Letters: Readers respond to an article about quitting the rat race, with some saying their generation was handed an untenable position and others saying the struggle is nothing new
Living with parents isn’t ideal, but a part-time barista job in a cosy market town, with not a single work email boring into my soul every hour of the day and night, feels much more conducive to my wellbeing.
Millennials have been handed an untenable position, with adversaries citing avocado toast and a poor work ethic as symptoms of a failing generation.
Twice I have been hidden homeless while working at full capacity; and my last landlord was legally allowed to raise rents from £600 a head to £900, with no maintenance or material changes to the property.
Charles Bukowski wrote his novel Post Office in 1971, which detailed his morning job as a mail carrier that allowed him the freedom to write, drink and bet on the horses for the rest of the day.
For those of us who didn’t have all the advantages listed in this article, the option of leaving a hated job and going back to live in mum and dad’s beautiful home was not there.
What saddens me about this account of millennials is that it appeared to present a choice between working hard for money and power or opting out to please yourself – and not so much about finding what was truly meaningful and making a worthwhile contribution to the community.
The original article contains 1,154 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Reading about rent increases boils my blood, the ultimate example of getting money because you had money to begin with. Not talent, or production, or anything like that, just had money, get money.
Rent seeking mindset I call it — too many people and companies seeking to press others to extract their money rather than providing tangible value to society, and it’s not generally millennials doing it. It’s the disgusting underbelly of the entrepreneurial mindset the many of the past used to frame capitalism.
I think there’s clearly some societal benefits to distributing the work of maintaining housing in this way. Is there a cartel making the prices go up more than they should in a working market or what is the reason for it?
Greed is the reason, because they can. People need housing. Same way grocery stores are getting away with charging so much, people need food. The working market theoretically should fix this in time, but so far it isn’t. New houses and competing grocery stores don’t appear overnight. I fully agree with you, rentals have their place and there can be many benefits, but without proper oversight and rent control this was always going to be the outcome - squeeze as much cash out of people until you literally can’t anymore. I don’t think there is some secret collusion going on between landlords (at least in most cases), there’s really no need. Just watch rental prices, then when the area average becomes higher than you charge for your unit, you raise yours slightly above that. By doing that you’ve now ever so slightly increased that area’s average, now other landlords will raise their prices slighy higher, causing other landlords to raise their prices slightly higher, rinse and repeat. Note that I might be completely off the mark here but this lines up with my experiences at least.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Living with parents isn’t ideal, but a part-time barista job in a cosy market town, with not a single work email boring into my soul every hour of the day and night, feels much more conducive to my wellbeing.
Millennials have been handed an untenable position, with adversaries citing avocado toast and a poor work ethic as symptoms of a failing generation.
Twice I have been hidden homeless while working at full capacity; and my last landlord was legally allowed to raise rents from £600 a head to £900, with no maintenance or material changes to the property.
Charles Bukowski wrote his novel Post Office in 1971, which detailed his morning job as a mail carrier that allowed him the freedom to write, drink and bet on the horses for the rest of the day.
For those of us who didn’t have all the advantages listed in this article, the option of leaving a hated job and going back to live in mum and dad’s beautiful home was not there.
What saddens me about this account of millennials is that it appeared to present a choice between working hard for money and power or opting out to please yourself – and not so much about finding what was truly meaningful and making a worthwhile contribution to the community.
The original article contains 1,154 words, the summary contains 217 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Reading about rent increases boils my blood, the ultimate example of getting money because you had money to begin with. Not talent, or production, or anything like that, just had money, get money.
Rent seeking mindset I call it — too many people and companies seeking to press others to extract their money rather than providing tangible value to society, and it’s not generally millennials doing it. It’s the disgusting underbelly of the entrepreneurial mindset the many of the past used to frame capitalism.
Rent-seeking is essentially the core goal of capitalism.
I think there’s clearly some societal benefits to distributing the work of maintaining housing in this way. Is there a cartel making the prices go up more than they should in a working market or what is the reason for it?
Greed is the reason, because they can. People need housing. Same way grocery stores are getting away with charging so much, people need food. The working market theoretically should fix this in time, but so far it isn’t. New houses and competing grocery stores don’t appear overnight. I fully agree with you, rentals have their place and there can be many benefits, but without proper oversight and rent control this was always going to be the outcome - squeeze as much cash out of people until you literally can’t anymore. I don’t think there is some secret collusion going on between landlords (at least in most cases), there’s really no need. Just watch rental prices, then when the area average becomes higher than you charge for your unit, you raise yours slightly above that. By doing that you’ve now ever so slightly increased that area’s average, now other landlords will raise their prices slighy higher, causing other landlords to raise their prices slightly higher, rinse and repeat. Note that I might be completely off the mark here but this lines up with my experiences at least.
Do you regard other forms of investment as evil also?
Not at all. It’s rent seeking, wealth from wealth without the creation of wealth, that I have a problem with.
Some (perhaps most) renters do create wealth by providing resources and maintaining the property. That’s why they are paid for it.
Gonna disagree on that.