Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
“You work three jobs? Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that.”
To a divorced mother of three, Omaha, Nebraska, Feb. 4, 2005”
― George W. Bush
i’m just an older millennial, what do i know about how people my age tend to overwhelmingly live their lives *shrug*
i could pull up legit statistics showing how people my age were not as effected by the recession as people younger, but it’s just a comment thread. 🙂
i am 35. i don’t automatically fall in line with the way a subset of my generation, or the generation to follow, gen z, use words. i also feel that no matter how you attempt to separate those words from their original meaning, they will eventually come back to the underlying intention of their original definitions (of which explaining that will take a lot more than just a simple response to this thread). i’ve actually always found the new definition of “hustle” to be sad. it assumes that you have to have 3-10 side gigs in order to make what once used to be considered a decent middle-class income, and that you have to constantly advertise yourself in order to keep the work flowing. no matter what the new or old terms are, the connotations of them are generally leaning more toward negative, no matter what.
i also don’t believe that all of the people in my age group would understand the new term for hustle. i am an older millennial. people my age have normal jobs and families. we are pretty much just an extension of gen x, to an extent. not as impacted by the 2008 recession as those 5-10 years younger.
if you’re 37, you’re actually not a millennial. you’re technically a member of gen x. when i was a kid, we were considered the first of the “millennial” generation due to graduating in the new millennium, the year 2000.
I don’t know, I find the whole “hustle” and “hustler” mentality to be pretty crass. Well, considering what the definition of hustler is, I guess a lot of people don’t realize how they are outwardly presenting themselves to the world, lol. That seems to be one of the predominant strains on instagram, as well as on youtube. And I’m a reseller! I can’t imagine how people that are outside of this community that stumble into these images and terms react to them. It’s sort of embarrassing to be associated with “colleagues” that use those words to describe themselves. It just makes all of this feel disgusting to an extent, when it shouldn’t.
Thank you for advice in regards to podcasts. I’ve been using the voice recorder on the phone for other projects, so I’m glad that it will also work for this if I do do this. I’ve also got a few zooms lying around, which I should probably start using again at some point.
after being on instagram for a week, i’m starting to notice that there’s not really a community of people that have been doing this for a long time. or, if they have been doing it for a long time, they are more apt to introduce beginning techniques and motivation posts for newbies. there really aren’t people that consistently do this (f/t) for years and post about their day-to-day. like, life is not all about ebay. that is why people left their jobs to get the ebay lifestyle, supposedly. people wanted more out of their lives than just work, yet everything that’s being presented online about reselling is just work work work. people congratulate themselves for taking a day off. yay? it’s some sort of puritan work ethic in overdrive. it tires me out to see the amount of work that people do day in and day out. it might just be early motivation for newbies, but it is really exhausting and not sustainable in the long-term.
no one really asks why they are doing this. there is really no actual freedom in one’s life if more time is spent working consistently year after year on an online business than in a throw-away job, with little outside of that work to show for it.
that being said, i am sort of motivated to *maybe* create an ebay podcast for long-termers that does not really go into process much outside of how it integrates into one’s daily basis. i have some ideas that i would like to go in-depth on, and since no one likes to actually read, a podcast seems the way to go.
it has also been interesting to see capitalism at its ugliest on instagram in terms of resellers. i am beginning to really understand better why collectors dislike resellers so much.
i once got an instrument to resell on ebay that i took to a repair shop to be fixed prior to listing. i can’t imagine they would be able to tell you more about an instrument’s worth than what you could find online yourself, but if you got them both serviced you could add to the listing “recently professionally serviced” and up the value on them on that basis alone.
03/22/2018 at 10:59 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 352: Scavenging is The Alternative Early Retirement #35859bit late to the conversation, but…
i really can’t imagine my life if i had had a job in it for the past several years. i believe the creative output i would have done would have been much less, and of much lower quality if i had squeezed it in on weekends, or hours before and after work. plus, i also had my salary capped in the low 30s and realistically would never have gone too much higher over the course of my working career. it was pretty much a “well, there’s nothing left to lose” feeling about quitting a realistically crappy job. i could’ve gotten my job back if i wanted to, even, so it really wasn’t that much of a risk to just quit. maybe if i had had a really good salary, i would have stayed. but, as it was, i was paying my bills and buying clothes to work at my job, and not really saving anything or feeling like i was accomplishing much.
i absolutely hated working a desk job. i hated the fluorescent lights hanging overhead, and the accounting for every single minute you were away from your desk. i find those environments so unhealthy – even though i had a gym membership as part of the job, i still gained weight no matter how often i went there. it took a few years to shed the office weight gain. ugh. i couldn’t ride my bike to work because it was in some far-off office park outside of the city. when i did ride my bike, i had to take a bus, and i would get anxiety over the bus rack filling up with too many racks. this happened sometimes, and i got stuck waiting for a bus home sometimes up to 2 hours after getting off work. all this so i could feel healthy and get some fresh air outside of that environment.
at least with selling online, you can work when you want. you are your own boss, so your time away from your desk is only accountable to you. you can lift objects and feel the physicality of them, not just sit at a desk and look at some abstract numbers that don’t amount to anything outside of the company you work for.
it might also be a millennial thing. it’s sort of horrific to think of sitting at the same job for 30+ years to just get to the point of doing exactly what i am doing now. there’s no job security anywhere. companies just let people go for no reason, and it’s just what is expected now. my feelings would also be different if i was in a f/t job only a few years away from retirement, or had kids and a mortgage and other responsibilities. i totally get why people do what they do. i just don’t.
i just started an instagram this week. papercosmonaut is my name on there. i’m thinking of eventually creating a secondary account with a store for ephemera, but for now i’ll just test it to see how it goes with just 1 account. i’ll add all of you!
I did a little bit of sleuthing and found your Ebay store. I’m fairly certain that I’ve bought lots of sheet music in the past (like 10 years ago) from you to resell on Ebay. Seriously small world on here.
I don’t do as much sheet music anymore, but when I do, your listings come up sometimes when I research comps. Like with postcards, the prices on common pieces of sheet music have really sunk over the past few years. Still, it is enjoyable to list, as well as ephemera.
That collection you purchased sounds insane. So jealous. I can’t believe that bookseller didn’t list them himself, but sheet music is really its own labor of love.
If you have the space to store more books, I would go for it. Especially if they’re that cheap.
Did you get a good look at the genres available for sale? Or is it seriously every subject known to man?
Sounds like someone that went to a lot of thrift stores to build up a collection that vast, if it’s a mishmash of everything.
03/14/2018 at 12:34 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 351: Being Frugal Is Not A Secret Club #35171Hey T-Satt,
What’s funny is that I am very much like these people, but I loathe working normal jobs so much that I have instead overthought tremendously on how to get out of working them. Selling things online and not having to go into work? Cool! I want to be at home and work on projects of my choosing when I want to, and not be encumbered by the restrictions of having to go to a place I don’t want to be in just to make money. Getting nice clothes, commuting, head down in figures and thinking up solutions for someone else’s problems? Naw. That is for someone else to do.
So, I get where they are coming from in just wanting to do and be without these additional hassles of living to look after. I just consider the way they act to have a lack of a survival instinct, to an extent, because of how ultimately important all the nitty gritty really is. It also helps that I don’t have all the normal things to worry about that people my age normally do (kids, mortgage, car payments, etc,.). That takes away a huge burden of responsibility that I would rather not have to deal with.
That is a really good idea to do a “test run” of something you have been meaning to do. On paper, it could look like the greatest idea ever. Two days on the trail, you might think “ah, what was I thinking? This pack is too heavy. Why did I bring so many clothes? I’ve run out of water already?!” It’s definitely a good exercise to better plan a longer run from. That is planning, not dreaming. 🙂
03/14/2018 at 11:22 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 351: Being Frugal Is Not A Secret Club #35159Listening to the podcast now. I try to advise some fellow art-inclined friends on how to go about procuring their dreams in a logical way, and they don’t want to hear it at all.
“I want to go to Europe, or Japan, and do this, and then do this, and then this.” “Okay, how do you propose going about that? How are you going to earn the money to do that?” Silence. It’s a pipe dream for a lot of them, and I really feel like a Debbie Downer in trying to show them how it’s not going to work at all, or if it will work, what steps will have to be taken in order to achieve what it is they want to do. People just don’t want to hear it.
03/12/2018 at 3:59 pm in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 351: Being Frugal Is Not A Secret Club #34936Alright, I still haven’t listened to your podcast yet, but I am listening to the Frugalwoods one now. I cannot even believe someone from NPR would ask the following:
“Are we putting some sex appeal on a lifestyle that many people are desperate to escape?”
Ummm…isn’t conscious behavior of your actions, i.e. in terms of your impact on the environment, one of the supposed drives of people listening to NPR? How can frugality be interpreted in those terms above? You are either conscious of what you are doing in the environment, your role in the chain of it, or you are really not and ask completely weird questions like the one above. Ugh.
I am glad that she asserted her privilege repeatedly. Yet still…that question seriously left a bad taste in my mouth. For one, it made it out like she was “playing poor,” as opposed to just changing her lifestyle and diverting her resources to other things. Don’t people remember the 60s and 70s? Maybe the intentional communities and communes were considered safer because everyone collectively became the yuppies of the 80s. Those were “just for play,” not actual attempts to live in a better way.
For people to actually go about and change their lives for the better, or “worse,” as some people will say, is too much to bear. You’re either down in the gutter in a shitty job with the majority of the people, or you are wrong because why aren’t you in the gutter? To live an alternate lifestyle, even one as seemingly innocent as a frugal one, is seriously so alien to people that they are only able to express their views with contempt. Even people that should know better.
Just so much wrong with that question. I could go on a really long rant about it, but I’ll stop here.
03/12/2018 at 1:28 pm in reply to: Do you save on fees with multiple stores? Or better to stick with one? #34902As I’m getting close to 10,000 items in my main store, I maintain a secondary basic store as well. I think it’s at the very least good to have a back-up store, or at least seller account.
My main store is currently at 9,100 listings, while my basic store is at 90 listings. My main store is niche, while my secondary store is filling up with all the weird stuff people discuss buying in the forums. I probably won’t turn it into a premium store, as I don’t have the space for that many larger items, but it is fun to list stuff I’m not used to normally dealing with.
03/12/2018 at 11:05 am in reply to: Scavenger Life Episode 351: Being Frugal Is Not A Secret Club #34872I haven’t had a chance to listen to the podcast yet, but I just wanted to chime in on people hating the frugality movement. A lot of people are not just against it, but are outright hostile in their attitudes towards it.
If you do not wish to own a car, go out for expensive meals and drinks, own clothing that is very expensive, you are viewed as having something wrong with you. If you are not constantly aspiring to have a lot of money, live outwardly “well,” you are not living life right. If you are in the extreme in your beliefs that you are fine with the minimal amount you have, whatever that is, you are targeted as being mentally ill and are constantly questioned for your stance on living as if you are not able to parse your own life for yourself. You get talked down to like a child for your beliefs.
I can understand people wanting to get the most out of life as they can, especially when they have normal jobs and all there is to do is to buy stuff with the money earned during the limited amount of vacation times provided and weekends. I get it. Nevertheless, not everyone lives under the pressure of this way of living, and does not have to fit into this one mode of dealing.
-
AuthorPosts