Discussion for article #234719
“Middle-class” is a sociological term and isn’t directly related to income level. In this case, these individuals, none of whom probably “aspired” to a middle-class social status to begin with, may or may not achieve middle-income levels. If any do, the choice to stay in shared housing is remarkable.
It seems to me that most of the baggage with regard to the positive and negative aspects of more conventional living arrangements is being carried by the writer.
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I see nothing wrong with any living arrangement or family of choice that makes sense for the participants. You can’t make it impossible for people to survive within a traditional family structure and tell them they aren’t allowed to figure out a way TO survive.
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All I really get from the article is that this is a collection of late 20 to early 30 year olds living together, with two children. As a long time resident of the SF Bay Area, this does not seem at all unusual to me and at their young ages it seems a bit pretentious to suggest that what they are doing is somehow a grand or bold move away from the “middle class dream.”
Let’s revisit these folks in twenty years and see if they are still living this way in their late 40s and 50s. As the article concedes, adult life tends to eventually pull people away from this manner of living as a long term adult lifestyle choice.
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Wasn’t this the basis of Friends?
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Oldsters best pay attention and learn how these 20- and 30-year-olds make communal living work. As Republicans continue their relentless efforts to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, people in their 60s, 70s and 80s may be adopting the same life style to survive.
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A while back I remember reading about multi-generation extended families who wanted to pool their resources and buy a house. They were black, hispanic, and first-generation Americans with low-wage jobs and the banksters said no way. How did these guys pull it off?
a perpetually exhausted set of parents finally getting Junior to bed, having given her their exclusive focus all evening, and sitting slaw-jawed in front of another episode of How I Met Your Mother before they tuck in for the night.
Pffft, this is so inaccurate. We finished that show months ago and are now watching The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
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Interesting–would love to see a link!
As a pretty big introvert, this living situation would make me lose my mind.
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The Slice at TPM is woefully bad.
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Most likely than not, that very lifestyle will push these people to devise methods to earn income sufficient for them to leave the “commune”. So you are right, lets wait a couple of decades and see where they will all be.
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“The 1960s movements were born out of excess, a generation with too much time and certainty; our era, by contrast, is defined by scarcity, how unlikely it is that we’ll come close to achieving those handed-down dreams in the first place.”
While I give Molly Osberg credit for not falling for the drop-out and form communes nonsense, that was a pimple on the rear end of the 1960s. The 1960’s movements were born out of the Civil Rights Movement and what was left of the socialist/communist movements of the 1920’s and 30’s, along with a series of recessions in a relatively short period, a reaction to the McCarthy witchhunt, war in Indochina and the contradictions a new large generation saw between “traditional values” and what was possible. The scarcity the author finds current actually stems from the long-term downturn of American capitalism, which started in the late 1960s and hit its stride as corporations stripped America’s industrial base in the 1970s and 80s. What we see now is the decay wrought by the continuation of that process decades later - and the continuing dominance of the Me Generation ideology that started with the revanche of conservatism in the late 1970s (with help from born-again liberals like Jimmy Carter). Unfortunately, Osberg seems to have learned her history from TV and news magazines (Time,Newsweek) and perhaps some cynical burnouts, rather than serious reading and talking with those active at the time and still full of spirit.
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I’ll give this 6 months to a year. People in groups compete for status and power in the group.
Men seek status as alpha males; women as matriarchs.
Then you get adultery and other forms of social dysfunction.
There was a big effort in communal living in the 19th C, then in the 1960s.
In the latter day version, the women ended up working as cocktail waitresses in the local bars and the men did handy man work.
I wish them well, but I don’t see this lasting very long before it implodes.
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I think a commune of introverts would be organized differently, more like a college dorm with each person having a small space that is theirs alone, smaller common space, and fairly strict rules about what is OK in the common space and who has what responsibilities for keeping it habitable. I could live in such a space, but the kind of space described here where everything is communal and in constant negotiation would wear very thin very fast.
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It’s gonna take awhile to scrub that overdose of hipsterism from my brain.
Thanks for nothing.
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I hope they flame out spectacularly, and that it’s captured on video.
This is an incredibly simplistic analysis. The social movements of the 1960s didn’t just magically spring out of the civil rights movement–they also sprung out of a generation who grew up during a period of affluence that allowed them the security to try out new things. The government made huge investments in public education in the 50s and 60s, giving rise to a surfeit of students with time and flexibility to show up at protests and go on the Freedom Rides. Housing and cars were cheap and college was pretty much free for anyone who got in. When immediate financial needs are met, it stands to reason that people have more mental space to explore social and cultural reform.
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Yeah, so would I. I’m going off a memory of a memory from an article I read, probably in the Wall Street Journal and probably at least 20 years ago. In my searching I turned up all kinds of articles about co-buying, but they all seemed to address multiple people with steady and fairly incomes, which is probably how these guys did it.
After reading your comment, I recalled hearing stories like this about one way my parents’ generation survived the Great Depression.
They did things like this out of economic necessity.
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