I smashed my phone about one month ago. I'm pretty hard on my phone and they typically last about 12-18 months. I bought a $125 Moto G phone (2022) from Amazon. Because I'm hard on my phones, my wife took the lead and got me a better case and a screen protector. All-in, I think I"m around $140.
For the first time in my life I got snarky comments from two separate groups of friends for not buying an I-phone. For context, I think they both identify with higher social status, but are not annoying about it. These two separate friends have the means to enjoy the finer things in life without working themselves to death. I would consider them both wealthy. However, these two separate people genuinely seemed bothered by the fact that I didn't purchase an I-phone. My best guess is that I'm at the age now where an I-phone is the norm. If I'm the only one without an I-phone, then I guess I'm not conforming, which I know can make people upset. My dissertation was on social norms, so I am very familiar with the theoretical concept. However, I guess I never anticipated that there would be an I-phone social norm among my peer groups.
Going back to my previous post of people in their 40's complaining about their financial situation and then blaming other people, I want to say that it's mostly distant friends from high school who spent decades making poor choices. From my perspective, these people look for short-cuts and then are surprised that it didn't work out. Instead of taking ownership, they blame others. It's the President, Government or the Big Banks that are ruining their life. I'm 44 years old and this behavior really seems to be amplified since I hit 40. I don't like to hang out with these types of people, so I don't have any close friends that exhibit this behavior. However, they still exist in my distant social sphere.
Geez, you could impress these folks by being an iPhone poser and getting the SE for $200. Yet there would be something wrong with even playing that game - something involving agreement with the mindset that self esteem is the things you buy and friendship is the things you buy together.
The observation about the people in their 40s who made a series of bad choices and shortcut decisions stands out to me.
This is close to a universal experience because we have so many more choices to make than any cohort of humans in history. Career, housing, education, debt, car, consumption patterns, drugs, exercise, friend groups, dating, marriage, divorce, level of sacrifice for family, food choices, etc. are all things old world peasants didn't have the luxury of worrying about. The odds of a young person going out into the world and knowing how to optimize all these critical life decisions - it's practically nil.
What's worse is the media highlighting the one-in-a-million people who did run the gauntlet and somehow and allegedly got most things right and/or lucked out. The rest of us get to compare ourselves to them, right after this ad which is intended to convince us to make another bad decision.
You're right, politics is the outlet for all this frustration, but the system itself is an unlikely game for most people to win. Politics is so emotional because we project our anxieties, insecurities, fears, and regrets onto theatrical characters, rather than making cold policy calculations around self-interest and values. A lack of self-accountability is partly to blame for the sorry state of politics, but the other side of that coin is a world full of pitfalls.
We can't ignore the pitfalls either. A teenager who tries a cigarette might condemn themselves to a painful early death, and leave their future family broke. A person in their 20's signing a car loan condemns themselves to a decade of financial insecurity. Eating at restaurants will make you obese and broke. The wrong college major will leave you with five-figure debt and a job waiting tables. The examples go on and on, because much of our culture and economy has the effect of destroying people.
This is not a rant against our freedom of choices, it is an observation that our ideas about individual decision-making and responsibility, plus our ideas about the primacy of making money, have led us to build a world full of traps for each other. This is a place where regret is inevitable, and it is perhaps also inevitable that people will direct their frustrations toward each other.
