A secret of many urban 20-somethings: Their parents help with the rent

It's an interesting balance. I'm the same as you, I received an incredible amount of help to pay for private college. I paid my way through grad school and now make a professional salary in an expensive city, entirely self supporting. I'm moderately proud of living below my means and also living "well".

I'd also be proud to be able to help my theoretical children, so it's easy to see the "other side" of the argument as such.

To keep it polite and short, that's really not how the world works anymore. These days your (at least financial) success in life is very much correlated with the wealth of your parents. If you're from Sweden (as your username would indicate) you can take Stockholm as an example. My non-independent friend (and their parents) there are millionaires from housing appreciation and savings, while my independent friends are are spending all their salaries on renting short lease 3x normal rent sublets.

Even if not implemented through monetary inflation, BI will cause price inflation. Housing asset prices are primarily constrained by the affordability of rent - either to a landlord or directly to the bank. If everybody can spend twice as much on rent then rent just doubles, and if interest rates remain the same then paper appraisals double.

BI seems desirable because it addresses a glaring symptom of the inflationary treadmill. But if the treadmill remains the explicit national policy ("full employment"), BI will really just give us even more rope to hang ourselves. The sustainable answer is higher interest rates, so that frugal people can be rewarded for channeling discretionary spending towards paying off principle. But this would diminish our "service economy", which is all we have left after gutting domestic manufacturing.

I think what we're really witnessing is an erosion of money as a decentralized store of value, part of the general centralization of power enabled by digital communication networks.

It probably correlates. People with wealthy supportive parents are more able to take a "less valuable" degree. Where value = market rate for your skills.

tldr; Why didn't they help ? Because they didn't and couldn't know how.

Well, to make it short (it would take a book to get into the details and the analysis) my parents had their first child for the wrong reasons. That backfired later on when the unresolved conflicts and the toxic relationship between all of us degraded the family's capacity to face challenges in an healthy way and I had to take/was given the black sheep role. A vicious circle of saviour/victim had been in place from an early age and I was too young as a child to escape it (even though they were adults they were too young as well to get around it without outside help which they didn't think they needed at that time).

They were 36 when I was 18. Mother divorced biological father when I was 7 and he died some months later in an accident that was covered as a suicide (go figure). So, something was always fishy in how we interacted with each other. Mother remarried a man who was courting her in their high school years. Turns out he was an alcoholic like my father was. Not the stereotyped violent alcoholic. The sad kind, the one we ignore the changes in behaviour and the fact he is lying at 2 in the afternoon on the bathroom floor, haha let's laugh about it. Alcohol wasn't the problem, it's the facade and the make-believe game that everything is alright that is messing up the relationship. The man is okay but totally lacks the ability to express feelings (I won't go into his family situation but it explains some of his behaviour of course).

So I was the silent kind about all of it but unexplained anxiety and inadequacy took its toll on the way we built the family (but I was too young to get that and thought I was the one who was malfunctioning) (which I was anyway but it was not completely my fault) and how we/I expressed our/my needs/wants/desires. Of course both me and my brother were told we were `mature for your age`. Which can have the same consequences as those children obliged to take on their parent's emotional responsibilities and play the parents.

That's just a very rough picture of the whole thing. My brother suffered from it as well but in a different way (much more closer to them but he messed up his studies nevertheless) (I finished my BS anyway, yada me) (I was the one sent to shrinks of course) (I really dig the role theory in psychology). And then there's the whole taboo thing about money in society in general and in my family in particular.

So why didn't they help ? Because they didn't and couldn't know how. And because I couldn't ask them and didn't dare ask them. For example I spent a year eating sugar on bread and ketchup on pasta. Lost a teeth in the process :D Don't do that :).

Sorry, it must be even more teasing now than before. That's because these kind of stories takes time to write down in a way that makes sense and english isn't my first language so I can't fiddle too much with nuances.

edit: to clarify things: yes they could afford to help. I don't think that once I had my first job they would have helped me money wise on a regular basis but when I was in HS and uni they definitely had the resources to do so.