There's also no real future to look forward to. Take London. Outside of finance, technology and law, even manager level positions won't earn you enough to ever own the roof over your head. The median salary is just under 50k pounds. Once you pay out of your ass for the myriad of taxes, you are left with say 30k. That's enough to rent yourself a really shitty apartment from an absentee landlord living either abroad or somewhere in a large house in Surrey. Anywhere within commute distance to London, living is so expensive that a large portion (probably the majority) of the population has the beautiful outlook that they'll never own anything and will work until the day they drop dead. Why bother? What is the point of making an effort?
The cost of living a good life has completely run away from the vast majority of the population.
Sadly this is true. 150k a year is "only" about 80-85k net, good luck buying a tiny Victorian row house for >1mln quid without your parents sponsoring the down payment. Or you can buy a crappy apartment built to "UK Standards" where everything is done by people who truly don't give even a shred of effort to quality and you are in the hilarious position that you don't even own your own walls.
And that is all on a very-very good salary in the UK (90th %ile is 60k).
Moving out to the suburbs or to satellite town is not a solution either. If you want to be on a main train line, the prices will be just as bad as in the city. If you compromise on the transport, prepare for your life to become an unmitigated misery as the terrible, dysfunctional, unreliable and at the same time extremely expensive UK train system bends you over the barrel.
There are a few lucky people who manage to pull off a London level salary and work remotely from a LCOL area, but this is not possible if your job physically requires your presence (e.g. you are a dental hygienist).
When the vast majority of people stop caring about working in London then wouldn’t the prices drop noticeably?
It seems to be contradictory, the very fact of the price wage disparity suggest many many people care to an extremely high degree of working within that literal specific geographic area.
Which demonstrates they care very very much about their economic interests at least.
I think we have crossed some wires. People care about living in and around London, that much is clear. People want to live in cities for many reasons, economic ones are just one of them. What this thread - and my posts - are about, is people caring about doing a good job, whatever that job may be.
And this is where the crux lies: you'll get paid better for your work in London, but unless you become truly rich, you'll still not earn enough to afford your own roof over your head. All your money will go on transport, rent and living expenses. The amenities afforded by a city, restaurants, cinemas, etc - these all cost money and are more expensive than outside of London. So you end up paying through the nose for the reasons why you actually moved to the city.
So you do the grind for 10 years, say you are actually quite good and have a bit of luck and you are now earning 5x the salary you could earn in some bumfuck village in the country, but you still can't afford to own anything, you are permanently feeding rent seekers on everything. Once this realisation hits, it's difficult to care about doing a good job. You realize that you could do a shit job, put the minimum effort and still get 80% of your "peak" salary, and this marginal decrease won't affect you in any material way. Perhaps you have to cut back on eating out, or maybe lease a 2 year old car instead of a brand new one. But you realize that this marginal 20% increase in salary won't get you anything that'd be worth all the extra stress coming from caring about your job.
You'd need to sacrifice all your social life, your energy and free time, put in a hardcore grind, save every last penny you can, and then after 10-15 years you can buy a tiny rowhouse on a mortgage with a postage stamp sized garden - if you are lucky. And then you realize you spent the prime years of your young adulthood but instead of a landlord you are now beholden to a bank and an interest rate. You are terminally burnt out and haven't been able to properly enjoy life in any way up till now, and the grind isn't over. Instead of paying rent, you now have to fund the mortgage payments for another 10-20 years.
Well yeah life is competitive…?
exceedingly so for property within London it seems.
Even if millions of Londoners hate it that doesn’t change the fact that they are continuing to do so day after day… so something must still outweigh all the downsides combined.
So their care is very high, just focused on perhaps a very peculiar basket of things, so to speak. I can’t see any other explanation for such large scale behavior.
Right. I'll try one more time: this thread is about caring to do a good job. People move to London, try to do a good job, find that they'll never be properly rewarded for going the extra mile, give up, and do a shit job going forward.
They still feel better off than doing a shit job in the countryside, otherwise they'd move there. But the question we are discussing is: "Why don't people care about doing a good job?"
The cost of living a good life has completely run away from the vast majority of the population.