Single, full-time working people, especially in tech, start to unlock the ability to travel abroad, maybe even one of those big two-three week Life Changing things to somewhere exotic, but only once in a lifetime or once every few years.
Middle / upper-middle class incomes eventually get to a point of wealth and freedom where they can take vacations abroad multiple times a year.
And I think you need to be even above that level, where you don't have to worry about your base income or mortgages or whatever, where you can have this lifestyle where you can have novel things and experiences all the time. And even then there's a risk people get used to it.
Even with very little means you can travel and see the world. It’s just a matter of priorities and what kind of life you want to make for yourself. If you think you have to establish the standard life package first and then go see the world when you have spare time and money, sure, maybe you won’t until you’ve made it pretty far. Right out of high school, instead of going to university, I decided to travel abroad. I didn’t have family money. I’m from a poor family in a small town. I just saved a little money working service jobs and traveled on the cheap. CouchSurfing, hitchhiking, camping out, hostels, etc. I’m not special. My little sister is doing the same thing now on waitress money. I’ve met countless people out on the road living interesting and meaningful lives, traveling abroad without being a single, full-time tech worker. You just have to ask yourself whether you need to compete materially with everyone who’s staying in one place and accumulating stuff.
To think you only deserve a couple Life Changing, two or three week trips, even as a high earning tech worker… Such poverty of spirit makes me depressed just thinking it. Consider a few great authors, like Orwell for example. As a broke 20 something he was tramping around living a series of great stories. If he’d chosen to play it safe, stay home and work at some Important Career and collecting stuff, he’d probably never have gone to Spain in 1936, and the world would probably never have received his most important works as a result.
In general, these are just different goals in life. If you want a house and kids more than you want the freedom to travel, that's cool and pretty normal. There's no stone tablet handed down from the skies that says that has to be the way it is, though.
When I was 23 I saved a few grand up and went hitchhiking around Europe on a budget of something like < 500 eur a month.
I didn't care about my base income and still don't. I think most people accidentally structure their life so that the 9-5 becomes necessary (e.g. if you rent a room in an expensive city, or a flat or house, now you need to pay for that).
The income is a means to achieve the things that you want. If you can't X because Y, and you want to X, then give up Y, not X, find a different way to do X.
I have a mortgage now, but I didn't bother with it for the longest time for precisely the reason you'd described. It locks you down. I waited until I was sure that it _wouldn't_ lock me down because I could really afford it (i.e. it's not 50% of my income from a full time job).
If I'm being charitable, I had the advantage that I could move my belongings etc in to my parents' house if I wanted to. They're pretty poor, probably in the bottom 20% in the UK, so that's not some fantastic privilege.
If you have fuckup parents (not just poor but failed in some way), then yeah, this becomes a lot harder, and I'm sorry about that.
Beyond that, if you couldn't find a way, then it's just not your priority, ya know?
Russian blokes from mining towns can afford to travel third class on the Trans Siberian, what's your excuse?
And I'm sure we'd have fun too!
Just to clarify, this suggests that your parents earn total around 16000 a year, pre-tax [0]. Perhaps your guess was accurate, and they really do - but I also find that the average person is normally wildly off in their estimates of the UK wealth distribution. A few thousands more a year would already place them in the top 50%.
[0]: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f...
My parents are seperated, both lived in social housing at that time.
In 2022 they earn approximately 16k between them. Think minimum wage 20 hours a week, that's the ballpark.
I looked at the table of individual taxpayers income. For the relevant years, my mother's income was actually probably closer to the bottom 10% :)
There is a skew here in that you need to pay tax to be included in the table at all, though, hence 2018-19 having 1% set at 12,100 because that's the income tax threshold.
The percentage doesn't really matter though, basically what I'm saying is that like, it's useful to have a place to dump your belongings. That can be a parent, friend, whatever. It's a social capital thing more than it is a monetary thing unless you own tons of stuff and are unwilling to part with it.
I have to wonder how people will look back at the current period. I really doubt we'll compete with the WW2 folks for the term "the greatest generation."
How does one live this lifestyle with children and/or other dependents, such as an elderly & infirm parent or a permanently-disabled sibling?
A lack of obligations is another kind of wealth; a privilege, even. I guess only people like you can afford to rise above this "poverty of spirit".
The opening of "It's A Wonderful Life" addresses this directly. It was undeniably George Bailey's priority, but even the "golden billion" aren't free from obligation(s).
By the way, children are a choice in most cases. If you decide to have children in your twenties, I agree, you won't have the same flexibility that I had. That's kind of the point of what I wrote: you can pick your priorities in life. Career and children are a popular priority, but that doesn't mean everything else in life has to be a nice-to-have that you can only consider once you have the house and kids. Orwell wasn't caring for a toddler while he and his wife were fighting in Catalonia.