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The death of partying in the USA

derekthompson.org

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Re: The death of partying in the USA

#241

Post by mtalantikite »

LeanderK wrote: post #41

Purely anecdotal, but I was recently reflecting at the current trend of people posting really extensive morning routines. Waking up, meditation, yoga, gym, shower, eating breakfast, meal-prepping,....having a whole day before your day starts. While they should impress you with their healthiness and discipline, I just thought how utterly lonely and sterile most of them look like. And you're completely done after work…

Well, the loneliness coming through on those posts might just be from the fact that the people that are posting on social media like that are, in fact, lonely and looking for connection. I have a pretty extensive morning routine of practicing music, sitting for meditation/pranayama, food, shower all before work, and then Muay Thai or yoga or strength training in the evening. I just don't post it on social media because I don't have social media. I still go out to see music/art and friends etc, but I also live in NYC where it's easy to do that.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#242

Post by typewithrhythm »

bluGill wrote: post #199
vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One important data point is that houses have become much more expensive compared to income in the last decades. When I lived in CA, my plumber neighbor told me he bought his house in the 70s for 80000 on a salary of 40000. Today he would probably pay 800000 for the same house but make maybe 100000 or a little more. It's definitely harder to buy a house these days.

At 18% interest which happened in the 70s your yearly payments would have been 14468.02 or 36% of your income. A couple years ago you could get 3% rates and so your payment on that house would be 40473.98 or 40% of your income, not much difference (and likely the house is larger). At todays 6% interest the payment is 57556.85 or 57% of your income and so not affordable, but this is a very recent thing.

This is both ignoring inflation, and the potential to shorten the duration of the loan.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#243

Post by bluGill »

realityfactchex wrote: post #94
01100011 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Southern California neighborhood used to be like this. It was a diverse neighborhood of white, Filipino, Viet and Mexicans and it felt alive. Then covid hit and the demographics changed. Prices went up. Now the neighborhood is as quiet at night as where I lived in the bay area a few years ago. No open garages. No music. People are generally unfriendly now and keep to themselves more. Sad what we've lost. We're sti…

> open garages Can you say more about open garages and community? Is that about car culture, music, pool tables, garage "bars", sofas, TVs, or something else? Would the whole local neighborhood be welcomed into open garages, or was open-garage-culture limited to people whom people already knew?

Yes. Each garage is different. If you are working on your car in an open garage that is an invite for someone else interested in cars to say hi, offer advice - and possibly pitch in when you are working on something that needs more than 1 person. If you see someone playing guitar in their garage that is an invite to bring your fiddle and join in. If you see someone playing pool that is your invite to play the next game. And so on. Note that there is nothing in the above list that will appeal to everyone, so if you don't like cars you walk by that garage, if you don't play music you walk by the guitar...

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#244

Post by shlant »

dylan604 wrote: post #216
vjvjvjvjghv wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One important data point is that houses have become much more expensive compared to income in the last decades. When I lived in CA, my plumber neighbor told me he bought his house in the 70s for 80000 on a salary of 40000. Today he would probably pay 800000 for the same house but make maybe 100000 or a little more. It's definitely harder to buy a house these days.

the higher prices are affected by the corporate buying of single family homes. for every home a corp buys, that's one less for individuals to buy. if the number of buyers remains the same but fewer homes are available, prices go up--seller's market. yes, prices go up adjusted for..., but inventory more competitively sought. the other issue is that the average buyer is looking to buy with financing while corps are pay…

> affected by the corporate buying of single family homes

> after corps, we have foreign buyers also coming in with cash offers

As someone mentioned earlier in the thread, these are memes that are not actually backed by data - commonly perpetuated by groups that blame most issues on billionaires/corporations/investment firms.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#245

Post by ValentinPearce »

prewett wrote: post #217
micromacrofoot wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This sentiment strikes me a lot more as people in their 20's complaining that they're poor because they don't have the financial resources of someone in their 40's, despite having more resources than the latter did at their age. Home prices have doubled over the past 20 years, twice the rate of income increases This isn't just "complaining"

There's been 65% inflation over the past 20 years, so to properly compare housing prices you need to multiply the 20 years ago price by 1.65. A house that doubled in price in twenty years only increased by 20% in terms of actual purchasing power (2.0 / 1.65). [1] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/

Are wages indexed on inflation ? If they increase slower, wouldn't that mean the 20% increase represents more than that ?

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#246

Post by triceratops »

southernplaces7 wrote: post #13
eplatzek wrote: post #2

With COVID partying meant that someone could kill you with an illness. That's a pretty hard lesson to unlearn. They carries a lot of momentum. Like with World Wars there's been a generational impact that changed how people relate to one another. The tribal momentum, of one monkey teaching the next, gets lost.

>With COVID partying meant that someone could kill you with an illness. Given the mortality rate for people typically in the partying age group (and especially those under 30), you were more likely to die in a traffic accident on your way to or back from the party, or from alcohol poisoning, than from a case of COVID acquired there. Let's not exaggerate. From the NIH: The median IFR for COVID based on age groups: 0.0…

Dying isn't the only risk from catchig Covid.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#247

Post by api »

jcranmer wrote: post #175
Apreche wrote: post #28

This article isn’t wrong, but it neglects to mention real estate, transportation, and lodging. A party needs a venue, and it needs guests. And the guests need a way to get to and from the venue. If they stay a long time, they need a place to sleep. People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. It’s kind of hard to throw a big party witho…

> People these days don’t own real estate. Wealthy people own it all. Normal people are renting apartments or portions of homes. If you look at a graph of home ownership in the US by cohort at various points in time (see, e.g., https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2018/08/homeownership... ), while the rates are somewhat lower, between the highest point and the lowest point the difference is at worst 10 percentage p…

That's for the whole country. This site is very heavily biased toward people who live in major cities, where real estate has in fact become the purview of only the rich.

Short version of the history:

Starting in the late 1990s, you had a super-concentration of both good jobs and interesting culture in a short list of cities: SF Bay, New York, LA/OC, Seattle, and a few others. I remember growing up during this period and the whole cultural zeitgeist was "if you don't live in one of those cities, you can't do anything."

These cities have always had an allure, especially creative centers like LA and NYC, but what I mean is that it got much more extreme. It fits with the general cultural zeitgeist of everything centralizing and going to the extreme right side in an increasingly tight power-law distribution.

This was followed by insane real estate hyperinflation in those cities, of course, because if you try to take all the "interesting" stuff in the world's largest economy and a nation of 300+ million people and cram it into a few metros, that happens.

The rest of the country still has a lot of affordable real estate, less so than it used to -- RE has appreciated everywhere and not just in the US -- but it's far less insane than the top-tier cities.

I post this every chance I get:

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#249

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

This was a post on the GenX subreddit (from a Gen Zer) from just a couple days ago asking about if parties as portrayed in late 90s/early 00s "teen movies" were actually a real thing:

https://www.reddit.com/r/GenX/comments/1lu102v/were_parties_...

The responses from the Gen Xers were a mix of bewilderment and sadness, stuff like "What do you mean parties like this, it's just a normal teenage party!? I feel so ancient and also so confused by this question." The whole comment section is worth a read, especially the disconnect between how the Gen Xers experienced adolescence and how the Gen Z poster does.

It's really sad to me how we have completely fucked a lot of youth with social media, smart phones, and over-scheduling/over-protection. I also disagree with some of the comments here that are bringing up things like "real estate, transportation, and lodging". Sure, those are issues, but you have families and kids in the suburbs today just like you had families and kids in the suburbs in the 90s, and the fact that kids today can't even recognize "basic teen parties" and question whether they are some sort of made up fantasy can't just be waved away by the fact that real estate is more expensive today.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#250

Post by Der_Einzige »

burnt-resistor wrote: post #11

My grandma was the head of the local Air Force wives' club. Their house was always stocked like a full bar and at least several people stopped by for a visit just about every day. They knew at least 10 of their neighbors well, and some former neighbors too. Find me community like this anywhere in America these days. Immigrant communities perhaps? Most Americans these days won't interact with their neighbors unless it…

lol!!!

“ It seems that the original modern American swingers were crew-cut World War II air force pilots and their wives. Like elite warriors everywhere, these “top guns” often developed strong bonds with one another, perhaps because they suffered the highest casualty rate of any branch of the military. According to journalist Terry Gould, “key parties,” like those later dramatized in the 1997 film The Ice Storm, originated on these military bases in the 1940s, where elite pilots and their wives intermingled sexually with one another before the men flew off toward Japanese antiaircraft fire.“

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-at-dawn/201211/n...

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