The Luxury of Low Expectations: What We Gained by Having Less

The daughter of a close family friend got married a few months ago. My wife Suzie and I recently had dinner at the newlyweds’ home. It was a lovely evening hearing the details of their honeymoon to New York and onward to Mexico.

Being a keen observer of the human condition, although Suzie suggests I’m just nosy, I couldn’t help but notice the material abundance this couple starting out in life have already acquired. It’s a stark contrast to our own humble beginning to married life.

Suzie and I purchased our first home in the fall of 1988 and spent the time until our marriage in the spring of ’89 happily stripping, painting, and fixing up what we could to make our decidedly worn-out house comfortable on a shoestring budget. For the first four months, daybreak was our wake-up time because we had no curtains to dim the morning sun.

Our young friends were having a lively discussion debating what color and shape of built-in bedroom furniture would best suit a spare bedroom. Different times indeed, I thought. I can remember the excitement of getting an actual bedroom floor covering the week before our first Christmas—it was our early present from Suzie’s parents. In fact, the reason we bought our house was that the seller was moving overseas and was happy to leave the furniture and cooker; otherwise, we would have had nothing.

My thoughts during the evening’s dinner revolved around the generational divide and something important that I think has been lost over the nearly forty years since my marriage. This generation has it good in so many ways by most measures, but I think something fundamental has been discarded. The change from the simple low expectations that myself and many of my peer group saw as normal might be thought of as something to celebrate. I view it differently.

Of course, I can’t argue the facts, today’s young adults face challenges I never did. Housing costs have skyrocketed, making homeownership feel out of reach. Job security has largely evaporated, replaced by gig economy uncertainty. Student debt that barely existed for me now follows graduates for decades. Their material abundance might be less about excess and more about seizing what they can while they can, in an economic landscape that feels far less predictable than the one I navigated.

Yet despite these very real pressures—or perhaps because of them—I wonder if something valuable has been lost in translation. This lower baseline of expectations and the lack of the modern “immediacy of wants” phenomenon let Suzie and me live without certain pressures that seem endemic today. Debt to fund lifestyle wasn’t front and center; saving for what we needed was much more the path taken—it was just how things were done.

Take my young friends again. Their whole spare bedroom refurb was financed by the supplier, essentially enabling the work. Our whole house was completed piecemeal as we had the funds. The rewards of delayed gratification—finally putting carpet in a bedroom or hanging curtains after months of patient saving—created a contentment that made not ordering that Friday takeout or going to that party worth the sacrifice. Vacations were a fantasy.

While I wish my young friends all the happiness in the world, I wonder if easy credit has created a perfect storm where immediate gratification feels both necessary and possible, even when it’s financially risky. The real luxury for Suzie and me wasn’t a beautifully decorated house on day one, but the simple satisfaction that came from building our lives slowly, deliberately, and always within our budget. No credit required.

I’m not romanticizing our tiny budget—today’s economic realities are challenging enough. But watching my young friends navigate a world where traditional markers of security feel increasingly elusive, I wonder if we might all benefit from occasionally pressing pause on our purchasing power. Maybe it’s choosing to save for something instead of financing it, or deliberately waiting before buying something we want. In a culture where both instant gratification and economic anxiety coexist, perhaps one of the best things we could do is rediscover our ability to wait and show prudence.

The generations have clearly changed, maybe for better, maybe not, but at least one thing hasn’t: dessert at the end of the meal. While I waited for the recent groom to lay down my treat, my mind wandered, settling on the famous line from the writer L.P. Hartley: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

These words, I think, perfectly sum up my doubt. Life is different now. As I finished my sweet, I was left not with criticism, but with a quiet conviction: that the slow, deliberate pace of our early married life—our forced luxury of low expectations—was simply a different path. Perhaps in another reality, Suzie and I would have taken the money lender’s coin, but I’m glad we didn’t have that temptation. We truly enjoyed the slow process of building our home.