My friends and I joke about moving back to our home town to be together, possibly on the same block, mostly because of how cheap it would be. Truth is I have a lot of childhood and frankly recent trauma there and would never want to move back. Thankfully over time we’ve all seemed to be coincidentally landing in the same metro area over the years so we see each other a lot and it’s been a great way to bounce back from COVID.
Like... an involuntary book club? As in one person opened up that they read something like The Scarlet Letter? I'm sorry that you experienced that.
At an old job I read a fiction series based on a suggestion from my manager but that's because we liked the same type of books, absolutely was not expected to be read to join the "in" crowd. If anything, we were the "out" crowd!
I use Firefox's built in password manager and it syncs across all my devices pretty well. The UX is not great because on mobile I have to navigate to Firefox, go to Logins, type in my phone's passcode, then search for and copy the right password, but it's secure and works well enough.
I think at first thought it's annoying, but it's worked for me since Everquest since I know the company I'm subscribed to will deliver updates forever, and if they don't I just cancel. I think it is annoying that I have to keep track of all my subscriptions, but that's a very minor inconvenience.
Subscription services have almost single-handedly ended the consumer need for pirating software as well.