Middle-class suburban streets, miles away from farm or forest, full of sparkly clean gargantuan pickup trucks
And they only put groceries in the back seat because the truck bed is “too dirty”
If you never put stuff in the back of your truck because it’s “too dirty”, you absolutely do not need a truck.
Hey, maybe they need to be ready to haul full sheets of plywood at any moment
I’ve started seeing US pick up trucks here in the UK in a city and they really are rediculous. Really large (comically so) and the truck bit is open to the elements although I have never ever seen anyone using the truck bit for anything whatsoever. Rediculous waste of space and I’m surprised they’re ever legal here.
I’m going to go with a slightly unorthodox answer. Phones.
You don’t need a new phone every year. You don’t need a new phone every two years. You don’t even need a phone every three years. Your old Galaxy S7 or iPhone 6 still works. Don’t waste your money keeping up with the latest phone. So what if it has a slightly better camera? What are you taking pictures of? What does it really do that your old phone doesn’t?
Once you properly consider everything you realise that you only really need to upgrade your phone every 4-5 years minimum. Many will last much longer.deleted by creator
The phone market has been a lot like the PC market 20, 30 years ago.
Back then, you actually had an advantage by getting a new machine quite often, as the newer machine was so much better and faster than the model from the year before. It actually made a difference for 99% of the users: The text processing, calculating, or browsing programs ran way better and faster on the current model than on the one or two year older one.
Nowadays, any off-the-shelf PC fulfills the needs of 95% of the users. It runs Windows/Word/Excel (or whatever else they use) fast enough to not be an issue. The only people who still need the bleeding edge stuff are some high-end uses e.g. in engineering, and gamers.
Same with cell phones. Ten years ago, the annual new model actually provided a big leap of abilities and comfort. Nowadays, I’m replacing my 5+ year old model just because the battery is getting close to the end of it’s usability.
Regarding the camera, I do a lot of backpacking and my phone is my only camera. Upgrading to appreciably better camera tech is something I will do. Example (Pixel 6 phone):
Yes, but it depends.
We had S8s that were getting noticably slow. We upgraded to S21s when those came out and those are significantly faster and haven’t slowed down.
We use our phones a lot, so significant slow down is noticable and annoying. But our phones are fine right now, so no reason to upgrade.
Can someone explain what that slang means?
People who drive trucks to get groceries, bonus points if the truck is lifted
My personal favorite is the Christmas decoration wars.
I have a neighbor that had one of those projecting rotating balls in their yard. It projects Halloween images… it’s still running, no xmas decor in their yard. I’m loving it!!
Christmas lights. Everyone needing a bigger or better display, or needing to put something out when they can’t afford the electric bills. Folks feeling the need to put out something because the people around them are.
I hear that. We are mostly lazy, so I have never hung up lights outside.
I was recently able to take my kids on a big trip to California to visit family and take a trip to Disneyland for the first time, and I could really only afford it thanks to the generous financial support from family, especially since everything ended up costing us at least twice as much as we’d budgeted and saved for.
My brother in-law who’s in his 40s recently settled on getting back together with his ex-wife after lots of disastrous relationships (and their relationship was very disastrous too) and he’s constantly getting bailed out by his mother on basic household expenses due to constant impressively bad short term financial planning. He works at a factory making decent enough money which he could live off of with some basic budgeting (aka not spending literally all of his income on tattoos, piercings, music and alcohol) and his ex-wife who has her own host of issues works at a fast-food restaurant.
They told us that they’re going to take their kids to Disneyland in California next summer, and also tried to test the waters for inviting themselves to stay with my family. I suppose they can’t get much worse off financially than they already are so I should be happy for their kids of they manage to pull it off, but holy crap was it an obvious attenpt to one-up us
My view point on this is probably not mainstream but I don’t mind having debt now for vacations. I used to worry so much about debt and I would never go on expensive trips. I would try to save for them but its hard because something always came up. As a result we never went anywhere. I got sick of that and tried getting a credit card for trips and we have gone to a bunch of places and it’s been awesome. I just pay it back the best I can before the next trip. If I were to wait until I had money to go places we would never go and my children would miss out on different cultural experiences. I’m totally ok with debt that makes my children more well rounded people. Also money is just made up. Some people get more than they will ever need when they are first born while others have to struggle for no good reason. Just try to live the best life you can and don’t worry about that shit lol.
I haven’t actually seen it, but I hear this was pretty awful.
