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adrian_byesterday at 8:37 PM2 repliesview on HN

You must be very lucky.

My grandparents were not rich at all, but they still owned houses and land that I will never be able to buy from the salary of an engineer or programmer. I own my apartment, but its true value is far less than of the big houses and ample lands on which my grandparents lived.

Moreover, while there is an abundance of cheap and reasonably healthy food around me, I cannot find at any price food with a comparable quality with that which I could eat at my grandparents, which was produced by themselves, from their cultivated land and from their animals.

There is an abundance of cheap clothes, cheap enough that there is no need to worry about repairing them, like in the distant past, but anything that I can buy in a normal shop has a much worse quality than the clothes that were available many decades ago. At least unlike with food, I can still find good quality clothes, but only if I order them online from various countries and from a different country for every kind, as there is no place where everything is optimum (e.g. I buy some things from Sweden, others from Scotland, others from Ireland, others from Austria, and so on).

There are of course things that are much better, mainly those with electronic components, but there are already many years since the prices of these have been growing almost continuously, so they have become less and less affordable.

In conclusion, while there are plenty of things that are much better than when I was young, there are also a lot of things that are much worse. It hard to say which is the balance between bad and good, especially because the things that have become worse are essential necessities, while those that have become better are mainly optional things, useful for research or entertainment.


Replies

greygoo222yesterday at 11:20 PM

You can most likely afford to buy a viable homestead in a rural area if you wanted to. Your problem isn't that you can't afford a house, it's that you can't afford a house in San Francisco.

I sincerely doubt that you can't find food better than your grandparents' by any objective measure. I suspect this is just nostalgia. I've lived and ate at rural family farms before, and while they often have better tomatoes than a typical supermarket and other tiny perks, if I had to pick between getting my food from the family farm and getting my food from a supermarket every day, I'd pick the supermarket without question. And I can always go to an upper-end market or a farmer's market if I really craved high-quality tomatoes.

I have never had any complaints about the quality of my clothes, including clothes bought at physical stores. I'm not sure why ordering clothes online is a downside.

greygoo222yesterday at 11:46 PM

It's crazy that you accuse the person you're replying to of being lucky, when your comment is the epitome of privilege. Since the year 2000, child mortality rates declined over 2x in Africa and Asia. That is millions of children who, in another era, wouldn't have had the opportunity to grow up.

I don't think your complaints about your life are true, see my other comment, but even if they were they make no impact in the big picture of "has the world gotten better or worse."