How to live on $432 a month in America

This almost seemed like it was going to be a Modest Proposal style tongue-in-cheek skewering of this "old man yells at cloud" style of curmudgeonly generational finger wagging. The breakdown of that $432 itself was almost enough to be a farce. But no, the author really does believe this. (Please correct if I'm wrong, as it still seems hard to believe such a fatuous piece could be written and submitted here)

>At the end of it, most people don’t want to live this way. That’s OK — I’m not here to judge them. But I am here to tell anyone who is fed up with the housing market, tired of living the “4HL,” and sick of seeing our country’s heartland regions continue to crumble that there are actionable solutions to their problems. They could do it today. They could make the change if they wished.

No one is angry that they can't buy a piece of shit shack in middle America where they will have to walk an hour each way to work at their (as suggested by the author) gas station cashier job in the deep snow all winter.

They are angry that in much of the latter 20th century, when the actual "boomers" (rather than the previous generations that the author is disingenuously using in their place) could afford a home that was near jobs and community without being in the top 10-20 percentile of earners. They're angry that this is no longer the case for a number of reasons depending on whom you ask, to include housing as speculation, generational wealth destroyed by medical debt, onerous zoning and regulations preventing housing development, selfish older generations selling their homes (and therefore much of their generational wealth) to fund either lavish retirements or more medical treatments, etc, etc.

Yeah you can live a 1910s rural lifestyle on the cheap, sure. Hell, get a tent and a backpack and you can live the hobo life in any of our major US cities today! But this is ignoring the obvious question, which is: If the productivity of our nation has exploded so tremendously since that time, where has all of the wealth gone that one would even dare suggest that we live a life of sufficient poverty to be suspended in that century-old way of life?

You seem really certain that the older 'way of life' is categorically bad, but you seem very unhappy and angry in the life that you reject it in favor of.

Also, you can make any number of easy tweaks to his formula to allow you to have conveniences that would make your life orders of magnitude richer than the true 1910s were. For instance, a $3,000 car, Internet access, etc. Also, anyone coming into this experiment with savings from a few years of "big city work" has a huge amount of capital to play with to set themselves up. $200,000 in savings would give you $10k a year in interest income to live on at current rates, for instance.

The whole point is mainly one about being honest about WHY we have to work 40-60 hours a week so we can stretch to afford a million-dollar starter home, two luxury cars, designer clothes, and IG-worthy vacations. Some people would arguably be happier working little to not-at-all, or working for themselves to make $10k a year and devoting the rest of their time to whatever makes them happy. Why is that so offensive an idea?