The Scandal of Financial Nihilism • Hacker News Board

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#161

Post by TheFattestNinja » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 1:59 PM UTC

Guid_NewGuid wrote: post #108

JansjoFromIkea wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"we saw our beloved parents struggle in old age with health and finance", This would vary from country to country but absolutely isn't the case in the UK. Most millennial's parents didn't have their income crippled by rent (with little chance of buying) and student loans (tuition fees only came in in the late 90s), and lived most their lives with a public health service that wasn't being aggressively gutted. If anyth…

Yeah, certainly from a UK perspective that part of the GP didn't ring true. While my parent isn't one of the boomer generation that will be extremely well off and I personally worry for their retirement, across the generation in general I think they might have experienced the peak retirement experience. I personally don't think retirement as exists today will be a thing by the time I reach the same age. I haven't rea…

To tie into the original post, we joke that our retirement plan is a good backpack for the post-apocalypse wasteland (you get to choose your flavor between war, climate, or many others) trekking, so I like your scenario better.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#162

Post by jesuscript » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 2:21 PM UTC

TheFattestNinja wrote: post #160

jesuscript wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have a different take on why we want to see the world burn. We’re watching as we get trapped into the void, the proverbial rat race. We have a specific vantage point, dead smack in the middle. We see both ends of the race clearly, with boomers in retirement at the end, and GenZ/Y at the beginning. All racing. At the beginning of the race we see the incessant vain jockeying of a group trying to socially manipula…

But why wouldn't disenchantment towards the rat race lead us more towards a "I'm just not going to play the game and enjoy myself doing art or whatever" rather than a "maybe the current conflicts will explode spectacularly and destroy the status quo" mindset? As mentioned, this seems to be more prevalent in people who are, objectively, well-off in the financial department, so it's not like they "hate" the system per…

You have to play the game to understand how weird it is, even if the weirdness benefits you.

There are financial constraints to being off the grid of the game.

Even if I wanted to run off into the woods and live in a cabin, I don’t know if I could live off the current amount I have.

So back to the grid, hence the resentment.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#163

Post by DontchaKnowit » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 4:53 PM UTC

TheFattestNinja wrote: post #155

DontchaKnowit wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed with your take on nihilism. But gen Z is 10x moreso. On average they are so Jaded. Theyve seen everything shocking under the sun (woman fucking horse? Check. Nun eating shit out of a priests ass. Sure. Eels in a vagina. Yep. Man beheaded by terrorists. Uh huh). And then with this over exposure to all the worst the world has to offer comes a sort of paradoxical closed mindedness. Where everything is "been there…

Maybe. But I don't think that being desensitized equals being nihilist, nor I believe genZ has had more exposure to "shocking" content than millenials. Things like 2girls1cup and rotten.com existed before genZ was even a commonly used word.

Yeah I think the difference is that to gen z all that shock shit is like old hat.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#164

Post by __MatrixMan__ » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 5:55 PM UTC

TheFattestNinja wrote: post #158

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a born in 1987, and I think I'm onto something similar. Older folk believe more deeply in the legitimacy of financial abstractions because they were adults before the cracks started to show. They have a stake in continuing the fiction that hard work == rewards. Younger folk see the abstractions as a farce that we don't really believe but that we bring out whenever we feel the need to justify an injustice that w…

Maybe it is a matter of being aware of "injustice" (for lack of a better word) too intensely, and then just becoming jaded to it to carry on. But it feels a bit too self-justifying to me, I'm wary of explanations that are too charitable to oneself. I hope we can find a way to channel that into self (and external) improvements instead.

I think we've always been aware of injustice. The new awareness is that injustice, left to fester, is a threat to the stability of systems that we rely on.

I'd love to take a moral view of the situation, but people dismiss those. Everybody speaks threat. And having acknowledged a threat isn't exactly a high bar.

We can worry about being too self congratulatory once we've done anything about it.

Re: The Scandal of Financial Nihilism

#165

Post by Apocryphon » Wed, Jan 18, 2023, 6:12 PM UTC

badpun wrote: post #154

arbitrary_name wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this every time. It doesn't effing matter if i don't have the option to buy a 1960s size house, let alone the newer larger home, die to price increases and high interest rates. Your analysis does not explain away decades of mediocre wage growth in the face of inflation in healthcare, education and housing costs.

But you do have an option to buy an 1960s house. They weren't all demolished - they're still here and naturally some are for sale. > Your analysis does not explain away decades of mediocre wage growth in the face of inflation in healthcare, education and housing costs. Wages are typically computed per household. In the late 1960, a tsunami of divorces and single-parent households started occuring (something that wasn…

If the median quality of these goods and services goes up, and so does the median price, then why hasn't the median affordability risen proportionally along with this? You're blaming the lack of wage growth on bad stats, which sounds like a just-so story.