No need indeed. I guess many people most of the time enjoy the anticipation more than the actual product they consume. Anticipation can be a fun “hobby” within a hobby for people.

Because being stuck in the past is generally not a good thing

Same, I never saw a MCU movies for instance

The French word for “entertainment” is “divertissement” and you don’t need to know French to get what it is: a diversion from things that matter.

I realized far too late that most mainstream media is about maximizing views and not telling those stories that worth telling as you said. They start with an interesting idea for a story and if it gets popular it just drags on to get the most amount of eyeballs for as long as possible only for it to end long after it should have with an unsatisfying ending.

And don’t get me started on injecting soap opera esque character drama just to keep the lowest common denominator inerested (looking at you For All Mankind)

I’ll never understand letting the outcome of a game make or break my mood in the following days.

Oh. My. God. Can fucking apps learn that when I say “block” and “less like this” I fucking mean it? Don’t show me fucking anything about baseball, soccer, tennis, basketball, and especially not American football. I AM NOT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE.

Also, I have to block a large fraction of my social feeds at certain times of the year because all they talk about are sports.

I don’t mind playing sports even if I suck at them, but watching them? Uggghhh.

I spent >10 years of my youth playing a sport competitively. I don’t think I ever watched a professional game to completion. Unlike pretty much all my teammates, I just could not have cared less.

Play the sport myself? Fun, sure! Watch someone else play? Uh, why?

I think it’s great that people enjoy watching sports. I dunno why but it just bored the hell out of me.

So, two points.

First, I’d encourage anyone to save. And as a place to keep savings, the market has done pretty well as to long-term returns. Having money in a portfolio isn’t incompatible with working for a living.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/10/31/what-would-happen-if-you-invested-100-a-week-in-th/

Let’s take a hypothetical investor named Annie as an example. At 25 years old, Annie has just landed her dream job as a chef, with a starting salary of $30,000 per year. She knows she may never make considerably more than that, but she doesn’t care – she loves her job! She also loves the idea of eventually retiring, though, and because the restaurant she works at doesn’t offer pension or retirement benefits, she knows she’s going to have to make that happen on her own. Living modestly, she’s able to set aside an extra $100 per week, putting that money into an S&P 500 (^GSPC 0.70%) index fund that conservatively returns an average of 9% per year.

How much will Annie have at the end of just 30 years? Incredibly, somewhere around $790,000.

Surprised? This is even more surprising: If Annie can keep finding that extra $100 per week for another 10 years, she’ll be sitting on roughly $2 million at the end of that 40-year stretch.

If she retires at 65, and you figure 2% inflation and use their 9% pre-inflation return, those savings generate a post-inflation maybe $140,000/year for her to live on without cutting into the portfolio in real terms.

But, okay, second, set investment aside. Let’s just say “does the economy matter”?

Like, if there’s a recession, GDP contracts. I’m pretty sure that a lot of people look at that and say “Well, that’s just some abstract number. It’s got no effect on me.”

Inflation, on the other hand, clearly causes prices to rise.

I was looking at a poll from a bit back talking about how most people – especially in Germany and the US, two of the three countries polled – deeply dislike inflation. They would much rather have a recession than see high inflation.

In general, economists are going to go the other route. They’ll say that recessions are really bad.

So, during Biden’s (and Trump’s, during COVID) time in office, a number of policies were made (not necessarily by them) that tended to avoid recession, but encourage inflation.

Polling shows that people were unhappy with Biden on the economy, because high (well, as the US goes) inflation showed up during his time in office.

Biden kept quoting figures that are generally considered to be very positive. Low unemployment, for example. But…there was that inflation.

When GDP drops – and a sustained decline in GDP is what constitutes a recession – it’s indicating that there’s less economic activity going on. What that tends to represent is a lot fewer people working – a lot of layoffs. Companies going under. Maybe furloughs or reduced hours, in some cases. The impact there is that a lot of people have their income go away or be cut, a lot of things get upended.

With inflation, on the other hand, wages are sticky, tend to take a while to catch up, but do catch up. There aren’t huge job losses. Things more-or-less keep moving along as they were.

I don’t think that Trump or Biden would have acted wildly different on the matter. You could swap their periods in office, and both would have followed their recommendations, which would have been to favor policy that encouraged inflation and avoided recession, though then the inflation would have shown up when Trump was in office. They’re not doing it because the economists advising them have some special love of having Americans pay higher prices, but rather because they’d consider that preferable to a recession and the problems that accompany that. Also, neither drives the Federal Reserve, which is what adopted an important chunk of that inflationary policy. In the absence of the pandemic, neither would have wanted inflation – it’s not that high inflation is desirable, just that it’s preferable to the alternative of recession.

That’s quite frankly how it’s designed. Capitalism favors no one but those that have built it and continue building on it.

Whenever I hear the word ‘economy’ I replace it with ‘rich people’s yacht money.’ I feel that clarifies a lot of my opinions on the matter.

Sounds like you need to find a less popular beach

Me too. And I live in NZ where there’s bloody beaches everywhere. Can’t move for beaches

Are you Bill Hicks?

Actually swimming in the ocean is a pretty unique experience, but it does kind of require you to be a strong swimmer.

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Star Wars fans that murder people for disrespecting Yoda.

It’s a sickness.

I hope you understand that was just a word that politicians slapped onto the idea of empathy and kindness because it goes against an agenda, right?

You’re doing exactly what people with agendas wanted, which is blanketing everything from just not being racist all the way through the micro-issues you will never be concerned with, under one, giant, dismissive label.

It’s anti-intellectualism, they want you to stop thinking and be less concerned with things. Be a machine, drink your beer and consume your walmart. Don’t care or be compassionate or ask for others to be treated with respect. That’s all [insert bogeyman word that changes every decade].

Don’t adopt other people’s terms mindlessly, think for yourself.

See, I don’t get this one. You were taught a language. Languages change over time. Some words are new, some fall out of favor. Why be stubborn about it?

Celebrities and sports.

I understand doing sports, but watching others is as exciting as watching paint dry to me. Not to mention combining both as in cheering for a team of people I don’t know. I don’t get it.

Scandalous! Where can I hear more about this ABC, DEF, JKL love triangle?

Add getting married to that for me. I enjoy not being legally bound to another human

Ugh, yep, I’m far from alone in saying I’d really rather not have any

AI for me as well. I’ve played with it a little and it’s kinda fun. Every company is pushing AI now including in areas where it doesn’t make any sense or is many years away from being useful. I’m also seeing a lot of developers being assigned to use AI without any directions on what to use it for.

I’m far enough along in my career I don’t need to worry about being replaced by AI. If it’s ever good enough to take my job I’ll be happily retired writing software for fun and living my life without AI. I just don’t have any interest.

Interestingly, I think people like you and me use Lemmy because one of the same underlying reasons as social media people:

Either:

1. Endless amounts of stuff that speaks to your interest. (With us it’s stuff like technology. On Social media, people are “interested” in what others are up to.

2. Getting likes/dislikes. Even though likes aren’t important on Lemmy, I notice in my usage that I do subconsciously get the same dopamine hits jf a post gets liked a lot, just like Social Media does. It’s less aggressive on Lemmy because you don’t get alerts for it, but it does factor in on engagement.

3. Engaging in conversations/discussions with other people.

4. Sharing things you find interesting yourself

The content might be different, but the underlying principles are really close. Social Media is actually really close to how forums work at it’s core.

But I know this is an unpopular opinion. And no, I wouldn’t call Lemmy Social Media per se. But the line is more blurry than I’d like to admit if I look at my time spent with Lemmy.

I too do not understand social media. The best I get is it’s about people shouting into a void and hoping someone else heard you to interact with it, by repeating it, liking it, or shouting back at you.

Hashtags are the only way to organize these posts and you need to add them or no one else will hear your shouts into the void.