Millennium Malaise
The post-luxury status symbols I’ve outlined across this series - connected privacy, wasteful time, having children, niche expertise, creating community, quality sleep - all point to the same underlying desire: to reclaim what has been stolen and repackaged as luxury. The basics of human existence.
Eugene Healey • Post-Luxury status symbols #6: Quality Sleep
FROM RESIGNATION TO REBELLION TO RESOURCEFULNESS - KEEPING PACE WITH CHINA'S POST-00S YOUTH
kult--ure.tumblr.com
We desire the world to be better, and yet we are deeply interested in notions of status, or success, and how it can be accrued.
Once, this may have been vanity. Now, it’s survival instinct in an economy where status directly correlates with security.
Post-Luxury status symbols #6: Quality Sleep
Disasters are portals. They give people permission to exist outside the rules of capitalism or career or age or anything else that limits their behavior. And in those moments, they overwhelmingly choose to be kind and generous. There’s a weird phenomenon where survivors actually miss something about the disaster years later. They have a nostalgia... See more
Jasmine Bina • 5 Ideas Changing My Perspective
Meanwhile, instead of systemic solutions, the culture offers individual ones. Optimization culture. Side hustles. “Maxxing.” Career content that treats a structural problem like a personal productivity challenge. The treadmill gets faster, and instead of questioning the treadmill, we buy better shoes.
I make good money. Why do I still feel like this?
while having a romantic partner is not a necessity for everyone, having a community is. “I truly believe that hyper-individualism, which is deeply rooted in capitalism, does so much work to trick us into believing that we should feel like we can do everything in life on our own,” maya says, adding that being in a relationship has made them so much... See more
i-D • Unpacking our generational fear of codependency
With everything — but money in particular — our culture trains us to believe we never have what we need, and there’s not enough to go around. Our culture’s focus on individuality and individual responsibility makes it hard to be generous and easy to ignore someone else’s need.
The Case Against Budget Culture
about a third of young adults aged 18 to 34 now live with their parents. Nearly 60% of parents financially support an adult child. As difficult as that might be, it is a required adaptation to a profoundly altered economic and social reality.