Today I am really missing 2019. Life hasn’t really been great since before 2020 and after the whole covid stuff, businesses and society have changed. Businesses close a heck of a lot earlier now, but now I’m noticing more and more businesses are starting to make shopping and checkout quite an unpleasant experience. Businesses are treating everyone like they’re criminals. and I get they’re trying to prevent shoplifters, but it’s at the expense of horrible customer experience. My work just started chaining carts in between checkout lanes so that people can not leave the store unless they go through a checkout lane that has a cashier, whether they’re buying something or not. The customers hate it, the staff hate it, it make mobility extremely uncomfortable and congested, especially for those who don’t end up buying anything or for staff that need to get from point A to point B. I also went to a thrift store yesterday that recently started doing something similar. They put up fencing so that you can’t leave the store unless you go directly through the checkout, and no surprise, it was also extremely congested and difficult to get through because there was a line. We don’t have a Target where I live, but I just saw a post online that said Targets everywhere are starting to lock up all their merchandise. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Walmarts here started doing something similar. All these anti-theft measures that are being taken are going to come at a cost. More and more people are going to opt for shopping online, because not only do honest people not like being treated like criminals, but who really wants to deal with that kind of congestion? Stores are going to lose the spontaneous “window shoppers” who go into stores just to look around without anything specific in mind to buy that end up buying something they had no intention to get. I do that a lot. I window shop just to see if anything stands out at me that I want, but at this rate, I’ll just be doing my window shopping online because of the hassle and unpleasantry that in-person shopping is turning into; but maybe that’s the overarching agenda; that more and more people resort to online shopping, driving more physical locations to go out of business, and people to have fewer and fewer jobs, so that by 2030 we can all “own nothing and be happy”, right? Life in society is becoming so unpleasant, unpredictable and unaffordable that it’s really depressing, and makes it hard to really plan for the future, because with the current trajectory things are on, there won’t be much of one. Even the price of renting a place to live is incredibly unaffordable. To put into perspective, only 10 years ago, I rented my first apartment for $625/month. It was a beautiful 1 bedroom apartment that overlooked part of the city. I could afford it on my own working a full time job that paid $14/hour. Today? Today you’ll be paying around that price minimum in order to rent a single ROOM in a shared house or apartment, because rent for the one bedroom apartment I once paid for would be double what I paid 10 years ago, if not more.
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It’s hard to not get caught up in how bad things are and not let it affect me when I see how bad it is every day. I worry what life will look like for the next generation, or the kids being born today when they grow up. What will be left? Society never got better after the plandemic. Things never did return to “normal”, but the “new normal” seems to have kept progressing beyond covid. I wish I didn’t feel so pessimistically about all of this, but is there really any way to look at all of this optimistically? Probably the only real job security to be continuously found for the future will be through selling forms of escapism, via entertainment, but likely through transhumanism at some point as well, because the real world will be so miserable, no one will want to be conscious in this reality anymore and seek other realities to live in.
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I suppose the only way to look at things optimistically is if you’re one of the ones who figures out how to survive outside of the system and is part of a community of people that works together to survive without modern day conveniences or luxuries. If you’re more minimalistic and don’t want much. I suppose for those people, it will be easy to adapt and see things from a different lens. And part of me is there with them, that I’d love to be part of a self sufficient community that relies on each other and not the system, but at the same time, I am materialistic. I enjoy going to bookstores and spending my money on such luxuries. I like buying video games, I like window shopping. I enjoy having things. I think I’d have a difficult time adapting. I mean, I was without internet for a couple weeks recently and that proved to be pretty hard, but I read a lot and really enjoyed that I had books I could read to make that time more enjoyable. That likely would not be an affordable luxury living outside of the system. Anyways, whether I adapt to becoming independent from the system or adapt to the consistent downwards spiraling system we’re currently in, I think it’s going to be a painful experience either way and I’m not particularly looking forward to either one. In the end, I think I’d opt for being independent from the system still, but I’m definitely not ignorant that that’s going to involve its own dump of struggles. There isn’t really any winning in this situation, but at least being independent from the system, you’ll be more free in the end, and I’d rather die with a sense of freedom with struggle than to be a prisoner who’s life is solely dependent on a system that keeps caging them in, siphoning more and more from them, including their freedom. Pick your poison, I guess. ✌️