I just watched a woman cry on the internet. Massive, honest, heartbreaking tears.

She’d filmed herself locking up her little bakery for the last time. With flour still on the apron, keys shaking in her hand, you could see it was the kind of grief that doesn’t perform well because it’s real. Anyone could see. That was real pain.

The top comment had 38,000 likes. It said: “skill issue.”

Below that, there were a hundred variations on the same theme: “should’ve made better croissants.” “Capitalism said no.” One guy just commented a crying-laughing emoji, seventeen times, like he was being paid per emoji.

*You can see this article in video form here.

And I lay there in bed, because I was in bed and it was 2AM, and I did have the phone 2 inches from my face and that blue light in my eyes…I thought: when did we all become like this? Because you’ve noticed it too, I’m sure.

The internet got mean. Not edgy-mean or banter-mean. Mean mean. Punitive, gleeful, recreational. I sometimes get these comments on my articles and videos as well — I usually find them ridiculous comments from ridiculous people.

But nothing like this woman with the bakery. She got served cruelty as sport. From people whose entire personality is cruelty. Cruelty as content. Cruelty as, apparently, the new cool.

Here’s the thing though. We didn’t suddenly become worse people. I think that’s just a comforting lie, and because I did some research about this, I’m about to take it from you.

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The smartest person I knew growing up worked in a tiny print shop next to a gas station. I’d go there to laminate printouts of favorite pop stars and soak up that grim fluorescent energy through the glass.

His name doesn’t matter and I probably never even knew it. What matters is that he had read everything. He could talk about Dostoevsky and macroeconomics in the same sentence, and he did, often, to anyone who’d listen.

He’d never look you in the eye. He was just talking, telling whoever was there. The laminator behind him hissed out steam that smelled like hot plastic and burnt dust.

He wore the same gray sweater for what I’m pretty sure was four years. He drank instant coffee from a chipped mug that said something in German that I later found out meant ‘Cats and literature are the only reasons to be alive’. I’d add music to that, but the list ends there.

He was the most articulate broke person I’ve ever met.

He’s still there, by the way. I walked past the shop two summers ago. Same sweater, same mug. The laminator might’ve been new.

I think about him a lot whenever I see idiots making bank while smart people stay broke. Because the answer isn’t really about money. It’s about a particular kind of trap that intelligence builds for you.

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A friend told me last month she was “seriously thinking about Portugal.” She knows I’m also “seriously thinking about Spain.” I was in Barcelona in January, just to check out the vibe.

I can say hands down Barcelona is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever seen, but I’m not sure about moving there. It‘s kind of touristy.

I know how hypocritical that sounds coming from a tourist, but I completely understand why Spanish people have had enough of tourists and their shenanigans. Still, they shouldn’t be throwing water at them, just saying. I was wearing a white shirt, come on.

Anyway, she said Portugal. I asked how she chose that specific country and turns out Portugal has the most Californian weather you can find in Europe. I’ve never heard a better argument.

So I switched my attention to Lisbon, but apparently tons of Americans switched their attention to Lisbon way before me and now the place is a gentrified financial hell where rent for a one bedroom is close to $2,000. How long until the Portuguese start throwing water at tourists? Can’t be long now, I’m pretty sure of that.

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Intelligence is the new sin.

“People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.”

Kierkegaard said that, more than a century ago. I’ve never found it to be more true than these days, when America is rapidly sliding into Idiocracy and intelligence is a liability.

I’m low key scared of turning on the news lately. And it’s not even because of the threat of global war, or the absolutely moronic decisions of the powers that be.

It’s because wherever I turn I see a daily celebration of people who are loud, proud, and braindead. And just saying this will probably get me laughed at for being an elitist.

Although, truth be told, I’m guilty of the same things myself: watching stupid reels designed to tickle the reptilian brain, rolling my eyes at those who use academic language… etc.

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Somebody is eating at a table next to mine while listening to music on their phone. Loud. Full volume. And the worst part is that it’s not even music I like. Rude…

I can compromise on music taste, but this is something I see every day— people listening to things on their phones without headphones. I mean… shouldn’t that be punishable by law or something?

Then there’s the guy taking a video call on speaker in a cafe, his girlfriend’s face glitching through the espresso machine noise. Always the worst possible angle, chin forward.

Then there’s the woman filming herself crying in a supermarket aisle. I even knew someone who constantly posted photos of herself crying next to her mother’s hospital bed. The mom was in a coma, tubes sticking out of her. I had to unfollow, I couldn’t take it anymore.

Or the two people standing in the middle of a narrow sidewalk having a conversation while everyone behind them does the awkward sidestep shuffle.

Kids screaming like they’re being exorcised, while parents scroll.

And nobody says anything. Nobody ever says anything. Like it’s fine. It feels like something major shifted.

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I finally caved and got those long fries that are more addictive than heroin, the ones that McDonald’s makes. I go to the electronic kiosk, because you know me, I’m an introvert, and whenever I can avoid human contact I do.

So I go to the kiosk. The first question: do you want to log into the app? No! Of course not. Second question: Proceed without connection? Connection to what? A burger? There is zero need to connect to fast food!

Why are these apps for everything everywhere? Why would I need to add more useless detail to my life? Useless apps are clutter and clutter is stress.

It’s just not worth it. Just like most things these days.

Here are a few other examples, and you tell me if I’m wrong.

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I woke up to the wild screams and screeches of something being murdered right in front of my apartment door. I stood up and ran to the door while also putting on a robe and when I opened it, ready to save whatever was screaming for its life, there it was: a child, couldn’t have been more than six, screaming his lungs out and dragging his butt on the dingy building floor. Like dogs do on the grass.

I froze. The mom, my neighbor, was there too. She was sort of smiling. I looked at the kid, I looked at her. ‘He’s ok, just throwing a bit of a tantrum because he didn’t want me to put sunscreen on him. I won’t force him, but he’s mad I even tried,’ she said lovingly.

I said nothing, gave her a dirty look and went back in, slamming the door in protest. Truth be told, I felt like having my own tantrum. I also felt like picking the kid off the floor and slathering his entire face in inch-thick sunscreen.

But I didn’t, because we’re living in a society, and because I know it wasn’t that poor boy’s fault. The mom, however… argh!

What gets me about this whole scene is that the mom wasn’t being cruel. She wasn’t being negligent in the dramatic, call-the-authorities sense. She was, by her own internal scoring system, being a good mom.

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If you’ve been broke for a while, you already know the obvious stuff. Don’t buy a yacht. Don’t gamble your rent. Got it.

I had a couple of years not too long ago when I was completely broke. Almost zero income. The good thing was that I own the apartment I live in, so I didn’t have to pay rent. Whatever little money I was making went on food. My parents were paying my bills. It was embarrassing.

One of those hardcore life lessons that you never wanted to learn in the first place. It taught me that you can live on much less than you ever thought possible. That most of our money is wasted. And that the real money leaks aren’t the dramatic ones.

They’re the small, boring, everyday choices that feel normal because everyone around you is making them too. That’s what makes them dangerous. Nobody’s going to stop you, nobody’s going to point at your bank account and say hey, maybe rethink this.

So I will.

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Bloodbaths in horror movies only last for a few seconds. The scarier, longer, and quieter part happens before the bloodbath. The eerie silence, the darkness hiding the killer, the anticipation of the knife piercing the skin — that’s what horror is built on.

That’s what the world feels like right now. It’s a global feeling of dread, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And the other shoe is dangling off America’s swollen foot.

The country is steeped in that eerie silence right now. Everybody’s still going to work, still scrolling, still arguing about the same six topics, and underneath all of it the floor is moving. You can feel it through your socks if you stand still long enough. That’s why nobody is standing still. It’s just too much to take, so we push it off until later, when we’re more prepared.

But it’s not later. It’s now.

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Most people spend their entire adult lives working 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, for a micro-managing boss with zero soft skills, and a corporation that uses them like batteries they’re going to throw into the trash when depleted. Those people used to be me.

I didn’t want to do it, I just didn’t know what to do to get out of it. Everything outside the regular path seemed scary: complicated financial jargon, business skills I didn’t have, a world I had no access to.

Luckily for me, my dysfunctional family gifted me trauma so deep that it made it impossible for me to accept anyone telling me what to do, so the only way for me to find a financially-stable place in this world was to carve my own financial path.

Thing is, when you start carving, you realize it’s not as difficult as it seemed from the outside. Everything changes when you realize what people who retire with nothing to show for it did wrong. After a lifetime of hard work: they kept consuming instead of owning. No knowledge, no discipline, no focus.

They financed cars. They carried credit card debt. They bought things that lost value the moment they touched them. And while they were busy paying everyone else, nobody was paying them.

The shift that changes everything is surprisingly simple: stop financing liabilities and start acquiring assets. Here are the five you should be building right now.

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It’s not just inflation. It never really was.

In the last ten years general inflation rose around 31%. In that same window, prices at the major chains climbed between 39% and 100% — with McDonald’s doubling its prices outright, raising them at more than triple the national inflation rate.

What the hell, McDonald’s?! Truth is, I wasn’t even surprised when I found the numbers.

I told you before how not too long ago I was sitting in the Mall food court Right in front of me, there was a McDonald’s and two little girls wearing strawberry bedazzled T-shirts. They were munching on those long fries from McDonald’s. You know those fries — the long ones, more addictive than heroin.

So I checked the price, hoping it would put me off ordering them and having them go directly to my thighs. Sure enough, the price did the trick. Medium French Fries: $5.29. $5! There can’t be more than like five fries in that pouch they give you, max!

That was the day I felt too poor for McDonald’s. It’s come to that.

That’s not inflation. That’s a choice.

The industry wants us to think this is simple economics; and the argument behind it is so logical it’s almost impossible to not believe. Their argument is this: wages went up, ingredients cost more, what can you do. And those things are true — but they explain only half the story. The other half is a lot more deliberate, and a lot more profitable.

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‘I just can’t take New York anymore. I have my reasons. Mostly financial. Mostly.’

That’s what my friend Diane told me when she packed her stuff and moved to Europe.

She sold her car right before she left. She had no idea she won’t be using it in Berlin. She just thought she’d buy a new one once she got there. Wrong. She’s been in Berlin for almost two years and hasn’t bought a new car since.

The culture shock when she realized that she had no problem going without several things that were absolutely vital to her in the U.S.

It took her a year to figure out there was not even one instance when she would have needed her car. Not once. That says a lot.

I visited Diane some time ago. I went to a Metallica concert in Berlin, she came with. 94,000 people showed up to see the gods of rock. It was spectacular. Berlin was just as vibrant. So was Diane’s state of mind.

Truth is feeling safe, financially and otherwise, does a number on you. The good kind of number, where you have time to realize that some of your problems have nothing to do with you and everything to do with geography.

Some of the purchases that felt non-negotiable to Diane and to most Americans turned out to be responses to American problems, not universal ones. Once those problems disappear, so does the spending.

Here’s what she stopped buying since she moved to Europe:

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Yesterday I had to rush a friend to the emergency room with a bleeding eye and a sense of doom that the world is not what it used to be and it never will be again.

I have no idea if that’s good or not for the world, but for his eye it’s bad news. For our friendship too.

I’ve known him for twenty years. We were walking down the street, a normal afternoon, the kind you don’t think you’ll remember. I was talking. He was on his phone, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling.

From time to time he would show me photos of things he thought I might like: the rare sight of an ermine on a beach in Alaska, hunting. Possibly AI. A girl going to sleep in a bed with the bedsheets made of lava. Definitely AI, I hope.

I was telling him something — I don’t even remember what, something that mattered to me — and he was half-nodding, eyes down, thumb moving. And then, mid-sentence, a sharp tree branch caught him directly in the eye.

A proper, head first, eye-piercing collision. He walked into it the way you walk into something when you’re somewhere else entirely, which is exactly where he was.

He was screaming. There was blood and fear and my stomach turning, and his bleeding eye throbbing. I rushed him to the emergency room.

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My friend who lost her job half a year ago just declared bankruptcy. She had to. It was her last resort.

She cried. I cried. I encouraged her, said I’m sure she’ll find another job, it’s just a matter of time.

I wasn’t lying. I’m sure she’ll find another job eventually. I just don’t know when. She’s been applying for the past 6 months. To everything. Absolutely everything she came across.

She used to be a project manager, so that would have been her first choice, but for some reason nobody called her back. Apparently project management is some unicorn job that only the chosen few can do.

I don’t know what happened. I remember when project managers were a dime a dozen. Now you only hear of the jobs, you never see anyone hired for them.

She was willing to do everything short of prostitution or selling body parts. Although she heard testicles are in high demand on the black market, but she has none; tough luck for her.

So she applied to everything else: shop assistant, museum curator, Big Pharma stooge, movie theatre ticket piercer and movie theater popcorn pusher, you name it. Nothing. She dumbed down her resume. Nothing.

Eventually, she had to face the big bad B: Bankrupcy. She’s devastated. And desperate.

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There’s a massive cultural shift happening behind the scenes and it’s so complicated that I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Yesterday I passed by a group of about 20 people, sitting outside, on the grass, in a park, talking, laughing. No phone in hand. None. They were literally just touching grass. I stood there and stared for a while. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it since the early 2000s.

Then I remembered something else: my IG feed keeps showing me these people from the 80s, tanned, relaxed, and big-haired, having a great time with each other, outside, on the curb, at golden hour. Sometimes they have water fights, but usually they just laugh with these beautiful pearly teeth.

I’m not going to lie — it looks amazing. I thought it must just be me, because I have a thing for the 80s and the algorithm must have picked it up, as it usually does. But then I took a step back and reassessed: it’s bigger than that.

It’s not about the 80s, it’s not about melancholia. It’s about people opting out of the online life.

Have you noticed more and more people read real books lately? Real paper books, out in public. Seriously.

Just look around — they’re the new wave of people trying to break free of this brave new tech-heavy AI-ridden world.

They read physical books on public transport. They own a camera that isn’t a phone. They don’t know what went viral yesterday, and they’re not apologizing for it.

They seem, somehow, calmer than everyone else — less reactive, less hollow-eyed, less like someone who just survived a war they didn’t sign up for.

They’re not off the grid in any dramatic, survivalist sense. They don’t announce it from the mountaintops. They’re just… not that online. And increasingly, that’s the most interesting thing a person can be.

We’re living through a status inversion, and most people haven’t consciously registered it yet. But they feel it. The same way you feel a shift in temperature before you look at a thermometer.

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There’s a version of adulthood most people have accepted without questioning it. You graduate, get a job, and sign up for a car payment. It’s just what you do. It’s what everyone does.

And that, right there, is the problem.

Car payments aren’t a fact of life. Or at least they shouldn’t be. I bought my car second hand from someone who sold it one year after they bought it. Why — I’ll never know. It had under 9000 miles on it, perfect condition, and the gas mileage is insane. I buy gas once a month. That’s it.

I paid cash and it cost me 30% less than it cost the initial owner a year back. It even smelled new.

However, I remember a time not too long ago when I drove a friend home from wherever we were. She was sitting in the back and suddenly exclaimed: ‘Are you kidding me? You have to roll down the windows back here? Manually?! You don’t have automatic windows on this car?’ Nope, I don’t. I also don’t have a monthly car payment that’s bleeding me dry. She does. She wouldn’t have to if she accepted a 3 seconds of manual window rolling on her back doors.

Car payments aren’t a fact of life. They’re a financial habit so widespread that people have mistaken them for a requirement. They’re not. They’re a choice, and it’s one of the most quietly destructive choices you can make with your money.

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My dad just bought a new fridge. It’s the fourth one him and my mom own in a two people household.

Why — I asked.

Well, one of those fridges stops working during the winter, apparently. Because they have it outside in the cold, I thought. Another one is extremely old and it was gifted to them by an ex-boyfriend of mine from 20 years ago. Wait, what? I had no recollection of such a thing.

The third one is functional, but it’s just not big enough for their needs. Not big enough? It’s as big as they get: 2 doors, 6’5”. For two elderly people. Truth be told, that fridge is always packed to the brim with every species of cheese and cold cuts under the sun, so… to each their own.

This fourth one is a humongous brushed silver beast that’s as noisy as a tractor and probably just as expensive.

My dad was very proud of it. He even got the extended warranty.

Why — I asked, for the second time in a five-minute interval.

Well what if it breaks? He just likes to feel safe. Safe from what? A big fridge? Will it come awake at night to haunt you? Well I suppose the possibility is just as big as it breaking while that warranty is active.

And this very situation is what prompted today’s article: for the love of god, some things are a complete waste of our money, and still…

Here are seven of them. But I might as well start a series with how much money we waste on useless shit.

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If I hear one more person call Gen Z snowflakes, I’m going to lose it. Especially since I was one of the people who did that. Well I was wrong. And I apologize.

There’s a whole conversation happening right now about Gen Z. They’re soft, they don’t want to work, they can’t handle pressure, they’re glued to their phones and allergic to effort.

They’re not tough like us millennials. Right?

Sure, if you squint hard enough and ignore everything happening around them, it really does look like laziness. It looks like a generation that gave up before it even started.

But here’s what’s actually going on: Gen Z isn’t lazy. They’re scared. And worse, they’re scared for good reason. Major things are happening that previous generations didn’t have to deal with. Things that make complete sense to be scared of.

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As a woman, it’s an objective fact that I deserve less: less of this manosphere bullshit.

Wounded men trying to convince other wounded men that anger equals strength and women’s rights have been stolen from men — that’s the manosphere.

Women are thieves, whores, and deceitful. It’s only natural to be angry at them. They’re not genuine trustworthy individuals, so naturally they deserve less. It’s only logic.

Isn’t it? Well… not exactly. That’s just incel math, and it doesn’t add up because it’s starting from a false premise. Or several.

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Thank god i’m not young! Because there’s no way in hell I could ever find my first job in this market where nothing is what it seems.

I pray I never have to search for a new job again, because from the looks of it, the market got awesome at firing, horrible at hiring, and practically non-existent at hiring beginners.

The Job That Doesn’t Exist Yet Asks for Three Years of Experience

How frustrating is it to apply for a job labeled “entry-level” and discover it requires three years of experience, fluency in six software platforms, and ideally a minor in machine learning?

Clearly, that’s not an entry-level job. That’s a mid-level job pretending to be entry so the company can pay you less.

Yet another friend of mine lost her job a couple of days ago. She was working in IT. Not as a developer or anything truly technical, but something along the lines of coordinating developers, being the middle-man between them, their boss, and each other.

She was basically the person who was doing the talking for people who aren’t good at talking. Team manager, project manager, jack of all trades, and word whisperer for code whisperers.

I suppose they figured out they can do the communication and coordination themselves, or maybe ask ChatGPT to form some coherent sentences in their stead. Ha! They’re in for a big surprise. I already tried talking to ChatGPT and it gets very weird the moment I get weird.

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