Ask Lemmy

It's all falling apart. No future. No safety. No hope. Buy until you die.

They remind me that it's cold outside and that I have to work every day to live in a hundred year old house that was probably built in a few months.

Just a persistent culture of materialism. That things will bring you happiness in some deeply rooted way that can't be matched. Add in an unhealthy dose of capitalistic mentality and there's also the push that if something costs more, it must be better.

So you get trapped in a cycle of buying things that have no real purpose, or can be better served by something cheaper, and feeling unfulfilled. So you look for something new to fill that emptiness that persists throughout the cycle.

not seeing your money is a factor.

if people can always see how fat or malnourished their wallet at the time of purchase, I am sure they'll double think.

but no, we solved that overthinking by means of credit cards.

or better yet, touchless payments. Just wave your magic cellphone and stuff is yours!

The most sinister is an almost inescapable one, where companies intentionally build things (larger appliances are a huge offender) to fail within 3 to 5 years.

It's the "a poor man can't afford cheap shoes" thing.

They love to "sell" this concept that making items cheaper means consumers can more frequently replace as their styles change. Fuck you, give me a white fridge that never breaks, I don't care if I have to pay double up front.

Mountains of people bad at math convincing bigger mountains of people even worse at math that they can't afford anything of major value.

So in turn they go and spend what money they do have because why bother saving it if you'll "never afford a x"

In reality most of the "you can't afford this and that" shit is built on top of bad math and content creators that don't understand how shit works.

And literally anyone with basic math skills can just go look for themselves and discover how bogus the claims are, or how much they misrepresent the state of things.

But nope, it's easier to give up and just buy forty Stanley Cups instead!

Simply needing shelter

They're being sold to in terms of dollars per month, which makes a very oversized purchase sound reasonable if no one spells out the end results. We tend to value having the thing now more than being totally broke later.

Also, peoples means keep staying the same or shrinking while everyday purchases get more expensive.

Buy Now Pay Later is what's exacerbating this. People are dumb, have short attention spans and most of them are statistically bad at basic math, so when they see a purchase that they can make without paying anything now they'll hit buy and they'll do it many times as the e-commerce platform will usually recommend other products to them they'll likely want, they won't do the calculation to see if they really can afford the split payments + the interest.

rent and housing run by the bank

They are paying 2/3rds of their income from a 80 hour warehouse job for a 1 futon closet in the middle of bumfuck nowhere, and then being told they are living too frivolously by assholes.