Is life genuinely harder now, or am I just getting older?

9 comments

1. One can only carry on, try to make life better and pray. It is depressing, but these are the times of today.

2. The world is definitely harder, scarier and more unstable now than it has been the last 30 years. Real income has gone down and living expenses are higher (rent and property expenses has grown much more than wages). The US used to enforce world order, now they are not to be trusted and part of the chaos themselves. Political polarization is high and misinformation rampant. We are more lonely and isolated than before.

   The world peaked in 2005-2006, then came the financial crisis, smart phones and the algorithms.

3. Yes

4. I think that it’s technically more complex, but not harder.

   When I think hard, I think of society before technology. Things were much harder just 20 years ago in that regard. For example, smart phones have had more processing power for the last 20 years than we had to land humans on the moon 60 years ago.

   What do we do with that kind of power?

   Candy Crush 😂😂😂

5. 2 ways to think about it, IMO.

   1. We have more responsibility. More people depend on us, and some people literally rely on us for their survival. We must listen to the noise to make informed decisions, which is stressful.

   2. We thought it was difficult previously, but the penalty was… go live with your parents (for many of us).

   So, while I agree that life seems more stressful and harder, those in the past were going through the most challenging times of their own.

   How do I personally handle it? I work harder, turn off the noise that doesn’t matter, and focus on the things I can control.

   Coke, binge drinking & hookers once in a while help, too.

6. Its that housing, a fundamental requirement for doing ANYTHING as an adult has skyrocketed in cost. When my mom was 19, she had her first job working as a courier at a local hospital. Her job was just to pick up things in one location, take them to another location and repeat. Low level, entry level work, the type of thing you would expect a 19 year old fresh out of high school to do.

   She was able to afford her own 1 bedroom apartment in Riverside CA (where we still live) where only 25% of her income went to rent. The place was also furnished. The apartment is still there, it has aged 50 years, it has not been extensively remodeled. Other than new paint jobs, new carpet and maybe a few new appliances it looks more or less the same as it did in the 1970s. Today the rent is $2000 per month.

   In order for someone to pay $2000 per month, and that is only 25% of their income, they would need to be making $8000 per month. Nearly $100k per year. The median household income for our city is substantially less than $100k per year. 19 year old high school grads with their first full time entry level work are not going to make that kind of money. Someone with that job today probably makes $35,000 per year. The rent is $24,000 per year. Nearly 70% of their income would be on rent. The majority of full time jobs in the city do not pay well enough for a person to even qualify for that one bedroom apartment. But my mom pulled it off as a 19 year old with her first full time job. We figure that after adjusting for inflation the apartment today is nearly triple what she paid for it.

   People aging into this system, and it has been going on for a while, see this extreme difficulty mode. I am 41. The housing market and job market in our area have not been friendly to the regular person for nearly my entire adult life. There was a period right when I finished high school when the job market was actually decent and apartments were not yet crazy expensive. During the GFC homes got super cheap, but the market for people who needed to buy new homes, people getting started in life, was an absolutely terrible labor market.

   Affording a place to live is a fundamental issue. You can have smartphones, you can have TVs, you can have the internet, all fine, all great tools, but if you can’t afford a cheap place to live, everything in your life will be out of whack. We are seeing it with people having fewer children. People say “Oh well its that women are all now super educated high earning professionals! “…. no… they vast majority aren’t… and even those who are can’t really afford to have kids.

   When I was a kid, it was common for people to buy homes where the husband worked at like a Home Depot in the Lawn Mower Dept and the wife worked 4 hours a day at an office while the kids were at school. Now that home is $700,000. Think a youngish couple can afford that?

   This housing crises adds agitation all over society. It adds a layer of anxiety that makes life feel tense everywhere.

7. I think it’s a combination of things genuinely getting more complex and chaotic and greater sensitivity to these things as one gets older. When you’re younger — at least, our generation — you tend you be less risk-averse, partly because of biology and partly because you just don’t realize how dangerous and filled with challenges the world can be. So people who grew up in the 90s/early 2000s have experienced the double-whammy of becoming more aware of and stressed about the state of the country/world as that state has deteriorated in various ways. It’s a difficult adjustment, for sure.

8. It’s a game bro, the further you get the higher the difficulty becomes.

9. Both.

   Even my boomer, French, right wing conservative, « self made » multi millionaire, « work hard pull yourself by your bootstraps stop complaining » boss openly admits that life is harder for us now than it was for his generation, and that we’re inheriting a undeniably broken world.

   (The only reason he empathizes is because his son is 26, but still. To have such a guy recognize this says a lot.)