Christmas as a child: "Oh man... socks."
Christmas as an adult: "Oh man! Socks!"
My wife: Getting old sucks.
Me: It beats the alternative:
My wife after a few moment of reflection: Not by much.
I feel that
The full story there is that we were at an Orthopedic urgent care. My wife has danced Ballet since she was 4. A bad jump resulted in a 5th metatarsal fracture, commonly referred to as a "dancer's break" and a severely sprained ankle. She was in a boot and crutches for 5 weeks. Her ankle literally had all the colors of a sunset. The Orthopedist took her shoe an sock off and actually gasped.
Omg hope she ended up healing up ok after a while. I know I've heard after a break that people don't necessarily always fully heal which sucks.
The least rewarding purchase I had to make was a boiler for a house. It's not like something you can show off to your friends. Just thousands in expense to maintain functional parity.
14 years ago when I was thrifting, I used to get excited about movies I'd find, season sets I'd find, a couple toy figures, maybe some games or hey, there's something I could use. Fucking awesome!
14 years later, I've been waiting until a thrift store at least puts up an office chair I'd like to have that's better than what I got and if the appliances I get are going to be useful.
I can understand that.
How 50-80 years ago winning an appliance on TV used to be a big deal, like all the sudden the winner's household gets a massive jump into the space age because the appliances then must have been expensive.
What do you mean back then? Appliances are expensive now.
Relatively speaking? Appliances are cheaper than they were before.
Here's a Sears catalog from 1991. Appliances are at the end, past page 800 or so. Stoves are $400 or $500. Washer is $400, and a dryer is $300.
By official inflation numbers, things are about 2.3x as expensive now as in late 1991.
Median rent, the rent that the average person was paying, was around $450. Median rent today is about $1500, more than 3 times as much.
Today, a stove that looks like one of those things in the 1991 catalog costs about $500, maybe $600. Washing machines cost about the same. That's only a 25-50% increase, when overall prices have increased by 130% and rents have increased by 200% since 1991.
So yeah, when a stove was worth a whole month's rent, it was comparatively a bigger deal than today, when a stove is worth less than half a month's rent.
The same is broadly true of furniture and other home goods, too: prices have gone up slower than inflation, so in theory we could store more stuff in our cramped homes.
And they don't last as long anymore.
Back in the late 80s, a friend of mine went on Wheel Of Fortune, and won pretty big. Back then, you won "money," which you then spent at the end of the show in the big showcase of products.
My friend went with a strategy, and bought stuff like wall-to-wall carpeting and a fridge, but also a couple things like a gaudy gold watch.
When he got home, he was getting his haircut, and his barber said "I saw you on Wheel. That was a nice watch you got." My friend sold it to him. That was his strategy - buy stuff for the house, but also buy some stuff that would be easy to sell, so he could pay the taxes out of his winnings.
The winnings are taxed?
Of course. All the prize money you see on Jeopardy, Wheel, Family Feud, etc. is all taxed.
If someone wins a car or vacation worth $20K, they will be expected to pay income tax on that value.
When Oprah gave away all those expensive cars years ago, she saddled many in that audience with a significant tax bill. A lot of them probably had to sell the car, just to pay the taxes, and then just have the remaining cash in hand after that.
It's not really an "of course"
Some countries don't tax lottery winnings, Canada for example. Though for Canada game shows are a bit more nebulous.
Don't you know that the US is the standard by now?
Yeah, it's income
Tell me you haven’t been appliance shopping without telling me you haven’t been appliance shopping. /s
I mean yeah, can be pricey, especially if you want all the features. But you can go bottom of the barrel bare bones basic shit and have it be not too much of an ordeal.
I bought my washer and dryer new and it totalled less than I paid for my cell phone lmao. They function just fine. I actually specifically didn't want extra fancy features because it meant more ways to potentially break.
I've had so much luck with used appliances, the trick is to go to appliance shops that are able to do repairs.
We've gotten two different sets from two different used appliance stores. The first set lasted about 9 years and survived several moves. When they finally died we found another (refurbished) matching set, $400 at a used appliance store, they even took our old set away (which I'm sure and hope they refurb'd and sold again). We used them for about 4 months, when the washer suddenly stopped working. We called the place we got it from and they actually came out and repaired it for free due to a 6 month warranty we didn't even know about, they were super apologetic. It was a pretty positive experience.
We've been pretty lucky I guess. You might have to shop around a bit but you can definitely save a ton of money if you're willing to forgo bells and whistles.
I'm inclined to disagree.
I'm fortunate to have everything I need and a fair bit of what I want. I lost 140 pounds five years ago and my body's functioning really well too.
Getting old is way better than I anticipated.
Same. As I got older, I feel like I am winning. I celebrate 10+ years at my career (jumped three jobs). I no longer drink myself to sleep, instead I drink casually. Im married and secured in my relationship.
My legs feel a bit weaker and my body isn't at its peak. But I have a lot of successes in so many other directions.
I'm proud of you. Enjoy your hard work paying off.
That's nice of you to say. Thank you!
No problem.
To be fair, aging tends to involve gathering objects over the years. So unless you hit really hard times, you to end up collecting a lot of what you "need". Age also makes most people care less what other people think you should have, so you don't feel that you have to buy many things outside of what you actually want and need.
No kidding, I was doing my groceries and they were playing Zombie. I almost cried. She's dead, I'm on the way, and that song that I used to dance to in dark industrial clubs is now accompanying me in the pasta sauce aisle.
I'm happy to win anything
I won the "lunchbox contest" when I a was a kid. The school teacher just gave a soccer ball to one random kid for having a healthy lunchbox, once of week for a month, and I was one of the winners. I still think about it often.
I won $100 Wendys gift card from a tweet. I cheered like I won the lottery.
Proudest day of my life. Oh and I guess the birth of my children.
The birth of your children was just a necessary link in the complex web of causality that brought you to the apex: the moment you won the gift card
I won a feature phone once when feature phones were normal. I won it from a radio contest.
Shit, I like getting old. I never thought I'd make it to 50. Glad to be here.
Glad to have you still around.
Good to see you, too
Don't even get me started on that solid wood Broyhill dinnette set!
Me 30yrs ago: Solid wood? Are we calling 50% sawdust and binder "solid wood"? Lol...
Me now: it has like real wood mixed in, like from an actual tree? WTF, I that is way out of my league...
Oh wow, windows! I don't think I can afford this place.
I'm like, "fuck it. We'll do it live. I'll learn how to make my own damned wooden furniture!"
I've misread "Getting olds sucked", thinking it was a meme about giving blowjobs to old people.
I'd still rather have the car or the trip to Aruba.
I owned my first appliance at 17. How old could you possibly be?
Aye. It's also the difference between planned upgrading for quality of life improvements vs being unexpectedly forced to buy a new fridge or something because the one crapped out. Like, you can live fine without a dishwasher, but a fridge not so much.
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A collection of some classic Lemmy memes for your enjoyment
