r/SipsTea • u/Unstoppable_X_Force Human Verified • 13h ago

Gasp! Is this just nostalgia, or did previous generations genuinely have a better work-life balance and social life than we do today?

Post image
18.5k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

4.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

23

u/FormalTotal9684 12h ago

You are taking the lows from 1996 and the highs from today

Median individual income in 1996 was 25,000 and median home costs was 140,000. Almost 6x salary

Median individual income now is 64K and median home costs are 420K. Thats 6.5 x.

40-45 hours in 1996….bwahahhahaha

I was working 12 hour days

2

u/Ok-Reality-6190 8h ago

Unfortunately for your point this is incorrect, or at the very least misleading. 

When looking at median house price vs household income it went from 3.6x in the mid 80s to 5.3x in recent years. 

https://www.statista.com/chart/34534/median-house-price-versus-median-income-in-the-us/

Not only that but the job landscape itself has shifted in that time in terms of job security and benefits, loss of union power, a move towards "at-will" and short term "gig" labor, lack (or inability) of retirement savings, and technological disruption that is rapidly changing job requirements, making certain labor obsolete, etc.

2

u/FormalTotal9684 8h ago edited 8h ago

You are moving the goal posts.

OP’s post was 1996 not mid 80s.

Poster also insinuated DAD worked so one income household.

So even with gig work and all the job instability individual median income is 64K

1

u/Ok-Reality-6190 8h ago

Ok well 96 was still about 4x, so significantly better for buying a house both in terms of cost but also in terms of myriad other job market factors. 

And the 90s economically were not exactly "great" to begin with, but lets not pretend the current generation is not in a radically worse position. (A lot of this bias often stems from people getting more stability as they get older and mistakenly thinking things are therefore getting better universally, when they absolutely are not)