Hacker News

points by mschuster91 21 hours ago | 0 comments

> What's driving the economy if not consumers?

Good luck trying to explain that to boomers. They wonder why the economy is going down the drain, why we don't have children and whatnot - yeah, no surprise, we barely make rent at the end of the month.

[–] lynx97 20 hours ago

Thats the way it is when you just started working. 25 years ago, when I started to work, it took me 10!!! years to finally earn enough to have a monthly surplus of a low three digit figure. I finally saving money in earnest roughly 8 years ago. So it took me roughly 15 years to earn enough to finally be able to save some money. Back then, doomsaying wasn't a thing yet, so all I did was hang in there, and, never really complain. Sure, things haven't gotten easier, but really, what GenZ is doing these days is professional complaining, thats all.

[–] creata 19 hours ago

> what GenZ is doing these days is professional complaining

We are watching machines rapidly match and surpass humans at countless skills that were considered uniquely human mere months ago - skills that demanded a lot of creativity and insight. Some of our oldest fields of study (e.g., mathematics) are turning into a game of who can spend the most tokens.

I think the humans are entitled to complain a little.

[–] AlecSchueler 18 hours ago

And don't forget that we're steamrolling ahead into a mass extinction event

[–] lynx97 18 hours ago

Is this sarcasm? I hope so. If not, forget everything that FFF has told you, its nonesense.

[–] lynx97 18 hours ago

I am of the opinion that if you have it better then 90% of humanity (which is likely true), you are not entitled to complain. But that is just me.

[–] Apocryphon 8 hours ago

But if you're having it worse than your parents' generation, you are more likely to complain. And as a corollary, if you are having it better than your kids' generation, then you are not entitled to complain about their complaining.

[–] mschuster91 16 hours ago

> Sure, things haven't gotten easier, but really, what GenZ is doing these days is professional complaining, thats all.

They have gotten measurably worse. Housing is the most obvious example, it takes more and more yearly incomes to buy an average house.

On top of that, every generation including and after the Millennials got force fed the propaganda of "you need an academic degree to be worth a dime" and companies went hard on that as well (because companies don't need to pay for training, unlike a classic apprenticeship/training system)... and now AI is displacing knowledge workers en masse, because machines can digest and reinterpret knowledge far, far faster and at much larger scale than even the most autistic superhuman.

[–] WelkinFolk 43 minutes ago

Why is this so heavily downvoted? Is HN just full of old people that can't digest the fact that the world hasn't really gotten better, when it comes to housing and jobs at the very least?