Do not, my children, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you and you will resent its absence.
I've noticed this brain disease on more than one occasion and it's hard to put it into words. People valuing functional objects in a weird idealistic way where just possessing the item is good, but actually using it is bad. Because if you use it then eventually you won't have it anymore and then it'll no longer be a functional object. :monke-beepboop:
shrink wrapping my furniture rn
All will be conserved, eternally
I read Everyday Use by Alice Walker in high school, and it made a big impression on me. Even when I was a small child, I had that impulse to save special things for some special day, then discovered that sometimes that day never comes and before you know it, you've outgrown that special thing, or it's gone bad without ever being used. So now I make a conscious effort to fight that impulse and enjoy the things I have while I have them, not saving them for some special day that may or might not ever come.
God, Everyday Use also made a huge impression on me. Never seen someone else bring it up, but I think about it fairly often
Oh cool! I've never heard anyone else talk about it either, but it's stayed with me for more than 20 years.
Me afraid to use my weapons for their explicit purpose in BOTW because they break
Me with my phone's brightness and battery life.
I almost never turn up the brightness and never let the battery go below 20% if I can
Ah, the post-modern condition; trading old anxieties for new ones
I might not need to feed livestock for field work, or be scared about a cold winter freezing me to death - but I'm worried about the battery level and condition of a half dozen devices and I need to stare at the screaming screen before falling asleep
now they've gotten rid of all the payphones this is a genuine problem. been stranded with plenty of money at night because you need a phone to spend money for a ride
The famous expression is supposed to be “Eat your cake and have it too”
I figure it's consumerism meeting economic anxieties. Most people I see exhibiting this sort of behavior could probably afford a replacement, but not comfortably. When your identity hinges on the sort of things you have and consume (as it sort of inevitably does in hellworld), but your ability to afford these things narrows, one way forward, without abandoning this sort of consumerism-based identity formation wholesale, is switching to a sort of curatorial mindset. Where you're collecting things, instead of consuming them, where you are worried about the longevity of your products, their degradation and maintenance. Where you're anxious about something breaking all the time, a sort of ascetic, curatorial consumerism.
lol, completely out of hand! That's nearly 7(!) bottles of water a day! Just under the recommended daily intake for 2(!) children!
Is this in some part of the US where the tap water isn't drinkable? Can't understand why bottled water was needed.
It's drinkable. It's just that tap water is associated with low status. "You mean, like, from the toilet?"
I remember back in the 90s when bottled water was just taking off. There was this bottle that literally said on the label "Source: Dallas municipal water supply"
And yet, if you poured a glass from the tap Mom & Dad would reject it. Put it in a bottle, sell it for $0.99, contaminate it with pthalates, and boom! Instant respectability.
I was raised to consider buying water when there's water in the tap a sign you were a dumbass who can't manage money
Same. This did bite me in the ass the year I worked as an English tutor in France and just drank from the tap though. Oh sure, the water was safe to drink, but in my area it was so full of minerals that it made the sides of my mouth crack and bleed. Didn't get better until I started buying bottled water like all the other people I knew in that area. I thought they were being silly and bougie, but it turns out they knew exactly what they were doing. It suuuuucked hauling water back to my place from the store though. Even with the bus, it was quite a ways to walk with that much weight.
The town I live in has very mineral-y water, to such a degree that the municipality set up a kiosk where you can get filtered water for practically nothing as long as you bring the container, and you can get it still or sparkling.
I developed some mild tendinitis on my forearms from hauling all that sparkling goodness last summer.
It's really cool that your town offered that! I'm sorry it ended up causing an injury. I can certainly relate. I ended up switching to bringing a backpack just for the water, and using a grocery bag for everything else. Aside from backpacking trips, I've never thought more about rationing how much water I was drinking.
you know if where you are has safe tap water and the advice to drink from the tap shouldn't really need to be explicitly pointed out to mean "only if that's safe" which can reasonably go unsaid
much like "cross the road" means "cross the road if there is no oncoming traffic"
I don't know how universal this is, but when I was a kid, buying bottled water was a signifier of being on a higher social strata. It was "fancy," while just drinking the tap water was for proles. But it was also known that the bottled water, though more expensive (and thus consuming it was a sign of class), was just municipal water from some other city, not fresh from some mountain stream or whatever. So the middle class looked down on the poors for drinking tap water, while we poors laughed at them for wasting money on something that was no better than what we were drinking.
Bottled water like Evian and Perrier was associated with high status. From France, and everything is better from France. It's not just water, like from the toilet. It's mineral water, which is especially healthful. Plus, being seen drinking means you can afford the murderous prices, which is the point.
They could if they wanted. But the well-being of empire citizens isn't a priority. We could have healthcare, housing, free college, and a pony for every little girl for less than we're spending on the current war. But no, they just don't want to. They regard us with contempt.
I'm not saying people should drink unsafe water, I'm just saying that sometimes buying bottled water is just consumption for consumption's sake.
I don’t think anyone did this.
Saying that you recognize the long standing perception that bottled water is a sign of luxury doesn’t either explicitly state or imply that people without access to safe drinking water who use bottled don’t matter. In fact part of the inhumanity of fucked up water supplies is that bottled water is so expensive.
And the person you’re replying to talked about their own experiences with bad water farther down in the thread.
Hang it up, no one’s fighting you or insulting your water.
It's that way in the largest municipality in my county. Tap water isn't safe to drink so most folks buy water. So +100k don't have drinking water out of the tap.
Tbf, this is a common problem in developing countries. You just don't expect it in a US city.
Acquiring glass/plastic cups and cleaning them every day is probably more of a headache for a small academic exploitation farm than 7 bottles of water per day (which is nothing, absolutely nothing)
capitalism so fragile it might get destroyed if kids spill water
- Get one of the dispensers with the large jug.
- Only allow the kids to drink at the dispenser so any spills are contained to a designated area that can be kept clear. Use small paper cups to further limit the amount of possible spilled water.
Those concerns were comically easy to address. I really expected it to be more about the kids using water or bathroom breaks to run out the clock and avoid the math practice, which you have to address on more of a case by case basis.
This is literal "individual bottled water is the only form that drinking water comes in" brain
I would get one of those mini bottles because kids rarely drink everything. So if they do waste or spill shit, it won’t be too much
