emptystation

If I earn $1000$/m, and I save $100/m - in a year, I'll maybe have $1200 saved up. 10% is so little for most you might as well spend it.

Personal rant: I've been saving up 20-50% of my salary for the last 5 years for a downpayment, and then in the past year 18% inflation hit, interest rate doubled, food price inflation is in top 10 worst in Europe, property prices in increased by 50% in 4 years. My savings obviously cannot keep up with the economy.

I'm glad I wasn't too stringy and spent some money to complete all necessary dental work in the past couple of years (dental is never covered by the insurance here), now I wouldn't be able to afford it.

Oh, and there's also a war in my home country and my family lost almost all of their income (thank god they aren't displaced (yet)), now I'm awaiting a decision from my company whether I get the boot or not. Fun times. I wish I invested in mental health and therapy too, I would still end up broke as I am now but at least I'd have some resilience.

I speak Russian fluently but I wish I didn't. I don't find it beautiful and the information that I've involuntarily consumed in Russian throughout all my life did more harm than good.

Overall, I am fluent in 4 languages, 2 were acquired early from the environment, 1 in my childhood, and 1 as an adult. Only English proved to be truly useful in life and it is the only language that I actually enjoy using. I dream of living in an English-speaking country and never touching any other language again. I know, it's a weird sentiment.

Agree, cities are just plain more interesting for many.

I also believe that life should be about discovery and creating but I'm not exactly sure what can be discovered in a shack in a middle of nowhere unless you're very outdoorsy to begin with.

I grew up in a town that didn't have a movie theater (or any theater for that matter) or any type of music venue. Interesting books? Not available - low tech area, Internet was not a big thing yet, one bookstore in town, underfunded library filled with Soviet leftovers and some classics. I wanted to learn a language my grandparents spoke and I couldn't do it properly - no classes or speakers in the area. Hell, we didn't have a modern well-stocked grocery store for the majority of my childhood. When the first local pizzeria opened, people, myself included, were raving. I had only seen pizza on TV prior to that. I'm not going to even mention the social aspect and the loneliness.

These days I am an avid cinephile, I adore listening to live music, picked up two music instruments myself, go raves occasionally, have access to any book imaginable. Meet people, meet friends, start romantic relationships and maybe a family, pick new projects, new interests, etc.

Having varied food too is also cool. Sure, it's not the biggest thing it life but it adds so much flavor (pun intended). I've tried spinach for the first time when I was 23 when I moved to a city in a spinach-obsessed country. I had wanted to try it for years and finally got a chance. Loved it! Cook with it all the time now, spinach is great. :D I don't ever want to go back to a place where the opportunity for new experiences is scarce.

I think what angers many people in the comments is the fact that OP is not poverty-stricken, he's a downshifter. Nothing wrong with that, just no reason to conflate the two. Downshifting is a completely different situation and lifestyle.

Ads insensitive platforms to design a more and more addictive infinite feed. If they cannot profit from children scrolling endlessly, why would they want to enable children to scroll endlessly? If ads for children on social media are banned (somehow), kids' feeds will probably just become way more boring.

Thank you for sharing, very interesting points! I wonder if Silent Gen and Boomers have had a change in their perception of beauty with age. Once you're out of reproductive age as a woman, beauty works differently for you. There must be some carryover from their younger years (for example, ideas of "properness" and "class" with Boomers seem to have been present throughout their whole lives) but some things must have changed.

I am a millennial myself (29 y.o.), and I felt like my generation was the one that was “awakened” to the reality of beauty standards. Obviously, feminist scholars have observed these patterns way before my time, but during my formative years the awareness entered the mainstream. My mom and her peers don't know what bodyshaming is, even though they both experience and perform it, my peers and I do know, and not because we've read specialized literature but because ideas are out there in the mainstream discourse.

I also know that my ideas and desires for beauty have been “planted” in me by the culture. There is nothing in me as a person that just naturally yearns to be underweight and have perky boobs. These were either instilled in me by the culture, or the culture promised something important in return. Sadly, this realization does not get rid of the desires themselves. I may be acutely aware that some beauty conventions are harmful, outdated, useless, exploitative, or inappropriate (conventions and contexts change!), I just cannot stop wanting them.

Gen Z’s situation is an interesting one. On one hand, they appear to be able to break the curse of desires “planted” in them and are able to connect with themselves as persons first and foremost, at least on some level. Their inner self, not Vogue, tells them to make a breast reduction. On the other hand, this is a rich ground for corporate exploitation. Listen, kid, you don’t need this lipstick for men, you don’t need it for other people at all, you need it for yourself. I, your friendly multi-billion corporation, just help you to articulate and get what you truly want!

This point reminds me of this [0] article discussing that same idea from a class + race lens.

Thank you for the link. The essay was very interesting. I am not very (or at all) educated in intersectionality, but it was a very accessible and insightful read. I do wish people didn’t have to deal with this crap but we live in a society yada yada.

It's not only that. Books are not ads. There can be bad books filled with stupid ideas and garbage stories but the purpose of literature is not to advertise something.

Modern social media is just advertisement in disguise of entertainment. I am an adult, hopefully a rational one, and my buying habits (and desires!) have been heavily influenced by the social media, I can only imagine what it does to children's minds.

The social aspect of social media, ironically, is often barely present. Services like Youtube are parasocial at best.

Right. I got a feeling that the OP is OK with their situation because they feel rather safe in their life conditions, there's an undertone "well if I _really really_ have to, I can take that job, or call my middle class parents, or the government will step in". None of these things are default for most poor people. When you're trapped in the cycle of poverty, you have one chance to get it "right" and you don't get a "phone a friend" option.

This aspect of poverty just mangles your mental state really. Suppose, if you're lucky, you manage to live an OK, accident-free, healthy life while poor, but the anxiety about "what ifs" is going to haunt you all the way.

Folks which have been poor and managed to escape it, are not driven by consumerism (not as the main driver at least), but by a sense of security.

I would agree with that, although my experience is mostly limited to America.

I grew up in Ukraine and have been living in the Czech Republic for the last 5 years, it's pretty much the same here, there are some slight differences about what is considered beautiful, what grooming practices are expected across different classes, what's trendy etc, but the phenomenon is basically the same.

how that pressure presents across different generations

That's interesting, do you care to share any of your observations? I noticed that gen Z, while having broader ideas of beauty, is leaning heavily into the self-expression aspect of it, while nothing wrong with that, beauty and fashion industries picked this angle very quickly and run it into the ground through social media. (I might be biased bc I'm into makeup but these days I just cannot keep up with the makeup industry and community, mentally or financially.)

people being stupid around attractive women is unfortunately one of those advantages, as gross as I feel about it.

There's only so many battles we can fight in our lives. Using lookism to your advantage, if you can do it in a healthy way, is just being a realist.

Coming back to the original topic - women who pick non-functional clothes are not irrational, imo, they just work with different input, so to speak.

I'd say some co-op games work well if they are paced well - when you circle through levels where you can idly chat, levels where you have to intellectually cooperate (solve puzzles together and such), and something more dynamic (shooters/action levels/fighting bosses) that lets your mind switch back to the game entirely.

Also, tabletop games somehow create more intimate experience, IMO.

I am one of those women who would wear an ill fitting bra over a well fitting one if a well fitting one accentuated my back fat. When you're conditioned to look and present themselves a certain way, it's almost impossible to fight it with rational arguments. It's anecdotal, of course, but I've seen a certain degree of conditioning in practically all the women across different cultures, just that the details differ.

Btw, I don't want huge pockets on my pants if they make me look "ugly". I've also recently opted for a handbag over a backpack, even though a backpack is an objectively healthier option for you back (and I am used to wearing backpacks, handbags are so freaking uncomfortable). The reason I switched? Backpacks made me look/feel "childish". That's it. I traded physical comfort and health for, hopefully, psychological comfort and the ability to control my narrative through my looks.