I already finished college a while ago. Have been living with my gf while she was attending college as well (she go a bachelors degree where i only got an associates cause im lazy like that my program didnt extend to bachelors at the time and now i am so knee deep in student loan debt i cant afford to take on the next set of corses i wanna do my own thing right now. Making videogames woo...
Oh yeah I had a job fixing computers for and selling computers/tablets/phones/etc to people who on average didn't even know how to use or need all the capabilities of their correlating device. I was good at it with like the best sales but it was so stressful and was actually costing more in related transportation and food expendatures than I made most weeks, so we were barely breaking even. Now we live in a nifty trailer in the middle of nowhere with barely any internet on a old laptop. I still have my work setup for programming and other production stuff, but lack of internet invalidates most of my software, meaning I have been having to learn all over how to program from the ground up without any utilities like Unity, Torque, or Unreal. Its more satisifying when I get something to work but much more tedious. Meanwhile I also plan on making some movies soon, and have been refining stories ive been working on since I was a little kid (mind you with alot of characters and plots updates to make themless kid-ish of course). I also have been learning how to live more sustainibly, learning alot of about material composition and development for not only lifestyle choices but videogame development as well. Basically I have been spending this time teaching myself how to live more efficiently which is something you don't learn in school, and have scarce time to learn once you are thrown into the world as you have to immediately get a job and buckledown on a career, but doing such makes you relient on a system that if adjusted would see you with inconsequential skills, unable to maintain one's own life.
Lemme tell you bout foraging
There are alot more edible plants than you realize. It is in part due to a large effort on behalf of food industries to unobtrusively make people uncomfortable with wild foods. It is important to properly identify all plants before eating, especially among plants with potentially dangerous varieties, but many plant families, like mustards for instance are always edible (although trust me, dont eat raw wild mustard greens, they are much more bitter than the cultivated variety, sautee them in olive oil, with salt and if you want, some pine nuts.
When we were calculating our costs, we determined food to be our greatest unavoidable expendature (laundry costs, and water useage are greatly reduced by hand washing, and line-drying clothes) (if we schedualed trips to require as few car runs as possible we could reduce gas (there are no buslines that go out far enough out here to take advantage of) ) and food costs could be reduced by calculating the most efficient source of nutrients and determining a schedualed diet. This may sound boring but actually its awesome, it requires you to have a varied and sometimes exciting diet based on efficieny of food costs. Sunflowerseed butter is tasty and really good for you, if you have a food processor, it only costs you the $1.50 for the bag of pre-shelled seeds, and the cost of electrity to run the processor for like ten minutes which is far less than the $7 asking price for a jar of that same sunflower butter. Reading other foods you can easily see why everything artificially costs so little, yet people are getting ill from malnutrition and end up having to spend even more on medical expenditures. Sugar. Well cornsyrup and sugar. Its in everything and acts as an awesome buffer, it makes people hyper, thinks the food tastes better, and is relatively cheap. When you buy a jar of nutella did you ever see the ingrediants? The first is sugar, there is more sugar, by volume, than anything else in that jar. The nutrients of the nuts in it might as well not be present because they are so diluted by all the sugar. By making homemade nutella out of roasted hazlenuts, it costs a bit less than half the cost of a standard jar to make the same amount, with less than half the sugar! When I tried this recipe, my complaint was that it was still too sugary and we eventually settled on a recipe with a rich darkchocolate taste, high in protein and other nutritious things with barely any sugar by comparison to nutella! its crazy!
Things cost too much in general too! well it could just be the cost society places on time, but take a shelf. You buy a stupid prelaminated ikea shelf. They tore down a tree, threw away more than half that tree in sawdust, emitted a bunch of chemicals to ship it across the world back and forth piece by peice coated in untold amounts of plastics and chemical preservatives until it ends up in sweden where they pack it all and ship it again using/emitting precious checmicals into the atmosphere where it is then bought by a consumer. The consumer uses it for 10 years then throws it away. The plastics and preservatives leave the pristene shelf in the landfill unable to decompose, whilst ofgassing dangerous chemicals for hundreds of years, with all precious resources invested into lost, permanantly unable to be retrieved due to their inegration into the product.
You build a shelf. You either find some precut wood or chop down a tree, use the wood present and save the rest for future use, you shape it into a shelf, without use of artificial glues or sealents. When in 8-10 years it starts to age, you break it up and use it as compost for your tree garden which is currently growing the next tree for your next table. But an efficient system for the environment/world unfortunately is not currently seen as an effiicient system for the economy but that brings us to the problem the economy has in itself. It doesn't exist beyond what people think of it.
People incorrectly believe we have departed from a barter system. We now barter papers valued at an arbitrary amount. The paper does have power in situations where people give it power, but beyond that it is just a paper. Moreover it is not even just papers now but an inmaginary number, alloted by a group of about 10 billionaires who own the private federal reserve system. This allows them to arbitrarily adjust the value of these papers to suit their means and while it is an efficient system for increasing production it has brought us to an interesting stalemate wherein we are capable of creating an infinite value of funds while there is always going to be a finite number of materials available.
Which brings us to our next issue: distribution of materials. The Barter system is a a chosen method of distribution wherin it values highest the person with the highest valued materials to the distributive entity. This is an important system for growing methods, you want your car sales to fund further car production, however it is also exclusative. If cars are important for getting a job, and a job is the only way to achieve funds for a car, the barrier to acquisition of a car and job are correspondingly increasing indefinitely. People are always up in arms about socialism and how it takes away from the people who work hard to get ahead, but the system as it is set up primarly rewards those based on their predetermined social status as achieved by their preceding generation, and it takes a lot of effort to break such molds. The determination I conclude is that governmental body is supposed to be inherintly socialist as it, in ideal situations, maintains and strives for social equality in order to promote diversification and the overall health and success of humanity as biological system.
But in order to maintain governmental appropriation of sociatial views, the democratic system must be encouraged. If you have the ability to vote, and do not vote, you have no right to complain about the legislature, candidates or any of the political system right now. When you are voting age, attend the election and at least read what propositions are being voted upon. You will care about them because they are likely going to affect your tax rates or other local or state regulations one way or another. It can be more tricky dealing with politicians since they often just state whatever views their publicist belives will enstate them most efficiently and then once in office cater to the whims of lobbyists, and such realizations can be daunting and discouraging, so I can understand your hesitancy to vote on the people themselves. The people voted in, however are the ones with the most power, and by doing research into your candidates you can at least make an attempt to determine which one values your viewpoints more.
Wow that reeeaaallllyyyy got away from me there...
Ninja edit: oh and more on topic me and my gf are currently designing a game that I am going to start making once I finish the current puzzle/party game thing I am working on
