Silicon Valley has been subsidizing millennials' lifestyles for most of our adult lives. We'll still end up poorer.

• There's a reason why in the 2010s everything from Ubers to Netflix subscriptions felt oddly cheap.
• It's down to a "millennial lifestyle subsidy" — startups made a loss to lure in customers.
• Now alternatives are gone and prices are up — so we'll still end up poorer.

There's a reason why the 2010s felt like a great time for young people who wanted their lives phone-orientated and cheap.

We said goodbye to the stale and expensive world of booking hotels, hailing cabs, and only ordering food from restaurants that offered delivery. Instead, we stuffed our home screens full of colorful apps that promised to fix these inefficient systems.