Rebuying decorations every year is also a leak on finances. Rebuying a bunch of camping gear (more than I can comfortably store in my home) is also a leak on finances.
It's far cheaper to use a storage unit for a lot of this stuff I do routinely use than buying and selling a house just to get more storage space at home.
I'm not blind to the fact not everyone just stores junk they never use. I'm certain there's a percentage of stuff in mine that is probably better off sold or trashed. But until we stop changing decorations for the different seasons, stop a number of hobbies with bulky stuff, or move to a giant mansion I just don't have the space and could use a few more square feet of pure storage space.
So give up on hobbies and everything occasional that requires some equipment since they can’t keep it at home, so basically give up on things that make life worth living to a lot of people. Yeah nah.
Every square footage of every home costs $$$ to keep in your possession. I pay a mortgage. I pay insurance. I pay taxes. I pay maintenance costs. There were acquisition costs in the purchase of it, and there will be acquisition costs wherever I go next. Not one square inch of my home is "free".
Suddenly that simple answer isn't so simple when actually confronted with reality, unless you're willing to be homeless and just carry your possessions in your hands.
i think they are suggesting to rethink the need for things like seasonal decorations if you are forced to pay a life long recurring fee for the privilege.
Who tf is breaking the bank on subscriptions and phone bills?
Are all these comments like yours coming from college students or what? If anything else, a storage unit is one of the most valuable things to pay for if you just moved out on your own.
No, I'm not, and I've also never rented a storage unit.
It seems hard to imagine the sums involved becoming comparable to other amounts of money lit on fire to avoid fights with family though (i.e. home renovation, travel).
This must be a generational issue. My kids took “their” things with them when they became autonomous adults. As parents, we raised our children that they would move out and establish their own identities and futures. We never created any expectation that their childhood home would serve as a storage facility, extended stay facility or even exist. We of course offer help and support when needed.
I know this is in conflict with a lot of modern parenting for many reasons. Our primary goal was to create independent, autonomous, fully functional adults capable of funding their own lives and determining their own future.
As a father of 3 kids under 5, we bought our house 2.5 years ago and it has appreciated so much that had we saved every penny for the last 2.5 years we couldn't have afforded it today.
It doesn't matter how high performing your kids are if no good opportunities exist. So while we hope the world will allow our independent, high performance kids to succeed on their own, we're planning on having to provide unique opportunities via resources/connections ourselves to make that happen. Accordingly we're treating our house as something of a family estate, to be held in perpetuity and they can live in as long as it's good for them. It's not about keeping them as forever-children, it's about providing a base with a secure perimeter from which they can marshal their resources. For instance, we're right in the middle of two major metros. So if they land an unpaid/underpaid but prestigious internship in one of them, they won't have to worry about housing.
A very interesting and valid observation. You and your children are super fortunate and your approach seems like a very good hedge against some serious uncertainty coming up.
We weren’t quite in the same position until much later, and I am somewhat envious of your position. Best of luck!
Likewise, and I wasn't trying to invalidate your approach. Raising independent kids who understand the imperative of building their own lives is absolutely necessary regardless of economic conditions
Kind of hard to take my stuff when I was attending college and then working clear on the other side of the country.
Other than renting a U-Haul and driving 2,800 miles, there weren’t many options. Which I even suggested, to which my parents insisted they were happy to hang on to the stuff until it was easier to do the handover.
>never created any expectation that their childhood home would serve…facility, extended stay facility or even exist.
Sounds like a pretty sad mindset to me. Between me and your kids, I wonder which are happier to visit their parents?
I somewhat expected my post would generate this type of attack and then lead to my parenting style is better than years, my kids are more successful than yours, my kids are happier to visit us than you, ad nauseam.
Parenting is hard and there are multiple approaches that lead to successful outcomes. Your approach worked and I am happy for you. Congratulations on your successful approach.
> I somewhat expected my post would generate this type of attack
It may not have been your intention but your post had a combination of a somewhat smug, lecturing tone and patting oneself on the back which is a bit off-putting. And implicitly made a lot of assumptions about other parents' intentions/lived experience raising their children based on a single factor that's pretty insignificant like # of sq ft of child's belongings kept in the family home.
Also, for all you knew at the time you replied, OP could've still had stuff in their parents' attic because they joined the Marines at 18 and was even more independent than your own kids. There was a lot of projection onto a trivial story.
Plus "must be a generational issue" just sounds like more of the same "my generation was responsible/good/normal unlike kids these days" meme that gets repeated by every generation as they age and is tiresome to hear as an explanation for everything.
>I know this is in conflict with a lot of modern parenting for many reasons. Our primary goal was to create independent, autonomous, fully functional adults capable of funding their own lives and determining their own future.
This heavily implies that the children of other "modern" parents are dysfunctional adults. As they say "to throw the stone and hide the hand". The funnier thing is that your parenting style is a modern post-WW2 phenomenon.
There is no implication here. It is clearly stated as "Our primary goal", not your primary goal. You are reading way too much into this.
I agree it is a modern post-WW2 phenomenon, but not sure what is funny about it. Societies and systems constantly change and evolve. This is part of progress, and yes, can also cause setbacks.
My use of the term "conflict" might be what is triggering. Maybe "bucks the trend" or "not in line with" would be better.
Many approaches to parenting are successful. I presented my approach. Others work.
Now you're characterizing what you've done as progress, to defend characterizing it as opposed to modern parenting, and you anticipated attacks from other people. I'll tell you why I think you anticipated attacks after I tell you a reason why I disagree.
I agree that it has been a generational thing. It was called the "Me Generation." Me, me, me. In the animal kingdom, parents abandoning their children to be completely independent is mostly common among insects, lizards, and amphibians, and is associated with large litters and a massive death rate among them. It's not modern, it's a feature of creatures that are lower than mammals.
What's triggering is the fact that you've decided to brag about your superior parenting in public, and claim the evidence of that is that you have told your children that you're done with them. Nobody asked you, and you're aware that normal people don't do that to people that they are close to (hence the need to lecture.) Everybody raises their children to have the ability to be completely independent and self-sufficient. You just think you're uniquely successful at that, and that it somehow would be the child's fault if you've failed.
Your kids didn't ask to be born, and if you don't rescue them from their failure (at least initially), it will be a reflection on you. If we are in the same social circles, and I know about this, I will judge you. Even hearing you explain it, and your feigned confusion (I guarantee you have this conversation all the time), would make me wary of hiring you into a management position.
I'm not a lizard. I want everybody I care about to be self-sufficient, and I also don't want them to try to be unless they actually have to be. They have resources available to them that are not always being fully utilized, and when those resources can give them an advantage in any context, I would be angry if they weren't used.
There are always limits to self-sufficiency, because there are massive advantages to abandoning it: that's what we call civilization.
Very good points. Thanks for the insight and critique. There is a reason I don't wade into social topics and usually only comment on technical things I have worked on and this is helping me understand why!
Honestly telling your kid going off to college (or elsewhere) "you have to take everything from you care about, the rest is going to go away" seems like a good way to stunt their independence. The natural reaction would be to take as much as they can of their current life, which is then going to be a burden preventing them from growing into a new life.
When you put it this way, it is very anxiety inducing and I understand that. What this is helping me realize is that my childhood, and our lives of our children were different than many of the commenters, not necessarily better or worse.
As children, my siblings and I didn't have a lot of stuff, and our family didn't have a lot of stuff either. It certainly wasn't our intent to traumatize and stunt our children and this doesn't seem to be the case. I will certainly ask them.
What stuff do you have that is worth keeping that wouldn’t fit in one or two storage totes. I would think anything of sentimental value like pictures, art, trophies, books, paperwork etc would be quite small.
When I was moving into a dorm, a few totes would have been a lot of my available space. I'm pretty glad my parents would let me pick and choose before clearing stuff out. Saving my childhood stuffed animals or favorite books so I can share them with my own kids someday is pretty meaningful to me, same thing I remember my parents doing. I don't know if I would have had the correct perspective to make those choices as a university freshman. Unless you immediately downsize after becoming an empty nester you're going to have way more storage space than you need anyways.
Growing up, actual peak existence was visiting Grandma's house and playing with my mom's old toys. The seemingly unlimited, completely novel hoard from another time. My son feels similarly about visiting my parents' house and playing with my old toys. This may or may not be sustainable but it seems like it is well on its way with four generations involved- from where I stand, keeping a good pile of consumerism around to pay it forward in 20 years doesn't seem out of proportion with the joy I've received. It's definitely a culture thing- nobody in my family tree seems to move much, and has decent taste in throwing out the actual trash and keeping stuff stored nicely over the long time gaps, then not being fussy about the next generation being pretty hard on stuff (within reason, as appropriate for their age)
You're right that this is a generational thing, but the expectation for your kids to move out like this is also relatively recent: historically it was a lot more common for your children to continue to live with you, or if not, to live very nearby. Arguably one of the biggest reasons for the modern birthrate dropping is that lack of local family ties to help with childcare.
(And yeah, for college this just isn't practical: college accommodation is temporary, tiny, and students have practically no money. Taking all your stuff with you to college is a lot of effort for very little gain).
> My kids took “their” things with them when they became autonomous adults.
College students both are and are not autonomous adults. It's not really practical to bring all your stuff to college housing, and you don't always graduate into a good job market where you can go directly to the workforce and a nice place where all your stuff fits. Not everyone can afford to, and that's fine, but if you can give your kids an easier transition to full autonomy, it seems reasonable.
If moving while the kids are in college, it's nice to keep their stuff somewhere.
A thousand dollars may as well be a million dollars. In my personal experience, gifting a thousand dollars to someone in housing distress will not lead to the purchase of a solar panel.
I'm talking about "working homeless" here. There are many people living out of their cars because they can't afford a proper home but still have money they can spend, and many of them in fact are living some kind of "stealth camper" setup with accompanying gear.
But that gear would have been infeasible even ten years ago - the status quo outside of luxury campers for six figures was absorber refrigeration [1] that needs a heat source - either powered by natural gas, which has challenges relating to safety as well as high consumption, or by electricity, which was lead-acid batteries back then.
The power density of lithium cells today is what makes that possible in the first place.
Poverty-homeless people however are a different thing, agreed on that. If you don't have a lockable place to store stuff you might as well have nothing at all...
Got it. I mainly work with people who have severely fallen off the cliff with almost no way to climb back out. I totally see how this new gear could keep someone from reaching a critical breaking point.
Going to college should not be considered moving out. They have moved out only after they have been done with college for at least a year. Until then they are trying to figure out life. Home is still your house, they are just not living there.
Once they are out of college and on their own though they need to figure out what to do about their stuff.
This is a difference in parenting approaches. For our kids, going to college, or in one case the military and another no college, was moving out. You have your approach, we had ours. They were perfectly capable and successful in figuring out their lives without flying back to the nest every summer.
Great that you and your kids had this privilege. A lot of college grads these days struggle to get a job, let alone one that pays enough to rent their own place not one shared with roommates. Honestly, your replies sound very condescending and tone-deaf.
I agree and understand part of what you are saying. I am not exactly sure what the privilege was, but I do understand your observation about the tone-deafness. It is for certain that current job outlook seems bleak and this is extremely difficult. In general, I admit I am very privileged in that I was able to live in a time when certain types of jobs were plentiful and there seemed to be limitless opportunities available to me.
My mom kept most of my books but threw out a rare box of Creative Computing magazines that all the world’s libraries wrongly decided were ephemeral crap.
One problem with what? Also, a problem is not “too much food”. This is an absurd statement. The problem is non nutritive, unhealthy food loaded with calories. Work in any troubled urban center and you will encounter a complete lack of actual grocery stores selling healthy food. Instead you get fast food, bodegas and convenience stores selling low quality, cheap items. We have known of this problem for decades. The poor are poor and certainly don’t have the income for “too much food”.
Cars are plentiful and cheap in America and can be had next to free in many cases. They will be in terrible shape, operated without insurance, registration and driven by someone without a license. They will also be gross polluters but won’t be taken off the street unless there are a series of criminal actions. Many states will only cite and not tow for lack of insurance or a valid license. The chance of getting pulled over is also quite low in many areas due to distribution of police resources. These vehicles are allowed to be parked and serve as shelters in many cities who choose to allow this as a tacit form of shelter. Just look at the transformation of the streets in Seattle, parts of the Bay Area, Los Angeles, and more. This is an ad hoc solution to a situation that can’t be addressed effectively.
My 25-year-old car gets 30+ miles to the gallon, far better than an F-series truck, which is the best selling vehicle in the US.
It's been 30 years since anyone sold a new carbureted production car in the US, for just as long cars have had OBDII, and it's been 50 years since cars were sold without catalytic converters.
There was a time, immediately after those technologies were developed, when older cars polluted significantly more than newer cars, but modern engine designs have been around long enough that cars old enough to be big polluters are expensive collectors pieces.
There may be an occasional car with a blown head gasket or piston ring polluting excessively, but they won't run for long in that condition. Thanks to CAFE standards increasingly limiting the availability of smaller vehicles in the US, the average 20-to-30-year-old gasoline engine probably pollutes less per mile than the average 0-to-5-year-old gasoline engine.
Not really. While it's true that CAFE standards have lead to bigger vehicles, average to average, the newer vehicle pollutes less. Yes if you compare a 2001 Honda Civic to a 2024 Chevy Suburban, the Honda wins, but 20-30 years old puts you around the year 2000, during which the pollution standards on cars was much more lax than they are today.
It is not even the cost of the car, but the upkeep. In large European cities parking alone can be prohibitive. In Sweden cars older than 2006 pay extra tax because they don't have emissions testing data.
In the US car taxes are based on value. Where I live once a car is 10 years old the tax is $50/year. Buy a cheap car for $5000, pay $1000/year to insure it, and $50/year for a license and it is fully legal. You still have to pay for fuel, but that is fairly cheap. You also have maintenance expenses, but generally the poor have a network of mechanics to do the labor for free (in exchange for your labor for something else). Even if you buy a different car every year, you will be hard pressed to find an apartment for $6000/year.
Downtown in US cities parking is prohibitive, but that is only a small part of the city. Most of the city you can park for free. You want to move the car every day just so it doesn't look abandoned, but otherwise this is a cheap way to live and you get transportation as a bonus.
In Sweden large cities even in the suburbs parking can be quite expensive. But I guess it is because "the big city suburbs" in Sweden are still mostly 4-6 story tall apartments.
At my current place (apartment in a suburb about 10km from the city center) our parking would cost ~180 USD per month. From a tech worker perspective it is not like unaffordable, but definetily a luxury for most of the population. The median after-tax income in Sweden is like 3k USD.
That tax I mentioned before also makes very old beat-up cars not worth keeping (which is the intent of the tax to be fair).
One of the main upsides of living in a detached house in Sweden is not having to pay for parking. But even so the increase heating bills in winter can easily cost more than a car installment depending on your HVAC and insulation.
The issue in America is that you can own a car, not pay for upkeep, not pay registration, not pay for insurance, not pay to park and still drive it many times without consequence.
As someone who has worked directly with these people in Los Angeles and Seattle, I tend to focus locally, otherwise the enormity of the situation is overwhelming and fills me with despair.
When you say “we need to fix this” no one can agree what “this” is. There is no one “this” and it becomes a morass of generational systemic issues, localized problems, competing views on economics, morality, government and more. It reminds me of when tech people show up to “fix” education. It just isn’t a single issue.
I agree we need to fix something, but as soon as I think about the big picture it feels futile and I have been involved in efforts for decades.
With your experience in this space, are you able to provide some pointers for how to get involved in a productive manner?
The housing problem feels so daunting that I struggle to understand how one could help move the needle. Knowing which organizations to volunteer with or places to donate that actually improve the situation would be a helpful start.
>I agree we need to fix something, but as soon as I think about the big picture it feels....
Yes, "fix" is a weaselly word, and 'futility' might be more appropriate if the subject has similar etiology to many of our other problems here.
At minimum, tolerance is due to the ones not causing significant problems. In my opinion, a substantial portion of the US will experience homelessness in the near future, but that won't discuss well around here. And note, I am from Florida. The East Coast version is quite different, as well as most of the median state situation. Very different. Especially in places where drugs are not the impetus.
It is sad, and as one of the several former BeOS employees who went to Apple to add our experience to OSX, I can say that most of us have moved on. This isn't to say that others can't do what we did; they certainly should be able to. The OSX team back then was much smaller and we all had a maniacal attention to detail. One reason is that we were micromanaged by Steve J. and did lengthy weekly reviews with him and he was direct and brutal. He wasn't always right, but he did have the final say. This is all gone and even though Steve Lemay (now head of UX) was there during this time, he was also present during the overall rot of the user experience.
/meta let me just say how cool it is to cool it is to make a comment on HN and have responses from folks who worked on legendary teams. Thanks for your work on BeOS.
Now that we are living in The Future, I am dumbfounded how e.g. dynamically populated lists change their content reliably to something I did not want, during the phase of interaction where my finger is descending onto the target. Click! Not what I want.
Feels like a lost art which will be "discovered" again in the next 15 years.
This would be so exciting. The implementation language would be less of a concern, but it worth wondering about... Would you use Rust, Racket, Lisp, Clojure, etc? I had a lot of fun teaching adults to program using DrRacket and didn't focus on the language as much as the concepts you mentioned above. They ended up being easily able to move to Javascript, Swift, and others at the end of the course.
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