I used to be a digital minimalist, and now my iPhone has every single app I know of. Minimalism is all fun and games until you're travelling somewhere out of your gated community where minimalism works, and suddenly you HAVE to have some popular filthy app, but you don't have it. You try to download it, and of fucking course your internet connection sucks ass, it's getting late, people are waiting for you, your phone starts to overheat and lag, all while you try to sign in to damn app. Its predatory algorithms detect an uNuSuAl LoGiN aTtEmPt and shadowban you, so confirmation emails/SMS won't come.

Just because of how sudden those things are, and because of how stressful it is to my autistic brain, I downloaded and signed in to everything I can think of.

…except TikTok. There are things I just won't do no matter what.

An IPhone is not very minimalist. That's like saying you're a minimalist driving a jaguar, an overrated expensive car.

TikTok was the top battery user on my phone while I didn't use it. You're just sitting on your red chair, being beautiful and then you get the notification that the app you never use is using much resources. Weird. Maybe they should send every thousand chars typed by user to China HQ instead of three

I visited USA a few times and this guy was showing me around. we drove to various cities and if you wanted to park your car on the side of the damned street you had to download an app

that's creepy and disgusting. what if you don't have a phone? so basically you need a phone, and a data plan, to be able to pay for your parking now

the airport also was pushing a mobile app to be used in place of a physical passport

I literally do not want this shit on my machine. dystopia

all this shit acts like a virus, and android is a joke of an operating system in terms of security / privacy

@retoor I never ever used TikTok. Also, the only app that has notification permissions on my phone is Apple Health.

@jestdotty oh poor little white girl with her smartphone and her personal guide in the richest country in the world, had to do what? wh… what? d… download AN APP? How did you survive sis?

@kiki I didn't download it

and usa isn't the richest country in the world

@jestdotty parking in Netherlands is weird. So much different payment machines. Who the f builds all this stuff. Are they custom per parking place? It's weird

Apps are the new crack and "friends" are pushers.

@retoor TIL 87 percent of teens in the USA have a Jaguar

Also wasn't minimalism just a millennial quarter life crisis type thing?

@spoiledgoods it was cuz we're all poor and can't afford anything because inflation

your parents had a house, one of them worked, and they popped out 2-5 kids off your dad selling shoes

now the generations moved on so nobody realizes that was once normal

they didn't actually realize it was due to inflation, they said it was because consumerism made everyone poor / aka "irresponsible spending", but basic goods have more inflation than stupid trinkets nobody wants so that was a lie

so minimalism was basically a way to blame the average person for being poor instead of the government admitting it prints money and we're all peasants because of it and things are only gonna get worse

@jestdotty didn't Canada tell people to not stop people breaking in their cars? It was some fucked up "everything is fine" bullshit.

@jestdotty that and millennials were maybe the first generation to have access to an insanely over-saturated online marketplace that caters to their every quirk and desire as well as the combination of 1. having the income to purchase the things (more so at the elder millennial/yung gen X intersection) and 2. useless trinkets being relatively cheap like ya said (even more so at the peak of millennial culture than today), and ofc 3. social media. I guess I always looked at minimalism as a rejection of that.

Not that the boomers weren't maximalist as hell, but it wasn't so widespread and was limited in its scope largely due to logistics and lack of something as gargantuan as the internet (people collected 500 Pyrex from D2D sales for example vs 500 Stanley cups they ordered online)

@spoiledgoods and the early 2010s (I call it the stomp and clap shit era cause of all the Mumford n Sons fedora wearing mustache waxing ass music was coming out) came fresh off the heals of the 2000s where America was building untold swaths of massive suburban wastelands and every stripper in Florida had at least four mortgages and shit was maximal as hell

@Demolishun it's called toxic positivity-driven policy and our cops are too busy giving Starlight Tours and harassing their ex-wives

Wtf? Who do you travel with that you feel forced to download a specific app? This is the weirdest thing that I’ve heard in a while.

@spoiledgoods i see the boomers as big spenders. Hoarders of stuff. Product of golden times

@retoor absolutely, and so many of them claim that modern times are "better" and "easier" simply because you can buy more useless shit

@Demolishun oh yeah

the Toronto police on TV told people to put the keys to their cars in their mailbox, saying the criminals breaking into their house only want their car so if they leave the keys in the mailbox their house won't get broke into

anyway that caused a stir

so turns out Canada is literally being mafia-like thieved by literal Africans. I'm not even kidding. this is how competent this "rich white country" is. that's not even exactly the problem. the cops are effectively complicit, because they'll arrest YOU for trying to do something about it or going to get your car

so cars are being stolen like crazy, driven to the Montreal pier, loaded up on large ships, and float over to Africa. then they're let out and the criminals have to drive like 5 miles to the border of the nearest country. a country that recently said you can't drive in a car without proof of registration, so now there's miles of mad-max-style abandoned cars there. African government > Canadian government

@jestdotty that is even more fucked up that could have imagined.

@jestdotty just don’t drive. You don’t need a car in Canada. It’s a good thing that car ownership is disincentivized

@Lensflare I don’t travel. I flee

@jestdotty by bike I meant bicycle