My wife: Getting old sucks.
Me: It beats the alternative:
My wife after a few moment of reflection: Not by much.
I’ve misread “Getting olds sucked”, thinking it was a meme about getting blowjob to old people.
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.
Tell me you haven’t been appliance shopping without telling me you haven’t been appliance shopping. /s
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.
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Everything hurts and I’m hungry all the time.
Also, if you don’t eat when you’re hungry, it’s not simply a grumbling stomach you have to deal with. Now hunger comes with lethargy, headaches, irritability, and more. I used to be able to fast most of the day without any issue, but at some point in my mid-20s, it was like a switch got flipped. Now when my body senses low blood sugar, it basically revolts against me until I eat something.
Yup. Get injured easier, and takes longer to heal. I got a Covid-ish (never tested positive) respiratory infection back in Oct, have had breathing/coughing issues ever since, this led to blood pressure issues, leading to issues in my eyes and just overall quality of life issues. Now that I’m on a laundry list of daily meds I can finally live a somewhat normal life :P. I wish I took my grandfather’s advice and never got old.
I got covid last year. It triggered an autoimmune response and now I have rheumatoid arthritis. Lovely as I just had an lrti on my thumb for osteoarthritis. Being active is good, but some days it’s hard to get out of bed knowing how much my feet are going to hurt as soon as I stand up.
Our fridge blew. I’m pretty handy, just too many damned issues. Fuck it. What can a new one cost?
I work at Lowe’s, best we got is $900 for the very bottom of the line. Got on FB Marketplace and we have the nicest fridge I’ve ever owned, $200.
Washer crapped out a week later. Same exact story and prices.
And don’t start me on appliances people hunk out because they can’t fix a minor problem. Found a dryer on the road needing a $14 belt. Sold it for $125. Upgraded 2 ceiling fans to super nice ones by bypassing the crappy voltage limiter (it’s a legal thing in the US.) I can do this all day.
tl;dr: Shit’s expensive. Stop burning the planet and your wallet.
My fridge just broke down tonight.
I was doing some electrical work and when I flipped the breakers back on it started chirping from its speaker like it was trying and failing to start.
This will be the second time I’ve had to fix this fridge now. The first time, it’s teensy little mains power connector shorted itself out with a loud bang.
I started fixingy own stuff out of necessity, but now I just do it out of spite. I paid good damn money for these things and I’m going to run them till they are withered skeletons, then I’ll strip from for parts and recycle the rest.
I got laid off and within a few days our dishwasher died. Had to wait for months until I got a new job to pull the trigger on a new dishwasher, all the while our stove was threatening to die on us. All this after our furnace died on us within a year of buying the house just a few years earlier, and then our AC just died last summer (not the end of the world, but insult to injury).
Not everyone is lucky enough to be handy, unfortunately…
If something is already broken there is no excuse to not give it at least a try. There are a lot of instructions on the internet for fixing common problems.
You might think that’s no excuse but I’m not fucking with anything running on mains electricity. Thanks, but I like living and not setting the house on fire.
I think there’s a risk element too
If I fuck up some plumbing in an appliance things are going to get wet, near whatever electrics are used to drive it.
There is a non zero chance someone might get electrocuted if I’m not inclined to be handy and attempt to fix things just with available service manuals and YouTube videos.
Here I’m only really speaking to incentive, when you start disassembly often the first thing you’re met with are warnings. Likewise speaking to friends and family members etc
People should try, yes. But, you stake the cost of parts against your ability, repairs take time, being cautious takes time.
When someone hasnt already started repairing your shit these are the things that disincline people from starting.
Depends on how long it will take and what value your time has. Replacing the door gasket in an LG washer is somewhat ridiculous. To get lint out of the heating element on their dryers even more so.
Free time, which many people have at least some of, is worth whatever you make of it. Most people have little or no money thus using their free time on this can be extremely rewarding and cost effective.
I had my washer 75% disassembled after it shat the bed last year. Was 90% sure what part failed and spewed oil everywhere, which would have necessitated 90% disassembly. The part was half as much as a new washer, and I had absolutely no way to effectively clean the outer bucket. The icing on the cake was disassembly showing how utterly inadequate water flow was under the agitator, with mold rampant despite regular tub cleans and leaving the lid open all when not in use. I felt bad buying a new washer instead of repairing, but the old one (which was still pretty new) was a piece of shit.
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 a feature phone once when feature phones were normal. I won it from a radio contest.
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
Just being a nominee is an honor
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.
you don’t feel that you have to buy many things outside of what you actually want and need.
That’s true. Most of my money, now, goes toward buying back my time in the form of saving for retirement. (At least, when I don’t have to help my deadbeat parents in some way.)
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As a kid i was terrible at guessing the prices because im Canadian and didn’t know about exchange rates, and also as a child i had no concept of what a car or a dishwasher cost
I’d still rather have the car or the trip to Aruba.
Knowing I have to pay the taxes on that shit, I’ll take the dinette set.
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.
Your neighborhood may have a Buy Nothing group on FB (and yeah, I know FB sucks but Buy Nothing groups are great) and you can bookmark it so you don’t have to look at any other features on the site.
Been wanting to start a comm and show all my tips and tricks, get others showing theirs.
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!”
better than getting dead innit
I owned my first appliance at 17. How old could you possibly be?
- And that’s not what the meme is about. It’s about not having to pay for a brand new appliance.
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.
Indeed.
This meme and variations of it pop up all the time, and sure, there’s a ‘haha’ there. But it’s doing some kind of whitewashing of REAL economic struggles of our generation, and I’m not sure how to feel about it.
It’s more about laughing to ease the pain. For sure the cost of living has gotten way out of hand. But having a bit of fun about a shared bad time makes going through said bad time a bit easier.
