Actually I expect some day the benefits that allow me to survive will end and I'll be another statistic.

But for now, the United States feels that I'm better off alive, though destitute, and unable to actually afford rent in California.

In the meantime, the millennials and zoomers I know don't expect to own anything ever. They eat whatever cheap food they can afford and pay rent and utilities and have a handful of trappings, and people write articles about how they're not into diamonds or owning real estate, or keeping a savings account. And one by one, they too are slipping through the cracks, usually when they slip down the stairs or get injured at work or catch a cold and don't have the strength to go into their job when their boss calls them desperate for a filler.

So regardless of what I expect, our establishment companies don't want to give anyone anything. They reward hard workers by working them harder.

I don't watch ads because they're antagonistic. I tend to avoid anything that features dark patterns because I'm susceptible to them, and they signal the product has been contaminated by its manufacturers with malicious intent.

If I can’t afford something, I watch ads

I can't afford to pay 20€ per month--that's more than my whole monthly phone bill with something like 50 or 100 GB of data. Cost of living is high enough as it is.

I also lack the most valuable currency there is in one's life, one that you simply can't get more of. Time. So I block ads, which cost a lot of time, with extreme prejudice.

Ads are also bad for my mental health, they just irritate me, rack up stress and easily swing me into bad mood.

Lastly, I don't give a fuck about costing money to some multi-billion corporation. I don't care about them as much as they don't care about me; the corpos see me just as a resource to exploit as much as possible then move on to another one when there's nothing more to exploit, and I see the corpos exactly the same way. Call it mutual parasitism. Yes, I'm a parasite. And parasites are the most successful lifeforms on Earth.