cardio, primarily stops you from _gaining_ weight.
So yes of course at the end of the day it is about calorie restriction, but fasting helps force your body into a state where it needs to break down stored calories -- ie. fat tissue.
You’re not wrong about breaking down fat via lipolysis but you’re wrong about the overall picture. Also, not sure what you mean by cardio stopping you from gaining weight. Cardio burns calories and you need to burn calories to lose fat.
Anyways, fasting isn’t a body hack like some people think. Just look at this article by Harvard health. At best the benefit is modest:
“intermittent fasting has a similar or even modest benefit over traditional calorie-restriction dieting for weight loss”
One reason is because the body regulates which sources of energy it uses, and will actually compensate for using too much of one energy source. For example, you might burn more fat during intermittent fasting because that’s what’s available at the time, but when you’re not fasting your body will actually burn less fat to compensate.
This is also why doing fasted cardio isn’t a hack. You’ll just burn less fat later and it’ll mostly be a wash.
Reducing the window for eating to 8 hours reduces total caloric intake naturally. I never said it was a "hack". Your linked article explains precisely why intermittent fasting is effective under the heading "The state of ketosis"; when it says "has a similar or even modest benefit over traditional calorie-restriction", that supports what I've been talking about, surely.
And cardio burns calories, sure, but have you tracked your caloric burn when exercising? You can't really do active cardio to burn more than you eat -- not without going into a deficit you have to earn back later. Ketosis isn't as fast as breaking down carbohydrates, so you're right, you don't want to do fasted cardio, usually, unless it's very restricted -- or you load up on carbs via a smoothie or something similar high-availability. I do brisk (~110 bpm average) 30 minute walks during the fasting window early in the morning, but that's about the limit.
We both know you’re trying to frame it as a hack. There’s no point in emphasizing fasting as much as you did if you didn’t think it was a significant improvement over traditional calorie restriction.
So no, I don’t think a “similar or modest” improvement over traditional calorie restriction supports your point. That phrasing suggests they’re not even willing to commit to it being a modest improvement.
You also seem to have completely misunderstood my point. It’s not about ketosis breaking things down slowly. Like I tried to explain, your body has various substrates it can use for energy (fat, muscle), and if you try to “trick” it by forcing it to burn a disproportionate amount of one, it’ll try to make up for it later. So if you do fasted cardio you might be burning more fat during your cardio session, but your body will try to compensate by burning less fat later. So these tricks don’t work, fasted cardio doesn’t help you lose weight more than non-fasted cardio.
Frankly it sounds like you’re getting your information from misinformed right-wing influencers.
> Frankly it sounds like you’re getting your information from misinformed right-wing influencers.
... how did you jump to that final conclusion? No wonder you seem to not be engaging in a good faith conversation here; you've been sitting on that prejudice all along.
A final piece of advice you're unlikely to heed, but I still feel compelled to share it: If you view reality through a broken lens, you'll see a twisted version of reality everywhere. I get my information from reading medical literature, not listening to influencers.
No I’m connecting the dots. A couple days ago you got downvoted for saying Elon Musk is getting us to mars and that he’s a great man. Now you’re arguing about fasting and keto.
If you want to deny it then fine, but I’d have to be an idiot not to connect those dots.
I’d encourage you to step outside your bubble and actually read about these things because you’re definitely not reading medical literature. You’re being fed bro science, not real science.
Just want to throw this out there for you and everyone’s benefit. Regular physical activity helps you age gracefully and has a lot of physical and emotional benefits besides weight loss.
Your body is a machine that burns calories. Give it less calories and it will burn its calorie stores.
You are right that there are a lot of scams that complicate this fact as much as possible to get money from you.
But rest assured, if you calculate your TDEE (many simple calcs online), and food scale your calories (everything you eat) to a diet -500 under your TDEE, you will lose weight (or you are a perpetual motion machine).
Yeah but it's meaningless.
The struggle with losing weight comes from difficult to overcome hunger pangs.
Advising people about calorie restriction is the same as advising an alcoholic to just stop drinking. It's easy if you can do it but if you can you wouldn't have a problem to begin with. It is missing the problem entirely.
The good thing about calorie counting is that you can dial in the speed at which you want to lose weight. And then it becomes more about discipline than pushing through hunger.
But yeah, no matter what it is going to require mental effort.
Confidently incorrect. Body builds what it thinks it needs. Lifting weights? It will think you need muscles. Living sedentarily? It will think you are conserving evergy and you need fat reserves. Running daily? It will think all the needs are met and you need cognitive strength.
In my case it seems that the problem is a combination of stomach capacity and the desire to taste all those lovely things.
What works for me is to keep myself occupied, to insist on eating only things that I really want because of the taste, and to eat little at a time but more often.
My GP concurs and claims that restricting one's intake by having several small meals instead of one large one results in the stomach effectively shrinking so that over time you find yourself feeling full after a relatively small meal. When I am at home I use a smaller plate at dinner than the rest of my family so that I just can't pile as much on.
After nearly a decade of this the result is that I simply cannot eat the same amounts as I used without feeling uncomfortable, so I don't.
>Wegovy (semaglutide) injection 2.4 mg is an injectable prescription medicine used __with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity__
Just saying.
Neither gym not dieting are scams and simply can't be by their nature. People who say that either have some serious health condition (and obviously you can beat some things with will alone) or people who failed at realising that "dieting" is about their consumption habbits.
Most people I see with this problem convince themselves that they are on a diet while they continue with their eating habbits.
You "just" tricked you brain and made things easier for yourself. Good for you but calling gym and dieting a scam is just laughable.
The main effect of diet is that more muscle can slightly increase your BMR, and the other health benefits of being in shape. It does also increase calorie loss from activity at the margins, even if it's a pretty small effect. (maybe 100-200 more per day etc in my experience.)
None of this will help much without the diet, but it's not useless.
Muscle and fat are metabolically active, which means they burn calories just to stay alive. If you lose fat, guess what? Your body doesn’t need as many calories to survive.
Another factor is the calories you burn not exercising. We burn calories all day, even when we’re not exercising but when people are dieting they tend to have lower energy so the don’t move around as much.
So yes, technically metabolical rate slows down but it’s not some conspiracy against you. It’s a direct result of losing fat.
That’s why some people lift weights while dieting to build muscle at the same time they’re losing fat. Personally, I haven’t had a huge issue with caloric restriction so I’m doing a more intense diet in the short term, then cooling off once I get to my goal weight and switching to more weigh lifting.
I would like to add that exercise also helps you to influence where you lose weight. Your body will often choose to lose muscle mass when you are running a calorie deficit. If you lift weights you are stimulating muscle growth which helps to shift your body to lose weight through fat loss.
That's certainly part of it (and people should absolutely exercise, regardless of their weight/metabolic/body fat goals, to be clear) but my understanding is that your immune system also reduces its activity level after increasing your level of physical activity, reducing caloric expenditures, as do a few other bodily systems
I can't imaging losing weight consistently without exercise. Diet is most important. However even for the most obsessed of us counting calories is difficult to get right all of the time. Muscle mass consumes calories and exercise creates a deficit. Both provide margin that help account for calorie counting mistakes. I find that exercise forms a virtuous cycle in dieting. If I go on a 500 calorie bike ride that's 500 more calories I can eat that day.
That's not quite what I am saying. You need to learn about calories and build a proper intuition about them before really getting into exercising. Otherwise you end up easily out eating what you burn.
I have known way too many people who regularly exercise but still cannot lose weight. The problem they have is that thry burn 500 calories exercising, and then go unknowingly eat 900 calories because they exercised.
You need to learn how to handle hunger. To control your own urges. Once you do, dieting becomes easy, the only part that sucks is the low energy and irritability.
Intermittent fasting is a great teacher in this regard.
While you are running or just in general? The former makes sense, but the latter is weird. Telling an obese person to run also makes orthopedic doctors cringe. Swimming or strength training are a lot safer for their joints. I personally find regular running makes me super hungry for anything and everything. Making sure what is at hand is healthy is critical for me.
None of what you described is a scam. Time and again, I’ve found the people who are critical of dieting aren’t doing it right… Which is hard for me to wrap my head around since weight loss boils down to one factor, caloric restriction.
You burn more calories than you eat and you lose weight. It’s that simple. All these tricks people use like glp-1 inhibitors and keto all serve the same goal of caloric restriction. GLP-1 reduces appetite which reduces calories, keto removes food groups from your diet and decreases hunger which reduces calories.
I’ve been dieting recently and lost 20 pounds just by diligently tracking and restricting my calories. 10 pounds lost in just the past month. In that time I’ve eaten bowls of pasta, pizza, gone out drinking, etc. All I do is accurately track everything I eat (everything), and if I have a less-strict day (like going drinking), I just eat less the next day to make up for it.
It’s simple, but it requires some discipline. That’s the real reason people have trouble dieting.
My experience aligns with yours. Words like "discipline" come off as moralistic. I know very disciplined people who struggle to lose weight. As someone who lost 40 lbs through long term fixation on calorie counting and exercise, I find it confusing. However when I look in the mirror and consider what I do to maintain my weight I realize that I'm the outlier. It is unrealistic to expect others to adopt my odd lifestyle.
The one time in my adult life I was in my healthy weight range. I got there that way. The maintenance consumed all my waking thoughts and energy. I decided that slightly overweight with a life was better. Staying just slightly overweight is easy for me with a few hours a week of exercise and excluding foods that I find addicting entirely. For me that is baked goods, grains, nuts, and dairy. So the staples of the western diet.
They actually don't. Everything from dating and fitness to manufacturing and politics is in decline in activities, and more so in effect and understanding. You can't convince (enough) people anymore that it is even important as many don't have capacity to do it. And it isn't even something new at this point.