I think more people practice religion than actually believe it. If it improves their lives to live within a set of rules, to have a community, etc. There’s plenty we don’t know and most people have some sort of “belief” about the unknown, I don’t think most people actively believe all the dogma even if they follow the steps.
I’m oldish GenX and maybe atypical but was a very early adopter of tech, on Usenet as soon as I could connect to anything, and was tech support for the older kids (but both got very tech savvy boyfriends) and of the younger set only the 19 year old has outpaced me. But I do think, if generalizing:
I can work computers because I had to fix them and like to mess with them. So everything now seems so easy in a way - I set up a network in my old house, wires everywhere, testing testing fixing, blah. Was dreading doing it when we moved - nope, mesh system, scan a code, boom done! Amazing!
Millennial kids don’t expect everything to work but seem stumped when it doesn’t. This may just be my kids because I fixed stuff for them.
The younger ones are used to everything working seamlessly and it does for them. That mesh network setup did not awe them, they expected it to be that easy!
I think yes we are all more similar than different but as you move north, there is less income inequality and better social services, less graft and corruption.
Supermarkets in the US are like nowhere else, they are incredible.
Henry Cavill? The guy who played Superman and Geralt of Rivia? Nobody can possibly think he got that body by sitting around. That’s like saying guys don’t think Lady Gaga wears makeup on stage. He’s not just fit, he’s built out.
Any actor is someone who is selling their looks as part of the package. However they look, it is a choice and they put effort into it. Even Jack Black.
Yeah boycott may be too strong a word, it’s more like they are at the bottom of my list in what I look for in a restaurant, and I live where there are other options. I do object to them but on grounds of being a chain, generally shitty to employees and not good or interesting food, I will not give them dollars but don’t hate them like I hate BOA or Cracker Barrel. They just seem like something that doesn’t need to exist.
I can’t fault my mom for falling apart when my dad died but it did mess us up, she withdrew and was lost and stupid for years after, and never really got her mind all back. I was 16 and got kicked out at 17, the other kids got more years of that. But all of us are ok now, and again, I really can’t blame her.
Nothing else really, she wasn’t a motherly kind of mom but never felt neglected or like she was not trying her best.
Lots of beans and rice. So many different meals with beans and rice.
A garden. Or knowing someone with a garden, at some point we all get an excess of something, I gave a big bag of jalapenos to our yard guys at the end of the summer, they were so abundant.
We do use the Too Good to Go app, but not many participating restaurants here, it’s more for a treat.
Working at a restaurant that feeds you, I used to work at a place you could come for supper (teatime) before the evening shift. Not a chain place.
Set aside some part of the weekly budget for oil, spices, seasonings, chili paste, condiments. With these you can build variety of flavor into a basic cheap diet and they last awhile, you don’t have to buy all of them each time, but always buy some.
ETA: planning the week of meals saves more money than trying to buy cheap foods, for me, but we still have kids at home so the calculation is a little different. I just don’t like to - so I make a loose framework, know about 4 of the 7 meals, and keep dry/canned beans and pasta and rice on hand, and there is usually some veg in the garden, so I can leave some room for improvisation. Even that level of planning does save money.
I am a working mom and will tell you - if you don’t schedule time for yourself you won’t get it. I prioritize sex and exercise into the schedule because if not, life and work will eat every moment. For 2024, schedule in 3 hours every weekend, or an evening or morning but every single week.
Realize that everyone is accommodating everyone else, they aren’t doing it to annoy you. You aren’t the center of the universe. But that doesn’t mean you don’t need time to recharge, plan it weekly in 2024 and let the schedule fit around you too. It will.
My own? Or that of others? Ignorance is usually fixable, learn what you need to. Incompetence can often be remedied through practice. Nobody starts out knowledgeable or competent.
If it’s someone else’s incompetence and it’s affecting me (like we had an A/P person at work who could not get one vendor paid at the right amount, ever, and it was making my job harder) I usually look at the systems around the person, thinking things should be set up to avoid human error - people are often asked to do things that don’t make sense. For example, to keep the same example - “make sure you don’t pay an invoice twice if it’s sent to us twice”. I mean, sure, but the system should be preventing that, people are always going to fuck it up.
Long answer but I generally approach it thinking people aren’t trying to do bad work, and certainly not doing bad work to annoy me, there is something in their way.
In real life people trust me, even if they don’t know me. It’s the middle aged white lady superpower. Apparently we are the group of people who are deployed to do surveys about personal habits, health, sex, because people trust us.
When younger (and still to some extent) I also seem to get picked out of crowds way more often than statistically normally for things where performers are choosing someone from a crowd. My mom thought it was remarkable, there could be a thousand kids in an audience but always I was picked out to go on stage. And no, I am not exceptional looking, it was not due to looks.
The general “Music” and “Movie” threads because I did discover stuff on them as well as being able to suggest stuff.
But have been satisfied with some of these that are still small but growing - curlyhair, science fiction, cocktails (mine now), fermentation and sourdough. And overall happy to give up the faster moving subs and be here for the beginning time.
This reminds me of two similar incidents - My mom never advocated for me in school. Like never. Until one day in high school I wore a miniskirt on a game day (on game days the cheerleaders were in really short skirted uniforms). I got in trouble at lunch for the outfit, but just pointed at a cheerleader and said "her skirt is a lot shorter than mine.". Got sent to the office, my mom picked me up, I figured I was in trouble but no. She told the principal she agreed with me and no she didn't bring another outfit. We went home.
And at a job, we got a dress code because people were showing up in pyjamas. One of the rules was this weird "4 fingers neckline" no deep necklines? One of our accountants was an older, very old school black man, proper and nerdy and nice. He heard the 4 fingers speech, started grumbling. Later when I passed his desk he had printed out 4 copies of Johnny Cash giving the finger right at the camera, and he just looked at me and said "four fingers!"
Netflix because my husband likes a lot of stuff on there. He’s watching star trek prodigy now.
YouTube for music streaming, and the kids & husband watch videos on there.
Disney/Hulu I like the Star Wars and Marvel spinoffs, Clone Wars and Andor were so, so good.
Amazon, if I didn’t have family I’d keep this only and I guess use it for music too, I don’t actually watch much TV at all but music I want every day, we do have a good community radio station here but if course nobody can enjoy everything they play. Amazon seems to have the most content, not all of it included in the annual cost but huge library.
So most of them are because we can justify with more people using the services, all are family plans with whatever the max number of accounts are allowed.
We do use HBO Max but one of the kids pays for that one.
I need a schedule - one of my coworkers does 2 months Netflix then 2 months Disney then 2 months Max, just loops through them, only paying for one at a time.