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Joined 19 days ago
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Cake day: October 14th, 2025

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  • I think comparison can be accompanied by misery but I don’t think it’s inevitable. I don’t know if it’s possible to go your whole life and not compare yourself to anyone, ever, on any metric. Some people are better than I am at some things, and I learn by comparing myself to them. I think the trick is to not condense it all down into a single spectrum. I mean that for broad moral judgements (e.g. “I am a better person than my boss”) as well as in particular domains (“My co-worker is a worse coder than I am”). I think that type of quick judgement can always be peeled apart and analyzed, and learned from, and I think that resolves a lot of the tension that typically comes from comparison.






  • Not OP but I was in a similar situation. Whole family was poor, white, Christian, Republican, listened to Rush Limbaugh (and the horde of soundalikes) on the radio in the car every morning on the way to school and everywhere else we went. I don’t think I ever really bought in but when you’re a kid there’s just so much about the world you have to take on faith, often because you don’t know there are other options besides the defaults you grew up with. Eventually you get around to questioning things and the foundations start to crumble. For me the first domino was that I couldn’t really square why god would make people gay if being gay was a sin, and they didn’t really seem to be doing any harm, even the very abstract “sanctity of marriage” argument kinda falls off once you see that het people get unlimited “violating the sanctity of marriage” passes and queer folks get automatic damnation. After that more foundational assumptions started to fall away and I drifted further from the church over time until I became the heathen radical socialist that shames the memory of my god-fearing parents to this very day.




  • Kinda. I definitely had hamburger helper back in the 80s, but kit meals were a luxury we could only sometimes afford. Necessity is often the mother of culinary invention but even among “the poor” there’s some variability in cash and time (and information availability) constraints, and things like hamburger helper (cheap but not the cheapest, but also quick and easy to make) have been a fixture alongside the true broke-ass “we need food and have basically zero money” recipes.