this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2026
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How can any of these, except debt and maybe grocery costs, be summed up as "use less resources"?
What resources is an average individual "over-consuming" to make their housing more expensive and their commute more onerous?
Housing: square foot per person doubled 1970-today. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/housing1.png
Food: Eating food not made at home increased 66% from the 70s to today. (restaurant labor = resources, you are paying for someone's livlyhood) https://www.ers.usda.gov/media/28125/106446-chart-image-file.png Caloric intake from 1950 to today has increased by 25%. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-supply?country=%7EUSA
Cars are incredibly resource intensive and long commutes didn't exist or were very uncommon before cars. We have become accustomed to these resources intensive habits and built our infrastructure around them. This moved the bar of normal resource utilization.
I think this illustrates the trend I'm talking about. People today use more resources than they used to in lots of ways, we've become accustomed to this way of life because previous generations have normalized it.
I appreciate you pulling up sources, especially if these are things you went out of the way to collect fresh.
It'd require more research on my end but I do have questions.
I question how many people were actually actually getting new single-family homes built for those time periods. Are the rates of new home construction similar between the 70s and 2016-18 for this data? Are more people moving out to further places with cheaper land to buy new houses? Or are a smaller number of richer people buying bigger houses?
And, regarding food, the graph does say
Which brings up the question of whether the increase in calories can be mapped to the increase in fast food, which are insanely calorie dense for the amount of nutrition they contain. Just the amount of processing in many foods cranks up caloric count.
Fast food is something I will agree is an example of normalized behavior, where the 90s cemented "fast food" as a cheap dining option when that has not been really true in years.
Look, I'm not making any claims on nutrition vs caloric intake. I'm using calories available per person as an analog for the amount of resources an individual consumes today vs in the past. A calorie is literally a unit of energy, so we literally have more food energy available to us today than previous generations. That's the argument.
As a society have normalized increased resource utilization. This has happened largely with a decrease in the cost of these resources until recently. There is no reason to believe the trend of increasing resource utilization and decreasing resource cost would hold over time. Our generation got unlucky that finite resources finally started to show up in resource costs. It was like a game of musical chairs and the music stopped around the mid 2000s and generations that had not established wealth at that point were left without a chair.
It's an unpopular take ... they said it up front.
The term "average" is you adding words to the original comment that weren't there to begin with. At best "average" is too subjective and nebulous to be meaningful without you providing a very clear definition of your intended context, at worst, it's loaded terminology.
I don't want to imply that I know specifically what that person meant by over-consumption regarding housing and transport, however, it could easily be applied to situations like ...
~ The trend in some parts of the world to build ever larger houses despite people having smaller families / fewer children.
~ People choosing to live alone, even when they have other options available like living with family or having roommates (as per the image).
~ People living alone in general, but choosing bigger homes with multiple rooms / bathrooms that were intended for families and people with roommates, leaving the additional space / room largely unused.
For transportation, the overconsumption side of that is often based on the argument that people are buying vehicles when they don't need one, buying larger and less efficient vehicles than they should, driving solo instead of carpooling, or avoiding taking public transport when it's available. Specifically the argument about moving closer to work in relation to over-consumption is, and I'm guessing here, addressed more at people who choose to live further away from work for reasons like "they don't like that part of town" or because they'd rather drive than take public transport / walk.
In the USA, for instance, there has traditionally been a very heavy stigma against "poor people", and so for a certain percentage of people who actually are poor or very close to it, over-consumption is a mechanism they will employ to mask their economic status. For example, wearing designer clothes or at least knock-offs, buying a new expensive vehicle they can't really afford, moving to a more expensive neighborhood for appearance, driving to work instead of using public transportation or walking, etc.
Obviously we can all cherry pick anecdotes where these things don't apply and it's easy to assume that how things are where I live are the same all over everywhere even though that's not the case, so keep that in mind.
"Unpopular take: all black people should be slaves." Preceding a statement with "unpopular take" doesn't insulate the statement from inspection or critique. "Unpopular" is a measure of popularity, not validity and I was questioning the validity of their statement.
Yes, I added average because "average" is the only way to make sense of their vague talk. Who would the subject be if not younger generations when they talked about previous generations normalizing over-consumption. Who is exhibiting these normalized, ove-consumptive behaviors if not some average, representative sample of the younger generation? If they were making a statement about and to some narrow band of western, upper-middleclass white person, they should claim that.
No one has made any citation of statistics or data, and I'm the one asking for clarification of dubiously-valid claims. So you and the previous commenter are the only ones providing (or, in the other commenter's case, hinting at) some cherry-picked anecdotes about the consumption habits of these still-undefined subjects who are habitually over-consuming their way to poverty.
So I can clearly tell you don't take criticism well at all. All I can say is jumping further down the well of logical fallacy doesn't actually clarify what you meant by average, and really only suggests that you did intend for it to be loaded. No point in spending any time further, other than I hope people reading see through your charade.