Gen Z is lazy and will die really quickly, along with social media digital economy and the trendy movements they popularised in this post millenial era.
The problem is not cars specifically, but the explosion of capitalism and people’s incomes being unable to keep up with artificial price rises on products and commodities.
Gen Z is lazy and will die really quickly, along with social media digital economy and the trendy movements they popularised in this post millenial era.
This has got to be a joke, right? The rise of cryptocurreny was 100 percent a millenial thing. The ‘trendy movements’ and influencer culture also came from millenials. Gen Z was just forced to grow up in it. Saying a whole generation will die very quickly is pretty strange and spiteful of you. You sound like an old man yelling at kids for doing kid things.
Cryptocurrency, in the pessimistic sense you mean, is not a generation thing, but a capitalist thing born out of those extremist investors and stock market “gurus”. Originally, crypto was made as an alternative way of transactions to SWIFT and similar systems that surveil dissidents and activists, only for the “system” capitalists to kill its reputation.
My observation was not spiteful, but was meant to be a consequence of Gen Z avoiding putting effort (learning how to drive, one example), blindly consuming instead of creating, doomscrolling, garbage physical health, not touching grass, not socialising IRL and so on. All that is just going to lead to a quicker death.
If you were able to understand the meaning, my internet comment fulfilled its purpose. Internet forums are not a place for English grammar examinations. Go lecture in a classroom.
“When I was their age, a car meant freedom. It meant you could take yourself to a place your friends were and your parents weren’t, anytime you wanted. To them, the Internet means freedom, and they don’t really see the point.”
I don’t know how old your dad is, but when I was a teenager 25 years ago, I could pick up a car for under $500, and it ran. Now, if it runs and drives it’s automatically $2500. It’s also probably beat to hell.
I can’t really blame kids today for not being interested in that.
~ 12 years ago I got an 04 rodeo for $1k and kept it running for a decade until it died over covid. That same $1k 2004 clunker that’ll still be in the shop for something every couple of months (even more so now 12 years later) is going to be 3-4k.
No thanks 🤷my bus system sucks but it works and I can just grab an Amtrak somewhere if I wanna travel.
You know what true freedom is? Not requiring a car to get to places by having decently designed neighbourhoods where people can walk or cycle. For longer distances good quality transit could be available. No massive investment or lisence needed to travel.
For real, the amount of freedom I get here without a driver’s license in the Netherlands is insane. I walk to the train station and can get anywhere in the country and even to a lot of other places in Europe.
Then I can just decide on a whim to walk to the grocery store, take a bike ride to visit my parents, go to a movie theater, whatever you can think of.
If there’s one thing I have pride in with my country, it’s the infrastructure we have. I find it very hard to imagine moving out of this country because of it.
I really don’t agree. Young people still like to be able to move around freely and “the internet” is not the same as phisically going to bar, roadtrip, etc. In my opinion, nowadays people mostly don’t buy cars because A) they can’t afford it and B) we’re more nevorinmentally conscious.
Ebikes will get you a good chunk of the way there in a lot of places. Other than that, if you live in a city then vote like hell and go to city council meeting as often as possible to demand bike lanes. Local voting actually matters and can change (some) things.
If you live in the country… Eh… Start sabotaging gas stations I guess? I don’t even know where to begin with a constructive answer. Rural folks are basically forced in to cars and there isn’t much to do about it without massive changes. In the Netherlands even small towns get train stations, but in the US and Canada and even a lot of Europe rural folks are just screwed.
At least here in Illinois rural towns have okay train access and can easily accommodate bike infrastructure. Many rural towns with a university have decent bike networks already. It’s North American suburbs that are more hopelessly designed around private vehicles.
I lived in rural California and Oregon for a while and there was just nothing. You had a car or you couldn’t live. Wanna get groceries? Drive, because it’s too far to bike and even if you did you’d probably get killed by a car. Wanna get your mail? Drive to the post office. Don’t bike because you’ll get hit by a semi. Wanna go see a movie in a theatre? Yeah, drive for at least half an hour to get to the closest one. But both of the towns I spent the most time in burned to the ground in wildfires so… Yeah…
But it’s good to hear not all of the US is hopeless and some of it is almost functional. I hope at least some parts survive, because there’s a whole lot that just can’t exist without cars and cars can’t exist forever.
Literally same. My entire life has been striving to build a life where I don’t need a car. (mainly out of frustration with NJ’s toxic surcharge program).
Sadly, no one in NY was hiring and my dumbass moved to Austin. Now my drive is to get back to NY where there actually is a hope of using public transit.
I think the key is “have to”. I’m living in the sticks and I’m working from home. Sometimes I’ll take the car and drive up into the mountains with my dog and go for a hike wherever we end up. I’ll take the car shopping. But if it’s broken or needs some maintenance, well, then we’ll walk near the house and I’ll ride my cargo bike along the paved path down the valley, 15km to the shop. And I’ll do maintenance and repairs on my own schedule. I think that’s a bit of a sweet spot. Have it as a tool or something to that my radius of movement, but I’m not dependent on it.
Exact same here. The amount of money cars cost is fucking ridiculous. I would pay more and wait longer to not have to deal with the bullshit of owning a car, but I can’t even do that because American public transit is worse than Mordor.
according to McKinsey. “And for those Gen Zers who decide that driving just isn’t for them, they can keep themselves busy with TikTok in the passenger seat—or get behind the wheel in the metaverse.”
Be a good consumer and accept our thought control.
Great question - but semi related, I really enjoy sim racing despite rarely driving a car in real life (maybe once a fortnight).
The metaverse doesn’t appeal to me, or most people, but there’s something to be said about jumping in VR and taking a car to a track virtually with a good force feedback wheel, nice load cell pedals and a H-pattern shifter.
Heck I even enjoy euro truck simulator from time to time.
If you’re working from home then ubering everywhere is cheaper than insurance for a new driver and once you put gas plus the cost of the car into the equation I totally understand this.
This is an easy thing to say, but ride-sharing apps price gouge ridiculously. Have you done the math on this for the average person’s annual needs, or does it just “feel” true? Also I assume your groceries and other regular shopping needs are all getting delivered in this scenario, so need to work all the delivery overhead in annual costs as well. I wish we could get rid of individual cars, but not sure this adds up…
Also, curious on the reality of this in big cities versus more rural areas
If you live within 1 mile of a grocery store you could easily walk, and you don’t need anything else on a regular basis. Use a bicycle and 5 miles becomes just as easy. People lived thousands of years without cars. The problem is our cities are built around cars, and they’re built poorly because of it.
The fact that it feels tiresome is worrying me. That should feel like nothing. 15 kg is not all that much (initially wrote “a joke”, didn’t realize that might sound disrespectful to some), unless you are either 12, 92, or really out of shape.
Have you tried carrying what equates to a toddler by one hand for 3km? Them plastic bag carrying handle bits are going to be digging into your fingers, friend. These days it won’t matter so much of course because the fingers will be frozen anyhow.
Frankly I haven’t used a shopping bag for years because I prefer collapsible cases (approx 40x60 cm) but economically those are even worse to carry farth than, say, 50m.
Why would I carry my groceries in a plastic bag or a collapsible box when I can just use a backpack? I can easily carry 15kg in my backpack.
I mostly go shopping with my bike though. I have huge bags that attach to the carrier and that can fit about a week of groceries for two people. I can transport even more with my bike trailer if I need to.
I might be a bad example indeed. I carry a lot of things in often quite unusual ways. As a male Paramedic working inner-hospital shifts in a 3000 bed hospital complex, well, there is a lot to carry around. And most things don’t have handles either; some resist.
I’m not good with cases, nor shopping bags. I use bags with long handles that I can hang from my shoulders. 12 kg per side won’t even make themselves felt.
Boxes are good to carry to a car.
The talk was about 1 km though, not three I believe? I might be wrong.
Anyhow, a good knapsack with a solid bottom. Two bags with long loops. I can carry 35 kg like that easily. In basic training, we carried that load for 20 km and more.
When I got my new barbells recently, I rented a car. My bench and rack I had delivered.
A couple of litres of milk, perhaps ditto soda, some canned goods and frozen items … easily 10 kg. Then add buying in bulk when there’s special offers.
I don’t work from home but my sister does and yes she did some thorough calculations. And yeah she’s getting her groceries delivered and Ubers/lyfts pretty much everywhere else. There are also local buses that she takes if they’re useful depending on where she’s going. For example there’s a mall that’s about half an hour away but there’s a bus that goes from half a mile down the road to the mall.
We do the same. Having things delivered or using public transport. Takes a bit longer sometimes. Not a problem. Saves us hundreds of bucks per quarter.
Living in a city should mean exactly that. Cars are for place with poorly developed infrastructure. Grossly generalized.
I’m going to download the uber app when I’m not on some miserably slow internet connection and do the math, because I’m curious if it’s cheaper or not.
Right now, worst case scenario is if I have to drive my Samurai to work. It gets ~20 mpg. With insurance and gas and maintainence put together I’m spending about $4.13 to drive to work for one day.
I pay about 12-20 dollars for a trip to or from the airport in my city. Let’s be quite generous and say I only need to take a trip like that once a week, and all my other needs can be met via public transportation.
That’s comically untrue in the Midwest but it holds true in places like Baltimore at least for some.
It would take 9 months of similar rides to equal what I spend on my car in a single month, including the loan, gas, and insurance.
Even if I took an under to and from work every single day which incidentally is about the same as a trip to the airport, it would cost half of what I put in to my car.
That’s true for me, but probably not everyone. I have a newer, upper mid range car that’s not great on gas mileage. And of course, I need my car a lot more frequently than just the ten trips a week. But there’s a string argument to be made in cities where public transit is even halfway decent for ditching a car all together and ubering when you need to get somewhere the bus doesn’t stop.
Insurance rates vary greatly with zip code in Canada. I moved just before I was going to buy a car and when I got quoted over $700 CAD per month to insure a Fiat 500 (new driver over 30) I quickly calculated that taking Uber to and from work daily is going to be much cheaper than insurance alone…
I’ve been driving 20 years. No points and no recent accidents. I last paid $1300 for 6 months of car insurance on a Hyundai and it’ll probably go up again next time.
That’s $2600 a year or $50 a week and we haven’t spoken about gas, or parking in some locations. Absolutely Uber is an option, or ebike.
I dropped driving 20 years ago. Way too expensive if you don’t earn money with it in some fashion. I’m not a home-worker, but I live in a city. Having a car in a city… That just doesn’t feel right. They should be used to bring stuff into a city. Cites should provide their own means of getting around. The few times when I actually needed a car, I rented one. Way cheaper than owning a car.
It’s like owning a golf course to play golf once a week. Well. Something like that.
Is that because the costs of cars has vastly exceeded inflation while wages have mostly stagnated until mid 2021? (please note: beating inflation by a bit for 2 years in no way makes up for the prior 40+)
They can't prevent you from purchasing with cash, that is the whole Legal Tender thing. Rather they dissuade you from not taking their financing. Very very different things.
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