Ahahahahaha i feel your pain. My last 2 identical beloved pairs of work BDUs i got at Goodwill for $5 each. Now, granted, they were 511 brand, so as close to indestructable as you can get. I must have mended each pair 20 times before i finally allowed myself to buy new ones. And i probably would still be mending them…

Actually another hard part of that situation is how you use the items. For example, I’ve sucked it up and bought an expensive pair of shoes only to realize after a couple wears, that no, they were not going to “break in”, I just wasted hundreds of dollars on shoes hoping they’d last a long time and they will, because…

I’m now financially completely secure and I still wear clothes with (mended) holes in them. Over the years I have gotten very good at mending and it just seems like such a waste to throw them out over a few holes. And this even though the time I spend mending them is worth more than the clothes themselves!

Having grown up poor, and struggled to pay my way through school, I relate to this. My husband makes fun of my holey underwear and socks, but since those don’t show (and thus don’t affect my professional appearance), I really struggle with replacing these until they are absolutely and completely worn out.

Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives deals with this exact thing. It’s a really interesting read.

The problem was that since I had so few clothes, I wore them out faster. I’d wear the same pair of pants multiple times a week. I’d have to wash them more often. Normal wear and tear happened at an accelerated rate.

An employer once described that phenomenon as “shopping like a Republican”. The implication being that all of them are rich enough to take advantage of that scenario, and shop less often.

This is such a hard thing for me to get used to. I used to keep wearing clothes until they had noticeable holes in them. Faded, worn out, didn’t matter. As long as I could still wear them. I never bought more than one, maybe two pairs of pants at once.

Very relatable. I still mentally justify things like an Xbox by the ‘avoided costs syndrome’ - if I play Xbox for 10 hours instead of, say, going to 5 movies, then I’ve ‘justified’ it. It feels like I have to go through mental gymnastics for anything I buy for myself - but when I buy things for other people, I never…

Very good article. One other example related to your “still feeling poor”:

And that reply reinforces that perhaps they aren’t the most friendly/empathetic type. Not someone I need a kid ‘learning’ from.

The thing about the ‘well they would have found another way’ crap is that it isn’t anymore true than your claim that including suicides is crap.

Uh this is specious reasoning. The risk of my children getting killed by a gun on a play date is independent of other risks, such as whether they might get hit by a car, or by choking, or by an earthquake. A responsible person tries to limit all risks with reasonable precautions. A blanket ban on letting my children…

That is not true. Limiting access to guns will affect those who have a short-term down turn by removing a method with a high perceived level of certainty and short planning stage, much like limiting access to lethal drugs does.

Well, maybe if your dumb Limey asses hadn’t cratered the world’s economy, people wouldn’t be pointing at you and calling you stupid racists.

Classic Trumpkin. The internet is not your safe space, get used to it. You’ll need to by November, when your dear leader will be hilariously slaughtered.

You do realize that much of the issues in the Middle East are a result of the UK and the rest of Europe carving up those territories for themselves with no regard to the fact that they forced groups together who hate each other.

Heh, I guess if you make that they litmus test, then never since nations only existed in the Middle East after the end of European colonialism. Kingdoms cooperated together. Generally at the point of a sword, but that’s the same story across human history. Europe only stopped murdering the fuck out of each other 70…

You might want to take a middle eastern history course some time. Or hell, just fall into a Wikipedia hole.

Maybe — JUST MAYBE — Clarkson’s not as dumb or far-right-wing as the character he plays on TV.