Quote:
Originally Posted by zerospinboson
How is that even remotely an answer? So it wasn't when your generation was "the young ones" but it started the generation after?
What do you think happens when people grow up in a time when access to goods is relatively hard to obtain, and then start working (and become fairly affluent fairly quickly compared to their parents)? Don't you think that they will (just like Mr. Dickens whom you told an anecdote about a while back) disproportionately care about having lots of stuff? And don't you think that they will say to themselves something like: "I will never put my children through what we had to go through because of the war," and give them lots of shiny things to play with? And that, that way, whole slews of people will either care too much about good appropriation or just "grow up with the thought that they can have anything they want"?
This used to be what the "old rich" had against the "nouveau riche", specifically because the latter were fairly "distasteful", but to a lesser degree this also applies to most of western society today. While individuals might not care about acquiring 'more', most do, which is then also implicitly shown through making tv shows about "middle class" people, and so on.
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I'm sure you're right about the
reason it happened, but I'm afraid that I still don't think that it's a good thing. Being brought up with the attitude that "you can have whatever you want, whenever you want it" is not - IMHO - a good attitude to life. You may of course disagree; that's fine with me.