they won’t be able to afford anything other than Buffalo on a retail salary.

Don’t.

NY has a bad economy and awful tax burden and some of the highest COL.

Unless you are making like 80K+ it makes no sense. The average rent for an 1 bed apartment state wide is 2-3,000 a month, even in the cheapest places a 1 bed is going to be 1500.

The last time rents in NY state were like 500/mo for an apartment was 20 years ago.

I’ve been raped by women. More than one.

I don’t assume every woman I meet is a rapist.

Because women aren’t rapists. Rapists are rapists.

But please tell me more how I’m a rapist and every woman I talk to, regardless of her attractiveness to me, means I’m potentially going to rape her.

Also you leave out the fact most women are reaped overwhelmingly by people they already know, friends, co-workers, etc. Not random strangers. Not a convenient fact for your ‘1/3 random men you see are going to rape you’ worldview.

The irony here is that… you are one of those bad people.

You’re entire attitude here is the pure hostility and suspicion without any evidnece to back it up.

A random stranger on the street has nothing to do with Epstein or Trump, and your assumption they do until otherwise proven ‘innocent’ an incredibly toxic and hostile way of living life.

Perhaps you should stop obsessing over this stupid shit because you have no control over it and never will. Nor will anyone else who isn’t also part of the social elite.

Your political beliefs also have no bearing on your personal deeds with other people. Plenty of hardcore leftist liberals lie, cheat, and steal and would do so from you if given the opportunity. Perhaps even you yourself have done those things, and you certainly seem to think they’d be justified against the ‘enemy’ you imagine is lurking around every corner.

Yes, it’s cultural. It’s also part of the ‘loneliness epidemic’ that is affecting most westernized countries. As a larger and larger cohort of the population becomes socially isolated, especially young adults.

And frankly, I’ve noticed a huge cultural shift in my own city the past 5 years. I used to have way more casual interactions, and now many of those same casual interactions are viewed with hostility and suspicion… just like OP’s reaction.

10 years ago if someone dropped something and you picked it up for them they’d thank you. Now they act get angry with you for trying to help them, and sometimes accuse you of theft or harassment. And that type of reaction basically teaches folks to just not bother, it’s a type of death spiral. Even personally, as the years go by and the hostility ratio goes up, it makes me increasingly want to socialize less in general. Even many of my closer friends from years ago have gone down this rabbit hole of hostility and suspicion, and I stopped interacting with them because it was so exhausting and miserable to be around someone who thinks the bartender is ‘looking at them funny’… no it’s you whose looking at the bartender funny… you idiot.

It is increasingly difficult to find folks who are receptive and open minded to strangers, which is the building block of any/all socialization. And what’s incredibly rare is folks who can just politely say no without demonizing the other person.

tapping trees for syrup is painful for them

depends

It’s the MO of every human being when they are interacting with a stranger for the first time…

I don’t assume. I observe and I listen.

The problem with a lot of folks is that… they are massive massive hypocrites when it comes to this stuff.

And they catastrophize ordinary harmless interactions into these hyperbolic experiences in their head and make insane conclusions about absolute strangers who gave them no evidence to support their judgements. I also encounter it a lot when dating too. I meet strange women and they start lecturing me about myself… when they know absolutely nothing about me. But the weird fiction in their head they have already written so intense and real to them, that often they totally reject any real facts about me that don’t fit the story they have already made up. Especially the past few years I had so many expereinces where people tell me about myself, and I go ‘well that’s not true, I did x instead of y’ and they go ‘NO, YOU’RE LYING I KNOW YOU DID Y’. And weird shit like that.

I wonder if OP has legit dealt with mentally ill folks at all. I have. They don’t act polite and respect your boundaries, they get up in your face and scream and threaten you. And usually fixate on something bizarre. Last time it happened to me a few months ago it was a guy on the subway who started screaming at me about my boots being gay and how he wants to fuck me because they are so beautiful.

This is insane.

Other people are not psychic. They cannot read people’s minds.

This is the attitude that is destroying things, right here. This expectation that an absolute stranger should know your preferences and what you want without ever expressing it.

The only way they can realize or understand any of that is if you talk to them first. This attitude is basically ‘everyone else should cater to me and they are shitty if they don’t do that’. Who, in their right mind, would ever want to interact with someone who is that massively entitled? Who thinks their comfort, their preferences, are the only legitimate or relevant ones?

Talk about epitome of self-absorbed.

or real life expereince with people like the OP have taught us it’s not worth it.

Frankly, I don’t want to interact with people who assume I’m mentally ill for being friendly to them. And where I live at least, that’s the way a lot of folks react to friendly conversation if you are like standing in line with them. they act like you’re trying to assault them.

Then they go on reddit and lament how body wants to be their friend… well because you reject anyone who tries to be friendly to you and you mischaracterize them in your mind as some terrible person.

and it’s very aged based. I have a dog. people over 50 have no problem petting and asking me about my dog. millennials and younger folks, are like visible anxious and paranoid about interacting with me and asking me to pet my dog. I am also a millennial, I do not understand any of it. But I’m not on social media and I barely use my smart phone for anything other than phone calls and email, so I understand I’m an outlier in the way I interact with people. People my own age think I am weird for not wanting to text, and think my preference for phone calls and face to face interact is ‘demanding’.

Yeah, that’s life. Any of us could die in a accident tomorrow, or get cancer or a million other things.

There are no gaurantees in life. And searching for them is a surefire path to misery and failure at life.

Nobody can predict the future, some people get lucky and some people get screwed.

And some people make really bad choices despite everyone in their life trying to prevent them from doing so.

The problem is many folks refuse to take responsibility for themselves and their choices and change their lives. They would rather double-down and wallow in their misery and lament that the ‘system’ failed them or needs to save them. Because you know, if that’s how you think, nothing is ever your personal fault, therefore you never have to change anything.

Pragmatic and practical advice and perspective.

This is what people don’t get. And to be truthful, I didn’t understand it either when I was 20 years old. Because nobody told me any of that stuff.

What people don’t really acknowledge is the ‘institutional knowledge’ is far more important than grades and degrees. And what people miss that wealthier folks teach their kids that stuff, because well, they have first hand knowledge of it. And that matters way way more than ‘connections’ and ‘wealth’ per se.

And when companies are hiring, your personality fit who the people who are hiring you is really the biggest factor. As much as people claim hiring is experience/skills based, it’s really all ‘vibes’ in the end. Looking and talking ‘the part’ is what works more than anything else, that’s why bullshitters are so successful in life.

It’s also story that’s true.

I grew up in a poor town. Most people there were lazy and made bad choices and blamed everyone else for their problems.

Rich people, also blame everyone else for their problems, but they tend to make better choices with their time and money. The rich can be lazy and make bad choices, and suffer fewer consequences though. Typically rich kids parents will prevent them from failing, no matter how lazy and useless they are. Poor kids don’t have that advantage in life, and often they have to overcome parents who are in the way of their educational goals…

Ultimately people’s choices are their own. Nobody forces anyone to go to college, or not go. Nobody forces them to study, or not study. etc. They make that choice on their own. And given the nature of human beings, either way, they will be unhappy. Your zipcode isn’t your destiny, and it’s your choice to be happy or miserable with what you have achieved in life.

The most unhappy people I known my entire life are some of the most rich and successful, because they have no objective context and their life is entirely consumed by competition with their peers. I wouldn’t want their lives anymore than I’d want the lives of my drop-out deadbeat drug addict friends from high school’s lives.

The problem with lemmy and leftist (and right wing) thinking is you seem to think ones economic class is equivalent of their moral worth or ‘effort’ in life. It isn’t. Poor people are not necessarily worthy and hard working, anymore than rich people are.

People however, love to feel superior to others, so they create these narratives, pick a side they are ‘on’ and use it to ego-boost themselves in generalities whether those be statistical or anecdotal. Reality however, is far more complex. People mistake their bitterness towards other economic classes as a tale of good and evil.

And having been on both sides of poor/rich, I can tell you both sides hate each other for the same stupid reasons, and both are wrong. And when present with evidence of people like me, who bridge the gap, they basically tell us to go fuck ourselves rather than acknowledge we exist. And ironically they both sides I have ‘betrayed’ them or something, shit is so weird.

Yes for profit schools are scams.

But those places aren’t attract students who can get in elsewhere.

Like, sorry you choose to fuck around in high school and get Cs and Ds and now you have to go to a crappy shitty for-profit school because no real college will accept you… but that was your choice to make. Also your choice to be foolish enough to by swayed by marketing and bullshit.

It does not have to be an investment. Plenty of people go to college for free.

The only people who freak out about it being in investment are those who have to pay full freight, and those folks already have money and huge advantages in life, even if they personally don’t feel that way about their life. They also typically tend to be upper middle class types who are paranoid about money and have internalized the concept that if you aren’t constantly building wealth you are ‘wasting’ money. That concept isn’t as common among the poor or the old money rich, who don’t treat wealth accumulation as a ‘High Score’ you are trying to achieve in life.

Nobody at my school cried harder than the kids who had no loans and were so angry their parents had to ‘sell stock’, and they were especially bitter at people who got free rides or financial aid, whose families had like 1/10 of their parents wealth.

I have family who are wealthy who are incredibly bitter about having to pay 80K a year to attend a college… and they act like they have no other choice, even though their children were offered free tuition to state schools. But they are ‘too good’ to attend a public college, and they’d rather incessantly feel angry and aggrieved at how ‘unfair’ life is to them even though they have millions of dollars in the bank.

or you go to business school and you learn how to manipulate and corrupt and exploit others.

I also don’t know about you, but people’s critical thinking skills tend to disappear when those skills get in the way of their own profit.

The problem is folks think just showing up was the ticket to being wealthy.

Everyone told me my life was ‘done’ once I got into college, like as in college will let you coast the rest of your life. They were 250% wrong. I also had some friends in high school who failed out of college because that’s how they approached it.

Truth is regardless of your wealth, effort is needed to learn things. You either make that effort, or you don’t. A lot of people wealthy or not, refuse to make the effort.

College isn’t a scam. It’s just something people say to cope with their inability to go, or their mistakes they made when they attended.

The quality of your education is mostly a product of your own personal efforts and investments in that education. Plenty of crappy schools have excellent students who get great jobs.

The passivity of your question belies a problematic attitude that college is a ‘investment’ that must give you a financial return. It can, but it won’t do necessarily unless you seek a job-focused specialized education in a lucrative field w/ many job openings, like petroleum engineering.

i had an ex who did this. Lost all interest in sex with her when she started doing it.