Faux-wholesome nonsense, but the "avocado toast" gives it away...
> People seem to be taught that owning a home isn't a good goal. Think of how hard it would be to move if you also had to sell said home. There's taxes, maintenance and insurance you'd have to pay.
Really? That's the impression you get of why young (and not-all-that-young-anymore) people aren't buying houses? Because that's not what I hear, which is generally people who quite clearly *would* like to afford a house but don't stand a chance of getting their foot on the ladder or being able to afford it if they did.
And I'm sure it's nothing to do with the fact that house prices have gone up obscenely in real terms- way above the rate of inflation- in recent decades and continue to do so and mortgages for such properties aren't affordable to many people even on a decent wage.
> People seem to be taught have come to the conclusion that owning a home isn't a good is an impossible goal and given up on it.
FTFY.
But then again, you mention the perennial "avocado toast"- something which not only became a cliché of blaming millennials' alleged profligacy for their inability to afford a house, but became *such* a cliché that it's generally used to *mock* such attitudes now. And yet the context of the rest of your post suggests it wasn't meant to be satirical.
Beyond the direct problem of affordability, the thing that pisses me off about the disproportionately high price of houses- something I've been saying for *many* years now- is how housing then distorts and becomes such a huge factor in peoples' lives, with everything having to revolve around that.
You can afford a house by paring down everything else in your life and caring about nothing else? And that's a good thing?
It's. A. House. It's a thing to live in, not your entire life. At least, it shouldn't be, and it wouldn't be in a less f****d-up society.
And that in turn ties new house owners to an economy in which house prices have become an unhealthy part, in which house prices going up is seen to be a good thing, and where those people who just bought an overpriced house then *can't* afford for it to lose value, even though house prices going down from their current inflated *should* otherwise- within reason- be a good thing.
I predicted correctly before the 2008 crash that while those over-inflated prices going down *would* be a good thing on paper, in reality it wouldn't be for *healthy* reasons or have a *healthy* effect. And it didn't. And after the so-called "recovery" from that crash house prices went back up and are now much worse than they were even in 2006-07.
So, tl;dr version, the shitty, overpriced housing market has a shitty, f****d-up, distorting effect on peoples' lives, society and the economy as a whole.
In isolation, I wouldn't entirely disagree with everything you said, including the bit about flat-screen TVs and streaming services. But in this context, they just come across as part of the faux-wholesome back-to-basics-happy-life facade over something that's pretty much just victim blaming "avocado toast"-munching millennials for not being able to afford a house.