Success was what? Go to college. Get a job. Buy a home. Build a family. Find a girl, settle down, like the old Cat Stevens song. You get married and you find a home. That was the thing. Today, I think they'd rather buy their $6 Starbucks, the $1,200 iPhone, and go to Houston and watch the game for $3,000. Or people have just given up. It's so far gone that they're saying to themselves, I can't. The chasm between me and that home ownership is so far. I'm not even gonna try anymore. I can't try.
That's from a conversation I had on the You're Gonna Die A Renter podcast with Brandon and Bill, and I want to expand on it, because the exchange holds two competing explanations for the same fact, and which one you believe changes everything about what should happen next.
What was the old script for success?
For most of a century, success in America had a script so universal nobody needed it written down. Go to college. Get a job. Find someone. Settle down. Buy a home. Build a family. Every step fed the next one, the whole culture reinforced it, the songs were literally about it, and the home was the anchor of the entire sequence. Not an investment strategy. Not an asset class. The place the rest of the script happened.
And the script worked because every step looked reachable from the step before it. That's the part people forget about the old script. Its power was never the destination. It was the visible staircase.
What actually changed?
On the show, I gave the spending answer first. The $6 coffee, the $1,200 phone, the $3,000 trip for a game. And I'm not going to pretend that's nothing. Priorities did shift. A generation raised on experiences spends on experiences, and money that once defaulted toward a down payment now has a hundred competing destinations that feel better this weekend.
But then I said the thing I actually believe is underneath it, and it's darker than lattes. Or people have just given up. For a lot of people, the distance between where they stand and that front door stopped looking like a staircase and started looking like a chasm. And here's what happens psychologically at that moment, in any part of life. When a goal looks hard, people stretch. When a goal looks impossible, people stop. Not because they're lazy. Because trying at an impossible thing feels like a tax on hope, and no one pays that tax forever.
So the spending everyone loves to point at might not be the cause at all. It might be the receipt. If the home is unreachable anyway, the coffee and the phone and the game are what reachable joy looks like. You don't save for a staircase that isn't there.
That reframe matters because the two explanations point in opposite directions. If it's spending, the answer is a lecture, and the industry has been delivering that lecture for a decade to no effect. If it's the chasm, the answer is showing people a staircase they can actually see. Smaller first steps. Clearer paths. Honest guidance from someone who knows the terrain and wants them across it.
Why does this matter for real estate?
Because an entire industry depends on people still wanting to make the trip. And here's what I'd tell anyone in this business reading this. The want never died. Ask people who say they'll rent forever whether they'd take the home if the path were real, and watch the answer. What died for many of them is the belief that the path exists. Belief is the industry's actual inventory, and rebuilding it, person by person, path by path, is the most valuable work anyone in real estate can do right now.
The full conversation with Brandon and Bill goes much deeper, on this and on where technology fits into all of it. Watch the full episode here.
*Judd Hoffman is CEO and Co-Founder of Ethica AI, building AI-powered tools for real estate transaction workflows.*