I eat Cheez-its!
Why do people feel so bad about the economy? I read your whole story. I still don't get it.
The broad data don't explain it.
It is a mental thing, I am sure.
Is it people aren't getting something they want?
I think so and I have an idea what it might be. They want to be winning bigly. A percent or two a year real wage growth does not even register as a win.
They want to brag, gloat, flaunt or show off.
Lacking that they are going to complain, complain loudly.
It is all about attention, people want to be noticed, they want attention. Wear a big red hat with big white letters, you get attention. Even negative attention can feel satisfying.
I find it hard to be disturb by the kind of inflation we have seen in the US. As long as my income and investments grow faster than inflation, what is there to complain about. Cheez-its did go up pretty fast.
Funny you should mention growing my own potatoes and making my own chips. I have done both recently and in the distant past. In the 1970s I worked on a potato farm in central Maine. We would make chips from the potatoes we had in storage to test their quality before we shipped them, that is where I learned to make potato chips.
I don't think everyone is a busy as they claim, I think many are lazy and complain about being busy, so people don't think they are lazy. Well, I make exceptions for families with school age kids, that can keep you busy. At work I saw more BSing than working. I had a boss that would come by my office and talk about his personal life for half an hour or more a couple times a week. If he did that with more than just a couple people, he was barely working. He was such a bore. Blah, Blah, Blah.
Back to your story, you wrote "If you buy food, you already know that prices are up." Prices are always up. The long-term trajectory of food prices will always be up, there will be no revolution that will bring prices down. The last time that happened was with Costco, Sams, Walmart and now Aldi. Maybe something like that will happen again but they are just blips, food prices will rise. Cost of production is going to rise, cost of transportation is going to rise, wages are going to rise so food prices will rise.
Pretty much the only thing that goes down is technology products like things that use computer chips, and they don't always go down because as they get cheaper, they add more features and capability.
TEK
