A Startling Example of Being Completely Detached From Reality

From time to time I run across people who clearly are completely detached from reality. Simply living in a large metro area, walking the streets of our big city, you can't miss them. Best I can figure, they're some combination of drug-addled homeless folks and emotionally disturbed, even complete insane, folks who no longer reside in institutions. While you occasionally run into someone who appears dangerous, most of the time they're just pathetic and harmless.

Uncharitable to speak this way? Not really. It's just an accurate description of one aspect of the urban landscape - at least in these parts - something akin to describing the growing number of obese people who waddle around town and take up more than their fair share of seat space in the subway. While the number of fat people has expanded in recent years, along with the homeless and drug-addled, disturbed crazy folks have always been with us. Over the course of history, institutions have sprung up to house - if not help - these people. But a certain percentage have always found some nook or cranny in large cities where they live their lives in various degrees of detachment from what the rest of us perceive as the "real world."

But in recent years, I've seen more of our "normal" fellow citizens join the ranks of the completely detached. While I have my own theory about how this phenomena arose, for today let's consider this glaring example of members of the Millennial generation who desire to own a home:

In a nationwide survey of about 24,000 renters Apartment List found that the 80 percent of millennial renters, born between 1982 and 2004, want to purchase a house or condo, but face a huge obstacle: affording a home.

If you've got any brains and common sense, you understand that knowing how you're going to pay for an item generally precedes - or should precede - the decision to purchase it. Of course, in recent decades, the unfettered use of credit cards has displaced logic and common sense, causing a growing number of people to run up balances that they'll likely never pay off, just to indulge their desire for more, bigger, or expensive stuff that they simply can't afford. But buying a home isn't something you can charge on a card. You've got to come up with some actual money, along with a commitment from a bank or other financial institution to provide a mortgage loan.

Apparently, though, Millennials (or some percentage of them) don't get this. Just look at the contrast between perception and reality in this survey:

16 percent of respondents said they plan on purchasing a home within the next two years, compared to 25 percent in our 2014 survey. Meanwhile, about two of three respondents, or 67 percent, said they expect to wait three years or more, an increase from about 53 percent in the 2014 survey.

Based on their current rate of monthly savings, our survey found that millennials in many of the nation’s large metros will need at least a decade to save enough money for a 20 percent down payment on a condo.

While the article considers various other Millennial mis-perceptions about the realities of home-ownership, here's one rather glaring example reinforcing the detachment from reality of which we speak:

...millennials seem to have an expectation that they need a lot less for a down payment than they actually do. For example, in Los Angeles, the market with the widest gap in expectation and reality, the actual median price of a condo is $420,400, meaning that a 20 percent down payment comes out to $84,080. Respondents in that region estimated that they will need $36,340, which is less than half of the actual amount.

As to how an entire generation grows up with their heads either in the clouds or in some other place too-delicate-to-mention here, one can only speculate: failure of the educational system; living in a bubble, having been spoiled by indulgent parents - the list goes on. Whatever the reason(s), there it is. The future of America will some day fall into their hands. Let's hope by then their heads are screwed on more tightly than they are now.