Enshittification continues as usual.

I’ve been laid off twice in the last 5 years, so I get it. I make less money now than I did in 2018, but my job is a lot more enjoyable now.

Good luck getting to the point of buying a house! I hope it’s not as tough as you think.

I never said I was close to the norm, I said I’m quite well off now. I started with very little and got to this point in around 20 years of work.

Yeah, I’m doing ok, but when I first started working I was earning about $20k per year. It’s amazing how much things can change.

I live near San Francisco.

As a person who started out poor and has reached the point of being pretty well-off I can say that $10k would have been life-changing in my early 20s, useful in my early 30s, and not even 2 months of mortgage payments in my late thirties.

I’m not saying that’ll be true for everyone, but it can happen. My internal scale of what is expensive versus cheap has changed dramatically over the years.

I wouldn’t spend $10k on a hotel room or a bottle of wine, but it wouldn’t change my life any more.

It’s a fucking shame that the system is rigged against normal people.