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Authenticity in the age of the grift

Authenticity in the age of the grift


Another day, another scam

PRM and the BIG MAD

Mr. Tucker has watched a Youtube channel called Punk Rock MBA periodically for a few years now. I watched a few videos myself but since it really isn’t music I dig, I never subscribed. In September 2024, he announced that he was leaving, posted one last video and then grabbed his toys and went home.

Ok, sure. That’s fair. Shit gets old. He’s onto other things now.

But when Mr. Tucker went to read the comments on the last video, he discovered some very, very, angry people. I guess an interview with the Punk Rock MBA guy dropped, gained traction and pissed a LOT of people off. This is the interview:

The TL;DR of it all is: he was only in it for the money. He was good at marketing, figured out what drew people in to watch, like and subscribe to his channel and when he met his financial goals, he peaced out. Some people were very understandably pissed off.

Although I’ve never been emotionally invested in his content, I can understand why people are. The key here is that our entire cultural communities are based on parasocial relationships. We get attached to communities and invested in like-minded people in a way that we feel some kind of ownership over them. So when they do things we find shocking, we feel angry and betrayed. Social media has ramped the problems with parasocial relationships up to 11.

Thanks to social media, the line that has historically been drawn between famous people and the Hoi Polloi has been deep: rarely did you know something about your favourite stars outside of magazines and tv. You never had access to people whose art you enjoyed like you do today online. There was this firewall of gatekeepers who fed us scraps of information via their content. But now everyone creates content and there is no longer that barrier.

Of course, there have always been fans who have gone too far. Keanu Reeves had his house broken into by a fan and John Lennon was murdered by a fan, to name some high profile examples. But these were before the internet had an absolute chokehold on interactions between fans and high profile people. In fact, with the advent of social media it has become a way to GET famous if you manage to get a viral post or two off the ground.

Chappell Roan enters the chat

Chappell Roan is a very interesting case. She started by playing small gigs and trying to leverage social media to gain traction for her music – like many artists who market their talents. But unlike 99.9% of artists, she had LARGEST leap to fame that I think anyone has ever had in such a short time. This does not mean she appeared out of nowhere – she was opening for Vance Joy 7 years ago and has been trying to get her music out there for a long time. But this chart has made the rounds and it is important to note just how huge she got in less than a year.

I feel like this essay by Eliza McLamb sums up a lot of it (found via Bernstein’s podcast, which is worth the watch: A Bit Fruity). What do you do with a stratospheric rise to fame? How do you manage it psychologically? In this day and age, the retort is always, “But this is what you asked for. It’s the price of fame.” But people are stalking her family at work, they’re stalking her and apparently she has even been sexually assaulted. I think we all need to figure out where the line is and unfortunately because some people are unable to even see that there is a line, the line must be very clear. Even then, as Eliza mentions in the podcast, Chappell Roan asking this of people is, “like trying to hold back the ocean” but she also says that Roan’s coming out and setting this boundary may carve a path for other artists in the future to also set boundaries for their own sanity.

The lines get blurry quickly from “big gay sleepover party” to “this is just my job” when your fanbase grows by millions and millions of people so quickly. Naturally, the parasocial relationship that drew people into her fanbase now feels like a betrayal when they learn that CR is not their friend and that the big hug they thought they were getting is now just an entertainment machine.

It’s Britney, bitch

We collectively have gone through a huge reckoning with the price of fame, most recently with the Britney Spears conservatorship. But I don’t think we have learned our lesson.

The entire world drove her insane, then we blamed her for what we did for her. The found of TMZ, Harvey Levin famously said, “Britney is gold. She is crack to our readers. Her life is a complete train-wreck, and I thank God for her every day.” This was a very normal thing to say in the Noughties but now it feels just gross, knowing what we know now. Heck, I didn’t even pay attention to her, or to magazines or tv and media in that decade and I still feel gross about being a part of the culture machine that abused her, allowed her children to be taken away by her lying ex-husband, forced birth control on her and then led to her indentured servitude where she was forced to generate money for her abusive family. If you have covid memory loss or live under a rock, Wikipedia has a great synopsis of this funhouse of horrors.

When all this came out we were horrified. #FreeBritney indeed. Freed she was from her conservatorship but fans still regularly call authorities to do wellness checks on her. I remember once I was served up a video of her dancing with a knife (her videos are mostly of her dancing!) and people were freaking out – and it was in the ramp up to Halloween! It was clearly meant to be seasonally-themed! But it’s yet another X against parasociality in the age of concern trolling. We get to directly affect her life by calling the cops to do a wellness check instead of TMZ being the intermediary of trauma…oh goody?

Blurred lines

Social media has commodified authenticity and I think for a long time there was sincerity there but it couldn’t stay that way when there was money to be made. Like the optimism in the 90s that the internet would be the great equalizer, I think people believed social media would do that as well, especially with art. Artists could build fanbases[1], get their art or music out to a worldwide audience and make a viable go at becoming somewhat famous but without the abusive intermediaries from before. I truly think it started to go downhill when these sites moved from chronological to algorithmic-based feeds. But not even the drama of the Cambridge Analytica scandal made people angry enough to leave.

But like frogs in the proverbial pot that is set to boil, these platforms demanded more and more. More reels/short videos, a more robust posting schedule, more engagement in the comments and DMs. The algorithm favours divisive posts and so the posts became more divisive. We were constantly feeding the beast and the beast devoured our time and energy but gave us less and less in return. People were complaining about shadow bans and other shady practices. Artists started complaining that they couldn’t do art and also keep up with the intense posting schedules that these platforms demanded of them just so that they would have their content served up to …the people who signed up for, and who actually want to see, their content. It boggles from a human point of view but not from an economic one: these platforms need you to keep churning out more and more free content for them so they can keep eyeballs on their apps and the advertising dollars keep rolling in. So if you aren’t creating content for them, they’re going to throttle what content you do share. So if the authentic folks are throwing in the towel, who is left?

Nature abhors a vacuum

Grifters. Grifters like PRM.

These folks peddle an air of authenticity and meanwhile clean up in the background on topics they just don’t give a flying fuck about. Humans are designed to trust and for a long time the internet sold us this narrative that you could do what you love AND be rewarded for it. So we just trusted that the creators who made videos about the things we loved, ALSO loved those things. We craved community and like-minded people but what we got was clever marketers who are sussing out what the people want and giving it to them.

But should we be mad at PRM? Afterall, we got the entertainment we were promised. He released finely tweaked videos devoid of opinion and substance so that we could imprint whatever feelings or beliefs we wanted to onto them. You have to admire the marketing skill, to be honest.

But conversely, he knew exactly what he was capitalizing on: people feeling a parasocial connection to a creator that they could relate to. An expert who loved the same music as they did and someone who felt comforting to watch. There is a reason that he wasn’t up front about his strategy from the get-go: he knew that people weren’t just looking for videos, they were looking for a community.

It’s fundamentally a pig butchering scam but cast with a wider net and no victims except the attention and time you spent watching the ads on his videos. Oh, and the betrayal some people feel for trusting.

The same need for community that Chappell Roan and PRM leveraged had two completely different outcomes: one flew too close to the sun like Icarus and got burned, and the other little piggy went “wee, wee, wee all the way home.”

Small f famous

Of course, between BIG B Britney and BIG C Chappell & me (not famous at all) is myriad of somewhat famous people who live a life that Eliza McLamb (in her essay linked above) calls, “cross the street famous.” The folks who can mostly go about their daily lives but who have 50K-2M followers on a variety of platforms. They can do their own groceries or go to a restaurant but at a film or music festival they’d probably get swarmed. I feel like these folks are in a more precarious situation in terms of stalkers or fan demands: they can survive on their art, but they can’t really afford a security detail.

I see a lot of these in-between folks bowing out of having an online presence for the most part. They’re still posting shows and events but I feel like if they don’t have to be a part of the social media circus, they won’t be. There used to be more personal twitter accounts, tumblr blogs and Instagram accounts that had behind-the-scene content that fans loved. But a lot of it has dried up in recent years and I think that is because some fans are so unhinged that it feels invasive. Parasociality has made the comments get weirder and weirder and I don’t blame folks for retreating from posting as fans (and haters) believe that they should be able to barf up the most horrible takes for the world to see.

A great example in that category of famous-but-can-probably-still-do-groceries I would put a band like Motionless in White[2]. A pretty solid following, a bunch of albums, tons of years of grinding/touring & they’ve built a pretty loyal fan base. A band in that category of folks who are big in their own genre but unheard of by most people on the outside.

This (shaky, poor quality but yet excellent) interview highlights that when you are small f famous, you still reach a point where you get all of the craziness of fame but without the benefits of big F fame. Of course, I will point out that Chappell Roan is a petite woman and Chris Motionless is a very tall man but this nutter called HIS MOM. She found their drummer’s phone number and even when confronted did NOT STOP. I have no idea how or if this situation was resolved but the absolute audacity of this person. Worse, the realization that you are dealing with someone who may not even have the capacity to understand is a mindfuck, too: what do you do with someone who doesn’t even comprehend that their behaviour is scary AF? It’s a funny story that makes for great interview fodder but there is darkness, too:

Look, I want to say for the record that I couldn’t really tell you what most of the musicians I enjoy look like out in the world, and I don’t follow them on social media. This is not some edgy flex, I am certainly not cooler than thou (and may I remind you that I trip over my own feet with alarming regularity?) I just don’t know them & I probably don’t want to. While I love music (what kind of psycho does not?) I have just learned that the phrase “never meet your idols” is just sound advice[3]. I would rather not care to learn that people whose music/movies/books I relate to are just unpleasant people, generally, let alone discover that they are absolute monsters[4]. But I get that some people make artists and scenes their entire personalities and I get why that happens: humans need community and for a lot of people that isn’t available to them in the meat space.

I know people think CR is a monster for boosting her career via social media, encouraging parasociality and then turning around and telling people to stop talking to her. But it is absolutely not the same when you have 20 thousand followers vs. millions. To put it into context, she has 6M people following her on instagram alone. That means that if she spent 1 minute with each of them, it would take her 4166 days or 11.41 years to greet fans. Who has that kind of time?

Paywall attention to the man behind the curtain

Clearly, boundaries are in order. But there are no clear boundaries when in the west we’ve watched Princess Diana get run off the road & killed in a car accident while being chased by Paparazzi. The laws are also still in flux in terms of rights to privacy. (But some scholars are arguing for better definitions)

In the CR debate, many people agreed with her in principal but disagreed that she shouldn’t expect people to not recognize her in public and talk to her. Like most things in the past 20 years, the internet has made things incredibly murky and having a social media presence where you’ve leveraged people’s connection to you, it seems very difficult to walk it back now that you’ve achieved superstardom. I think in CR’s case she had probably slogged it out in the trenches for a long time believing she may only reach small f famous so she was vastly unprepared for the Fame Slingshot ride to launch her straight into the stratosphere. It’s clear in her video that she is exhausted and angry that her life & her family to come under siege by rabid fans and unfortunately, the normal fans get swept up into the fray as well. I think that is where the disconnect is: normal people feel they shouldn’t be punished for the behaviours of a few bonkers folks but unfortunately: #yesallfans.

We have come to expect 24-7 entertainment for free, or for very little (being served up ads). We feel incredibly entitled to having everything from videos, music and art on demand when we want it (and we want it now!). So it’s not surprising that people feel entitled to creep into the DMs of, or demand hugs from, their favourite artists. It’s the culture we’ve created. It’s the kind of culture where clever marketers like PRM win, and art loses.

Since I have already simped for capitalism by having a blog marginally related to personal finance, I don’t think it will shock anyone to see that I think the only solution to this issue is: make people pay up.

I know it seems crass to reduce a fanbase to a monetary transaction, but I think it is the only fair way to manage. There are not enough hours in the day to answer every DM, meet every fan, and take every selfie with fans outside the venue. I am seeing more and more bands do fan meet-and-greets (and those usually come with other perks as well) or panels/talks at festivals and I’m not mad about it. I think KISS started it, ComicCons popularized it, and many bands are now doing it as well[5]. It always amazes me when people criticize these sorts of events for being a money grab but I ask these people: do you work for free? Yeah, probably not. A tour is work. I guarantee you when you are at work dreaming of all of the other things you could be doing, bands are also doing that except they don’t get to go home to their families after. I have many friends who love their jobs & even some who get amazing perks like travel and fine dining but even they wouldn’t do it for free.

You can love what you do. You can appreciate your fanbase. You can also recognize that there are only so many hours in the day and so much energy you have to give. It’s normal to admit that you are human and have human limits. Fans who say shit like this DM Eliza McLamb posted overstate their contribution:

You got what you paid for: a concert. What you are asking for: free overtime and emotional labour.

“You are not allowed to yell at me about this unless you pay me. That is the new rule.”


You bet I hit that subscribe button so fast!

What a delight it was to open BlueSky tonight and see this amazing exchange. I, myself, have used the line, “I don’t take homework assignments from strangers” whenever some Tech Bro wanted to have a Bad Faith argument on social media but I think this is way more effective.

Many more creators are putting their content either on Nebula, or in Patreon (and others) because of the penchant for trolls to do the most unhinged things from swatting to en masse reporting of videos, triggering demonetization. It hasn’t solved 100% of the issue – Contrapoints had to repost a video to their Patreon after a mass effort took down her unlisted GamerGate video. Fill your boots, I guess. She got it back up AND she has your $5. Win/win in the end, I suppose.

Caveat emptor

I don’t have a solution for “bad” actors like PRM, however. Trying to police authenticity online is trying to get grampa to stop talking to scammers on his landline. Grifters aren’t playing by the same rules. But if we go into it thinking that every creator is like a boy band: a fictional creation of a clever PR person, it should be ok. The Sex Pistols were, in fact, a clever creation and we still consider them a cultural touchstone…and who doesn’t love the Spice Girls?

We don’t get angry with journalists who write articles about things they don’t care about and I don’t think we need to make creators our entire personality, either. I mean sure, it is much easier to create something if you care about the topic but it isn’t a requirement. I think we have also blurred the lines between artist and creator. Nothing on PRM’s channel could actually be considered art. But people inferred art and inferred community where there was none. I actually feel sorry for people who are just trying to get a foothold in art or in even creating informative channels because the future isn’t looking very authentic. In a post-truth world, we should probably all assume that everything could just be an elaborate ruse.

Fundamentally, people are angry with PRM because they’re angry with themselves for getting sucked in. I think – especially after the last week – it’s time for us to realize that the only winners in the game of parasocial relationships are tech companies. Everything feels like it’s circling the drain and I wish I had a solution for artists and creators to get their stuff out there without all of us hopping onto the hamster wheel of selling our personal information and pulling down on the endless scrolling slot machine.

So Usenet or Blogrolls, anyone?


[1]Not just art, there have been a lot of people made famous by social media and Tim Ferriss talks about almost being kidnapped when he was still low on the famous totem pole. He wrote 11 Reasons Not to Become Famous in response to his experiences.

[2]So some background here: Metal isn’t a genre I know ANYTHING about. It’s Mr. Tucker’s thing and he enjoys different styles of the genre (why are there so many!?). I grew up with the Punk/Goth/Industrial kids and the Eldest was born in 2008 so I missed all of the fun metalmusic stuff that came out of that era. But I came across Shonalika’s video on how Goth is White which led to Gender, Power and Heavy Metal…and now all I’ve been listening to is In This Moment and Motionless in White for a month now. Kinda a genre made for refugees of those scenes, tbqh. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[3] I read Whores: An Oral Biography of Perry Farrell and Jane’s Addiction when it came out. Way to retroactively ruin your own childhood!

[4]As I write this, Neil Gaiman is currently being exposed for being an absolute shitbag and quite frankly I am grateful to have never really resonated with his work as a teen. Gen X friends are positively beside themselves this week.

[5]I am not going to touch the state of the music industry here with its 360 contracts, nor will I address how promoters are offering VIP packages sans-band-meet.

(I honestly wish I remembered the HTML for footnotes but I don’t. I am having a hard enough time remembering that HTML writes “centre” the American way & it’s my #1 code mistake)

It’s you, PF community, not me

It’s you, PF community, not me

One of the things I have done this past December is cut down on the amount of Personal Finance blogs/Substacks, videos and podcasts that I consume. At the end of the day, most of the content out there is just splitting hairs for nerds or a rehashing of the same advice. I still enjoy it but honestly, I am well past the point where I GAF* about whether or not, for example, people should buy XEQT or VEQT and save cents on the dollar when we live in a world where most people struggle to even save $100. That isn’t the bottleneck for most people, the basics are. This isn’t shade to those creators – some people love those debates and love reading and writing about them. But I am done with the made-up hand-wringing of nothingburger questions.

Part of this is because we’ve made it: we’ve achieved our goals and quite frankly this content hasn’t been enjoyable for a while, so I am going to just stop. It used to be that I enjoyed reading that content because it felt nice to read people’s individual struggles when I was going through my own. But the other part is that the core tenets of personal finance haven’t changed in a really long time. Sure, the methodology and access to investments has changed but the basics of how to manage money has not really moved the needle since OG DJ Chuck D said, “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty-pound ought and six, result misery.”

Another part of this is that I am just so sick and tired of the constant ads, amazon affiliate links, pop-ups and course offerings shilled by every website. Again, no shade to those creators at ALL: the bills must be paid and somewhere along the way we have collectively decided that user-hostile websites & affiliate links was the way we would pay for content. I actually prefer when creators write books because it feels satisfying to hold a book in my hot little hands (I have also bought books for my kindle, so that works, too). I think I just enjoy having all of the info in one place, offline. But it’s become off-putting when I hit a website where it’s pop-ups and ads skewing the window and there are so many affiliate links, calls to action and mediocre course offerings/coaching** that consists of someone just editing a mish mash of content you can find for free online and giving it a fancy new name, “It’s not a budget! We hates budgets, don’t we Precious! It’s Personal Accountability Tool!”

Gollum GIFfrom Gollum GIFs

PSYCH! It’s actually a budget!

This is also just discussing people who I actually do give out good advice – established, intelligent folks who give advice that I may not agree with but is generally well thought out and competent. On the flip side, we have these TikTok Finluencers who have the most unhinged hot takes (enragement is engagement!) whose existence I generally try and ignore.

Finally, as I mentioned earlier: I am spending more time in the meat space. What happens when you achieve your goals? As it turns out, for me, the answer is to live a bigger life learning new things, doing more art, hanging out with more friends and trying new things. I no longer HAVE to sit in front of a computer for work so I don’t have the need to take short breaks to read posts or to listen to podcasts while I work. I think I kept up with a lot of websites and podcasts because it was good to have a few things in my back pocket to keep my brain busy when I was stuck in place. Then I just didn’t cull when I retired.

I eventually did start to scale back the content I was mainlining and worked on my social media use as well. Now, I have nothing but facebook now (marketplace and local communities keep me hooked and it’s just basically an address book now) which I only access by desktop.

I suspect I should write up what I believe are the core tenets of personal finance. So maybe that will be next. Or maybe my absolute frustration with Substack and the complete lack of viable business models for content. Or maybe authenticity vs. income.

Oh, and if you’ve read this far – Happy New Year!

*Give a fuck – shout out to my Oldhomies
**As an aside, I know a disproportionate amount of people who lost their jobs and became life coaches

Dear social media, it’s you, not me

Dear social media, it’s you, not me

After seeing the most eye-rolling, terminally online crap hot take this week, I made a decision: Instagram was next up on the list of shit that had to go.

I went ahead and deactivated Instagram and deleted the app from my phone. I discovered I was picking my phone up way too much to be distracted by videos and memes. Social Media has become a content regurgitation factory where so much of the content I am served is gleaned from twitter, threads, reddit and tiktok. I figure about 1/3 of it is also things I’ve already seen. So I am going to try this for a bit (maybe a month?) and see how it works out. Like most people, I use the phone when I am bored and anxious and Insta is my go-to (because I am old and don’t have tiktok).

Like many people, I am also wrestling with how social media fits into my life. I was reading this Spyglass article and this quote really stuck with me:

“People have long joked (and not joked!) that using social media makes them feel worse… Yes, there are funny tweets, but that’s increasingly because the network is a hive of stolen meme content from elsewhere (or other Xitter users). You see the same things that get engagement pop up over and over again just completely ripped off by other users. So even funny things feel bad!”

(The Bloomberg piece it references also is worth reading: The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X)

I will be honest: as soon as I retired from the working world I deleted both Twitter and LinkedIn. But I am so emmeshed into the Meta properties that I find it difficult to extract myself. My Instagram use is pretty high even though I have seen the same funny videos, the same screenshots of funny tweets, reddit posts and the same hot takes over and over and over again. Because our personal social media account is a microcosm, I find so much content is shared and re-shared by many of my friends. So I may see the same video in different people’s stories 3+ times a day. That’s harmless when it’s a cute cat but how many times do I need to see violent or political content? Probably not that much. I probably don’t even need to see the cute cat that much, if I am honest. I figure since there is so much regurgitation in the things I see, maybe up to 1/3 of my time is spent rewatching things I have seen over-and-over-and-over again. I realized when I was going through my facebook memories that I had seen the same meme make the rounds again in the past week. I don’t even remember posting it the first time! That’s how many there are roaming around and 99% of them have the same qualities: funny but forgettable.

As for Facebook, I would completely divest but Nextdoor hasn’t really taken off in my area so all of my community info is gleaned from Facebook. Also, it still is the best way to organize events and sell things locally. I do however find myself de-coupling as much as possible. I have gone back through my memories and made as many as I can private posts and now I make anything I do post private within 24 hours. But I am posting rarely as facebook is just basically an address book to me now – and it shows. I have seen the reach of my posts plummet over the past few years the less I post. I also find I am not getting notifications like I used to. Sure, facebook used to hold back some notifications so that when you came back later it would show that you had a little red circle in the notification corner (from hours ago) and therefore you’d get more addicted to it. But the less you engage with the platform the less it seems to bother to tell you that you have anything at all. If I am waiting for a reply, it’s best to go to the post in question to see if there is one because facebook rarely tells me about it. It seems to be ghosting me as much as I am ghosting it.

Hilariously, as I was writing this a friend of mine posted this article to facebook (natch!) about the AI spamming happening on Meta’s platforms: Where facebook’s AI slop comes from. So another nail in the enshittification coffin for social media.

So now I have no social media on my phone at all and no Instagram accounts available to even access via browser. It is insidious though: since deleting the app, I find my fingers automatically go right to the place that the button once was. Muscle memory is pretty strong so I figure it may be a while until my brain finds no reward there and stops trying. Until then, I find myself staring down at my phone wondering why I opened the blur tool for photos.

I am cutting down on blog reading & some links

I am cutting down on blog reading & some links


What I am currently reading

I have so many links in a variety of formats that I have enjoyed and have saved to make a post about. But by the time I get around to it, the links are generally older and posted elsewhere. Here is a few from this week:

“Dishabituation can be achieved in two ways. The first is to take a break—remove yourself from your environment for a period of time, however short, and then return to it without making any permanent changes…The second way to dishabituate…is to insert variety into your routines.” How to fight habituation

The U curve of happiness, is now a hump.Youth mental health declines in 82 countries

When life hands you unaffordable housing, build your own with friends.

“More chaos is coming, I fear. AI tools are making it easier and easier to manipulate images and videos. Every day, it gets easier to generate content that plays into people’s perceptual biases and confirms their prior beliefs — and easier to warp perceptions of the present and possibly even change memories of the past.” The internet peaked in 2015

Speaking of which, How to object to Meta’s AI data usage. Is it convoluted AF? Yes.

Speaking of F’s: one of the best things I have read this year is this essay: A unified theory of fucks.

I have drastically cut down on my social media usage – including the amount of blogs I am reading & youtube videos I watch. While I love to read a variety of personal finance blogs, the ratio of relevant information to ads/sponsored products has tipped over into the “not worth the hassle” category. I realized this weekend that one Canadian blogger I read has a 50/50 ratio of content to referral links. UGH. Don’t get me wrong: I am glad people are out there making their bag producing informative content for people. It just really isn’t worth my time anymore to read it because there really isn’t much new out there. On top of that, Instagram is now testing unstoppable ads. I haven’t come across them yet but it just may be the nail in the coffin there as well. I am only really posting pics to the account related to this blog because my personal account is overrun with things I can’t do much about, as I have written before.

I remember Amy Dacyczyn (of The Tightwad Gazette fame) used to compare her newsletters to Weight Watchers. Her argument was that people generally knew how to lose weight like they knew how to be frugal but the value was in the community and seeing other people do it, too. I think for a long time I consumed a lot of content based on that premise: it confirmed what I already knew and I got to read about similar people on a similar path. But now we have solidified our investment strategy, saved enough for Mr. Tucker to retire, paid off our house, saved enough for the kid’s post-secondary etc. with no plans to really change things up. Most debates that occur in the Finfluencer community are faits accomplis for me, so they aren’t really decisions that I am wringing my hands over anymore.

For example, I always joke to Mr. Tucker that when Ramit Sethi runs out of ideas, he runs a new video about owning vs. renting. Don’t get me wrong – his content is amazing – but CHRIST ON A CRACKER please save me from ever consuming any content on owning vs. renting ever again. It’s a personal finance dead horse as far as I am concerned. Do definitely read his book and watch his podcasts on Tuesdays with couples. Those things are great, especially if you are just starting out or need to change course. But I own a house, the house is paid off, and while I will happily sell it and become a renter if I need to someday, for right now that isn’t changing. (also, if you want to hear a pro-ownership argument Karsten at ERN does a really detailed one with a lot of numbers. In fact, his content is also fantastic if you like getting into the weeds)

Also, it helps that June has been a super busy month for us so far. For some reason we decided last minute to sort out our storage room that hasn’t been touched since we moved in and join the community garage sale. So we spent a week of evenings cleaning and sorting stuff. We told the kids that they could split whatever we made & they each made around $55. Not bad. The rest got sent to friends, the thrift store, or organized in bins to sell when the weather turns (it’s hard to sell snowsuits when its 30C out). We also happened to discover that our toilet was leaking so we had that fixed before it became a HUGE problem. So a small victory there as well. On top of that, dragon boat practice is twice a week, and The Eldest has a series of band events and job training to do. The Youngest is graduating from middle school and they also have many end of year field trips and events. So it’s a busy time for everyone – especially Mr. Tucker who is the maestro of everything. So I haven’t even really had a ton of time to read online content.

But we have been adding more fun stuff into our budget & reducing friction in our lives. More on that another day.

Much ado about a veggie tray

Much ado about a veggie tray

Sometimes the local community groups online are just a gift that keeps on giving. Currently, many people in the city are up in arms about this $44.99 veggie platter at Metro (TikTok vid). Like! Most! Hysterical! Social Media! Posts! This video is simultaneously true and also misleading.

If you put on your thinking hat, you realize that while what she is staying is correct – a 2.7KG pre-prepped veggie tray is $44.99 – a few tricks of the eye and mind are happening here. Thankfully, you can just pop online and search for the veggie tray and find it on the grocery store’s website. Here it is, with similar trays for comparison:

What people don’t seem to realize is that in our heads we all are imagining the medium tray because that is the tray that is a> most available in the stores; b> the one more commonly purchased. It also doesn’t help that they make the trays fit into the same size of square in the photos on the website, even though in person they vary. Every potluck I have been to features the medium veggie and/or fruit tray so it is the most ubiquitous and almost every grocery store sells the same one. So it is a bit of a trick of the eye which you can notice when she puts her hand down on the tray briefly: it is much larger than the medium size.

If you run the numbers, the veggie tray costs you $1.67/100g. If you look at grape tomatoes alone, they are $1.76/100g and carrots are probably the cheapest at $0.79/100g. Both of these are easy to toss onto a tray (which also costs money) unlike the celery, broccoli and cauliflower that requires processing which costs labour, also not factored into the dramatic balking at the price*.

I think the funniest part about VEGGIETRAYGATE is that if you lay out all of the trays beside each other – like I have in the image above – you can see quite clearly that you get a better selection/value of veggies, with dip, for $1.47/100g. So in my head that is the biggest scam of this entire debacle: buying more in bulk is costing the consumer more money! Along with Shrinkflation, this is one of my biggest pet peeves because it is designed to use our minds and habits against us.

It doesn’t help that Canada also has a long history of bread price fixing and a tumultuous relationship with the qu’ils mangent de la brioche Weston family that can’t seem to stay out of the spotlight for very long much to the chagrin of their PR folks, I am sure. These are their veggie trays which are very similar:

I am also not arguing that grocery prices aren’t high – after 10 years of almost no inflation we seem to have had all of the inflation in a short time span and it hurts, especially for people with the lowest incomes**. I also get that not everyone wants to drill down and do the math on the unit price – but also: the f*ckin’ unit price is right on the sticker! If you are going to be BIG MAD about something than at least be BIG MAD about it truthfully. Personally, I am more than happy to pay $24.99 for a selection of 8 types of veggies and some dip if I am pressed for time and off to a potluck event. A pre-washed and pre-cut tray of veggies packaged up for easy transport isn’t a necessity either. You can just make your own or you can vote with your dollars and just walk away.

I spend $50 easily on drinks when I am out. It seems to me that $44.99 for 2.7kg of veggies is a way better deal.


*Minimum wage is $16.55 in Ontario

**Hilariously, the OG video was taken in one of the richest suburbs in my city

The great enshittification

The great enshittification

So I went on vacation last week to an all-inclusive resort. I haven’t been to a AIR since I was pregnant with the youngest -13 years ago – but I have been on luxury cruises and have stayed in high end hotels. I am currently working on a post about that but, I did write a fair but honest Tripadvisor review… that was promptly throttled. It took 3 days to “approve” my review so now it is buried 3 pages back while 5-star reviews were automatically approved. The review appeared after I made a scathing post on facebook. As the kids would say: SUS.

I did a bit of digging and it seems that I am not the only one who has experienced this phenomenon. Apparently Tripadvisor now partners with brands and that gives them more control over the kind of ratings & rankings they receive. After years of having a community-built model that enshrined trust in the website, it is now just another pay-to-play platform that prioritizes business over transparency.

This speaks to the larger phenomenon of what Cory Doctorow calls the “enshittification” of the internet. All of the platforms we have grown up with and contributed to have now been raked over by capitalism and our data and our eyeballs are sold to the highest bidder. Etsy is now just a slum of drop-shipping, Reddit (which, like Spotify, has never turned a profit) is selling its communities to the highest bidder to mine for AI, and even Bandcamp has been recently bought out and is moving towards maximizing profit and minimizing payouts to artists.

This topic seems to be ramping up lately, so here are some interesting links:

“We’re at the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users, where ultra-rich technologists tricked their customers into building their companies for free. And while the trade once seemed fair, it’s become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly.” Are we watching the internet die?.

“Viewers may hardly see MrBeast having fun in his videos because he’s not actually having a good time. In podcasts, Donaldson tells hosts that he goes so hard, he won’t stop working until he burns out and isn’t able to do anything at all. With a laugh, he admits that he has a mental breakdown “every other week.” If he ever stops for a breather, he says, he gets depressed. MrBeast is so laser-focused on generating content on YouTube that he describes his personality as “YouTube.” He acknowledges that this brutal approach to videos, which has cratered many creators over the years, is not healthy. “People shouldn’t be like me. I don’t have a life, I don’t have a personality,” he said in a podcast recorded in 2023.” The end of the MrBeast era: Jimmy Donaldson warped YouTube in his image — but YouTube is warping him back.

“Everything used to work symbiotically. Then, those entities unceremoniously flipped to become extractors of the web, pulled up the digital drawbridge and never looked back. And all have been made significantly worse by doing this… They want your attention, intellectual labor and links (to them) all for free, but will not reciprocate even just your ideas if they’re external. They’re attention roach motels (traffic goes in, it does not come out). There is no ‘focus on the user’ any longer. Users like hyperlinks, which are internet lindy and a representation of our digital freedom: sharing what we want, with our online communities – links included. Personally I’ve witnessed this happen everywhere: my own links on social are shown to increasingly fewer followers, while posts without links do fine.” You aren’t upset enough about the war on hyperlinks: Our freedom to share links with our own digital communities has in many places already been taken from us.

This Apex Money post also has a link to two posts in r/professors that are a depressing read for anyone with kids. I have warned my own children about using AI for their schoolwork. But what is fascinating is that we have this happening:

Essay created with AI -> Essay run through AI detection scrubber before submission -> professors run essay through AI detection program AND AI detection scrubber detection program

Exhausting!

The Eldest has told me that some teachers have moved to only doing homework assignments in class, in pen, and submitted in person (not online) as they were experiencing so many ChatGPT submissions that it had become untenable.

Also, there is a great link to the Honest Broker in that post that I had also queued up to post here but is worth reading as well. The Rise of Dopamine Culture. I’ve seen it posted everywhere so it is definitely resonating with people.

I am still recovering from our trip – I don’t know if it is just a horrible reaction to mold or if it is something more serious like Legionnaires Disease (I wish I was kidding) but my breathing is horrible. If it doesn’t clear up by tomorrow I am off to the doctor’s. So much for our last HURRAH of a luxury vacation until the kids finish high school!

Building a functioning dam(n) for the river of horrors

Building a functioning dam(n) for the river of horrors

As we enter a US election year I have decided to reduce my exposure to online dialogue substantially. I don’t live in the US, I don’t vote there and if something is important I am sure The Americans* will tell me about it. The fact is, it is impossible to not know what is happening in the world today and there is a constant barrage of horrors to choose from. Yes, there is also goodness in the world but when ‘enragement is engagement’ the horrors are always top of the feed.

I have completely stopped going to my private Instagram account because it is non-stop horrors. Horrors I have no control over. Horrors I am not educated or have enough power to do anything about. I could spend most of my day educating myself about global politics and still never scratch the surface of knowledge about everything. It’s all too much.

I also don’t want to be ignorant of the events of the world. I do hit a news site for the biggest headlines and read the paper (yes, a physical national newspaper like an old person) once a week so I know what’s going on and I think that is about as much as I can handle. I am overwhelmed every time I hit a social media site and the feeds feel like a battlefield.

To me, it felt increasingly like everyone was just screaming into their own echo chambers. I think when everyone is terminally online, posting memes feels like activism. I, myself am guilty of this and only have recently been really taking a long, hard look at what feels good vs. what does good. I spent years setting the dopamine gun to STUN and quite frankly, it’s basically changed nothing except that my iPhone reminds me on Sunday mornings that I spend more time on it than I do with my kids each day.

One of the reasons why I don’t have comments turned on here is because I am horrifically addicted to feedback (and I love making new friends). Although many people assume that I don’t WANT feedback – oh I do – negative and positive! I want to mainline the comment sections of every website I go to, proving once and for all that my opinion is the best opinion (you can take the girl out of debating…). But realistically I have spent so many years doing this: on IRC & BBSs/usenet since 1994, to livejournal in 1999-2007, to all of the Meta properties until today (I have thankfully avoided tiktok so far…)**. I can’t even remember a fraction of those discussions and I don’t think I have changed the world in the slightest. If fighting on the internet with strangers had a longevity prize, I’d probably be up there with my 30 years of service (as an aside, the gift for 30 years of marriage is jewellery containing pearls: the internet would snicker at that relentlessly.). But when I look back on my life I don’t want that to my defining characteristic; my tombstone would probably say something dumb such as: THERE WAS AN ATTEMPT, TUCKER HAS LEFT THE CHAT or 404 LIFE NOT FOUND.

The reality is though that I just don’t have enough social media clout to make a difference. I used to work in social media and the first thing I did when I retired was shut twitter down. I loathe twitter. I don’t use my real name on facebook, I am cautious on Instagram and even on my posts I try to respect the privacy of my husband, children and our lives in general. Sure, I am not so dumb as to think that people couldn’t find me if they really wanted to – I am not in the witness protection program after all – but I try and keep some modicum of privacy. I also don’t think I am interesting enough to find, either. I admire my friends who have chosen different paths and create these hugely popular networks that have served them well – they have political clout! When they speak, people actually listen. But for the rest of us, all of the memes and hot takes and snarky political commentary is all shit for flowers: no one gives a rat’s arse what we think. In the grand attempt to turn the internet into one giant Speaker’s Corner, there are no more corners in which to hide from the constant barrage of opinions.

I just think that we need to actually reevaluate the way we engage with the systems of the world. I feel like we’ve gotten stuck in a feedback loop from the last decade which was all about “raising awareness.” You just shared post online and TA DA! You felt like you did your part and you didn’t even need to leave your house. But did making people aware of issues bring us anything more than pink vacuums at a markup? Probably not. In many cases as well, raising awareness does more harm than good. It made me wonder: am I posting because I think it will change things, or am I just posturing?

Don’t misunderstand me: this is not a treatise about bowing out of political life. Not at all. I just think that we should be cognizant on what we can change and what actions are effective at enacting change.

In my city, the turn out to vote for mayor and city council was 43.79%

In my province, the turnout for the last election was 43.53%

In Canada, the turnout for the last election was 62.2%

But this is all wrong, realistically. The government that has the most to do with our lives as citizens is our municipal government. They are responsible for every day things such as school boards, waste/recycling collection and road maintenance. We interact with our municipal public servants more than any other government representatives in the country***. This is followed by the province who is in charge of things such as healthcare, social welfare and highways. Then the federal government is responsible for the big things such as national defence, law, immigration and taxation. Of course, there is a wide amount of overlap between all levels of government but it’s shocking to me that people vote the least in elections that control more aspects of their daily lives.

But even then, many people I know don’t know that their elected representative’s main job is to represent you, the citizen, to their legislature.

I can’t remember any Civics lessons from school and most of what I have learned about the political process has come from working for the federal government and then extrapolating that to all levels of governance. But to come back to my original point: your MPs, MPPs, the Mayor of your city and the councillors probably don’t follow you on social media. The heads of departments or people who sit on committees don’t know you and they don’t know your opinions on issues: you need to tell them.

It is not enough to post memes and clapback to online trolls. It isn’t enough to comment on news articles and spread awareness for causes unless you have a HUGE following that ends up making your opinion trend. But that doesn’t mean we have to give up! I decided that this year would be the year of doing what DOES good instead of what FEELS good. Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of things that I have decided to do this year:

Stop posting about politics online: controversial, I know. I don’t want to constantly be under the watchful stare of the terminally online. I also don’t want to be terminally online. No one who is important**** reads my locked down posts so it’s really an echo chamber for the most part.

Stay informed: your representatives usually have mailing lists and websites. Go there first for info. I have now gotten into the habit of pointing people towards the incredibly detailed newsletter our city councillor puts out weekly when people get hysterical about the “lack of communication.” I remember one woman had an apartment building going up behind her house. The councillor actually took a team to FLYER the affected neighbours, posted repeated online about it on social media, and put it in the newsletter for a month. This woman was absolutely hysterical that “no one had told” her. But what more can politicians do? I feel like people expect an engraved invitation but let’s be honest: it’s up to us to stay informed as well.

Write elected officials: I have been writing emails to my officials and giving them my name and address and my opinion on things. Recently, our community was slated to have transitional housing occupy an old LTC that had been decommissioned. Of course, this cued a bunch of online fighting but hardly anyone went to the meeting or emailed the contact with their opinion. I wrote many, many people about how great it was that our community could use this building to house people…in a housing crisis.

Contact elected officials and ask them: email or call with questions or concerns on how they’ve voted and why. If they don’t get enough feedback from citizens, it could be difficult to gauge their temperatures on issues. I make sure they know how I feel.

Donate: CHANGE THE WORLD WITH THIS ONE TRICK! Honestly, we doubled some of our donations this year just because inflation and housing is just brutal for anyone who isn’t middle class or higher. My cousin is getting married this summer and she has asked people to make donations to the woman’s shelter where she is the ED. She is a middle-aged woman who doesn’t need gifts and who already owns a house. I think this is a brilliant solution!

Volunteer: this doesn’t even need to be a formal volunteer position. We help our elderly neighbour navigate technology. I see people offering to run errands for sick neighbours & shoveling walkways for the elderly all of the time in my neighbourhood group. The community association is constantly looking for people to help with events and other activities.

Sign up to work at a polling station during an election: I have done this before. It is an extremely long, gruelling day where you don’t get a break. You will meet kind people, but you will also get people who call you a fascist for asking for ID. It is really good insight into the process, and I did learn a lot.

Protest: there are so many ways to protest from boycotts to physically going to a rally. I feel like shopping in your community and buying products from artisans instead of dropshippers on amazon are forms of protest as well. To sound cliché: we do vote with our dollars. I know none of us are perfect and some people just don’t have as many options but we need to support our communities if we want to keep them.

People often believe a dam is designed to completely stop water from moving. But often it is just good water management for the purpose of generating electricity, preventing floods and providing communities with water. I don’t want to eliminate news and political engagement but I just want to make it manageable for me and targeted in ways that make it a net benefit, not just a feel-good moment where I click share, wipe my hands, and move on with my day.


*These are my Americans, get your own
**I am ancient and from the Beforetimes
***Yes, I live in the capital and see more federal public servants than not but let’s be reasonable
****You are important to me! Just, not, like, the world at large.

Children & devices

Children & devices

Links
• How to weigh the risks of social media a conversation with Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy.
• Visual Capitalist and the most popular social media apps (ranked by downloads).

Thoughts
My kids often complain that my device policy is horrible because their friends get their devices 24-7. I tell them that I don’t care what other parents do (which is the response as old as time). Of course, the internet comes with all sorts of complications – and is addictive: Social media gets teens hooked while feeding aggression and impulsivity, and researchers think they know why.

Yesterday The Eldest had a conflict with someone she knows peripherally, and this kid posted a nasty story to her Instagram about my kid – complete with pics. But my kid just took it in stride. She was upset but not bothered too much by it, which was incredibly grown up of her. We had a great conversation about how she takes some responsibility for the argument but that she felt this kid went too far. My kid has a locked-down social media presence on this platform, which I think she was grateful for as the other kid didn’t have much material to work with in terms of her public shaming.

She showed me this girl’s Instagram and I was floored: I swear it looked like an OnlyFans account (think: pic of a butt wearing only a thong with a painted handprint on one of the cheeks). Suddenly, I was just so profoundly sad for this girl who is only 15 years old and so obviously lacking in positive attention. It struck me as super dangerous for a child this age to be posting unlocked photos like that to the internet at large. As someone who grew up with ZERO parental involvement in my life, it made me wonder about what her life at home was like and if she had someone who loved her and who would find that account and put a stop to it? I did a LOT of dumb things as a teen who spiraled without adequate oversight from an adult but that was in the beforetimes. In the age of the internet whose memory is long it really makes me worry.

I will admit, a lot of these feelings come from the feelings from within me but wow, I was unprepared for how depressed seeing that account made me. I wanted to reach through the internet and scream, “That’s enough of that! I’ll be your mom!” But it’s conceited to think that her parents aren’t involved. Maybe she eludes them because they are less tech savvy than her and she has multiple accounts? I don’t know. I’m in no position to judge.

I was impressed about how The Eldest responded to this bait though: she ignored it. I am lucky that she has a core sense of self and a group of amazing friends who are incredibly supportive and kind. I would have killed to have half as much self-worth as a teen that my kid has. Of course, I did find my tribe eventually and some of those friendships are now 30 years old. But I can say I am grateful for not having to navigate the internet in my early teen years.

Do I can Instagram?

Do I can Instagram?

What I’m reading
• In completely non-shocking news, the rich are getting richer.
• Visual Capitalist on 20 most common investing mistakes.
• Death by 1000 small fees: hidden charges are getting ridiculous for sure.
• Early retirement in England, mostly the preserve of the wealthy. This is discussing ER in your 50s and 60s, which is more of the traditional ER definition.

On the tail of yesterday’s post, I am really trying to stay off social media and as we head into the end months of the year. It is one of the reasons I started writing here again regularly: it keeps me from doomscrolling social media (or what I have left of it namely, Instagram). I was saying to Mr. Tucker last night that I keep thinking about the quote by Tom Eastman:

I’m old enough to remember when the Internet wasn’t a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.

It really stuck with me because the algorithm keeps serving me up tweets, fb and tumblr posts that keep getting shared and shared. I have seen many of them myriad times as they get recycled and the algorithm picks old ones back up again and cycles them through people’s feeds. While I enjoy them – after all the algorithm does a great job of determining what I like & what I will share (thus continuing the cycle) – it’s not adding much value to my life and so it is time to cut another app out. I admire Mr. Tucker and his complete disdain for social media. He will just delete the app and move on with his life. I need to learn from him, to be quite honest.

Over our morning coffee, I said to Mr. Tucker that it’s weird that socially it is totally normal for people to pick up their phone during a conversation but not say, pick up a book and start reading. There is an urgency in checking one’s notifications that makes scrolling acceptable. Even when Mr. Tucker and I sit down in the mornings, I feel sheepish about picking up a magazine and reading that I don’t feel that if I pick up my phone and start to scroll Instagram. It’s such an odd phenomenon.

I loved the idea behind Mouse Books which sadly now looks defunct. Dutton has a more modern pocket series of books as well that you can still buy. I feel that this would be a good solution for the in-between times: in the doctor’s office, waiting for the bus, in line practically anywhere and in the bathroom (remember reading the back of a shampoo bottle? My children will never know the suffering of forgetting to bring a book to the washroom).

I’ve discovered that I scroll the most under two conditions: when I feel bored or when I feel anxious. Anxiety happens when I watch movies and there is tension in the story, for example. I pick up my phone as a way to alleviate it even though building tension is a crucial part of the movie watching process. I also pick up my phone when the boredom settles in to alleviate that feeling, which is probably just anxiety from the fact that my brain is stuck with its own thoughts. BUT then I complain that I don’t do enough creative work on the projects I want to accomplish (ie: writing here, painting, knitting and video work). But the most rewarding projects require you to sit with the boredom. If I did, I would eventually resolve to pick up a project that is a bigger hurdle to start. The phone is an easy win, settling down to do a creative project requires you to push through that boredom and anxiety.

I am glad that facebook has stopped allowing Canadians to post news articles because 80% of my usage was posting news articles and then discussing them with my friends. A friend recently told me that this blog reminds her of my old livejournal because I would constantly be posting news roundups in the morning. At the time I did a news link email for my organization as part of my job so it was a natural extension of that work. So thanks for being cheap, facebook! It’s kept my eyeballs off of your ads because I no longer enjoy your site! So it’s good to be back to more long form writing.

It’s about 1.5 months until the end of the year and this is when I typically review:
1 – My mailing lists: what am I still receiving that I don’t read or that doesn’t add value to my life? I need to stop spending so much time deleting junk email or mailing lists I don’t really want to be on.
2 – My online paid subs: do I still enjoy the content from X creator enough to keep paying?
3 – The media subs: digital and print. While I think I will never be able to get away with canceling Spotify or Netflix (thanks, children), I do need to probably stop the New Yorker. I love the magazine but it’s way too much and I never get around to reading them. I often don’t read every Saturday newspaper but I do want to support journalism and I also get a tax credit for supporting Canadian content (which is why I will also keep The Walrus). I canned Canadian Notes & Queries and The Canadian Literary journal as well.
…and finally…
4 – Do I give up Instagram? Do I make rules around its consumption? It is really my last hold out from random scrolling (praise Jeebus I never got into TikTok) of stories.

Finally, I got together with The Americans* last night and we chatted and played Trivial Pursuit. Because I was imbibing some Greyhounds (vodka/grapefruit/soda) I feel confident enough to tell you that I won the game**! Despite the fact we chat every day on Signal I do miss their faces quite a bit. It was nice to pick up a game and just hangout.

Have a great weekend!

*these ones are mine, get your own
**I most certainly did not

Don’t make decisions on perception

Don’t make decisions on perception

What I’m reading
• [Early Retirement] was not what I expected. Honestly, I have never loved the acronym FIRE (in my head it should be FIER, which is the French word for pride) but I don’t begrudge people using it. They know what it means to them. I prefer FI just because in the early 90s when I read Your Money or Your Life that is the term they used – and it is via FI that allowed me to stay home with my kids, start a business, go back to work etc.. But I absolutely LOATHE when bloggers nitpick about people saying they’ve achieved FIRE but they still work. It’s like when people say “dividend investing isn’t a thing.” Of course it is, people have defined their terms and so the clarity is there. Being pedantic about it is just weird.

• Yes, and… this reminds me of a meme I stole from the internet:

A lot of the “this is the worst of times” suffers from the knowledge of history. Being in the middle of WWII when things were absolutely dicey (most people don’t realize how close it was at one point) was horrific. But from our place in 2023 where the Allies won, it doesn’t seem so scary. Sure, things definitely feel pretty terrible right now but how much of it is real and how much of it is just perception? We spend so much time on our phones and as a result of that the algorithm feeds us things that confirm our perspectives because that content keeps our eyeballs on their ads. It makes us more fearful and makes us believe things are so much worse than they are. It reminds me of this Dara O’Briain bit from 2009:



The Economist published this fascinating chart recently about how the pandemic has broken people’s views on the economy. The economy in the US is actually doing well, but people don’t believe that it is. It’s the first time since they started tracking sentiment that there has been such a wide gap. I suspect a lot of that is due to how we are constantly being fed doom and gloom from various social media sites. They call it doomscrolling for a reason.

But even if you go back and read economic headlines from the past, the only way we really knew things were good or bad was in retrospect. 2010-2020 was unprecedented for growth but for a lot of that period there was a lot of doom and gloom predictions floating around. This is a very good reason to ignore the noise and just focus on your goals. If you had believed a lot of the advice from “experts” you would have made some terrible decisions. Just leaving your money in an index fund for the entirety of that decade would have made you a very rich person. Ignore, ignore, ignore. Trust the process. Stay the course.