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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 13th, 2023

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  • The big lifehack here is to not just buy less stuff, but to pool time and resources with your friends.

    You spend less money if you cook and play together on a regular or semi-regular basis. Restaruants, pubs, movie theaters, sporting events, all ask or require your money to capitalize on your need for socialization. Also, material goods are frequently aimed at the solitary consumer and aren’t really for sharing. Just go around all that nonsense, share/exchange your tools and appliances, host a board-game night, hang out on slack/discord for a few hours, or watch Netflix together.

    Edit: if the above seems out of reach, or even the least bit “bad”, I encourage you to dig deep and ask yourself: why? I get that I’m advocating a far less solitary lifestyle. Maybe that can’t be helped, but it might also just be possible that there’s more at work here. For me, I found that I had internalized biases and habits all pointing at a maximal consumption lifestyle. Our economy (here in the US) is built around this behavior, complete with an advertising arm that aggressively teaches it. So, I really am advocating swimming against the current here. But I can also say that the rewards are worth it if you can.









  • I swear, overcoming fixed functional-ness is like a superpower when you can apply it.

    I once shared a small office with a co-worker. I had the idea to move the desks away from the walls and place them back-to-back, diagonally, in the middle of the room. Other co-workers scoffed and remarked at how dumb and unconventional this looked. Then I explained that we each now had nearly full privacy from each other, much more personal space in our respective corners, no more glare from the window, and nobody could sneak up on us from the door anymore. Things got pretty quiet after that.