I wish this was our problem. Of course, there should be no shame in living with your parents. But it should be out of free will, and here in the Netherlands sadly that isn’t the case for many. Our housing market simply doesn’t offer affordable housing options. For many young people the only option is a rental apartment that will cost you so much, that if you can afford it at all, you can forget about ever saving any money. Which means that you’ll effectively be stuck in this situation forever. Which is an option to consider, but meanwhile those who can afford to buy a house, because of rich parents or whatnot, they have a far better deal, often even paying less on a monthly basis, while at the same time their house increases in value. It’s a major dividing factor in our society, separating the rich from the poor. Of course staying home is another realistic option to consider, and more and more people make this choice, but only for lack of a better option. The real tragedy is of course when staying at home is also not a realistic option. A fucked-up housing market makes the vulnerable all the more vulnerable.
I’m in the party that thinks if you have a full-time job you should be able to afford a home
Both can be true, we can put pressure on all fronts
Also homes could be way cheaper if zoning were fixed, density were legalized, and property taxes were retooled into a land tax
I dunno about America, but Australia has the problems you listed, but we also have problems with tax incentives to investing in housing rather than investing elsewhere, which also helps push up property prices by increasing demand without affecting supply.
Shame my house would be pretty crowded in that situation. Although those pod bunk beds look fucking sweet and could work.
It’s certainly cheaper to get the pod bunkbed that will make any child scream with excitement than it is to buy a larger house which will leave them bored while all their stuff is moved and likely move them away from their friends.
Asian families: what do you mean “leave”?
Seriously, it’s not a bad thing to stay until you can afford to leave.
Unfortunately I can’t live with my parents. I probably won’t have kids, but if I do, I doubt they could afford to live anywhere else. Not unless I leave the US. It’s rough here.
Me, my pregnant wife, my retired dad and my working brother all live in one house. Belgium
Can we afford to live in 3 houses? Yes.
Is it necessary? No.
The house is paid off. One house is being heated, …
Me and my wife save up about 2500 euros per month. My brother saves up even more because he’s spending literally nothing. He saves up his entire paycheck.
Building generational wealth is pretty fun. My parents worked for us. Me and my wife work for our kid. I got basically a house as inheritance in a great economy. Our kid will have a house + investment portfolio (Stoxx 600, gold/silver, …)
Our biggest “waste” of money is traveling. I don’t even have a car, just using my taxes to have a long tail e bike that does the same shit.
We have 2 cars on the property, they barely are used. Literally one is being used to drive to train station. The other one for the grocery store within 2 km. It’s good that one of those two is a company car, otherwise gigantic waste of money.
Our household (my wife works 14 hours per week ATM). Earns a net income of: 9300 euros.
Include capital gains of like 4%. It becomes a total of 13300 euros net “income” per month. An e bike valued 9,5k euros. An electric car.
All because we are mentally stable enough to live under one roof.
Abolish rent, abolish ext family living.
Conservative family values…
Depends on your family.
No THIS POST is a psyop to help normalise the idea of generational family living at home again so that we’ll swallow the ungodly recession and poverty that will be brought upon the entire working class; should we not agree, as a global unit, to Tax the rich and restore wealth to the Government, Middle and Working classes and out of the hands of Billionaires. Fuck this post.
Anytime anyone suggests we need to decrease consumption people complain that it’s a plot by the rich to get us used to poverty.
we should eat less meat
The elites are trying to make the poor eat bugs
we need to drive less
The rich are taking away our freedom
we need to live in denser housing
The rich are trying to force you into a shoe box
You know what the rich really want?, consumption. They want you buying as much as possible because that’s the way we get growth and it also makes it so you have less savings and are more dependent on your job, and less likely to make demands or quit.
I agree we need massive wealth redistribution and consumption by the 1% is magnitudes more harmful then the rest. But the current american lifestyle of heating and cooling an entire house for 1-2 people in a sprawled out suburb where you have to drive everywhere and have meat with every meal is not sustainable either. We need to reprioritize what we value as a society, deemphasizing individuality and private ownership and moving towards community.
You know what the rich really want?, consumption. They want you buying as much as possible because that’s the way we get growth and it also makes it so you have less savings and are more dependent on your job, and less likely to make demands or quit.
No, not anymore. We exist in a post-capitalist world. Capital used to be the output, whether that’s labour, or a trade, or a craft that’s what capital is. Now, we are the capital. Google is a search engine that made billions selling your private data to amazon, whose effect on the global economy has massively accelerated climate change. Google maps records your phone calls, they copy and scan everything from your phone. Every free online pdf converter, every image editor. Most of all computing and all of the resulting data is collected in the browser. Every app on your phone, generates data points it sells to Google, Amazon Web Services, Meta and all of big tech. The clearnet has shrunk drastically to only a handful of companies. They use this data to profile us, socially engineer us. Your thoughts and opinions are not your own, they are what you have been trained to believe. Advertisers and sellers pay rent to Google, AWS and meta to remain on their platforms so that they have access to us. The rich don’t need us to spend anymore. When you are worth more than the GDP of entire continents, when less than 3000 people have that wealth, they seize control to install themselves as our rulers. Why do you think Jeff Bezos, Zuckerberg and Alphabet have said nothing despite reportedly losing “billions.” Because when money becomes meaningless, you go mad with the power to use it to control people and reshape the world into what you want. That is why being a Billionaire is a mental illness, because when you have access to literally everything and anything at anytime you want. You relate to no one, because they exist to please you and you value nothing, because you struggle for nothing. The people who want you to spend aren’t the rich, they’re the farmers that rent the land from the lords that own it. Who will never need money again.
We have to do that as free equals, not the family hierarchy system
That doesn’t track though. Consumption is just a vehicle for the accumulation of wealth, and is easily wielded as a weapon once it stops being effective. Like, if they were truly in favor of consumption, the whole avocado toast thing would have been encouraged instead.
We need to reprioritize what we value as a society, deemphasizing individuality and private ownership and moving towards community.
Except… how do you do that?
Write a book?
Post on social media?
There’s nothing actionable there. Vaguely encouraging people to consume less will literally do nothing in the face of endless advertisements and algorithms.
There is no way to change the mass behavior of human populations without doing something direct… like addressing the fact that the wealthy are hoarding all of the wealth.
Banning advertising would be a good start.
This requires a cultural change. Even if we fully redistribute the wealth, if everyone uses there new money to buy a huge pickup truck then we aren’t helping to make a sustainable system.
Changing the culture is going to require some carrots and sticks.
The carrot is showing how you can enjoy life without consumption. People in the west have been indoctrinated by advertising and other cultural forces to think the path of happiness lies through consumption. Banning advertising and having media show paths to happiness that are less consumptive can help with this. Social media can play a part in this by showing people enjoying life withiut needing to buy anything, eg. Posting a pciture of your friends hanging out in the park. Celebrating a low consumption lifestyle can direct peoples drive for happiness away from consumption towards less destructive pursuits.
The stick, which most people don’t want to do, is shame. Christianity was able to channel people’s sexual drive into monogamous heterosexual married relationships for centuries using shame. If it’s able to control such a fundamental desire as sex, it can stop people from buying useless junk. This will have to wait until the culture gains majority, because a minority shaming a majority just results in the minority being ostracized.
i suppose you’re one of the people who insists that they are always right solely based on the fact that “it has always been like this”. i.e. you claim “it’s natural that we all live in individual houses”, though that’s actually a fallacy:
people are naturally tribal animals and we used to live in rather large groups of around 30 people or more for most of human history. it’s an incredibly young thought that people live in 4-person homes. (i couldn’t track down the exact time when this started but it must have been sometime within the last 200 years, i guess.)
what are your actual arguments in favor of the single-family home?
I don’t think we should incentivise single family homes but I also thing people shouldn’t be stuck living under the ownership of their parents. You know it won’t be an equal relationship even after age 18 the dominate continues as long as the dependence does
Yeah. This is ignoring the fact that not only did they live in the same house, but also the adults used to have the absolute authority over their children. Living standards changed and it’s okay. Even now, my parents dread me living with them as an adult because that would mean me never becoming fully independent.
Sure, I can contextualise this with the fact that every single year since the 2008 crash the economy has worsened as the mega rich have collected massive amounts of wealth. Wealth extracted through endless advertising and social engineering, across every single denomination in the world while paying basically zero tax through exploiting tax loopholes. This forces every single country’s central bank to print more money which drives inflation. Which is absolutely meaningless to the absurdly wealthy because billionaires will notice no change whether it’s 50 dolllars to fill their gas tank or 5000. If we continue as we are now, generational living will become absolutely necessary for everyone because in 2 generations the wealth gap in the west will grow to resemble some of the poorest parts of India. This is reality, there is a reason 2 working adults with full time jobs cannot afford a 1 bedroom apartment in san francisco and homelessness is rampant. It’s why it’s 1.2 million euro for a fully-attached, 1 bedroom bungalow on the South Side of Dublin city. As the rich acquire more and more wealth they will out compete us all for resources, for our homes, food, politicians, countries. It is why most millennials will never retire and it’s the reason for the rapid decline in birth rates across the globe. The internet and social media have been nothing more than a giant skinner box, used to redirect your ire away from the Billionaire class and at other members of the working class. Be that racially, with immigrants and asylum seekers. Or, politically, left and right. Wake up comrade.
It can be both.
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Yeah I’m not living with my mom thanks
Generational conflict is the other major factor. If the generation above me weren’t so difficult to be around it wouldn’t be so hard to imagine.
True. You generally aren’t treated with respect when you live under their roof so you gotta get out
I have the idea that parents are difficult to be around (especially towards their own children) to push their children “out of the nest”. I.e. it is not a natural “defect” that parents stop being acceptable people once their kids turn into puberty, but rather a feature of nature that is supposed to push teenagers out into the world to explore.
In other words, it’s a behavior that is meditated by signals: The parent gets the signal “my child is old enough to explore the world by themselves now -> push them out of the house”. That would imply that the signals can be identified and eliminated or reprogrammed to make parents more acceptable for their kids. Just a thought.
My guess is that if it were naturally preferable to keep kids in the house (for example because it’s too dangerous to go away from the house), then maybe parents would adopt to not push their children out of their house anymore.
I don’t know about that. I think in a lot of cases, it’s also down to our parents not getting any help for their mental health and not knowing how to deal with stuff they’re going through also making being around them a genuinely uncomfortable thing to do, even without anything like that going on.
That and a lot of people wind up having kids when they’re in no position to actually care for them and raise them properly, which aggravates the above, as well as providing material incentives to kick them out earlier.
These days it’s that they’re intolerable to.be around yet won’t let you explore the world on your own either.
What if you were neighbors? My family has talked about how cool it would be if we had like a family cul-de-sac
Hell no. I moved halfway across the country to get away from them, and it’s still too close.
I like the idea of doing a commune, preferably with better urban planning than a cul-de-sac
That can work for some people, not for me though. I want some distance.
My parents live about a half hour away, and that’s a good distance: close enough that we can visit frequently, but far enough that we can claim we don’t have time. It works for us.
My mother in law lives next door and we love it because we don’t have to worry about her but still have some distance
Yeah I wouldn’t mind that. My in-laws have a duplex but our aunt lives next door. If it wasn’t her, it would be us.
Indirectly, maybe.
I also think it’s mostly just shitty parents, possibly who also had shitty parents, that forced the “hard knock life” on kids to make them “tough” and self reliant. Assuming they weren’t just regular old being abusive in some form. Being poor can also drive people out, if someone isn’t earning money in an already economically tight situation it can create a lot of friction.
Americans have a kinda messed up family life. This “self reliance” that separates the family unit and attempts to make it a standalone entity against everyone else really doesn’t reflect the way a lot of the rest of the world operates with closer family and community ties. Even not too long ago America was a lot different in that fashion. Probably WW2 and the growth that followed were the main shift.
YES thank you, finally somebody says it. I couldn’t muster the motivation to make this exact thought into a post yet even though the idea has been going through my head for a long time.
Of course, if every person uses their own house, you need lots of houses which “stimulates the economy”, i.e. it shifts wealth from the pockets of the workers into the pockets of the construction companies, up from where it goes partially to the owner’s pockets, partially to the wages. Yet with every iteration of the game the owners grab a bigger and bigger piece of the wealth, until it is all accumulated uphill. Consider:
It’s a bit thick on the wages and thin on shareholders but the concept is right
I made 10 bucks an hour in 2007 and had a one bedroom one bathroom apartment for $475 in a college city.
Living on your own was possible 18 years ago.
These days $475 a person crammed into an apartment with more people than bedrooms is a good deal. It’s shocking to hear about how within just the 21st century it was possible to afford housing
I pay more than that and live with six other people. We have a house but rent is fucked.
That same apartment I lived in jumped to something like $750 immediately in response to the crash. It now rents for $1300 last I checked. Same little end unit next to the dumpsters.
The real reason your parents want you out is so they can fuck everywhere in peace and bring the kink back into their life. Kids are the ultimate mood spoilers.
*meant in jest, you’re all lovely*
Other way around too. One major reason why the current cohort of 18-25 year olds aren’t getting any is because no one wants to bring someone back to their parents’ place.
When I was that age we fucked anywhere, no need to go home for that… Unless the old folks were away for the weekend of course
That’ll get you on the sex offender registry these days
I don’t live in Americanistan
