With a decent rice cooker and some 20-lb bags of rice, lentils and beans, you can have nutritious, protein-rich meals for about $1 a day; maybe $1.50 a day if you're an unusually big and/or physically active person—even if you're living in a transitional situation where you don't have a stove/hot plate/cook top. An outlay of $5 every few months in the spice aisle can add flavor and variety.
Add in a good multivitamin/mineral plus some extra stashes of quality supplements of vitamins D, C, and B12 (none of which can be meaningfully "overdosed"), and you've got yourself a nutritious, extremely protein-tich, diet that's loaded in all the necessary micronutrients. Still clocking in under $2 a day. Still if you don't even have a stove or a hot plate.
One of my favorite meals is Tandoori Chicken and Ginger and Garlic Rice. You can get three large breasts of chicken for $13 at Loblaws in North Van. A 1 lb. bag of rice runs about $8.
Well, I am not sure how long one can last on rice and beans alone. I don''t think it's realistic to expect anyone in the modern world, surrounded by food temptations, to survive just on rice and beans for a long time. I would get bored out of my mind at some point and won't be able to stick to it. (And I think I am relatively disciplined about my nutrition and budget)
"However, we can help the next generation by demanding that schools make cooking and budgeting core courses in high school. One course, call it life skills, covering both would be sufficient." Meh... My daughter's high school had a mandatory personal finance class (as do all schools in our state) - she learned nothing. (Ditto for her classmates who took a cooking class). However, she quickly learned to budget and cook when she found herself on a very lean budget in college. With all the recipes on the internet, learning to cook is easier than ever now. Most of her friends in college manage to cook for themselves. It's fun, they exchange recipes and invite one another over to try them. It's nice when your parents and grandparents teach you when you are little and pass on some cool family recipes, but really, basic, healthy, budget cooking is not that complicated.
Maybe but I suspect your daughter learned to budget and cook because of how she was raised rather than because she was on a lean budget.
So kudos to you.
If all it took was lean budget to teach these skills we wouldn't have seen so many people complaining online. "I don't have enough money! I'm going to lunch."
Oh, home ec classes are certainly fun and should be offered for those who are interested - just not mandatory since it's a skill one can learn without a teacher.
There's a huge number of low-cost cooking shows on YouTube, mostly aimed at young adults who don't have a lot of money or time ("Struggle Meals" is my favorite). Many of the younger people I talk to about this don't believe that its's easier, cheaper, and healthier to cook at home than it is to order delivery (and nearly as quick).
The "I don't have time" argument make little sense. How do people with kids and all the time consuming demands that come with it, have more time than childless single people?
Have them add up a month's worth of delivery meal costs. (If it's two meals a day, this will be WELL into the four-figures in U.S. dollars. Even if it's just one meal a day, if that meal costs $28 like everybody is saying above then that's still almost $1,000 a month.)
Then ask them if they'd spend that much per month at the grocery store. Hell, ask them if they even COULD spend that much per month at the grocery store.
As an old engineer for decades I have said that the single most important class in high school would be a home econ + basic finance one. Should be mandatory in every school district with minimum grade of "C" to pass. I was fortunate in being able to learn quickly because despite all the high grades I got in high school I was woefully unprepared to be on my own. Thankfully I learned to live inexpensively and stay out of debt, but would have been nice to have a better foundation to start from.
I buy snacks and drinks for our young part-time workers so they don't go and buy an $8.00 coffee. I feel it is my duty to not only provide but to give a bit of schooling on saving money. Speaking of coffee, a friend and I were in a SoCal coffee house/restaurant and marveled how we were enjoying the fruits of a lovely setting because some crazy women were willing to ride in covered wagons with their even crazier husbands to settle the West. But no one thinks of these things. No one reads John Steinbeck to know what it really was like a 100 years ago. As for 'affordable housing' we don't have a housing shortage as much as we have a shortage of housing where people desire to live. I grew up in a pretty area with rolling hills. Section 8 housing killed the area. This isn't unique. Drugs killed the Rust Belt areas and rural areas. The problem is that there are no more functioning schools or grocery stores. But this is a far different obstacle than the slums and dangerous jobs that met immigrants over a 100 years ago. We are all soft and that includes me.
It's very good of you to help out the young people. I remember my first Starbucks coffee. I had it while visiting Seattle with the Canadian Navy sometime in the 1990s. It was awesome! That said, the explosion of coffee shops and growth of coffee culture, for lack of a better term, is probably not helping young people save money.
Housing is complex problem. Certainly looking down on an 800 sq ft apartment and roommates is not helping. I never lived alone and my wife and I lived in a small one bedroom for a few years after we were married. Not once did we think we had it bad.
Living in much of SoCal is unaffordable. Hands down. And the political landscape keeps chasing businesses away. There used to be a pretty robust engineering economic sector but they were chased away. So you have young people doing service jobs and they using aid to get by. At the Farmers Markets young health people think - especially young women - think nothing of using food stamps to buy things. I don't blame them. In my early 20s I might have done the same thing but society made it unacceptable. The larger problem is that the subsidies distort everything. Where I grew up, there are well built brick homes for less than $150,000 but no one wants to live there. So we have the homes but not the amenities. I get that but that is a luxury attitude that didn't exist a 100 years ago.
What I think is worse is that we are squandering the natural resource of human resolve to figure things out. Not that such a process is easy. The slums of NY over a 100 years ago are frightening. But prosperity grew out of the garbage.
I actually think it's the instant gratification mentality that culture has pushed for ~40 years. Each subsequent generation simply possesses less distress tolerance for, well, anything. That includes tolerating the time, talent, and prep work to make one's own food. This, and the defensiveness on display of said behaviors, can all be neatly summarized by the word "entitlement."
"I'll never own a house so I'm going to brunch," is not something mature people say.
Thirty years ago a black colleague of mine explained the concept of young broke black men buying expensive sneakers in much the same way. “They realize they’ll never be able to afford the 3000 square foot brick home that you live in, so they look for luxury and status in different ways”, he told me.
I'd also suggest that there's a fair chunk of manufactured helplessness there as well. They've been programmed to be dependent and helpless. This is another symptom.
"I believe that the problem is that many Zoomers did not experience hard times until they were already adults or near adults, and consequently are incapable of adapting to them."
There ya go, in a nutshell. People who have never had to be thrifty never learn to be thrifty, plus we have become so insanely wealthy compared to just fifty years ago that there's been a total lack of selection pressure against profligate habits. Being of 1955 vintage, I remember when the average kid had 3 sets of clothes -- school, hand-me-downs for play (want to get yellled at? Play in your school clothes), and if you were lucky, something nice for Sunday-go-to-meeting. Used to be one family car, and if the teenager wanted a car he'd best earn enough to buy some beater, then learn to fix it himself, but most of us walked to school or rode a hand-me-down bike. Now it's a new car, a new pickup, and a lightly-used car for each of the high-school-aged kids.
Also, since the American economy has grown so fast, there's been no selection pressure against the inherent grasshopper mindset, which cannot learn thrift. Some people live entirely in the moment, and will always be broke no matter how much money they're given, or earn. The song "Putting on the Ritz" wasn't originally about night life. It was about poor people of a certain class, who would work hard all week, then come the weekend blow their entire income showing off their new fancies and then be too broke to feed themselves. No different from inner city welfare types today, who whine and cry about being too broke to pay the rent, but somehow can wear $300 tennis shoes and be covered in expensive tattoos and they never run out of pot.
Here is the fundamental difference between being POOR and having NO MONEY.
Give a poor man ten bucks, he'll go to McDonalds, buy a burger and fries and a super-shake and a pack of smokes, then a few hours later he's broke and hungry again.
Give a man with no money ten bucks, he'll go to the thrift grocery, buy a pound of hamburger and a bag of rice and various fixings to make it tasty, prepare enough food to eat for a week, and have a couple bucks left over to put in the bank.
When I was a kid we had no money, but we were NEVER poor.
"My father wasn't a poor man. He was a rich man with no money." -- Dom DeLuise
"Grasshopper mindset." Yes! People used to sacrifice to get what they wanted. We're not talking about skipping meals, simply not eating out. My most recent article has added pets to the mix.
Before I got into the lower end of real estate - biggest mistake of my life - I used to think people were poor because of bad luck. There is some of that, but most of the poor and "working" poor I ran across were in their condition because of the choices they made, like choosing to buy multiple pets and expensive trucks instead of saving.
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as 'bad luck'." -- Robert A. Heinlein
Pets and new cars, or at the degenerate stratum, tattoos and drugs[1]. Even when things are going poorly, one can make choices. Those choices can be in-the-moment, or they can be forward-looking. Your future depends on which choice you make.
This basically mirrors r/K selection, which is very much the dividing line between "poor" and "no money".
As to low-end real estate, Heinlein had another observation (tho I vaguely recall it originated during Reconstruction):
"When it don't rain, the roof don't leak. When it rains, I can't fix it no-how."
___
[1] Some honest social worker noted that if her "homeless" clients didn't blow all their money on drugs, they'd have a comfortable income just from what they stole and fenced (the calculated average was about $100k/year).
Although I'm Gen X, my parents are immigrants so I spend like a Boomer on food. I moved to NYC in 2000 as a grad student, made maybe $100 a week with a PT job while I had class/clinic full-time, and had to survive on that $100/week to eat and pay my metro card. I was intermittent fasting before it was a thing.
I would eat a $2.75 bagel with cream cheese for the day from the local deli. For dinner - boiled eggs, instant ramen, and hot dogs at home. When I saw classmates "eat out," I knew their parents were paying their credit card bills. I never went into debt. I still went out to clubs and restaurants with friends but only spent money I already had from saving all week.
I still kept the same habits when I started working and making decent money. I still have those habits and think I am imparting them to my own son.
My friend complained recently that her kids once door dashed for 2 boba teas and it cost her nearly $50. I can't even imagine.
I don't know your or your friends background but I often wonder how much of this mentality is based on the financial demographic.
By this I mean, if you grew up in a family where money wasn't an issue, you don't give it much thought. It needn't be a rich/poor thing. Middle class vs. Upper middle class will do.
I see it with my kids. Where I will walk or take the bus, they will take an Uber. It's not a big thing but over a long enough time it adds up.
I chastise myself if I go to Starbucks two days in a row. From an affordability standpoint it's almost meaningless to me, but it feels like wasting money.
I grew up upper middle class, and my son is probably growing up in the affluent category. My frugality wasn't a money issue, but I hated the idea of being wasteful with money, especially on things that didn't matter in the long run, but the costs of said frivolous things would add up. I rather have a safety net of funds than designer anything. Also, I was pretty secure in myself as a young woman so I didn't need to wear a certain brand or do a certain thing (starbucks, pilates, etc) to feel validated.
I vaguely remember “health” class my freshman year of high school (mid-1990s) that took one-third of the year in lieu of PE. Nothing fancy, but it did include some rudimentary cooking (including hands-on) and was as much “home ec” as it was “health” (what I’ll call matter-of-fact, biology-driven sex ed).
This is completely side stepping the point. It's not food costs or knowledge on how to make a sandwich.
It's that the government and the Fed have bailed out the incumbent asset owner by printing trillions of dollars and young people paid the price with inflation and low ability to accumulate assets themselves (at proper valuations).
Everyone paid the price. The fact that some are complaining that they can't afford to go to lunch everyday and that being forced to brown bag it is a form of oppression is exactly the point.
Every generation had challenges. This may be the first one that was told to STFU and get to work.
But seriously, how the fuck can *anyone* actually *not know* how to make a sandwich?
I caught chunks of that kerfluffle, but I also wonder what the fuck these idiots are eating for lunch. Even when I go to the store and get a six pack of beer and a burrito for dinner, it doesn't cost $28.
With a decent rice cooker and some 20-lb bags of rice, lentils and beans, you can have nutritious, protein-rich meals for about $1 a day; maybe $1.50 a day if you're an unusually big and/or physically active person—even if you're living in a transitional situation where you don't have a stove/hot plate/cook top. An outlay of $5 every few months in the spice aisle can add flavor and variety.
Add in a good multivitamin/mineral plus some extra stashes of quality supplements of vitamins D, C, and B12 (none of which can be meaningfully "overdosed"), and you've got yourself a nutritious, extremely protein-tich, diet that's loaded in all the necessary micronutrients. Still clocking in under $2 a day. Still if you don't even have a stove or a hot plate.
I love rice!
One of my favorite meals is Tandoori Chicken and Ginger and Garlic Rice. You can get three large breasts of chicken for $13 at Loblaws in North Van. A 1 lb. bag of rice runs about $8.
That's a minimum of three meals for $21.
😋😋😋
Well, I am not sure how long one can last on rice and beans alone. I don''t think it's realistic to expect anyone in the modern world, surrounded by food temptations, to survive just on rice and beans for a long time. I would get bored out of my mind at some point and won't be able to stick to it. (And I think I am relatively disciplined about my nutrition and budget)
I hear Ya. It's not something ppl would do unless they have to... but for those who have to, it's a workable solution.
"However, we can help the next generation by demanding that schools make cooking and budgeting core courses in high school. One course, call it life skills, covering both would be sufficient." Meh... My daughter's high school had a mandatory personal finance class (as do all schools in our state) - she learned nothing. (Ditto for her classmates who took a cooking class). However, she quickly learned to budget and cook when she found herself on a very lean budget in college. With all the recipes on the internet, learning to cook is easier than ever now. Most of her friends in college manage to cook for themselves. It's fun, they exchange recipes and invite one another over to try them. It's nice when your parents and grandparents teach you when you are little and pass on some cool family recipes, but really, basic, healthy, budget cooking is not that complicated.
Maybe but I suspect your daughter learned to budget and cook because of how she was raised rather than because she was on a lean budget.
So kudos to you.
If all it took was lean budget to teach these skills we wouldn't have seen so many people complaining online. "I don't have enough money! I'm going to lunch."
We loved our high school "home ec" classes and even learned how to cook a few things (this was the 70's)!
Oh, home ec classes are certainly fun and should be offered for those who are interested - just not mandatory since it's a skill one can learn without a teacher.
The problem is not enough people are learning them. Especially the budget side.
That said, we could decrease the cost of schooling if we just eliminated all the electives. Go back to the three R's.
At first we did it because there were mostly girls in the class, 😂 but we actually loved the cooking!
There's a huge number of low-cost cooking shows on YouTube, mostly aimed at young adults who don't have a lot of money or time ("Struggle Meals" is my favorite). Many of the younger people I talk to about this don't believe that its's easier, cheaper, and healthier to cook at home than it is to order delivery (and nearly as quick).
That is astounding.
The "I don't have time" argument make little sense. How do people with kids and all the time consuming demands that come with it, have more time than childless single people?
IKR... maybe they just assume there's alws a stay-at-home parent in those situations? (which says a lot about their own background)
Have them add up a month's worth of delivery meal costs. (If it's two meals a day, this will be WELL into the four-figures in U.S. dollars. Even if it's just one meal a day, if that meal costs $28 like everybody is saying above then that's still almost $1,000 a month.)
Then ask them if they'd spend that much per month at the grocery store. Hell, ask them if they even COULD spend that much per month at the grocery store.
As an old engineer for decades I have said that the single most important class in high school would be a home econ + basic finance one. Should be mandatory in every school district with minimum grade of "C" to pass. I was fortunate in being able to learn quickly because despite all the high grades I got in high school I was woefully unprepared to be on my own. Thankfully I learned to live inexpensively and stay out of debt, but would have been nice to have a better foundation to start from.
I agree 100%.
I buy snacks and drinks for our young part-time workers so they don't go and buy an $8.00 coffee. I feel it is my duty to not only provide but to give a bit of schooling on saving money. Speaking of coffee, a friend and I were in a SoCal coffee house/restaurant and marveled how we were enjoying the fruits of a lovely setting because some crazy women were willing to ride in covered wagons with their even crazier husbands to settle the West. But no one thinks of these things. No one reads John Steinbeck to know what it really was like a 100 years ago. As for 'affordable housing' we don't have a housing shortage as much as we have a shortage of housing where people desire to live. I grew up in a pretty area with rolling hills. Section 8 housing killed the area. This isn't unique. Drugs killed the Rust Belt areas and rural areas. The problem is that there are no more functioning schools or grocery stores. But this is a far different obstacle than the slums and dangerous jobs that met immigrants over a 100 years ago. We are all soft and that includes me.
It's very good of you to help out the young people. I remember my first Starbucks coffee. I had it while visiting Seattle with the Canadian Navy sometime in the 1990s. It was awesome! That said, the explosion of coffee shops and growth of coffee culture, for lack of a better term, is probably not helping young people save money.
Housing is complex problem. Certainly looking down on an 800 sq ft apartment and roommates is not helping. I never lived alone and my wife and I lived in a small one bedroom for a few years after we were married. Not once did we think we had it bad.
Living in much of SoCal is unaffordable. Hands down. And the political landscape keeps chasing businesses away. There used to be a pretty robust engineering economic sector but they were chased away. So you have young people doing service jobs and they using aid to get by. At the Farmers Markets young health people think - especially young women - think nothing of using food stamps to buy things. I don't blame them. In my early 20s I might have done the same thing but society made it unacceptable. The larger problem is that the subsidies distort everything. Where I grew up, there are well built brick homes for less than $150,000 but no one wants to live there. So we have the homes but not the amenities. I get that but that is a luxury attitude that didn't exist a 100 years ago.
"I don't blame them. In my early 20s I might have done the same thing but society made it unacceptable."
The erosion of social norms is possibly the biggest problem.
Here's what I did when I couldn't find a job in the place I really wanted to live, I moved.
I have no sympathy for people who feel they deserve to live in expensive cities when there aren't any jobs that will pay them enough.
Move!
What I think is worse is that we are squandering the natural resource of human resolve to figure things out. Not that such a process is easy. The slums of NY over a 100 years ago are frightening. But prosperity grew out of the garbage.
The cost of eating out versus brown bagging represents $5k a year extra
Simple breakdown:
Takeout sandwich $10
Value of materials in sandwich $2
Labour value value of sandwich $8
Time to make sandwich 2mins
Hourly cost of having someone make you a sandwich is effectively $240/hr
If you make less than $240/hr it’s silly to have someone else make sandwiches for you.
Nobody is suggesting that you can't eat out occasionally, but doing it daily and complaining that you don't have any money is just dumb.
I actually think it's the instant gratification mentality that culture has pushed for ~40 years. Each subsequent generation simply possesses less distress tolerance for, well, anything. That includes tolerating the time, talent, and prep work to make one's own food. This, and the defensiveness on display of said behaviors, can all be neatly summarized by the word "entitlement."
And that's all.
Entitlement? Probably. However, laziness and immaturity have to play some role.
"I'll never own a house so I'm going to brunch," is not something mature people say.
It's difficult to say how broad this behavior is. Obviously X is going to show you the worst side of the Zoomer generation.
"I'll never own a house so I'm going to brunch," is not something mature people say.
Thirty years ago a black colleague of mine explained the concept of young broke black men buying expensive sneakers in much the same way. “They realize they’ll never be able to afford the 3000 square foot brick home that you live in, so they look for luxury and status in different ways”, he told me.
Yes, it's understandable but it's shortsighted and more importantly wrong.
This isn't the first generation to experience economic difficulties. Blowing money because times are tough today just puts you in a permanent hole.
My parents taught me how to save and budget
So effectively in fact
I haven’t spent a lick of money since I was 14!
I am nearly 18 now.
So….
I am the most frugal guy ever.
I also know how to make a sandwich…. In theory
Shit
I am the other part of the stereotype, aren’t I?
Thank your parents for making you a competent adult.
I'd also suggest that there's a fair chunk of manufactured helplessness there as well. They've been programmed to be dependent and helpless. This is another symptom.
Yes, adulthood is being delayed in quite a few people.
"I believe that the problem is that many Zoomers did not experience hard times until they were already adults or near adults, and consequently are incapable of adapting to them."
There ya go, in a nutshell. People who have never had to be thrifty never learn to be thrifty, plus we have become so insanely wealthy compared to just fifty years ago that there's been a total lack of selection pressure against profligate habits. Being of 1955 vintage, I remember when the average kid had 3 sets of clothes -- school, hand-me-downs for play (want to get yellled at? Play in your school clothes), and if you were lucky, something nice for Sunday-go-to-meeting. Used to be one family car, and if the teenager wanted a car he'd best earn enough to buy some beater, then learn to fix it himself, but most of us walked to school or rode a hand-me-down bike. Now it's a new car, a new pickup, and a lightly-used car for each of the high-school-aged kids.
Also, since the American economy has grown so fast, there's been no selection pressure against the inherent grasshopper mindset, which cannot learn thrift. Some people live entirely in the moment, and will always be broke no matter how much money they're given, or earn. The song "Putting on the Ritz" wasn't originally about night life. It was about poor people of a certain class, who would work hard all week, then come the weekend blow their entire income showing off their new fancies and then be too broke to feed themselves. No different from inner city welfare types today, who whine and cry about being too broke to pay the rent, but somehow can wear $300 tennis shoes and be covered in expensive tattoos and they never run out of pot.
Here is the fundamental difference between being POOR and having NO MONEY.
Give a poor man ten bucks, he'll go to McDonalds, buy a burger and fries and a super-shake and a pack of smokes, then a few hours later he's broke and hungry again.
Give a man with no money ten bucks, he'll go to the thrift grocery, buy a pound of hamburger and a bag of rice and various fixings to make it tasty, prepare enough food to eat for a week, and have a couple bucks left over to put in the bank.
When I was a kid we had no money, but we were NEVER poor.
"My father wasn't a poor man. He was a rich man with no money." -- Dom DeLuise
"Grasshopper mindset." Yes! People used to sacrifice to get what they wanted. We're not talking about skipping meals, simply not eating out. My most recent article has added pets to the mix.
Before I got into the lower end of real estate - biggest mistake of my life - I used to think people were poor because of bad luck. There is some of that, but most of the poor and "working" poor I ran across were in their condition because of the choices they made, like choosing to buy multiple pets and expensive trucks instead of saving.
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as 'bad luck'." -- Robert A. Heinlein
Pets and new cars, or at the degenerate stratum, tattoos and drugs[1]. Even when things are going poorly, one can make choices. Those choices can be in-the-moment, or they can be forward-looking. Your future depends on which choice you make.
This basically mirrors r/K selection, which is very much the dividing line between "poor" and "no money".
As to low-end real estate, Heinlein had another observation (tho I vaguely recall it originated during Reconstruction):
"When it don't rain, the roof don't leak. When it rains, I can't fix it no-how."
___
[1] Some honest social worker noted that if her "homeless" clients didn't blow all their money on drugs, they'd have a comfortable income just from what they stole and fenced (the calculated average was about $100k/year).
Great quote!
Big fan of Heinlein. Spent my pre- and teenage years reading everything he ever wrote. Likely explains some of my beliefs.
Although I'm Gen X, my parents are immigrants so I spend like a Boomer on food. I moved to NYC in 2000 as a grad student, made maybe $100 a week with a PT job while I had class/clinic full-time, and had to survive on that $100/week to eat and pay my metro card. I was intermittent fasting before it was a thing.
I would eat a $2.75 bagel with cream cheese for the day from the local deli. For dinner - boiled eggs, instant ramen, and hot dogs at home. When I saw classmates "eat out," I knew their parents were paying their credit card bills. I never went into debt. I still went out to clubs and restaurants with friends but only spent money I already had from saving all week.
I still kept the same habits when I started working and making decent money. I still have those habits and think I am imparting them to my own son.
My friend complained recently that her kids once door dashed for 2 boba teas and it cost her nearly $50. I can't even imagine.
I don't know your or your friends background but I often wonder how much of this mentality is based on the financial demographic.
By this I mean, if you grew up in a family where money wasn't an issue, you don't give it much thought. It needn't be a rich/poor thing. Middle class vs. Upper middle class will do.
I see it with my kids. Where I will walk or take the bus, they will take an Uber. It's not a big thing but over a long enough time it adds up.
I chastise myself if I go to Starbucks two days in a row. From an affordability standpoint it's almost meaningless to me, but it feels like wasting money.
I grew up upper middle class, and my son is probably growing up in the affluent category. My frugality wasn't a money issue, but I hated the idea of being wasteful with money, especially on things that didn't matter in the long run, but the costs of said frivolous things would add up. I rather have a safety net of funds than designer anything. Also, I was pretty secure in myself as a young woman so I didn't need to wear a certain brand or do a certain thing (starbucks, pilates, etc) to feel validated.
Sounds like we think the same way.
The person in question does have to be able to cook something without burning their place down.
In some cases, this is beyond them, mostly because they've never had to do it.
If the bar is "don't burn your house down," it's pretty low.
Anyone can learn to cook.
A person who can manage to burn their house down making a PB&J should probably be institutionalized.
I vaguely remember “health” class my freshman year of high school (mid-1990s) that took one-third of the year in lieu of PE. Nothing fancy, but it did include some rudimentary cooking (including hands-on) and was as much “home ec” as it was “health” (what I’ll call matter-of-fact, biology-driven sex ed).
Yes, obviously it would have to be restructured to focus on useful life skills.
Absolutely agree!
https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/after-closure
This is completely side stepping the point. It's not food costs or knowledge on how to make a sandwich.
It's that the government and the Fed have bailed out the incumbent asset owner by printing trillions of dollars and young people paid the price with inflation and low ability to accumulate assets themselves (at proper valuations).
Everyone paid the price. The fact that some are complaining that they can't afford to go to lunch everyday and that being forced to brown bag it is a form of oppression is exactly the point.
Every generation had challenges. This may be the first one that was told to STFU and get to work.
Fair enough, but it's side stepping the bigger issue that the incumbent has won since 2008.
Sorry, I'm not following. It's been a long day so I'm probably just a little thick at the moment.
But seriously, how the fuck can *anyone* actually *not know* how to make a sandwich?
I caught chunks of that kerfluffle, but I also wonder what the fuck these idiots are eating for lunch. Even when I go to the store and get a six pack of beer and a burrito for dinner, it doesn't cost $28.
The existence of dumb people should not shock anyone at this point.