There's a lot of things in life I don't understand and I'm okay with not understanding them. Growing up I had quite a few unique interests that other kids didn't share with me, I liked to draw, I liked to play certain games and I liked to think about things that normal kids that age maybe wouldn't, or it's at least something I think now looking back. For most things I've been okay with "being different", like most teenagers were interested in mopeds and then after getting into cars and spending a lot of money on getting from A to B in the coolest looking way or best sounding or fastest, etc, while many of them had no B and the whole point of it was driving around and chilling. While I get how cruising is fun and relaxing, I realized that for many of these people this was their "end-game" so to speak, having a nice car, getting a nice girl (potentially thanks to the nice car), keeping that nice job after getting a good enough education and then potentially raising a family and that's it. I was never really interested in that scenario myself.
Now you may think I'm a "free-spirit" or whatever people call nomads these days but for most of my life I didn't travel much if at all. I'm not that interested in traveling for the sake of traveling, sure it's nice to be able to a bit more now but I still feel it's not worth it often unless there's something that needs to be done that requires the traveling, i.e. not for vacation/amusement. I'm usually content with just being at home and maybe trying to do less work for a while as there's plenty of things to do online. This point reminds me that I should also mention computers/the internet pretty much consumed my life ever since I got our first one at the age of 12 or so. Gaming was still the focus but it moved from doing it on consoles/handhelds to the PC.
Now I don't remember exactly when, but while playing WoW and some players in the guild were talking about buying gold for the new expansion because they wanted to max out their enchants and pots/elixirs and stuff to be optimized for raids. I was gonna buy some with them but decided to just grind it out instead of risking losing my account I had spent quite some time on. They never got banned but they were talking about the process, how they used paypal to send this random email address $5 and got thousands of gold in exchange, more than they'll ever need for only $5. I started wondering how these gold farmers were able to get that much gold together and sell it for that cheap. I learned about gold farms, some in China that were being run in inhuman conditions, letting people literally manually farm gold for 16 hours a day and then sleeping in a sleeping bag under the PC table for 8 hours. It wasn't that they were using bots, since that would get them reported and banned, but they were literally manually farming gold, spending 18 hours of their 24 daily hours grinding it out. So how come they sold so much of it for only $5 I wondered, thinking the minimum hourly pay in Finland was something like €5 at the time. Well, turns out it's still better than no income and gold farms were quite competitive at the time I guess.
I spent some time scouring the internet of ways to earn, going through things like paid2click or some dumb stuff that'd give you $.001 each time you clicked on an ad or solved a captcha and once you obtained the minimum $2-5 you could withdraw it to your paypal. No matter how fast you were or how many tabs you could open without your pc running out of memory to load those ads and wait to claim your reward, it wasn't worth it long term, especially for someone living in a country with decent wages, but I could understand how it could've been for others.
This random interest got me to find out about Bitcoin in 2013, but let's not go down that storyline now as this post wasn't meant to be about that nor was it meant to be about anything I've written so far, really. Just thought a backstory of my experiences and evolution as a person might give you a better idea of why I feel the way I feel about what I'm going to say next.
There's people out there, some I know personally, some I assume and some others tell me exist, that live paycheck to paycheck on their own volition basically. I'm not talking about the struggling american middle-class or other working people who just can't find work in cheaper cities, etc. I mean people who know their monthly income, but choose to spend close to everything anyway on things that aren't necessary. I'm talking things that really, really aren't necessary.
Imagine people in their twenties spending all day at the mall, in a coffeeshop or some other places where you "hang out" with friends and family. Let's not even assume they spend all day but they go there often and spend their money on things there, say starbucks, fast food, drinks/alcohol, etc. Like, I really don't get these people.
I've thought about it for some time, trying to get into their mindset and step ino their shoes of what lead them to live their lives like this. Are they pursuing something that requires this spending? Like, I would understand a single man/woman spending money in a bar/club on alcohol every weekend or maybe even weekdays depending on what kind of city you live in, if their main interest is to find that partner that'll get them to the next stage in life. I'm talking more about those who just hang out and "have fun" and still decide to spend everything they earn on a constant basis without the hanging out or having fun ever taking them anywhere. Are they just content with life the way it is? Are they okay with this being their life until they hit a certain age, find a certain person and shift their priorities through family creation? What if something were to happen, an accident, a sickness, anything that would require them to front some money towards getting better and paying for assistance.
It just seems like the whole savings generation is diminishing and we find ourselves with majority being spenders instead. As I'm thinking about their mindset, I've even considered that maybe they understand inflation is working against them, fiat is a scam, etc, and that could maybe be a reason they don't want to save but choose to spend instead. If that's the case then hey, I can't complain cause they may not be fully wrong. I also get that statistically they may not reach some of their unique goals that'd set them aside from doing just that what they do today or settle the way the majority of others do with family/work. Maybe it's a mix of it all where they both realize the odds are against them and that the monetary system and most of the economics are also not in their favor and that saving a little and investing that won't change much.
I don't know, I mean I was in the same situation not too long ago where if crypto just went dead I wouldn't have been able to survive on my savings for too long. I just know that I didn't spend money for what I consider dumb/unnecessary things and would rather save it instead. It feels that this generation thinks a bit differently about it. There may be a lot of factors involved but hearing how popular "quick loans" are I really wonder why some people choose this.
Could be that if I wasn't involved in crypto/hive where your "savings" literally earn you interest/rewards and potentially eventually give you the power/freedom to fulfil your goals I'd be doing the same thing today. Maybe the knowledge I've acquired and witnessed myself has made me question their decisions even harder and find them unbelievable at times.
Makes me wonder if people would think differently/change if they were also provided with these opportunities that we have.
It also brings me back to my story early on, where earning basically anything online was so, so, hard, especially if you didn't have any required skills to provide in exchange. It makes me wonder why people get so weird about Hive and the rewardspool at times when the change is so big and without risking your own money I doubt there's other similar opportunities out there to earn these days either.
I saw a tweet earlier by someone with close to 100k followers and quite literally constant activity, replied to most comments in his tweets, tweeted all the time, etc, and he earned $133 last month from ads on a platform owned by literally one of the richest people on this planet. While here with a little effort and our tiny 100m marketcap people can earn way more. I know it's not great comparison with ads but it's really something to think about how Hive can scale and that the main way these other platforms reward their userbase is something Hive apps wouldn't need to exclude forever and instead ad it like the cherry on top.
I do wonder how Hive would affect and change people if they found out and stuck around long enough to learn, at the same time I also wonder how a bigger hive would change the older users and how they behave.
Oh well, enough ramblings/ranting for today.