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- Photo by Raymond Yeung on Unsplash If I’m being honest, I’m not the most responsible person in the world. I have some impulse control issues, which means I do some things without thinking them through, and have to deal with the ramifications later, such as having missed an appointment or spent money that shouldn’t have been spent.
This is something I categorize as a personal flaw, and while much of it stems from my ADHD—something that I cannot just make go away, no matter how much I’ve tried—I try not to make excuses for them.
I thought this was called “being an adult.”
Tilting At Windmills is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. However, over the last week or so, there’s been an inane discussion on X regarding people’s spending on food. In particular, restaurants of various kinds. I think it started with Shark Tank’s Kevin O’Leary blasting people who made below a certain income for spending more than they should on lunch.
Others responded, noting that O’Leary has an expensive restaurant, so he’s a hypocrite for saying that, and others got into it by arguing that DoorDash is an essential service for poor people—yeah, Taylor Lorenz seems to have maintained that position, hilariously enough—and that no one should say anything because Boomers ate fast food, too.
Yeah, I don’t get that last one, either, but it was said directly to me, and I can only shake my head.
At the core of things, there’s this idea that if someone spends irresponsibly, the problem isn’t them, but the entire system that hasn’t bowed down to give them everything they want.
If this were about groceries, I’d be willing to listen. The core ingredients for home-cooked meals being expensive means there’s little option for folks beyond seeing more and more of their income syphoned off to pay for such an essential thing.
But it’s not. It’s about food that someone else prepared, food that you do not have to spend money on in order to get all the sustenance you require. It’s about eating out, having food delivered, or otherwise living a life of leisure rather than performing a basic household task.
There is a cult of irresponsibility that sees the lifestyle of the wealthy and not just idolizes it, but tries to replicate it via expensive spending that requires little effort from them, then lashes out when they are told that maybe the reason they’re broke is that they make bad decisions.
They take it as a personal insult to be told that $30 lunches out might not be the path toward financial greatness, and they do it because they want to be the victim. They want the system to be the problem because then it doesn’t mean they’ve made a mistake, that they’ve been the reason they can’t buy a house or take a fancy vacation overseas every year.
And legions are willing to enable them in this, probably because they buy into the same self-delusion. They want to spend without concern. They want their entry-level jobs to pay them to live the life of a celebrity, and rather than try to work hard to get to the point where they can do all of that, they’d rather just spend, then blame others when they don’t get where they want to be.
It’s their money, and it’s their right to spend it however they wish. I wouldn’t dream of taking that away from anyone, if for no other reason than I don’t want anyone to do that to me.
But it’s not their right to lash out at the world for not distorting reality to conform to their fondest desires. Reality, by definition, can’t do that.
The truth of the matter is that while things have gotten expensive, and wages really haven’t kept up as they should have, the answer to all of this isn’t to suddenly pretend that no one should be expected to adjust their lifestyle as needed. I grew up at a time when most people either brought lunch to work or else had enough income to comfortably eat out during the workday. Families kept food delivery and fast-food runs to a minimum, making it a treat rather than a way of life. Home-cooked meals were the norm, even if the chef was terrible at it. Working parents would make large meals, then have leftovers a few nights a week so that no one was in the kitchen every night.
People adjusted their lives to the reality, rather than expecting reality to morph to their desires.
And even hinting that this is good and proper will get the cult of irresponsibility baying at your door like wolves who smelled blood.
It shouldn’t be controversial. It’s a common-sense approach to a financial situation, one that doesn’t even require a lot of responsibility on someone’s part. For so many today, though, it’s just way too much. Share Is it any wonder that communism has been making a comeback? People don’t want to act responsibly. Instead, they want the state to provide for all of their needs, so responsibility doesn’t matter. Never mind the history of socialism/communism around the world, mind you. No, that wasn’t real socialism or communism. I’m sure that, despite the idea of American exceptionalism being false in these people’s minds, we’re still too exceptional to fail here, as it has everywhere else.
To the cult, I have only this to say: If you don’t like your lot in life, change your life. Do not expect the rest of us to do the changing for you, nor should you expect to get a piece of my pie because you took a dump on yours. Grow the hell up, stop embarrassing your parents, and make the best out of what you have until you can find a way to earn more.
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