Standards of Living

It seems the ease of living in America today is based on the number of creature comforts a person can accumulate. These comforts do not include the standard requirements for survival of shelter, food, water, and rest. These are taken for granted because of the ease of acquisition centralization of the economy has brought.

It does not take much to go to the store. They are putnere everywhere and you can find fruit and vegetables year round. There is a stocked meat section and aisle after aisle of corn derived products being sold as food. There are govt programs to provide people ample supplies of these foods and other commodity programs and food pantries in just about every community for people looking for even more free food.

Water does not require much to get anymore. You do not need to go to the well, lead pipes will bring the poisonous and tainted water right into your home, for a fee of course. There is housing and housing programs and pretty much each and every one of these programs has a large number of politicians and organizations using them for their own grift.

So when it comes to standards of living, these issues that used to dominate the persons daily activities are no longer of much concern. Now people are concerned with having the most recent smart phone, so smart phone companies make sure and issue new releases regularly so people can feel trendy. Computers are taking back seats to the hand helds, so now people have systems solely for gaming or even solely for crypto mining. The household computer of lets say the 1980's or 1990's no longer exists. Everyone has one in their hand and most people have a laptop with more computing power than almost anyone needs and which a large number use solely for pornography.

Televisions, once a true luxury have become giant, light weight, and disposable. It is hard to avoid seeing a large television hanging from the wall in almost every room in many peoples houses. There is still very little on them worth watching, but there is always some kind of degeneracy available to poison the minds of viewers. Automobiles, clothes, and many other things now are all the considerations for out standards of living in excess.

So here is the question. Are people better off now that everyone has more cars than they have drivers? Are people better off holding credit cards with large limits that are nearly maxed year round at high interest? Are people better off having houses 2-3x or more of the standard house before the 1970's? Are we better off having 25 things plugged into our homes at any one time constantly sucking juice and increasing the power bill?

Or, were people who grew gardens, raised livestock, and maybe even made their own clothes and only bought one pair of shoes a year and were in a daily struggle to make ends meet better off. I hear stories about how hard it was growing up for the older generation and how they had chickens, hogs, and large gardens. Maybe the dad had a job in town or maybe he just worked his own land, but his wife for sure stayed with the children, of which there were many. The one thing I never hear them say is they were not happy. Life was hard in its material barrenness, but it was good in its fulfillment. Time and energy were not wasted on worthless distractions.

I look at the modern American and their life is filled with the superfluous and they are anything but happy. We scramble from one thing to another and our lives are owed to banks, credit card companies, and employers as modern day debt slaves. The wheel we run never stops because there is always something else to buy, plug in, or put on credit and we can never have enough.

So I ask you, are people better off with the modern standard of living or were we better off without all the clutter?