still thinking about the cost of things

june 23, 2024

i visited my great grandmas house today. nobody related to me lives there any more. while we walked around the house my dad reflected on the way his grandma only had one bill for electricity. and then we both thought that there's something sad about the way everything is bought and sold today. i think it takes a lot of energy to think about it all. one of the only times in the year when she had to throw some coins at someone was for electricity... her family grew its own food and made its clothes and if their wagon broke i guess they just borrowed somebody's wrench. they didn't have a culture of buying hundreds and hundreds of items all day long. the more money you have the more time you spend administering it. do expenses. open new accounts. wait for sales and bargains and deals. pay bills and monitor bills and split venmo's and change phone lines and compare uber to lyft. budget. save. do taxes. get a job. get fired and be unemployed. collect unemployment and get hired again. get promoted and get more money. work all day. money money money. go to college. pick a major. pick one that makes money though. spend it. then go to grad school. and optimize and strategize there, too. have income. have income tax. look at the compound interest. robinhood, car insurance. move to a place with a lower cost of living. jesus christ.

i understand why people want to make money so badly in america. in san francisco it is very scary to be poor. there is not so much help if you slip, and there is a lot of danger. when i run through san francisco's most depressed neighborhood, i see the misery and i smell it and when i was unemployed a couple of years ago, if i didn't have a family, it is hard to guess how low i could've sunk living in that expensive hell hole with no paycheck. unemployment didn't cover half my rent that i was already splitting three ways with my roommates. so unemployment didn't cover ⅙ of rent.

we need this green money because on some ancient level there is fear of that grim depression of being stranded and trapped in a place like what you can see in that part of SF. and because we have no skills anymore. we can't make clothes or grow food. we just buy things. the corporations with their factories and newspapers pump plastic and metal out of the earth and sell us garbage and the smart educated people are exploited too. because they are working hard and using their big intelligence to invent great stories and advertisements that undermine our self esteem. and that make us hunger for more things to buy. more clothes. and then instagram is invented and it is truly, amazingly brainless and in there i see a false sliver of a wider reality and i am left feeling without the friends or the travels or the tastes of my very impressive online acquaintances.