It’s stunning how many people seem to forget that there are other countries on the planet that use dollars and weren’t involved in Vietnam. No, I’m not making an assumption. The person who posted this is Canadian.
Y’all really need to take a step back and reflect a little bit.
My dad bought about a third of an acre of waterfront property in the 80s with a small cottage on it that we added to. He paid something like $50,000. Guess what a small waterfront property is worth now?
No one gonna bite? Ok, I’ll go first… One million dollars!
I mean okay but this person would’ve been a young adult during the Vietnam war and the war on drugs and died at 53 to avoid the war on terror.
That’s… Dying at 54 years of age?
and the problem is where? I’m here for a good time not a long time
Made me think of this Irish toast:
“Here’s to a long life, and a merry one
A quick death, and an easy one
A pretty girl, and an honest one
A cold beer - and another one”deleted by creator
You can still be happy in your 50s and beyond.
At least until 72 or so. After that it’s iffy.
Eh, my parents are pretty happy in their 70s. They still go skiing, travel a ton, etc. Stay active and your 70s can be quite pleasant.
Teach me this skill.
Ideally also long.
This.
You can push it back to 1944 if you’re in the US, the war wouldn’t have impacted you much. You could even push it back to 1940, but there may be some depression era nutrition issues.
That bumps 2001 up to 57. Honestly go for a few more years and retire before '08 and die in 2019 before covid at age 75
Why die before COVID? COVID was honestly kinda okay, if you’re a home body type. I played so many video games, it was glorious.
Being 75 puts you in the choking to death from covid range, no fun.
Looking at the stats, I’d take my chances.
Dying at 54 means you can also live in the bliss of eating red meat, drinking, and ripping cigarettes every day after your 20s.
Yes please
Did he fucking stutter
As God intended.
My grandfather picked tomatoes to buy his house in cash.
He was a hard worker, but damn, imagine buying a house in cash.
My dad bought his house for $650 in 1976, had it moved from the mill village where it was for $2000 and has lived in it on land he was given for 50 years. Its current value is over $225k.
He offered to sell me a quarter acre for $50k.
Fyi $650 in 1976 is about $3600-3700 adjusted for inflation.
Sounds like pops is needing slot machine money.
Change the last bit to
Retire in 2001 with a inflation linked final salary pension scheme.
deleted by creator
Then smile to yourself as the rest of the world grinds to a halt to protect you during the pandemic.
Not specific enough. Going by typical evil genie rules you’d be born in 47’, but be a poc in like Alabama or Oklahoma. Just in time to get drafted to fight in Vietnam and then have to fight for civil rights at home.
Have your house torn down for a highway two years after buying it maybe?
Im amazed that ever worked. If you forcibly tore my house down to build a road, you’d find that that road had a tendency to explode… every week or so
You forgot the part where you get to call young people lazy
This is basically my dad
Impress them with a firm handshake.
Didn’t work for me… in my 1972 bank job interview I was told, “I’d hire you if you were a man, but you’re not. If I hired you, you’d just get pregnant and leave.” It wasn’t against the law for him to say all that.
And for what it’s worth I didn’t buy a home - a small one-bed flat - until I was in my 40s. Cost me so much I couldn’t afford proper furniture. Yes, my current house is worth a lot more than what I paid for it (mainly because I bought a wreck), but so is any other house I could afford if I sold it.
would be great if you told us how much it costed and how much you brought in hourly. i wanna sympathize but then i remember you could rent a studio in the 70s-80s for like 300 dollars month. i probably could have bought a house with a missing arm and working 30 hours a week.
My flat cost £43k in the early 90s, nearly three times my annual income at the time, and all my savings went on the deposit. I had previously lived in a shared house, the only way I could afford to save anything.
More nostalgia… Looking for a 1br flat to rent in 1980s Wellington (NZ) was a trip. Demand far, far outstripped supply. Among the gems offered to me for top rental (can’t remember how much, but it was crazily high), was a place that stank of damp and had rat-holes chewed in the bathroom wall - which was just soggy softboard against a dirt bank. There were three couples viewing at the same time. Another place I was told was fresh to the market, no-one else had seen it yet. The stove had been dismantled and the toilet was piled high with human shit. When I shouted at the agent she said, You don’t want it then?" and hung up.
I eventually lucked in with a “granny flat” whose owners, an adorable elderly Polish couple, lived upstairs.
ahhh, didnt realize you were from the UK dont know enough to speak on it. i rescind anything i might have said
That’s the general problem for everyone who is not from US here on Lemmy: Everybody from US assumes that everybody knows we are talking about US. I would never say that “the ideal life is being born in 1947” and I was wondering why anyone would say that. That’s right after World War 2. Must have been a crazy time.
Yeah, I was hoping I’d see less of that moving away from Reddit to a non-US site, but eh, what can you do.
No worries - life is always a struggle for some, no matter where in the world you are.
When my parents bought in the UK in the early 80s, the average family house was £20k. But mortgage rates at the time were ~20%, meaning you had to pay £4k per year just to cover the interest alone, and the average salary was below £6k.
Yes, interest came back down after a few years, but a lot of people learned about Negative Equity during those years.
Dang so it sounds like new Zealand has had a bit of a time with housing for a while then huh? I’ve heard a lot about it recently but just assumed it was a relatively new probably (post 2000-ish)
Wellington has had a heated property market longer than most places - it’s hilly for a start, so can’t just sprawl like Auckland, and it’s the capital, so a lot of well-heeled bureaucrats who don’t want to commute from the hinterlands. I don’t live there any more, so I don’t know what the rental market is like now.
Yes we’ve been through multiple housing crises although it’s gotten truly ridiculous in the last couple decades.
The crowning achievement of the first labour government when they were elected in 1935 was to create a massive state house building programme due to the huge shortages and miserable state of the stock at the time. This continued until the 1980s when we went full neoliberal, privatised everything and sold off most of the state houses and private landlords and speculation now dominate.
Anything built between early 1990s and 2004ish is prone to leaks due to the deregulated building code at the time and is basically trash.
Wellington is a particularly bad case, and has always had a worse housing situation than the rest of the country (although Auckland is more expensive). Hilly topography has meant lack of space to build and lots of damp hovels that get little sun. Add in character/heritage protection that made it effectively illegal to alter or demolish the draughty and falling apart 1920s wooden villas that make up most of inner Wellington and there you go.
You should do an AMA on life back then
Way to make me feel like a bloody dinosaur!! 😂
I dont know how things are in new zealand these days but in a medium city in canada a house or condo costs at least 10 times the average annual income and closer to 20-25 times a minimum wage income. So things may not have been as easy for you as the post makes it seem but they’re a hell of a lot harder for a lot of people now.
Wow, so it’s almost like no matter what time/year you were born that you will have hardships to face? Lemmy led me to believe that houses cost peanuts in the 60s and everyone working at a gas station could afford a multi room house.
This is great, as reply and shitty, as content. made my day and ruined my evening.
I’m sorry! Truly.
I had the same interview at a dental office in something like 2017. I wasn’t offered the job because, as the female dentist told me, they’d have to put a lot of time and effort into teaching me, and then I might just get pregnant and quit.
As long as you’re white
And a man.
And lived in US
And cishet
And able bodied
And secretly homosexual
And resemble a wasp
When you are white the sky is the limit. When you are not the limits the sky. -Chris Rock
Chris Rock must have been high as a kite when he said that then.
That or I’m having a stroke while reading it.
This is from his bigger and blacker stand up from early 2000 after saying this line. He also said that there is a one legged white bus boy who would not switch places with me and I’m rich because the bus boy would say nah man I’m gonna ride this white thing out and see where it takes me.
Cool, but the quote is still giving me a stroke.
The limit is the sky?
So you wouldn’t even live to be 60?
My dad was born in 1947. He died a year ago. Lived in my basement for 3 years toward the end, we converted it to a “in-law” suite. Probably spent most of his money on medical bills though because he had an accident that paralyzed half his body.
Anyhow he worked the same job his entire life only worked his way up to middle management at a factory. Prided himself in slacking off his entire career and still did better than I do now and I have to work much harder and have my spouse be employed to pull in what he did alone half-assing it.
So it was different for sure, middle-class was easily achieved if you were a white male. I’d almost say if you were poor you just got very unlucky, were a single mom, or a minority. If you were a white male, you’d really have to be dealt a bad hand in life to not be middle-class.
You have to be at least middle class and “white”/seen as the dominant demographic for this to work out. Just like every other place and time period.
middle class constraint can be relaxed for hunter-gatherer societies.
Could one feasibly claim that the less hunter-gatherer we are, the less egalitarian we are, societally?
