The three sacred treasures of the middle class

Guys guys, hes just being nostalgic

Yeah, I remember being a kid and my sister (who is fourteen years older than me,) had a (non-internet) personal computer that she was very proud of. I don't know what else you could do with it, but it had a monopoly game on it that was okay. It was no Mario.

I think Cell phone would be better than Color TV for today’s day and age

It's been about 23 Years since my wife an I have owned a tv. Couldn't take the ads anymore. Still hate 'em. If you don't want me to buy your product, force a commercial on me.

Long Read Ahead.

You and I are about the same age. Growing up we SHOULD have been middle class but my father had alimony to his first wife and my mom had a gambling problem.

So we would have peaks and valleys of suddenly having something new and nice and then a drought of pinching pennies just to put food on the table for our family.

The reason I mention all this is to say, since we were SUPPOSED to be middle class, my father would try his best to keep up with the Jones'.

The family car that sat in the driveway was a very new 90s minivan, while he drove a 1985 Dodge Aries K-car to work. We had a big fancy remote control color TV in the living room… But we didn't have satellite or even cable most of the time. And when computers became all the rage, my father bought a WORD PROCESSOR with black and orange display for the spare bedroom which became an office.

The flaw in this plan of course being, he didn't buy a printer for it and despite looking similar to a computer… All you could do is type letters or papers on it. It didn't even have a graphics package to make effective spreadsheets, and without the printer… Was legitimately useless other than pretending we owned a computer as you walked past that room.

I had not thought about any of these things in probably 20 something years – thank you for the videos ya make and reminding me of my Dad's $300 paperweight.

Get a load of Baron von Moneybags over here

This really is an excellent sort of shorthand for the things I in the middle class really apriciate, especialy being a bit too young to afford something like a house. the 3 times in my life I felt like my quality of life quickly and imediatly improved was when I got a powerful gaming computer that could play any game I wish, When I got my Miata, which dispite being an old car is verry fun and makes me feel sucessful when I drive it, and my big ol 75 inch TV, which holds a domoneering space in our Livingroom.

AirPods.

I heard the gap between the rich and poor has white so there’s gonna be no middle class anymore soon.

14:17 I miss being a “computer guy”, now I regularly deal with people who call themselves that.. Just for them to be back in my shop an hour later saying the monitor on their new gaming PC isn’t getting signal… (They always plug into the motherboard 😂).

Every kid was designated by what video game console their family had in the late 90s and early 2000s. We were a PlayStation family, stricter parents had Nintendos which didn’t carry M-rated games, and one really lax family let their kid have an XBOX– which we’d play Halo on.

I specifically remember one kid I knew had all of the big 3 (XBOX, PlayStation, Nintendo) and it felt both luxurious and excessive.

Going to Blockbuster wasn’t just about movies, it was about games. And because you only had the rental period (I think 48 hours) to play them, you played them for hours on end to try and beat them in that timeframe. I played Spyro until I threw up. And I still can’t really get into video games because I associate them with this high stress nauseating feeling.

Movies elude me too man

I think that the three pillars are probably comfort, ownership and education. Middle class families are less likely to shop at ikea, and more likely to look for inheritance pieces that are more durable. They own their own homes, may own more than one, and usually have some form of non job related income like stocks, a rented property, or some sort of small business. And finally, they pick where they live based on the quality of the schools, and encourage their children to attend higher education. There does also seem to be a higher tendancy for them to have gone to university when they were younger, or to have gone as a mature student once they could afford to.

The three 'C's are all under the comfort label to an extent. I've definitely noticed an income related effect in my family with cars and technology. After a long period of unemployment after the recession, the first thing my dad did after getting a new job was to buy a really nice car, and the quality of our phones, computers and TVs changed pretty quickly too. All of my aunts and uncles also have some sort of german black estate car with leather seats.

I grew up in the mid to late 2000s in semi-suburban Wisconsin, and we had a VCR in the 'room above the garage', which was a room above our detached garage (our house was somewhat old). I had a VHS copy of Pinocchio that I would sometimes watch up there.

I also had a small tube TV on top of my dresser. We lived too far away from any city to pick up any good channels, so the only stuff I could actually watch was Qubo. I did eventually get my own DVD player, as well as a V-Smile. That TV did fall on me once, though (as well as the Christmas tree). Many fond memories in that house, but when we moved to Minnesota, my younger brother always got the bigger bedroom, and I've never really had much room for myself ever since.

In terms of cars, it changed a lot. My mom had a Ford Explorer at first, and my dad a Honda Accord, but then my mom got a Subaru Forester and my dad eventually got a pickup truck, which we actually used for pickup truck things like yard work and towing our hand-me-down family boat. Also road trips. My mom had to get a Chevy Malibu (which she hated) after the Forester blew an engine after towing a pop-up camper too many times, and after that she got a 2015 Jeep Cherokee– the very first (and as of now only) brand new car our family has ever bought.

When I was 17ish, I got my own car. It was/is a $500 beater that I both love and hate unconditionally ('01 Mazda 626). Of course, my younger brother got a nice '14 Ford Focus.

I couldn't find any way to fit my Nintendo DS Lite with Walmart lightning stickers into this story so here it is.

I love my 2014 Mazda 3, my first, and best car. I also love my old gaming PC I got in the late 2010s. I'm fairly indifferent about my 24 inch TV I got probably 10 years ago, since I usually use my desktop, and don't have cable, and feel the same the HP laptop that I just got.

I'm not sure if this is a Zoomer trend or just a me thing, but 90% of the YouTube watching I do is actually on my smartphone. I'd be curious to see the actual stats on desktop vs laptop vs mobile device watch time (or even watching on PlayStation/Fire TV/whatever)

Another award winning video!

As a car huy, I find it interesting hearing non car peoples opinions on cars.

Id say in The modern day car would stay in the list but colour tv would be replaced with high quality pictures tv and computer would be replaced with newer smart phone

I feel like home ownership should be included in there, and tv and computer maybe smushed together (since people watch shows and movies on their computers so much now a days).

haveweird to hear these problems with people using public transport
in eastern europe there's nothing bad about using public transport, be it a bus or subway
though again, people barely had cars in the 70s here, and cities are way more adopted for walking.

this is the biggest throwback of all time, especially the "satellite arms race"

As a 'computer person', I couldn't relate less to your experience: from my very first moment seeing a DOS prompt, I was giddy like an apprentice magician seeing an impossible trick for the first time 😂