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My favorite is conservatives complaining about avocado toast. I am anti-consumerist myself but it still just reads funny.
“You are not poor! You are just financially in a situation where, as a working class person in one of the wealthiest countries on earth and its history, buying avocado spread once a month can bankrupt you into lifelong debt. Economy is fine!”
Fuck pleb trying to enjoy things with their poor money.
Disgusting
I have always lived frugally. I buy used clothes, I cook often and boil bones to make stock, I repair my car when I can, and so much so if I’m pinched, it’s the market, and it needs to improve.
You know, reflecting on history, the Boomers tried communes because of the same exact market conditions. So, it’s already been done. And the reality is… the rich have never had such rates of returns as ever before so yeah, fuck it. Either improve or heads might start rolling.
Then they bitch no ones eating out anymore, or why is Gen Z not buying houses. Etc. Its fucking crushing us under capitalism and we can’t take it anymore.
Yea. They’ve always been saying this to poor people just now you’re one of them.
I get the meme but dang you guys leave the water running??
Yeah thats super weird to me
Ill wet the brush, shut it off, put the paste on, wet that, shut it off, brush, then turn the water on to wash my mouth and the brush and thats it. Why would you keep it running the whole time??
Don’t you hold the flusher down while you take a wizz???
Yeah its part of my stretch routine I pose up with my foot on the deck and heel on the flush and activate both my ankle and penis at the same time
That’s amateur business unless you’re also simultaneously doing butt kegels with a hematite egg
I like the sound of water.
Find a stream idk
Just how I roll.
I shower while brushing my teeth and then soap my body down after the 3 mins it takes. Shower time didnt get longer just more efficient
Advices are like: Why are you poor? I advise you to go an atm and get some money
“cook at home” is a solution to grocery prices? WTF are you going to cook?
The rich.
People keep saying we should eat the rich, but they’d probably taste awful.
They’re probably only good for stewing. With lot’s of herbs and spices. Billionaire Gumbo!
I don’t know. Fatty things taste good, just look at deep fried anything. I suppose the cocaine and other drugs might add to a wild ride though.
They’re so full of preservatives they’d probably have a good shelf life as well.
For anyone struggling with food prices, first, I empathize. I’ve been there. It fucking sucks. Second, when desperate, I put together a plan much like the following, and it helped me get through some hard times.
USA prices 2026-09-16
26 oz salt: $1, 0 calories, 0 protein
200 lb dry beans: $120, 300000 Cal, 20000g protein
200 lb rice: $50, 330000 Cal, 2400g protein
360 tablets multivitamin: $37.50
Annual cost: $208.50 Daily calories: 1726 (suitable for a sedentary person.) Daily protein: 61 g
You can get even higher protein and lower cost if you have access to bulk soybeans. Multiply by whatever values you like to hit your calorie or protein needs.
You don’t have to eat JUST this. But if this is the majority of your meals, you have enough to survive, and in the US, you’ll actually be healthier than most of the people around you.
Where are you getting 200lb rice for $50?
Asian market wholesale, depends on where you are but here it’s around 30$ for 60 lbs
Shout out to multivitamins!
I don’t have any link or anything but a long time ago I heard some college kid tried to live off only ramen for a semester and ended up getting scurvy lol
I would not want to share a bathroom with them
instant noodles with a side of disappointment?
Buy beans and fart your tears away.
I think you’re missing the point. Cooking at home involves buying groceries, which triggers the concern about grocery prices.
What this tells people is “fuck off, you are on your own. Government doesn’t work for people like you.”
But that isn’t how Democracy is supposed to function. It is actually supposed to develop and implement policy to improve the quality of life for the general public - especially the broad swaths of people who work for a living.
It’s also insane that the advice is to “get a roommate” at the same time leaders are crying that people in their 20s and 30s aren’t having enough kids. Guess what? If you make people live like they are too young and broke to have kids for the first 25 years of adulthood, they will… Not have kids. Shocking.
Some of these are based around good ideas, but the overall post is not intended to be useful advice.
Realistic version: Cook at home instead of ordering out, don’t buy expensive things that you don’t need (especially on credit), and move to somewhere with a lower cost of living. These are all obvious things that we know about. But they do work to keep expenses down.
Unpopular take: This can be summed up as ‘use less resources’ and it has more to do with previous generations over consumption becoming normalized.
I believe we should live sustainably and modestly. But I also despise being preached to about sustainability and moderation by rich assholes who are the epitome of greed, gluttony and overindulgence. Good advice coming from an hypocritical, condescending jerk will not be well-received.
How can any of these, except debt and maybe grocery costs, be summed up as “use less resources”?
What resources is an average individual “over-consuming” to make their housing more expensive and their commute more onerous?
Housing: square foot per person doubled 1970-today. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/housing1.png
Food: Eating food not made at home increased 66% from the 70s to today. (restaurant labor = resources, you are paying for someone’s livlyhood) https://www.ers.usda.gov/media/28125/106446-chart-image-file.png Caloric intake from 1950 to today has increased by 25%. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-supply?country=~USA
Cars are incredibly resource intensive and long commutes didn’t exist or were very uncommon before cars. We have become accustomed to these resources intensive habits and built our infrastructure around them. This moved the bar of normal resource utilization.
I think this illustrates the trend I’m talking about. People today use more resources than they used to in lots of ways, we’ve become accustomed to this way of life because previous generations have normalized it.
I appreciate you pulling up sources, especially if these are things you went out of the way to collect fresh.
It’d require more research on my end but I do have questions.
I question how many people were actually actually getting new single-family homes built for those time periods. Are the rates of new home construction similar between the 70s and 2016-18 for this data? Are more people moving out to further places with cheaper land to buy new houses? Or are a smaller number of richer people buying bigger houses?
And, regarding food, the graph does say
Measured in kilocalories per person per day. This indicatesthe calories that are available for consumption, but doesnot necessarily measure the number of calories actually consumed, since it doesn’t factor in consumer waste.
Which brings up the question of whether the increase in calories can be mapped to the increase in fast food, which are insanely calorie dense for the amount of nutrition they contain. Just the amount of processing in many foods cranks up caloric count.
Fast food is something I will agree is an example of normalized behavior, where the 90s cemented “fast food” as a cheap dining option when that has not been really true in years.
Look, I’m not making any claims on nutrition vs caloric intake. I’m using calories available per person as an analog for the amount of resources an individual consumes today vs in the past. A calorie is literally a unit of energy, so we literally have more food energy available to us today than previous generations. That’s the argument.
As a society have normalized increased resource utilization. This has happened largely with a decrease in the cost of these resources until recently. There is no reason to believe the trend of increasing resource utilization and decreasing resource cost would hold over time. Our generation got unlucky that finite resources finally started to show up in resource costs. It was like a game of musical chairs and the music stopped around the mid 2000s and generations that had not established wealth at that point were left without a chair.
It’s an unpopular take … they said it up front.
The term “average” is you adding words to the original comment that weren’t there to begin with. At best “average” is too subjective and nebulous to be meaningful without you providing a very clear definition of your intended context, at worst, it’s loaded terminology.
I don’t want to imply that I know specifically what that person meant by over-consumption regarding housing and transport, however, it could easily be applied to situations like …
~ The trend in some parts of the world to build ever larger houses despite people having smaller families / fewer children.
~ People choosing to live alone, even when they have other options available like living with family or having roommates (as per the image).
~ People living alone in general, but choosing bigger homes with multiple rooms / bathrooms that were intended for families and people with roommates, leaving the additional space / room largely unused.
For transportation, the overconsumption side of that is often based on the argument that people are buying vehicles when they don’t need one, buying larger and less efficient vehicles than they should, driving solo instead of carpooling, or avoiding taking public transport when it’s available. Specifically the argument about moving closer to work in relation to over-consumption is, and I’m guessing here, addressed more at people who choose to live further away from work for reasons like “they don’t like that part of town” or because they’d rather drive than take public transport / walk.
In the USA, for instance, there has traditionally been a very heavy stigma against “poor people”, and so for a certain percentage of people who actually are poor or very close to it, over-consumption is a mechanism they will employ to mask their economic status. For example, wearing designer clothes or at least knock-offs, buying a new expensive vehicle they can’t really afford, moving to a more expensive neighborhood for appearance, driving to work instead of using public transportation or walking, etc.
Obviously we can all cherry pick anecdotes where these things don’t apply and it’s easy to assume that how things are where I live are the same all over everywhere even though that’s not the case, so keep that in mind.
“Unpopular take: all black people should be slaves.” Preceding a statement with “unpopular take” doesn’t insulate the statement from inspection or critique. “Unpopular” is a measure of popularity, not validity and I was questioning the validity of their statement.
Yes, I added average because “average” is the only way to make sense of their vague talk. Who would the subject be if not younger generations when they talked about previous generations normalizing over-consumption. Who is exhibiting these normalized, ove-consumptive behaviors if not some average, representative sample of the younger generation? If they were making a statement about and to some narrow band of western, upper-middleclass white person, they should claim that.
Obviously we can all cherry pick anecdotes where these things don’t apply and it’s easy to assume that how things are where I live are the same all over everywhere even though that’s not the case, so keep that in mind.
No one has made any citation of statistics or data, and I’m the one asking for clarification of dubiously-valid claims. So you and the previous commenter are the only ones providing (or, in the other commenter’s case, hinting at) some cherry-picked anecdotes about the consumption habits of these still-undefined subjects who are habitually over-consuming their way to poverty.
So I can clearly tell you don’t take criticism well at all. All I can say is jumping further down the well of logical fallacy doesn’t actually clarify what you meant by average, and really only suggests that you did intend for it to be loaded. No point in spending any time further, other than I hope people reading see through your charade.
Most people on earth have never even had a chance to overconsume due to economic inequality. Only certain people in previous generations were even able to overconsume, and always a small minority of every generation.
I dont think this is an unpopular take. You are spot on.
Only thing I’d add is:
Both the wealthy and Previous generations’ over consumption has been normalized. And in the case of the wealthy it has been glorified.
How does cooking at home even fix grocery costs? I’m already doing that. It’s the cost and quality of ingredients that’s the problem, bit to mention avoiding any of the US products in anticipation of the next version of diarrhea-lettuce or cancer-beef.
Also playing video games and watching tv shows helps.
Its all bread and circuses since the roman empire.
I live close to work, and have never lived alone - but living close to economic opportunities costs more, not less. Not having to drive saves some money, sure, but probably not enough to make up for the difference in housing cost.
Cooking from scratch at home is more a quality of life thing, I do that so we can eat well & reasonably healthy. The more money we make, the more I cook from ingredients. Have a garden now, even - it’s a luxury of having space for one, not a cost saving measure.
Nothing you can do on the expense side will ever make up for the depressed wages - productivity and costs have increased much faster than pay, and nobody can save their way out of that.
For real, I’m always impressed when home cooks can get it done cheaper than restaurants (who are buying ingredients at wholesale, cook everything in batches, etc). Most can’t. People look at me like I’m crazy when I say this, but there’s a reason working class people get so much takeout: it’s cheaper than cooking, when you factor in the time spent cooking.
Yes. Say you make $20 an hour and can get a takeout meal for $20 or ingredients for $15 and cook for an hour to make something better and healthier. I enjoy cooking, and am in a multi income household, but if you need to maximize work hours to make it, better to spend more time on what you are good at & pays the most.
Cooking from scratch at home is more a quality of life thing, I do that so we can eat well
again for people who weren’t listening. most of my fun money goes into more expensive, higher quality foods or recipe experiments.
The fun part is if you actually do enough of these things, it effects the economy negatively, so they’ll find ways to force you to spend anyway.
Yeah now they’ve got their panties in a twist that we’re not making enough new consumer slaves. I’ve got enough worries keeping myself alive, let alone bringing a kid into it.
Then they circle back like this generation is killing (name your industry) because of the above.
Last I heard it was millennials killing [industry]. We conquered Applebee’s and fabric softener. Have the younger folks gotten in on the act?
Gen Z is killing the alcohol industry (and good for them).
I think they’re crediting gen z with the dismantlement of the cable television cartels, but I can tell you as a millennial that I haven’t watched cable tv since I moved out when I was 18…
Same. I have never paid for a cable tv subscription.
Well I am trying my best, but all these new poor people don’t seem to understand how to kill industries.
