Yeah, the ideal of the internet was that, ultimately, we would all have our own little box in our house that we would post our stuff to, and our friends would read it and see it, and maybe a few passers by on the internet would observe it, and that would be a way of journaling our lives and sharing them with each other.

Instead of being a global hearth, it has become a global marketplace, a battleground for power in the form of advertising revenue, sales revenue, and tracking every bit of data they can possibly get from you.

This is so that, 1, they can sell more things to you, and 2, so they can sell that information to other people who, like themselves, do not have your best interest in mind and do not care one fuck about you.

In the way that only crazy, sexually oppressed wasps ever can be.

For me, it really depends on my mentality, but for the most part, I have the sneaking suspicion that if you’re not occasionally downvoted, then you’re doing something wrong.

Like, you do not have to be a flawless member of the Hive Mind. It is okay to think for yourself and have your own opinions, you know?

Your sandwich is all wibbly wobbly.

My childhood friend was like that. His name was Tim. Everyone liked him. He was loud, he was brash. He was a bigger guy. He was not very attractive, but he had charismatic personality, and people were drawn to him.

And he was such a douchebag.

I haven’t talked to him in, like, a decade. But last I heard, he was still just douchebagging it up everywhere. No job broke as shit. People still coming over to his house to smoke weed and watch tv even though they’re in their freakin’ 30s and 40s and shit.

I feel like that’s an incredibly harsh analogy, and I don’t really think it’s appropriate.

It implies, relating your analogy back to student loans, that people who are incredibly intelligent and capable and good with technology chose to take a $200,000 PhD in underwater basket weaving and then they don’t want to pay their student loans.

I would say a more apt analogy would be if an orchard owner didn’t take proper care of their orchard and then their neighbors came over and helped them dig out all of the stumps so that they could plant new seeds.

Honestly, why would you even care?

In America student loans cannot be discharged unless you have a fatal disease or you die, and sometimes not even death causes your student loans to go away.

If they would rather sacrifice their late 30s and 40s to paying off debt the hard way that they could have paid off the easy way in their 20s, then what does it matter to you?

They’re going to actually pay more back because the interest is going to keep accruing on their debts for all of those years.

You’ve saved yourself a lot of money, you’ve opened the door for yourself to have a higher quality retirement or possibly even an earlier retirement because you’re being financially smart and that’s good on you.

Why would you take the thing that is good on you and make it a bad on somebody else?

I paid off my student loans at the beginning of this month. it took me 16 years and like $65,000, right? If someone else comes in behind me, goes through the same shit that I went through, and then gets their loan forgiven or paid off in a couple of years?

Then I’m happy for them. Good for them, their life is gonna be so much easier without that burden over their head, and happier people means I get to live in a happier society, which means that I get to be happier too.