me_irl

Asking people what they do for fun can be some of the saddest conversations you’ll have(or the best!). Music? No. Art? Not really. Dancing? Sometimes. Games? No, not that much. The saddest thing for me personally is hearing someone say they used to play an instrument but just kinda don’t anymore, to the point where I lent my guitar to a friend so they’d have something until they could buy one to replace what they sold to move here.

FYI, if you use code format instead of the quote, the entire text in the box is displayed in one line, so people reading it have to scroll the tiny box horizontally - and in my case when I'm trying to do that on desktop, the scroll bar obscures most of the text:

with quote formatting the text wraps lines when necessary:

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

It's this much in the Seattle area sometimes, so that's one possibility. It's insane and I barely ever get any anymore.

let's just say this person isn't in the lower class

In the USA we are slaves to make the rich be richer. It's kind of why the USA sucks at everything, because the citizens are raped by those above.

You should visit sometime if you want to understand more deeply. Most people are nice to foreigners and will spill their guts telling you anything you want to know.

I live in a relatively expensive cost of living area, Seattle, WA, but can still find good espresso for $4-6 USD for a double latte or mocha with good body and balance of flavor.

And personally, my phone was $1300 USD new when I bought it 3 years ago. I put it in a good case and try to take care of it, because while money is tight, I also use it for many things and the capabilities and quality enable me to do stuff with it that I like to, like good photos for traveling, bright screen for navigating in bright places, a stylus for impromptu explaining complex stuff and note taking, and lots of storage because I'm a power user. I also just really like tech and planned to make this phone last as long as I could. Battery life is still very good, and I use my phone everyday.

I do want a headphone jack, expandable memory, an easily replaceable battery, and better cases again. But, I'm no longer working in environments where I have to replace my case every few months, so that's a plus.

Also, the cost of living is high here because there is so much tech and high paid people. The capitalist land owners jack up the prices because they can and people pay it because they can and have sort of just accepted that if you want to work at, say, Microsoft or Google or Amazon or Meta, and you want to have a competitive position, you have to not be remote. And if you're going to live locally, you should try to be close, so as to save time and not deal with as much traffic. So people make a lot of compromises to do the things that they either love or pay well.

And then you have to really think that in 2020-2023 or so, when people were still socially distancing, a lot of businesses transitioned to remote work, which actually solved a LOT of problems.

It solved problems for citizens and workers and the planet.

It did NOT solve problems for corporate land owners and those invested in corporate real estate.

And guess what capitalism is? It means that the people with all the capital have the power-ism!

So, back to the previous system we all went! So that we could all be wasteful and give money to the landlords and business owners again!

I hate it here. Please help.

The word "coffee" is being used very liberally here. Starbucks and company will happily sell you highly sugared drinks for $7. They'll also sell you "American" (drip) coffee for $2.50, which is still too much but it's a bit more reasonable.

If I want a relatively fancy coffee drink it might cost me $5 CAD max. At a little local coffee shop.

I cannot fathom spending that much on a coffee.

That said, the baked goods. They get you with the baked goods.

Anything to fill the void

i mean this person is also paying $1000 for a phone so that explains a lot

This but also for the phone

Last time I owned a $100 phone I regretted it dearly.

You get barely enough storage space to run the OS and maybe two apps, the Cracker Jack box CPU makes apps crash and the OS extremely unresponsive, and you get so little RAM that you can't even have anything running in the background. Your music literally stops playing just because you needed to read a text. Never again.

Up that budget to about $300-400. Couple of months ago I got a Samsung Fold 4 for that price; it's extremely responsive and has enough RAM and storage space to last me at least 5 years while still feeling nothing.

Inflation has hit coffee hard. A black coffee is like 3 dollars most places.