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The death of partying in the USA

derekthompson.org

321–330 of 756 posts

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a detail conveniently left out by home owners justifying their purchase, especially if they overpaid and have a higher interest rate on their mortgage on top of it. With a mortgage, the amount you pay is the expected floor you'll encounter, whereas with rent, the amount you pay is the maximum you'll deal with, at least for the duration of the lease agreement. Renting honestly can be a better deal, especially…

> This is a detail conveniently left out by home owners justifying their purchase I mean you can phrase it this way. Or you can phrase it as homeowners are willing to play a premium for stability / forced savings. (And to be less generous, homeowners may be getting cheaper access to capital than otherwise available to a renter; espsecially as the homeowner locks in ~2% interest rate while a margin loan has increase t…

I will say, one huge advantage for home ownership over renting is when you are in a dual income household and have kids. Your lifestyle isn't going to be as compatible with moving around constantly trying to find a good deal (like I'm able to as a single person). And if you do plan to stay put for 10 years or so, you will most definitely come out ahead. But you really need to be in the right mindset and phase of your life for this to truly make sense. I often times see others not really ready to settle down rush and buy a home, only to end up regretting the decision a few years down the line, sometimes even sooner.

I will also note, that the notion of having access to a cheap line of credit, like a HELOC, can be a fantastic tool when used correctly. But... I'm also seeing folks abuse this to keep up with the Joneses. And when times get tough, they won't be able to pivot and might end up defaulting and then losing their home in the process.

The overall state of the economy will still need another major shakedown before those elements of society get their wake-up call. It sorta started happening with Liberation Day, but we bounced back rather quickly... so who knows when that would happen.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ll endorse this heavily. We bought into a nice suburban community. Good schools, low crime, the dream. No one knows any neighbors. Kids rarely play with one another intra-neighborhood despite a very healthy blend of age ranges. In fact, I’ve loosely associate with exactly one neighbor in the three years. We went out of our way to try and meet neighbors our first month. Most treated us as if we head too many heads o…

>No one knows any neighbors. Why would you know them? If this were 1965, you were going to live in that house the rest of your life, and they were going to live in that house the rest of their lives right next door and so it only made sense to get to know them. But today, both you and they are only here temporarily until it becomes time to move away in 4 years when you job-hop for that raise. Will you even live in th…

Americans are moving less frequently now than they were in 1965:

Overall, when looking at both migration between U.S. states and within them, fewer Americans are moving each year. In 1948, the first year on record with the Census Bureau, more than 20 percent of the population moved in the past year. This had decreased to just 8.7 percent in 2022. While the share of Americans moving across state lines remained more stable, those moving within their state became much fewer, from between 15-17 percent of Americans per year in the 1950s and 1960s to results in the single digits in the new millennium.

https://www.statista.com/chart/32135/share-of-movers-and-non...

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#323
post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean normal teen parties when I was a teenager were places for teens to get blackout drunk and make bad decisions. I empathize with your position somewhat, but it wasn't all good.

Not all parties were like that. Or at least I was never invited to those. We geeks stuck to LAN parties, got drunk, and played games. Since there were no girls around, we managed to avoid making any bad decisions :) But we did party way more than kids today.

Reminds me that some of the hardest partiers/most adventurous kids were not popular: theater kids!

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#324
post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So you're insinuating that the specific example of a house sitting empty owned by a foreign buyer is made up? In my neighborhood specifically, there are homes being bought not by single families but specifically buy management companies so they can then rent the property. To deny this happens is just as much of a stick your head in the sand meme as what you are accusing me of.

So you're insinuating that the specific example of a house sitting empty owned by a foreign buyer is made up?

I'm sure that happens occasionally. It's not nearly as significant as exclusionary zoning and other bad policies that prevent housing from being built.

In my neighborhood specifically, there are homes being bought not by single families but specifically buy management companies so they can then rent the property

Even in that case, the homes are still on the market.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does seem like there's something wrong with that data; I find it somewhat implausible that the average parent was only caring for their child for 1.7 hours a day in 1985; even if you assume that all of the tween and teens were free-range and only got an hour or two of parenting a day, little kids have always required nonstop attention to make sure that they're not actively dying. Although... the infant mortality r…

Yeah, I've wondered if there is some sort change in how people think about and label their activities. Would a 1950s parent even think of themselves as doing a defined activity called "childcare"? Or rather, the children are just around, as the parent is doing things. If I am cooking dinner while a toddler putters around the floor and a baby is in a high-chair eating scraps I give him, am I doing "childcare"? Would a…

Toddlers don’t just putter around. They want to be wherever you’re at doing whatever you’re doing and opening all the cabinets and boxes and pulling everything out to look at it. I think people were more apt to put them to work around the house in the past whereas now people infantilize them more. My son doesn’t speak very well as a 19 month old but he understands a lot and pays attention, and right now we’re trying to figure out how to put him to work in the kitchen and around the house so he feels involved and we get what little help he is able to contribute.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#326
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…

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Re: The death of partying in the USA

#327

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…

Ya I'm shocked by it too, said as a Gen Xer born in the late 1970s, occasionally a Xennial.

I partied for 4 years of college which is something like 30 years in sober adult terms. Our ragers were reminiscent of Animal House and Revenge of the Nerds, all of those old party movies that didn't age well. Scenes from Hackers, Fight Club, The Matrix, Trainspotting, Go, Swingers, Made, 200 Cigarettes, SLC Punk, Dazed and Confused, PCU, even Undergrads (a cartoon) were so spot-on for campus life, living for the weekend. Can't Hardly Wait, American Pie, Varsity Blues, Waiting, Superbad, etc came later, and I almost consider those watered down versions of the feral partying that happened earlier just as the internet went mainstream, but still canon.

A Friday night at my city's bar scene today looks like what our Sunday or Monday was. People half tipsy on 2 drinks, even though they're Ubering home later. The faint scent of ganja now instead of basements filled with smoke and first timers trying laughing gas. Nobody puking or disappearing around a corner to relieve themselves. No sound of bottles shattering. I feel like a curator of a museum now, a derelict from a forgotten time.

In fairness, I went to college in the midwest, where there was nothing else to do. Now the West Coast has effectively legalized drugs, awakening much of the country to the full human experience, and people have done the trips and plant medicine and maybe realize at a young age that alcohol and tobacco are rough drugs that tear you up. Which is admirable, but they also prepare you for getting torn up as an adult. To miss out on learning how to make your way home on drunk logic before you black out seems like a crucial rite of passage has been lost.

And it shows. In our country's embrace of puritanical politics like we saw in the jingoist 2000s, regentrified for the antivax era. In the worship of unspoiled beauty, idolizing of influencers, pursuit of financial security over visceral experience. In the fanboyism, bootlicking and drinking the kool-aid for every new evolutionary tech that cements the status quo instead of freeing the human spirit in a revolutionary manner. I gotta be honest, most of what's happening today is laughable to my generation. Blah I sound like a Boomer. Ok cryable then. We're in mourning. We worry about the kids today. All work and no play and all that. It's killing our souls, and theirs.

I guess my final thought after writing this is that partying is one of the most powerful reality-shifting tools in our arsenal. All of this can't be it. This can't be how America ends. You know what to do.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#328

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…

The economic realities shouldn't be discounted. With more competitive conditions, the youth have to work much harder to secure the same opportunities relative to previous generation. With this comes the decline of partying or other high risk or non-productive activities. It's also true of adults - nightclubs are not as much of a thing as they were in decades prior.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#329
post #152

If I were to try and pinpoint one of the leading causes of this issue myself, I would personally say that Americans have an outdated and ineffective model regarding its use of addictive substances or what I like to now call "Brain Hacking" systems as they are not necessarily just physical substances anymore. Recreational drugs cause unbelievable havok within communities where they are unleashed. Its well known that s…

Socializing in most Western countries used to be built entirely around an addictive mind altering substance, alcohol. Despite its many flaws it was extremely pro-social. Other drugs had their own party scenes.

Not to mention the stereotype of the 50’s housewife using “diet pills” to get more done. Back then they were amphetamines.

Re: The death of partying in the USA

#330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People these days don’t own real estate. The home ownership rate has been 64%, plus or minus about 1%, for the last 45 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RSAHORUSQ156S

Perhaps, but what about the median age of buyers? That tells a more complete story here https://www.axios.com/2024/11/04/home-buyer-age-older

But presumably we are talking about the parents of teenagers who would own the homes for these parties, so people who are 40+
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