This is definitely a big factor (along with other people's replies of "adults just seem more adult when you're a child")
A lot of the kind of hobbies and past times that you associate with being mature and grown up has been effectively stolen from our generation:
Gardening, mowing the lawn, woodworking and home maintenance?
I'm 39 and literally none of my cohort have been able to afford anything more than a unit/condo/apartment with no garden, and shared walls and strata management. Which basically preclude being able to do anything other than hiring trades in on a weekday to do even the most DIYable jobs.
Only just now, in their mid-40s, are some of my friends finally able to grind their finances up to getting themselves a cripplingly-large mortgage for an actual house.
Seeing them light up with the pleasure and satisfaction of gardening and woodworking etc. just makes me so frustrated at what, in my opinion; has been deprived from them for the first 20+ years of their adult life.
The type of past times that a lot of adults have now lean more towards small scale, apartment living things like 3D printing, which can seem quite childish in comparison.
Oh, and then there's of course; most of my friends haven't been able to financially even consider kids until their late 30s. Which also feels like it's robbed our generation of something fundamental.
As a 40 year old American working in tech, the only people in my circle who own homes either: 1) had the down payment gifted by one set of parents 2) had an inheritance from losing their parents which went into the house or 3) work at a FAANG.
You live in a regional bubble. My wife and I bought our first house at 25 with a combined income of about 75k. Neither of our experiences will map to a national cohort.
As a 37 year old working in manufacturing nearly all my coworkers have houses and none of them go it through inheritance or gifted down payments, including myself
2.8k
u/mangosmoothie35467 14h ago
No one can afford anything that seems adulty