Substantial_Bus5687

I would buy a mini digger.

Clearly it's personal.

I would refrain from immediately pathologising him or assuming clinical depression is the sole cause of this malaise. What you're describing could just be a natural human response to going through a rough patch and losing his foundation in life. Either way, there is likely no getting around this without a professional therapist or counselor. I highly recommend looking into Existential therapy or coaching to see if it feels like a good fit for his situation: [https://www.dilemmaconsultancy.org/](https://www.dilemmaconsultancy.org/)

Hard to judge without being there, but it reads completely harmless. We make self-deprecating jokes, we poke fun at each other, it's all just ordinary interactions.

I don't think it's a fair comparison as we haven't actually crashed (yet).

*"We live in an era where we can travel almost anywhere in the world at the click of a button. "* *"We have a myriad of transport to get places domestically without the need for a horse or walking."* Fast travel ruins the experience of open world games, and it also ruined Game of Thrones. Same principle applies in the real world. \--- *"We can go down to the food store and buy food without needing to hunt or work hard to get our daily meals."* *" We live better than pretty much any royal person in previous eras, even those from as recent as 100-200 years ago. "* Lucky you, I work two jobs just to afford food and a roof above my head. Let alone eating good. \--- *"We have modern medicine which is absolutely massive, and has been a game changer globally."* Yes, depends on whether one can afford it or not, or whether your country has universal healthcare. \--- *"Rather than being limited to one area like many would have before modern transport."* This is a modern misconception of the past. You can fact check it. \--- *"We can meet strangers online or via apps, even people from other countries."* I don't want to meet people. \--- *"Via YouTube we get to see other countries and places."* which kind of ruins it. It's so much more fun to read about a place, and then get there without knowing how it really is. \--- *"We get to learn almost anything we want to from the Internet."* But are we actually any wiser? I think not. \--- *"We have mobile phones so contact with others is easy. "* I don't want people contacting me out of nowhere, unannounced, 24/7. And I don't want to carry a tile in my pocket whenever I go out. Write a letter. Then I could just check my mail box once per day in the morning then be off on my day. \--- *"Do we often take what we have in our current times for granted?"* It's all about perspectives. But I do appreciate power drill, electric saw, and lawn mower.

I just hold it in until I get home.

oh boy, let me start essaying here. But before I start, when I said 'pool of money', I was primarily referring to the corporations which used their money to buy back shares to inflate stock prices, as well as flooding the property market with their money and inflating the housing prices, none of that contributed to the real economy (for wage growth, for job creations, for investments into start-ups), so I wasn't exactly thinking about why ordinary people aren't investing, as many don't even have the savings for that. But back to your question, if 100 friends each put 10k into a pot, that's 1 mil, it's quite a bit of money, but also not a lot. First of all, it's unlikely I would be investing into any particular businesses at this stage because UK lacks the high-growth industries of the future (AI, electric cars, semi-conductor chips manufacturing etc) that the big boys (US and China) are riding on. But we can't just plop those in UK and hope it works, because all those industries are energy intensive, if energy is costly, LLMs cost more to train, things cost more to produce, and all that inflated cost is translated downstream - LLMs cost more to use, equipment are more expensive to buy, businesses cost more to run, harder to reach profits, fewer jobs are created, higher failure rate. My point is, akin to preparing the soil before planting stuff, we need cheap energy as the foundational layer of a growth strategy. It's two-pronged: 1) keep the cost down for businesses and industries, 2) serve the people directly by lowering their energy bills, which means more savings, which translates into a higher aggregate demand for the local economy. Normally, the consideration for energy should be the role of the government, but as we have seen throughout successive governments, be it left or right, they don't have a long-term national strategy, politics is theatre, politicians are in it for themselves, they ain't gonna do sht for us ordinary people. Back to the 1mil, what can we do with it, we use it to 'prepare the soil', invest it in a small communal renewable energy project on a **private** wire network and sell the electricity directly to the local area. Why renewable energy: It's not even about climate change, it's just that fossil fuels would never be the solution to cheap energy, because 1) fossil fuels companies have their own financial interests in mind and our needs for cheap energy runs directly counter to that, 2) even if we got these transnational corporations to drill for more gas domestically, the price would still be dictated on the international markets, it wouldn't make a dent. We need an energy base that is detached from the volatile global fossil fuel spikes and the leeching middle-man. Why private wire network: Without feeding into the national grid, we'd get energy at a fraction of the standard grid price (which is heavily inflated due to marginal pricing and the extortionate standing charges and network costs) TLDR: In order to thrive, we use that money to invest into a local private network of renewable energy, detached from the global gas market, detached from Ofgem's extortionate grid taxes. Hopefully, this becomes the fertile ground where further opportunities grow. But even if it doesn't, even if we can't save the whole UK economy, at least our local businesses will still have the cheap power they need to keep running, and we can all still afford to heat our homes. Beyond the scope of this question, the bigger issue is how we stop those corporations from hoarding residential property, and how we ban further share buybacks to actually force them to deploy their capital into venture capital investments. We are talking about unlocking a pool of money worth at least 50 bil a year here (this is a number that can be derived from public filings alone).

I very much enjoy having a common surname, I love being unremarkable and unmemorable, it's almost like an invisibility superpower. If one's sense of identity has to be derived externally from a unique name, i doubt they have much of an identity to begin with tbh.

That historic perception is still true but it doesn't apply to the new generation of tech products — phones, electric cars, network equipment, solar panels — they are all top notch for an affordable price. Even German car manufacturers are now outsourcing their R&D to China because the Chinese have genuinely outpaced them in the software development and integration side of things, as it's no longer about good mechanical engineering anymore.

Yeah, our generation came into working age just in time for the 2008 financial crisis. The effect of that hasn't really gone away since, it's just been papered over. I remember there were multiple studies confirming just how much we had to play catch-up in terms of careers and life in general compared to previous generations. Yet the boomers blame it on avocado toasts.

UK has had effectively zero growth for more than a decade, couple that with lack of investments and rising costs, businesses either fold or cut jobs. If you think this is pretty bad already, wait til the real crisis hits.