Roommates and ramen

It's a little weird, in a good way, but a lot of cultural things come up on CoasterBuzz periodically, especially as it relates to the cost of roller coaster nerding and traveling. After Disney's last earnings call, citing a "moderation in demand," many in the press have run with this idea that Disney vacations are too expensive and that this will hurt the company. To be clear, this has been going on for years, and yet, the parks look insanely different from the way they were just ten years ago. They're still making more than enough to keep improving them.

What often comes up in those discussions though is the issue of expectations as they relate to income and affordability of everything. For whatever reason, Disney vacations seem to be aspirational to Americans, as the ultimate thing to do with your kids. That always seemed weird to me, even before I lived next door, and after I had a kid of my own. We have a great time there, don't get me wrong, but the world is a pretty big place with an awful lot of cool things to see. I wouldn't prioritize it.

But mostly, those conversations get into financial realities. The first thing is that obviously this is a discretionary expense. No one needs to take a vacation. There's also this thing where you keep seeing stories about people who skip what I call the "roommates and ramen" stage of life, which is to say that you start your adult life kind of poor, and so you have to make some compromises about your lifestyle. My roommate happened to be my then-girlfriend-future-first-wife, and we didn't have a lot of fancy things or eat fancy food. That seemed reasonable to me, because college degree or not, I hadn't really done anything in life yet. Without experience, I wouldn't expect to be well-off financially.

This comes up a lot in the context of student debt. It also gets conflated with the cost of college and ease of borrowing, and while I don't want to trivialize those issues, they are different from the expectation problem. Maybe there was an expectation that if you just go to school you'll be better off, but that was the story when I went as well. What changed I think is that the expectation also started to include the idea that you'll have nice things and do nice things right away. I know there are memes that mock the expectation involving avocado toast and $8 Starbucks iced coffee, but I can't imagine doing that sort of thing when I was 22. It's even worse when people get a masters degree (MBA's especially), and they think that they should be living large immediately. But like me after school, they haven't actually done anything. Education isn't the same as experience.

The worst example is the asinine articles where they find some family that together makes $500k a year, and they're "struggling" to make ends meet and pay off their student loans. Naturally, they live in expensive markets with huge houses, obnoxious cars and a nanny. I mean, buy what you can afford, but if you're struggling and buying things you could easily do without, you made that situation. I bring up this example because I want to illustrate that the expectation problem is not just a facet of recent college grads. It seems to be a much wider cultural issue.

I first went to Walt Disney World as an adult four years after graduating college. And when I say we went, I mean Steph's grandparents, who were snowbirds, had a friend that was a retired Disneyland mechanic, and he front-gated us (got us in for free), and we park hopped between three parks in one day. Not exactly a dream vacation. At least I had moved beyond ramen at that point.