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by throwawaygh
1540 days ago
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It's not a money thing. It's a mindset thing. I am fairly senior and make tons of money. The ratio of income to my annual grocery bill is stupid. Also, I eat mostly salads and meat is not my most common protein source. Groceries could go up 10x and fluctuation in my investments would still grossly dwarf . But one of my earliest memories is my mother crying at the ATM because the checking account was over-drawn and there was no food at home (by the time I was in high school we were much better off than most, but the treatment effect stuck -- my younger sibling and I think about money in very different ways. Crazy what a $2K savings buffer can do). I then spent a good part of my early adult life stressing about affording food & choosing between rent and desired groceries. I still stress over every single thing that goes in the grocery basket, for absolutely not rational reason. In particular, I don't stress about e.g. restaurant bills. Why? Because the times in my life when food was scarce do not overlap with times I was in restaurants as a patron. The grocery store in particular is a source of psychological terror for many Americans at one point or another in their lives, and those memories are visceral. |
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It's not on the level of food insecurity, but I see a ton of comments in this thread by people who obviously are too young to remember the dot-com bust of 2001.
I was just out of school in 1999 and can vividly recall one of the senior engineers warning me, with mortal seriousness in his eyes, "it isn't always like this". I also remember having absolutely no fucking clue what he was talking about, except on the most superficial level. He was then just about the age that I am now.
Winter is coming.