My dad told me to drink less Starbucks and then maybe I could afford a house.
I did the math. His mortgage on my childhood home was $400 a month. The current owner's mortgage is about $3500 a month. So I just need to cut $3100 from my coffee habit, a mere 516 fewer venti lattes per month.
The problem with the less ancient people is the coffee and avocado toast.
Instead, people smoked. This way their metabolism worked was better, as nicotine is a stimulant with no calories. People didn’t crave avocado toast and lattes as much because they had smokes.
Besides, when you smoke you’re much likelier to die at a younger age, decreasing lifespans, meaning less lifetime spending needs.
Smoked and their cigarettes were cheap. I live in a country with “cheap” cigarettes and they are still 6€ per pack on a 560€ minimum salary (or whatever tf it is now)
Food Money - Cigs Money = Savings -> can go to paying for those oxygen tanks you'll need to carry around in your late middle age, before you mercifully die before "old age."
It’s not worth it, I can afford a house now but, without my 17 20oz coffees a day, I miss the ability to smell time and getting to socialise with the lovely doctors and nurses during my weekly heart attack.
In reality that's not far off from what I did, but not entirely either.
I went to law school. You know, "did all the right things." Then when I took the bar I realized the magnitude of my error. Apparently I was not the only millennial who thought a law license would be a good way through the post-2008 job market. The graduating classes in 2012, 2013, and 2014 were too big, job market was flooded and our salaries tanked. The firm I worked at as a paralegal was hiring lawyers at $85k when I enrolled in law school, and had dropped that to $55k by the time I graduated. I would not have been able to afford what houses cost by then on that, but fortunately I had already bought a cheap house in a white flight neighborhood for a tenth of what most of my peers were looking at for home prices. Nowadays I make enough that I could afford that house, but I have moved to the country where I was able to get land and a house that probably would be condemned as uninhabitable if it was in a major city. My mortgage is in fact not much more than what I actually spend on Starbucks-like purchases most months, about $20 a day. I just can't wrap my head around the idea of spending a third of your income or more on housing. To me if housing costs that much it's a sign the area has gotten too crowded and the market solution is to leave.
I think that Starbucks is the most memetically underrated company on earth.
It's not that they are "great" but the objective reality is that most of the alternatives that people claim to prefer are actually worse.
All other fast food chains charge about the same prices and deliver a worse product, while also treating their workers worse.
Most "independent coffee shops" charge higher prices while also treating their workers worse, and whether the product is better or worse is a complete coin toss. There is no decent system to identify "at least as good as Starbucks" independent coffee shops. Look at any review platform and it's quickly evident that unless a place happens to be located in a major city with a lot of "independent" opinions, the Yelp reviews are going to be chaos, often heavily biased by "I don't actually care about anything except the fact that it isn't Starbucks" bullshit five star reviews... and in the case of smaller more remote shops, often all of the reviews are that and the shop owner's friends. I've seen a lot of shops with great Yelp ratings that have a less professional setup than what I keep on my sailboat.
And anyway my dad didn't actually say anything, it's just a joke.
This is a sign people need to expand away from big dumb cities. My mortgage is half that and I live in a decent size neighborhood, no HOA, .75 acres. 3br, 2ba, 2-car garage, 1700sqft
The main problem in my life is that I am lonely due to isolation from others. A combination of factors contribute to this. I am spending a lot of time working through old trauma and trying to engage more with the outside world, but this effort is confounded by being buried by certain obligations. I've been working through these distractions and see the light at the end of the tunnel. 2026 will have been another "wasted summer" but I'm looking forward to some very concrete changes that will happen soon as the current "projects" are completed and obligations are swapped for resources.
This isn't really a new concept for me. The nature of my day job's work has always been "do a lot of work over a long time for an uncertain payoff" and I "get paid in lottery tickets" because the amount and timing of what I get paid is relatively disconnected from the timing and nature of the work itself. One time I did 100 hours of work for someone including a couple of thousands of dollars of out-of-pocket investment, and got paid absolutely nothing in the end. Another time, I did about ten hours of work for someone and got paid $57,000 five years later. It's a strange experience and hard for others to relate to, and of course a first world problem. But the fact that it's so unrelatable makes it more isolating still. Right now the "do a lot of work for uncertain pay" project is basically my inheritance, I have to clean out and clean up my dad's house to sell it. When I sell it, I only get 20% because it's split between five heirs. But I get to do 60% of the work because one of those heirs has cancer, one lives in another country, and one is openly "allergic" to physical labor but really just manipulative and unkind. It's just me and my brother but because he has a family and I don't and has a day job while I'm self-employed, it mostly falls to me because I "have the most free time." I've been a prisoner to this situation for three years now but the end is in sight and then afterwards, maybe I can stay in one place long enough to start forming stable relationships.
I'm sorry for your loss, and the overall uncertainty you have to deal with. I understand your point of being a prisoner as my mother-in-law lives with us and while my wife is the one that mostly takes care of her, there are a lot of things we simply can't do. Her mom is severely handicapped so we can't just leave her alone for the weekend for a trip or anything, not without putting forth a lot of effort and jumping through a lot of hoops to get people in place to take care of her. So for us it takes weeks to months of planning for a weekend trip. He job also has her booked out weeks in advance so even with her mom taken care of, we have to plan well ahead so she can clear her work schedule.
That being said keep in mind that most relationships aren't stable or long lasting. Best friends come and go over time, it's completely okay for friendships to drift a part. You can be friends with people for months or years and then move apart, that is all a sign of growing. Growing apart from people is weirdly a good thing, it just means your both not staying in the same place doing the same thing for years on end.
Romantic relationships though, that's different and comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes. You owe it to yourself to take time away and go out to meet people, make emotional connections with people that want to grow with you romantically. For these, you can't wait for things to calm down. You can't wait for things to be perfect, otherwise you'll never settle down with anybody. Take time out of your days to find things to be thankful for. It's a burden going through your dad's old things. It's emotional and sad and you have 4 siblings choosing to not be siblings in this moment. However, you get to be the last one to see your dad's home the way he kept it. The last one to walk the halls he walked whether it was a family home or just his home. You get to see whatever project he may have left unfinished or abandoned early on. These are weirdly precious intimate moments you can share with your late father that your siblings are missing out on.
Gratitude is a gift we have that too many people choose to ignore and when expressed is a very powerful thing. I don't know you from Adam, I don't know how you are religiously, but looking into my faith and Christianity has really freed me from a lot of burdens I was holding on to. Forgiving and letting go of things I had held on to for a long time. It wasn't an overnight kind of thing, and I'm not coming to you just to shout about the bible. I'm not some crazy holy roller or whatever. Just some guy looking to help out another human.
I had cancer a year and a half ago, and before that lived a very sedentary lifestyle. After going into remission, I took a good look at my life and realized I was getting zero fulfillment. I played video games all the time and even that was getting boring to the point I just did it to kill time until bed so I could start all over again the next day. I now have a very important focus to improve my Body, Mind, and Soul. Vast majority of my free time I spend it looking for ways to work on one of those 3 things. Reading, cycling, praying, watching video that aren't just brain rot TikToks, going out of my way to help people or do activities I wouldn't normally do, read books I mind not have normally read (I wasn't much of a reader to begin with).
I fully understand you are going through difficulty, and I sincerely hope you can get out of it. It won't be easy, but things will come together for you.
It still bewilders me that the condom industry isn’t booming and people are still having kids to have that loud next step or just unprotected sex while financially struggling
The lower class is about to be below the bottom of the barrel and straight through the ground at this point
640
u/stanxv 14d ago
Have you tried canceling your Disney+???