People who tell parables based on exponential curves are almost always wrong. It’s not that there aren’t exponential curves. It’s not that things don’t sometimes rapidly change. It’s that the people telling parables have no good ability to predict how things will turn out.

I've glorified poverty and dilapidation largely because I've always assumed I'd be poor forever regardless of what I did. I figured I might as well learn to get enthusiastic about poverty, dysfunction, and obscurity if it was inevitable. Now that I've escaped it, I ask myself: "What the hell do I do now?" What do I actually want? After years of training myself to "want" a poor life on the distant (rural) margins, now that I no longer have to do that I have no idea what it is that I actually want. Always, I've let my blackpilled perspective on my own station interrupt my ability to want anything. If it wasn't ultra-cheap, I simply forced myself to not want it, period. Now? I could realistically make it work almost anywhere with careful planning. Could get into all sorts of businesses, try anything, make any number of interesting or edifying gambles or ventures... this is solely because of careful, anxiety-inducing levels of fiscal caution and extreme frugality. If you've ever wondered why it is that I seem "all over the place," it's this exact thing. It's this combined with becoming a father and realizing that the dilapidation and poverty I've forced myself to "want" isn't actually what I want to give my kids.