The Lifestyle Ratchet Is Hard to Avoid
Changes in the culture make opting out of lifestyle upgrades difficult to pull off
I grew up in a small house without air conditioning where I shared a bedroom with my younger brother.
I remember how awful it was on hot summer nights in August. I put a box fan turned to high on a chair about three feet from the edge of my bed to try to get cool. But other than that, growing up there wasn’t bad.
Back in the 1970s and 80s, lots of people did not have air conditioning, or only had bedroom window units. Sharing bedrooms also wasn’t uncommon.
Things have changed today. While plenty of people don’t have AC or have children sharing bedrooms, these are now almost entirely a result of lacking the money to get them.
Air conditioning and one bedroom per child have become socially normative to the point that it’s a point of parental contention to choose differently.
There was a recent interesting article “Why Do So Many Parents Think Kids Need Their Own Bedroom?” in the Atlantic addressing this very point.
When I ask my husband what it was like to share a room as a kid, he shrugs. He didn’t consider it that big a deal. But many parents I’ve talked with who live in metro areas with high costs of living feel the same as I do. Some are stretching their budgets to afford a house with more bedrooms; others are reluctant to grow their families without having more space. As I mull this over, I wonder: Why do so many of us prioritize giving kids their own room?
Over the past half century or so in the U.S., the practice has become what the University of Pennsylvania sociologist Annette Lareau calls a “normative ideal”—something that many aspire to, but that not all can attain. It’s gotten more common in recent decades, as houses have gotten bigger and people have been having fewer kids. From 1960 to 2000, the number of bedrooms available for each child in the average household rose from 0.7 to 1.1, according to the Stanford sociologist Michael J. Rosenfeld’s calculations using U.S. census data. It’s held fairly steady since, the University of Washington real-estate professor Arthur Acolin told me. Recently, Acolin analyzed 2022 American Community Survey data and found that more than half of all families with kids had at least enough bedrooms to give each child their own (though it’s not certain that all of them do). Even among parents whose children share rooms, more than 70 percent say they wish they could give everyone their own.
Economic, technological, and social changes affect the availability and norms of society in ways that make it difficult to avoid adapting to them.
I want to dial in on cultural and social expectations. Because these can put pressure on people to upgrade their lifestyles in ways that might be possible to resist, but which are difficult to do so.
One kid per room is an example of such a standard. When I was a kid, I obviously would have preferred my own room. I knew that kids from families with more money did have their own room. But there was nothing unusual about sharing one.
Over time, as one child per bedroom became seen as the norm, not having that would mark a family as an outlier. The kids might feel poor rather than simply not rich - a big difference. As the article indicates, families might even decide to avoid having more kids if they can’t afford an individual bedroom for each one.
It’s similar for air conditioning, which is now seen as standard. When we were looking for a house, I don’t recall seeing a single listing for a house without air conditioning - and having grown up without it this is something I explicitly look for.
Air conditioning is expensive to install and run. But let’s be honest, once we’ve lived with it, how many of us can really want to go back to living without it? To say nothing of what it would do to the value of our home to not have it. And do you want your kids to be the rare ones without AC at home?
Or think about all of the consumption patterns of the upper middle class. Fancy coffee. Gourmet foods. Designer furniture.
Not all of this is expensive. You can get furniture from Ikea or something. At the same time, they do cost money. And they aren’t entirely optional either. These are class markers that help demarcate the in group from the out group.
It isn’t precisely required to engage in all this stuff, but if you aspire to be a professional in a corporate setting, you’ll set yourself apart from your prospective colleagues if you don’t live at least something of this lifestyle. Top talent or other high status people can get away with flouting conventions. Most people can’t.
People understand that most upper middle class people realistically can’t deliberately go against many social trends, such as by explicitly rejecting Black Lives Matter or DEI. But similar effects are true for some consumption activities as well. If you want to avoid them, you have to somehow frame it as aspirationally higher status, such as by saying a spartan lifestyle is all about the environment or something.
The net result is a society that pushes people towards conformity with higher consumption norms, and to embrace patterns of life that might even be unhealthy (such as kids having smart phones).
I see a lot of arguing on the internet that seems to suggest that the root of people’s inability to afford things like a house is simply overinflated expectations of how big a house people need or the amount of money it takes to raise kids today.
Surely some of this is real. But some of it is not. It takes real effort, and entails real social costs, to buy a much smaller house than the ones other people are buying today (if you can even find one in a good neighborhood).
Not spending all the money on the same activities for your kids as other kids are getting spent on them probably will have some effect, even if most of these activities don’t actually do much in terms of real development.
Not doing what other families are doing, especially similarly situated families socio-economically, also will mark your kids out as weird - which is unpleasant for them, and in at least some cases will involve your kids resenting you for it after they grow up. It’s one thing to do this out of moral principle, but another to simply refuse to buy things you can afford.
I believe that Americans do need to reduce our level of consumption. I aspire to do that personally. It’s very hard to go backwards in consumption once you’ve rebaselined to a higher level, however. That’s especially true when you’re trying to do it voluntarily. Every year I talk a good game of how I’m going to hold off on turning on the air conditioning until later in the year. But wouldn’t you know it I had mine on in late April. (Fortunately for me, I did already go through the process of painfully deflating my lifestyle after leaving the corporate consulting world).
But even if we can overcome that, there are very real social forces that make it difficult to go against the grain of what everyone else is doing by refusing to take part in certain consumption patterns.
There’s a collective action problem. If we all stopped buying certain things, then the social pressures would ease. Sometimes rule making solves this for us. Florida passed a law banning smart phone use in classrooms, for example. This solves the collective action problem. But we aren’t going to pass laws to ban consumption in the US.
In many ways today, our society actually promotes questionable or even dysfunctional behaviors (pot smoking and sports betting, anyone?) Avoiding these, even if it’s just as simple as consuming less by having a smaller house and not running the AC all the time, requires special effort to go against the tide. And it entails social costs. Realistically, most people aren’t going to do that.
Most of you reading aspire to live differently in at least some ways. But we should be aware that successfully doing so isn’t cost free.
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"Happiness is reality minus expectations" is one of those deceptively simple phrases that seems to explain everything.
The fundamental difference between Christianity and Buddhism? There are two ways to happiness. You can improve your reality, or reduce your expectations. All successful religions offer sound advice which can improve your life (no sex before marriage, etc.), and a cosmology that provides hope and meaning. In other words, religion improves your lived reality, as well as your perception of unseen reality.
Successful religions also tell you to curb your desires. I.E., reduce your expectations. Typically, they focus on ratcheting material desires: The kind of desire that is not fundamental to human existence, and which in the long run just sets an arbitrary new baseline below which you are not happy*.
Buddhism differs from other religions in its rejection of all desire, not just intrinsically harmful ones. Buddhism teaches that the path to salvation is by setting the "expectations" dial to 0.
Christianity is radically different. Of course, it tells us to set the "expectations" dial much lower than secular society would. But it also sets the "reality" dial to infinity: You will live in a perfect world, in perfect happiness, forever (if you follow Christ). Even in concentration camps or in the moment of painful martyrdom, Christians can be filled with radiant joy. Not just because we hope for salvation, but because we can see the reflection of that perfect world in the fallen world around us. Even when those healthy desires which we are not told to reject (food, shelter, family, etc.) are unfulfilled, a correct Christian perception of reality always leaves the equation of happiness in the positive (granted, internalizing the correct Christian perception of reality is much of the hard work of being a Christian).
*"H = R - E" also provides a strong critique of the Industrial Revolution. The unprecedented technology and wealth of the last 250 years have done a lot to fulfill our needs and irreducible desires. Unnecessary pain and early death are bad; modern medicine has reduced it. Shelter is another fundamental need; there are (almost) no shanty towns in developed countries. Starvation is bad; modern agriculture eliminates famine.
But you can go to very poor countries these days, and find these problems solved. A GDP per capita of less than $10,000 seems sufficient to give everyone a livable house or apartment, food on the table, and sufficient medical care to banish the specter of infant mortality and common death by infectious disease. The US reached $10,000 per capita GDP by 1913.
Every dollar past that point is just driving the ratchet up. Think about it: To the extent that they were not starving or living in a shoebox, are we actually happier than our grandparents? Our great-grandparents? Americans living in the 19th century? The Amish? Ratcheting desires don't actually make us happier. In the most important sense, they do not make our lives better.
And in order to fulfill these ratcheting desires, we have radically restructured our society in a manner hostile to fulfilling human needs: I.E. the things that actually do make life better. If all the computers in the world vanished tomorrow, we would be lost and confused for a few weeks... and then we would get used to it. We'd probably be happier. But we all yearn for love, for community, for a sense of meaning in life, no matter our wealth, or where or when we live, not even if our whole culture is telling us that the hedonic treadmill is enough.
I grew up in a copy-paste American suburb. We weren't particularly close with our neighbors, but I remember the last block parties in my early childhood (mid-late 90s). We moved, and then moved again, and so did most of our other new neighbors. How can you have community under these circumstances?
I had no idea how to be a man (our culture certainly didn't teach me), and have only started learning in the past few years. The result: My teens and twenties were spent entirely alone. Many women in my cohort are facing the opposite problem: A very exciting youth, and loneliness thereafter.
I was a depressed materialist until a few years ago, too, after a childhood of nominal Catholicism and a few fervent teenage years. Not because I wanted to be, but because I found it impossible to believe. Eventually, life experience showed me the truth in what society convinced me was false, and I rediscovered my faith (albeit via Orthodoxy, not the Catholic Church). It's my greatest source of strength as I put my life back together.
This is not an atypical story.
We can blame a lot of this on de-Christianization. But most of it is industrial modernity. The society that malforms us is not just a culture, but a material organization hostile to human flourishing. East Asia was never Christian, and it has most of the same problems: Decaying community, decaying sexual morality and family formation, all-around decline in spiritual and mental wellbeing... and all as society grows wealthier. What's the point? The lifestyle ratchet is attached to a vice press, and it's crushing us.
Yes, it's difficult to de-ratchet on your own. But Christians are already starting to realize that we need to build intentional communities and parallel social networks. I think we should take even more from the Amish, and ask ourselves: How much of the decline we're escaping from is an inevitable outgrowth of industrial society? How much do we have to throw out to form stable Christian communities?
The Amish are a proven success story. They threw out almost everything but modern medicine. It works. Maybe we don't have to go that far. But when you have a community around you, any decline in happiness from turning down the ratchet is temporary. The happiness from healthy communities, healthy families, and healthy faith is more permanent. These are the greatest gifts we can give to the next generation. And if we build a system that works, it could be the key to evangelism in the 21st century. People my age and younger are increasingly questioning the ratchet. Show them a way out, and a lot of them will take it.
One of the things I find very difficult about living in an affluent area is that the parents send their kids to activities (that they have to pay for) all the damn time. Like, our kids could just play in the yard or the street. They would be doing the same basic stuff for free and we don't have to drive them somewhere according to a schedule.