You also can't separate the social media part of this. An expensive cocktail is a cool social media post, Natty light is not.
It is just a much more postmodern world than when I was young. There is a whole level of digital simulation on top of the activity that I never had to think about. The post about the expensive cocktail is the real social activity now.
We may as well be comparing dating on tinder to a rural barn dance in the 1950s. Technology has moved faster than our language as these aren't even the same activities but the words are the same. "Dating", "socializing".
I think you are right but the expectations of young people are up much more.
These are all relative valuations with your pears and expectations. No one cares we are all vastly more wealthy than people living a 100 years ago.
People know how much Jamie Dimon is worth. No one cares they basically have more abundance today than JP Morgan himself.
It is also the difference that when I was in my 20s I had no illusions that I was going to become Michael Jackson or a popular TV sitcom actor since I never danced, sang or acted. Now though you do have that anxiety since people your own age are famous and wealthy from nothing more than network effects.
When I was in my 20s the only people that seemed to have disposable income were drug dealers lol. It was easy to not feel anxiety that I wasn't as well off as a drug dealer.
That is because there has been tremendous stagnation in wages outside of software in the middle. Huge compression between the middle and min wage.
My first job as a cook pays basically the same as what my first processional job pays now. It was a huge win for me at the time and now would have been no raise at all.
I think this is expressed in the jump in housing prices since covid too. So young people have better purchasing power besides for the one thing everyone wants.
As an IT professional I don't have to put up with grave injustices like less than optimal rent seeking for myself and friends.
Whatever decision I come to is basically the results of a science experiment. Of course, the results of the experiment just prove I am always right. If the results proved otherwise then obviously there was something flawed in the method and design of the experiment.
Science is the method that proves what my friends and I thought all along was not just true but to think otherwise proves you are an immoral person. Unlike my friends and I that the experiments prove we are the good guys.
If this wasn't true, my salary would be much less. "the market is always right"
Anyone who thinks cycling of all sports is clean is a total fool.
It is a sport literally built around doping. You can't take things to the Tour De France level and recover from those workouts without drugs. Beating the test is part of the sport.
In the NFL/NBA, drug testing is just a theatrical performance. I know in the NFL because careers are so short, the players basically have a gentleman's agreement that whatever you have to do to stay on the field is fair game.
Cycling though is just such a sport of watts per kilo there is no way around doping being a huge variable.
The stupidest thing to me is every player basically says they will do everything they can to win , no matter what the sport. Everything but the thing that will help them the most in PEDs. For some reason the public just wants to believe this bullshit.
It is especially stupid because there is nothing analogous to Tiananmen Square in the west.
On the other hand, have it write a dirty joke. It just wrote me a few jokes that silicon value wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole.
Not sure about the utility overall though. The chain of thought seems incredibly slow on things that Sonnet would have done in a few seconds from my limited testing.
I don't know or really care what other people are doing with LLMs.
I have learned so much the past 2.5 years it is almost hard to believe.
To say I am getting dumber is just completely preposterous.
Maybe this would be leading me astray if I had the intelligence of Paul Dirac and I wasn't fully applying my intelligence. The problem is I don't have anything like the intelligence of Paul Dirac.
This is just pointless ceteris paribus because genetics are the biggest variable.
If someone has a predisposition to diabetes they can't drink alcohol and hold things ceteris paribus because of the way alcohol effects the liver and then effects insulin.
Insulin sensitivity gets worse, blood sugar is all over the place and then the person is on a rollover-coast of over consuming calories to try to stabilize blood sugar.
IMO your post is why almost all dieting advise is just complete oversimplified nonsense. Meaningless ceteris paribus linear combinations that mostly add up to a non-reality for a non-linear complex system. It is a way for people to pick and chose what they want to be true.
I have lifted for 30+ years and something very un-intuitive with powerlifting is the optimal weight class for a height is extremely high.
If you are 5'10" you are pound for pound stronger at 240 than at 198. 198 will be dominated by someone who is shorter otherwise.
You are also much stronger the more you weigh, period. Strongman are eating so much to keep their weight up, not because they are burning so many calories while working out.
Even the most intense prowler workout that will make an untrained person puke their guts out is easy to out eat.
It is easiest to see with a contest bodybuilding diet. Even a 250lb bodybuilder who is doing a ton of working out is basically eating nothing. The body is incredibly efficient at holding on to weight. If it wasn't, humans would have starved to death a long time ago.
The irony to me is I am the opposite of the kid that got a computer in the 80s and learn to program on my own.
My parents were able to afford a $5k inflation adjusted Appl 2E and I never used it. I played a few games a few times but it mostly collected dust.
When we got the internet in the 90s, I mostly looked up what I could get high from and porn.
Then I spent a good decade drinking too much beer.
I blew every chance I had when I was young and have still done pretty well simply from being born at the right place at the right time.
I wasn't born with a lottery ticket, I was born playing a game of craps with weighted dice in my favor and was allowed to roll until I started winning.
We live in a society though of insecure douchebags with no self awareness to really gain perspective on how they won the powerball lottery of existence in terms of their time and place of birth. Make up fictional narratives on their own personal genius and "how you can too!".
Everyone going crazy over the weekend and seeing DeepSeek chain of thought was in January.
Right now feels exactly like when DAW and VST were maturing 25 years ago in computer audio. A new announcement all the time.
There are still music producers but the democratization of audio production was not good for professional studios who were charging a $1000 a day for studio time before this.
The wonderful life of a coal miner in 1890 lol. It is just a completely insane idea.