Certainly if you expect to have good economic prospects. I don't think it's a new phenomenon either; "Europe on $5 a day" was the classic Boomer travel book.
"Certainly if you expect to have good economic prospects."
But I think the idea is that maybe this is true even if you expect to have _bad_ economic prospects. If I worry that the future is grim no matter what I may just say "screw it, I'm having my fun. We all wind up in the dirt anyway".
Traditionally we're told we should have expensive thing x ["homeownership", "retirement account", "family with kids in private school", "beautiful objects"] but if x is impossible I'll go with y ["traveling around Europe", "nice musical instrument", "bit more hedonism than I might have otherwise", "nice craft beer and dinner"], because I might as well spend my money on a good that's attainable. If you can save up a down payment for a home in only 20 years then why the hell bother? Hell, you might wind up buying a house just to have flood insurance jump 10,000% because the seas are rising.
Put in other words - for the person who has no prospect of ever owning a home, why should they save for a down payment instead of using it in some other way?
Of course, there is a continuum and plenty of folks are threadbare in retirement and regret not saving. I just think there are probably also plenty of folks who:
• saved and lost it because of political or economic instability (note the examples I cited), wishing they'd just had fun with the money.
• saved and had money to spend while their bodies rotted away so it didn't do them any good.
• didn't save and lived an austere life in their later years but figured it was worthwhile.
• died.
•• We don't all make it to 75+. Once I hit my thirties I was startled as more of my friends and acquaintances started dying. I'm more willing to spend money on travel, friends, etc. as a result.
but we hear their stories less often. I don't know whether this is because they occur less often.
I'm not endorsing completely throwing away the idea of saving but I can see how when someone finally gets the chance to do what they want they figure they'll go for it because the goals we're ostensibly supposed to strive for are never gonna happen.
Also, we see everything through the lens of our own experience and my own is substantially biased by having spent a lot of time in the bay and LA not getting anywhere (admittedly my skillset was smaller then), then striking up a conversation over the pronunciation of JSON with a random guy in a pub in Dublin during the aforementioned farting around Europe and getting an interview out of it and now having a decent job and over a month off a year that I'm not guilted for using in a city where I might reasonably expect to own a home within the next couple years, not the next couple decades. YMMV.
https://www.smartertravel.com/2017/06/19/56-years-later-euro...