I love receiving long, thoughtful replies to my pieces here. The best ones are as good as, or better than, the original piece. Today I’m sharing two, with the essays to which they’re replying linked at the top. They’ve been lightly edited, but otherwise, here they are!

About That Avocado Toast:

This is an excellent post. I’ll add my n=1 anecdotal experience to your assessment. My (much older) dad grew up in the Great Depression and went to college on the GI Bill. He bought a modest bungalow in the D.C. suburbs before he went to college to house his family he’d had with his high school sweetheart. They drove around in his singular, but brand-new Buick.

Like most young men of his generation making very little in the much-healthier but still low-paid field of journalism, he wasn’t exactly flush. He didn’t eat avocado toast or wagyu beef. But he could still afford the whole package of stay-at-home wife, kids, house, and new car in his mid-20s in a way that I, his son (born into the upper-middle class with a very expensive university education and much higher earning potential doubled with my similarly higher-earning partner), could never afford a half-century later in the same metro area. Getting married? Kids!? New car!?!? An actual house!?!?!?

Now, we like to castigate ourselves and compare our debased morals with the thrift and grit of a Great Depression baby like Dad. And being a modest daily spender, combined with juicing the newspaper expense account for meals and not having any student loans, certainly helped. But more than that, it was just down to everything else fundamental being radically less expensive.

I can’t complain too much. Because I do have all those American Dream-type things now. But it didn’t happen for me for another decade in my life, in my mid-30s. And only really because I left the United States, and live in a country where having the American Dream is far more accessible.

And I found that it’s not just home price inflation and student loan debt servicing that blocks access to my parents’ late 20th century middle-class life: it’s the cost of healthcare, childcare, transit, etc. I’ve tallied up the latter line items and that would literally run our family $50,000 extra for the first five years of my son’s life if we were to move back to the U.S. tomorrow. Even now, with a dual-earner household of two higher-paid tech workers, I just couldn’t afford the life my dad could afford at age 28. And I really can’t afford my own childhood—the life that we all thought was a little middlebrow and crummy when I was a kid!

Meanwhile, most of my peers and my brother back home will maybe just never afford any of it. Ever. So, instead, they’ll enjoy the hedonic pleasures of Ethiopian food and travel to Costa Rica instead of the stability of owning a home or the subtle transcendence of having a family. The child-free, HOA-avoiding, drunken-brunch crowd among my cohort pity my lack of freedom. But maybe they secretly despair of ever “adulting.” So, I accept their professions of pity in stride and play along bemoaning the pains of parenthood and the lost joys of unfettered individualism.

This isn’t even just a problem for the middle-middle class or the lower tiers of the upper-middle-class. I even have a few friends who make $300,000+ (outright rich, in my book) and still can’t afford to buy a modest house in their very expensive local real estate market! That’s not just annoying wealthy people cosplaying as middle-class for sympathy and to avoid critique: the numbers just don’t add up for them in places like New York City, Los Angeles, or San Francisco.

To bring this full-circle: I have another quite financially comfortable friend who bought a house just a block away from the house where I was born on Capitol Hill, Southeast D.C. That, my parent’s old house, a Victorian “with good bones” (and regrettable surroundings), they bought in the late 1970s for $80,000, shortly after they first met. It now sells for...$3.5 million!

My friend’s smaller, similarly-dilapidated Victorian “starter home” nearby cost her a cool $1.3 million. She will rent it out for a profit for a few years before moving in, to help defer the cost, which is at least less than she’d pay in the Bay Area.

Having to buy back my childhood home for perhaps 20 times what my parents paid for it is a pretty neat metaphor for all this.

Loaning Forgiveness:

Both my husband and I come from upper-middle-class families, and our parents paid for college (and I even went to a private one.) Both our parents are conservatives of the Boomer generation and truly did work their asses off to pay for college themselves—an example of what you said: work ethic being rewarded with just payoff. Our parents (dads, in particular), went on to get well-paying jobs in STEM that financed a modest but comfortable life, wanting for nothing, paying for their children’s college educations, their own retirement, etc. My mom even stayed home for the majority of our childhood, so most of this was on one income in our family’s case.

But...this seems ever illusive, with the ballooning cost of...everything. Nothing that hasn’t been written about before.

So, my husband now has a PhD in chemistry (grad school funded and paid for with a stipend), which is the only way my husband and I are able to modestly afford me staying home with our two, almost three children. (We live in a small city in Wisconsin, not a sexy city.) His parents gave us a down payment for, again, a very modest house we just closed on. We don’t have student loans or a car payment (yet) and saving for all of: life + tithing/giving + retirement + our children’s college would be ABSOLUTELY out of the question at this point in time without our parents paying for our education and helping with the down payment.

We try to work hard, be frugal, give generously, live within our means...but I shudder thinking of how crushing student loans for both of us would be. So yeah, it’s a travesty and an injustice that the cost of college has crippled a generation in this way. My husband and I aren’t particularly special—we were just really, really fortunate.

There’s a bunch of women out there who would also love to stay home during their children’s younger years, or even homeschool, but living on one income is increasingly out of the question. It shouldn’t be only an option for the upper-middle-class. For the sake of family formation and health, we absolutely need to have pro-family conservatives seeing these ballooning, bloated costs as problems to their cause. And it’s not something plain old hard work can really solve, in many cases.

(I originally found your Substack from Jake Meador retweeting your “Still Renting After All These Years” piece [read that here] several months back.... so I’ve enjoyed your related essays ever since.)

There’s so much here, and I hope you made it to the end. Leave a comment and let’s keep this going! Also, check out the related reading links, both of which are also reader contributions.

Related Reading:

Rural New Mexico Blues

Fry’s and the End of the Self-Made Computer

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