Uncertainty

I am listening to a Boyscast interview with Rob Henderson.  I had not heard of them,  and expected it to be rather Joe Roganish. I might be unfair to Rogan on that, as I have only listened to fragments of a few of his shows. The interview is smarter than that, perhaps because Henderson is elevating it. He brings evolutionary psychology, intrasexual competition and the sexes policing themselves and the other sex both, and contemporary culture trends. I'm about halfway through and liking it.  I think women will find parts offensive, but I think some of it is fair observations put in a provocative way. The other episodes of the show do not look promising. They are all 1.5 generations younger than me, and this is deeply reflected in their comments about "men," "women," "expectations," and the like. 

They were discussing homeowning, and the interviewer brought up a statistic that 40% of 30 year-olds in the 1950s-70s owned homes, but only 14% do now.  I can't vouch for those numbers and they look more extreme than I would have guessed, but point taken.  I think there is a lot to that. Henderson had not heard the statistic but immediately had the same thoughts I did. People were in not in school as long and married younger. Even when I graduated high school in 1971 there were classmates who had dropped out before graduation because they had a mill job or construction or trade job that they were never going to need a diploma for and decided to just get started.  They would have had fourteen years experience as a mason or hairdresser by age 30.

For the others, the expectation of "house" was different as well. People bought older, shabby houses just to have a house of some sort.  The term fixer-upper was common.  I don't hear it much now.  Bethany thought that condos might be the equivalent now, and you don't fix up a condo and add to the value in order to move up. Having any kid of a yard matters if you've got kids, too. They got into the whole discussion that we just had here about whether older generations had it easier or harder than today's young people. Something was missing, but I couldn't tell what. They discussed AI coming to take white collar jobs and how that was different from the fear of robots taking blue-collar ones.

Then these very intelligent young men (the interviewer Ryan Long is a comedian) whose objectivity I respected came to a conclusion that jumped out at me, and I thought "That's it. That's what's missing."  They both agreed that numbers don't convince anyone of anything, and what is different now is the uncertainty. And I immediately knew that was crazy, but understandable to think so.

Looking back on the stories of people buying houses for $10,000 in 1951, working at job, fixing up the house, rising in your career, upgrading with a new mortgage five or ten years later, houses rising in value - it all looks smooth, regular, predictable.  Heck, it looks that way to me looking back, and I was present then, with a life that didn't look like that. My wife had a nice predictable looking childhood in an upper-middle-class suburb and a father who had a very good business installing laboratories, it now looks rather idyllic.  For her, it was.  Only as an adult did she learn that her parents took out a second mortgage to keep the business afloat at one point. What we look back at as normal was the survivor bias of those where things did not go horribly wrong. If someone had a terrible accident, or your spouse became alcoholic, or the factory/mill closed in a one-industry town, or you got drafted to Vietnam and died, you fell out of the memory of what was usual.  My mother remarried and I reentered the usual progression in late childhood. In our turn my wife and I bought a terrible fixer-upper that I didn't much fix up, we bought a larger house in the same market so the selling/buying price was not a problem, we both worked and didn't spend any money.  Adopting children set back the finances, but mostly just put prosperity on hold for a decade rather than ruining it. In retrospect our lives and our parents look like a nice calm progression with some struggles.  But predictable.  Once things have happened, they look as if they had to happen that way.

Yet our lives did not look predictable at the time, and uncertainty followed us as well. Not as much as it did our parents, who had been through the Depression, WWII, and Korea, but still plenty of uncertainty to go around. 

That may be driving a lot of the complaints.  The data driving their expectations is driven by survivor bias out of all those "exceptions" who ended up with harder lives. And every generation has its own anxiety, which is not visible to succeeding generations. Even I do it, looking back at my parents and grandparents.  Their survival to old age with some sort of a house and comfort looks like what was always destined to happen, because it was a "normal" life for their generation. 

I even look at my own life that way. I had nostalgia for my youth, as many of us do, forgetting how anxious I was then about finding a wife, finding a job, and just generally not screwing up.