After doing my budgeting for the upcoming month I was pretty saddened by how little my income seems to cover these days. 
.
I was curious and checked the existing inflation. It's not looking good. It's insane to me that over the last four years the cost of living has gone up approximately 22%. I think four years is a good period to examine, as whenever I hear "inflation is going down actually, it's gone down 2.9% since July! We are in a "cooling" period" 
" those people are usually referring to like maybe six month period at best. Also shut your dork-ass up man.
I checked a couple of different sites, some newspaper, some official US Government sites, and an economics site I'm like 96% certain some evil GOP-backed SuperPAC probably funds and they all seemed to say the same thing.
I'm not an economics guy, but one thing I have a vague understanding of is stuff like the Vampires and their ghouls thought COVID-19 conditions would extend forever. I'm not exactly sure of what they did or the mechanisms behind it, but it seems uniquely bad to have everyone's paying power reduced by ~22% (that's numbers probably higher for people who already in a bad spot). I'm sure it gets worse with interest rates and other fancy economic terms and devices I don't understand.
What is a person to do? I'm not even talking about hip and cool leftists of various stripes like us who at least have a framework for understanding why this everything sucks ass, but what about regular "normal™©®" people? I don't understand how people are making it these days. People with kids or dependents, people with medical needs for themselves or loved one, or people with any real complications in life? Just regular people trying to have a decent and upright life, how they supposed to make it man? I think about my younger cousins who are graduating high school or are in college right now and I think how are supposed to even get started?
How are people supposed to survive let alone thrive, when they have 1/4 less than they did four years ago? Also they didn't have enough four years ago to be frank. I'm also sure that this was like a zillion times worse for people nations under US sanctions, as I while I'm a US citizen I don't want to think we are the only people who exists, cause that's not a very cash-money thing to do.
Like what the fuck?
I'm not on some doomer-shit, more so on that "How do i find optimism in these dire times"-shit.
I got $100 worth of groceries the other week and it was like 15 items. I can remember like not even 5 years ago $100 was an order of like 20+ things. All store brand too.
A huge grocery run with my family used to be 250ish dollars. A huge grocery run now gets closer to 400. Prices might have gone up 20% but food has gone up faster
My power prices have doubled
It's really bad
A lot of it stuff that used be like 80 cents is now 2 or 3 dollars instead so it's hard to realize how much you are spending until you get to the register
Not trying to get all in your business, but was that getting that $100 to more "do-able" (I wouldn't say "easy" because that word just doesn't feel right) not even 5 years ago as well? I know for me it was.
Yeah