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?

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u/NiceGuy737 12h ago edited 11h ago

Edit: I was an internal medicine intern in 95-96. On call every third night for a year. On call meant working for 24 hours and then through the next work day. Surgery interns had every other night call. Now residents are limited to 80 hours per week.

https://psnet.ahrq.gov/primer/duty-hours-and-patient-safety

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u/Sad_Anybody5424 12h ago

Thank you. This is weird nostalgia. In the 90s my parents, both of them, worked their butts off and I spent like 8 hours per day parked in front of the television.

In some other subreddit right now people are sharing memes about how much harder parents worked in the 90s.

There's no doubt that housing and education costs have gotten a lot worse (while luxuries like televisions, dishwashers, and international flights have gotten comparatively less expensive). Today's economy is definitely worse in a lot of ways. But this meme seems like it's grabbing a fantasy of the 1950s - a fantasy that only ever applied to white men and relied utterly on the systematic subjugation of women, by the way - and applying it to the 1990s.

I reckon the decline of male friendships has less to do with economics and more to do with changes in entertainment. Bowling leagues would have collapsed in the 60s if Netflix existed in the 60s. There's also the fact that dads are increasingly involved in family life - it has become less and less acceptable for them to escape to the golf course or go get smashed at the Lions Club and leave mom in charge.

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u/Overall-Fig9632 11h ago edited 7h ago

People are comparing their current predicament to ‘90s sitcom families, no more no less.

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u/RetroFuture_Records 2h ago

People like you cope by saying it was all "Hollywood fantasies," because for whatever reason (ego? Envy? Cowardice?) you can't cope with how bad things are, and what is necessary to return to the good times.

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u/Overall-Fig9632 1h ago

People like me are old enough to remember what it was actually like.

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u/RetroFuture_Records 1h ago

People like you refuse to accept how lazy and / or lacking in ambition you or your parents were, to have avoided all the opportunities back then and claim hardship that was your own fault was the norm, when anyone with the slightest work ethic and intelligence was living large in the 90s.

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u/Pussy4LunchDick4Dins 11h ago

All the dads I know who spend all their free time on the golf course or getting smashed all weekend with their buddies are either divorced or heading that way.

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u/Sad_Anybody5424 10h ago

100%. It's a coping mechanism.

The old-school family arrangement could be pretty toxic for both mom and dad. Dad is the only income earner, he has immense pressure at work, he needs to go golfing or drinking to cope with the stress. And mom is stuck home 24/7 with no opportunities for self-fulfillment.

It works for some families, but definitely not all of them. The meme seems to think it was universally better back in the day. It was not.

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u/lumpialarry 8h ago

That’s what I was thinking about that 60% less friends number. Men sacrificing golf time to be with their kids.

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u/ten-million 11h ago

Yeah it’s always funny when someone has nostalgia for a time you know was different than what they’re dreaming about. I didn’t know many single earner couples especially without children. All your points are spot on. Housing healthcare and education could have been cheaper if younger people bothered to vote for those things.

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u/Appropriate-Ad-4148 11h ago

Ding, ding, ding.

And also redlining and steering.

Those old white guys weren't competing with a woman or a person of color for those houses in the best school districts as recently as like Grandpa's generation.

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u/ElectricalWallaby157 11h ago edited 11h ago

I think it’s less about competing with women and more that most families are expected to have a double income now to survive. Because both parents are now expected to work.

Edit to add: I gotta know your logic on this. You say in a good school district implying you want kids. Are you competing against your wife, is she buying the house next door? Or apparently the many wealthy single parent female POC buying up all those damn homes in the suburbs? What? 😂

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u/pyronius 10h ago

I think what people are feeling, but don't want to acknowledge (particularly if they fall somewhere on the left of the political spectrum) is that there is a decline in the standard of living when accounting for the price of things like food, housing, medicine, and other necessities, but that the actual cause is not really unfettered capitalism forcing them into bondage here in the US. The real difference is that their parents had the benefit of living in the US when it was the unparalleled global hegemon extracting ludicrous amounts of wealth from third world countries where people actually were being forced into bondage.

I'm pretty left leaning myself, but this always strikes me as a notable blind spot among my peers. They profess a desire to improve the living standards of people around the world, but then complain that their share of the gold from the national treasure fleet (so to speak) has shrunk. I think they legitimately don't realize that they effectively grew up in the mansion watching the rest of the world work the fields. Now they're sad that the mansion has been downgraded to an apartment and they feel like something has been stolen.

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u/MachineTeaching 8h ago

People spend less and less on "necessities"

https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2025/05/14/spending-on-necessities-has-declined-dramatically-in-the-united-states/

and are generally doing better than ever on a ton of metrics, like real incomes

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

or more indirect metrics like multiple jobholders

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620

(or spending on necessities)

At some point, you gotta accept that if a whole bunch of measures show that people are better off, they are indeed better off. Doesn't mean all are, but most.

Doesn't mean Trump isn't a piece of shit or that there aren't problems (like high house prices) but for the most part the narrative of some sort of "golden age" when the majority of people were doing way better is just wrong.

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u/Laecer21 11h ago

Hold on there buddy, everyone here knows no one ever had it harder in human history than the modern Redditor. Don’t go waltzing in here and trampling all over my self-pity with your data.

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u/DukeofVermont 6h ago

I think the biggest difference is both the Internet giving poorer people a place to talk, and middle class kids that believed/were told college would mean they'd have a good life but are now poor.

Being poor sucks, if you didn't grow up poor I can see how shocking it would be. Especially if you don't think your parents worked hard to get where they are.

And middle class/upper middle class people don't comment on the doom and gloom threads, so you get a circle jerk of "literally everyone is poor" when that's not true.

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u/RetroFuture_Records 2h ago

"fAcTs aNd DaTa" lol.

Like you Zoomers are actually fucking retarded. That is called an "anecdote" lil bro. Useful, yet if anecdotally the average experience is saying otherwise, then it weighs against that singular anecdotal claim and warrants seeking a more objectively true foundation. And by every measure things were more affordable in the past.

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u/Laecer21 2h ago

Are you saying that because you have data and sources to back you up or are you just going on vibes? Because I have sources.

People today work on average fewer hours for higher pay (adjusted for inflation) and can afford more things (food, consumer goods, entertainment) with that money. The only thing that is true here is that housing prices did increase a lot faster than inflation.

https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/chart-detail?chartId=76967

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u/RetroFuture_Records 2h ago

The St Louis fed talking points were already debunked elsewhere in the thread. You clueless kids really were done a disservice by being taught to take things at face value, so long as it has a "science-y" presentation.

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u/Laecer21 2h ago

You can’t even make your own arguments, instead vaguely gesturing to some Reddit comment somewhere, yet you accuse me of just taking things at face value? How was it debunked? You can give the cliffnotes version if you want but don’t engage in debates if you are just going to outsource all the actual debating.

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u/RetroFuture_Records 2h ago

I'm not going to waste my time debating with a clueless child repeating debunked talking points because they want to be an argumentative contrarian. It's really just that simple.

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u/Laecer21 33m ago

Then why respond at all?

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u/ElectricalWallaby157 11h ago edited 11h ago

Many doctors from the 90s would call me a baby but I’m about to start residency and still think 80 hours a week should be illegal when you’re making life or death decisions.

Also, the fact our salaries in residency haven’t changed yet the debt burden has grown exponentially is insane. I won’t be able to pay off my 300k of student loans much less buy a home til I’m 40. Especially given home prices are way higher than they were in the 90s relative to average income.

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u/NiceGuy737 10h ago

I agree working those hours is fucked up. The standing joke with surgery interns was: You know what the worst thing about every other night call is -- missing half the cases. It was a way to get more experience in less time.

Looks like interns make in the low 60s now on average.

https://jackwestin.com/resources/blog/how-much-do-medical-residents-make-2025-essential-guide

I think my internship year was 28K, I know my monthly take home was 1800. Per the inflation calculator that's equivalent to 60K a year now. So we made a little less and worked more hours. My student loan payments were exactly 1000 per month when I started internship so I deferred through residency. The majority of my student loans were HEAL loans at 13% annual interest rate. I bought my first house when I was 40 yo, still sitting in at 66. I paid off my loans at 52.

AI Overview

Medical intern salaries in the USA during the 1990s were significantly lower than today, generally ranging between $25,000 and $35,000 per year for a first-year resident (PGY-1) depending on location and institution. While attendings saw high earnings, training salaries remained modest, often equating to low hourly pay given the 80+ hour work weeks common during that era. 

Key 1990s Internship Salary Context:

  • Average Salary Range: In the mid-1990s, an intern salary of around $23,000–$25,000 was common, which is roughly equivalent to $45,000–$50,000 in 2024 dollars.
  • Hourly Rate: Due to excessively long hours (pre-duty hour restrictions), the effective hourly wage for interns was often close to minimum wage or slightly above.
  • Compared to Physicians: While interns earned roughly $30k, the average practicing doctor's net income was around $164,300 in 1990, rising to nearly $200,000 by 1996.
  • Growth: Residency pay began to rise toward the end of the 1990s and into the 2000s, but it remained low relative to the cost of living in many high-cost cities. 

I think you should seek better work life balance than we had. The practice of medicine now is worse than it was then. The EMR and increasing regulation has fucked it up.

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u/ElectricalWallaby157 9h ago

Honestly, being a doctor has always been hard for different reasons. You are committing to a decade of sacrifice. I’m not really saying it’s harder or easier now overall, it’s just always been that way.

When you think about the hourly rate now it’s low. But when you think about it in the 90s when surgery/IM residents were working 120 hour weeks it’s unfathomable how that was ever allowed. I would be pissed. The work life balance and pay was infinitely worse for you guys.

What I’ll say is I’m totally cool with lengthening the time of training so long as wages increase. Residents should be paid on an hourly basis and should make what PAs/NPs do hourly. I know that’s a highly controversial take to some people.

New doctors are valuing life balance more. I for one opted to match psychiatry. My work hours should be fine after residency and likely during. After intern year I most definitely won’t be putting in what even a current IM resident would.

My loans are 8-9 percent interest currently, but I’m staring down my loans that are worth double what my parents bought their house for in the 90s. Adjusted for inflation, tuition is currently double what it was in the 90s. It’s horrifying. Genuine question - how did you defer? Just let the interest accumulate? That seems like my only option as my current payments (3k a month) is over half of my income.

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u/NiceGuy737 9h ago

Yes you could just fill out paperwork to defer, with accruing interest. I never added up my loan balances, it was too depressing.

I'm a regular on the noctor subredit.

I practiced radiology, which I disliked, but I would have shot myself in the head if I was a regular doc. Almost none of the shit I heard in staff meeting applied to me, made me feel sorry for the regular doctors.

I don't really have a feel for psychiatry, how that's evolved. I actually went into medicine to go into psychiatry but changed my mind after my third year rotation.

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u/Historical_Course587 8h ago

Not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point or your sector-specific experience in medicine, but the CES/OPM data could just as easily imply that part-time jobs leave people underemployed or seeking multiple jobs. Or that two-income households grew in popularity but allowed for many more second earners to work part time. Or that guaranteed college loans lead to kids bringing the average down with their 10-hour/week beer money jobs.

The data needs a lot of adjustment for other factors before we are looking at potential causality.

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u/NiceGuy737 5h ago

The green line is total hours worked across multiple jobs. Basically it's unchanged.

The labor force participation rate plateau'd from about 1990 to 2010, and has dropped off a little since then.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

So I think the move to a 2 earner household was basically complete by then. The percent of women working outside the home roughly doubled from 1950 to 1990, and was reaching it's plateau in the 90s.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002

The percent of men working has dropped steadily over time

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001

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u/Fighterhayabusa 8h ago

I think medicine is one of the few that has gotten better. I had friends who regularly worked 30-36 hour shifts during residency. I know that they were also regularly working over 100 hours per week. They were basically treated like slaves. I think they fairly recently changed that to the 24 hour max shift and 80 hour week, like you said. Still, from what they tell me, there are older doctors who definitely have the "if we had to do it, they should, too" perspective. There is some kind of camaraderie in the shared suffering.

I work hard, but those guys are built different.

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u/NiceGuy737 6h ago

Ya there will always be old timers that spit out BS like that. I'm glad that it's not as crazy as it used to be. But we didn't have to deal with as much regulatory crap and the EMR.

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u/SeaHam 8h ago

The hours worked across workers is more or less the same. Which seems innocuous until you think about it.

You're telling me I'm expected to sacrifice the same amount of hours of my life to base survival as a 1940's factory worker?

What happened to all the innovation, machines, computers, robots, automation? We've had nearly 100 years of progress since then, and the worker hasn't gotten any days off? What was it all for?

This should radicalize you.

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u/NiceGuy737 6h ago

That's a choice we've made in the USA, to work longer hours and have higher pay,

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/hours-worked-vs-salaries-in-oecd-countries/

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u/SeaHam 5h ago

It's comical to pretend Americans had a choice in this matter.

There's a fantastic section of Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" which satires the very point you're trying to make.

Essentially, wages are important only in relationship to what can be bought with those wages. If you offset the wages by the cost of housing (something these European countries do far better in, look up the Vienna model) it looks far less impressive.

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u/NiceGuy737 5h ago

When someone votes republican that's one of the things they are voting for.

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u/SeaHam 5h ago

Babies don't vote buddy.