The fear of a “normal” and stable life is hilarious in hindsight. I was listening to And Introducing’s episode on the New York rock scene in the 2000s and there are so many glaring examples even in that of how having a stable life has become more alien in such a short time (and how 9/ll basically kept parts of new york from being gentrified even earlier – thanks Osama for keeping rent down a little longer, I guess).

https://soundcloud.com/and-intro-pod/48-meet-me-in-the-bathroom-ft-graham-wright

It’s not a terribly deep movie but it’s at least a little more nuanced than that. It’s actually pretty anti-capitalist, anti-consumerism.

Besides, isn’t the idea that you can get paid just enough to stop caring about other people and just buy furniture and waste your life working to make somebody else more money a little bothersome?

holy crap, you could buy stuff straight from ikea? like, not used?

I was thinking about this movie recently! Durden managed to create a huge working class movement/revolution by uniting alienated men. Then he blew up a bunch of what, banking offices? Pretty fucking rad tbh

I was not allowed to watch simpsons as a kid but I rigged a coathanger to the back of the TV and figured it out anyway. My older brother saw one of his friends do it. That’s how we learned EVERYTHING back then.

found the tweet:

the simpsons has been on so long that they went from a fairly standard single income middle class family with a house and three kids to an impossible fantasy world where a thirty four year old high school grad with no inheritance can have any of those things and still be ‘lazy’

also here’s this recent article on the same topic:

The Life in The Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable

It’s a traditional sitcom using a cartoon base. It leans on both sitcom and animation tropes with a wink to the audience. For example, sometimes the house will be a shithouse in a bad neighborhood, sometimes a mansion in a good neighborhood. Everything in the Simpsons depends on the plot. Sometimes they can’t even afford good toilet paper IIRC.

I feel like the Simpsons also conveyed the desperation the working class is feeing today, though, in the good seasons that is. It’s just intensified as time has time has gone on. They are constantly skrimping and saving. When homer’s company stock increases, Marge is excited that they will finally have a savings account (though Homer goofs and cashes it out when it’s $20 and buy’s an expensive beer). When their dog needs an emergency surgery, they have to cut things out of their life and modify their standard of living for a little while because of their lack of money. In the first episode, when they have to pay for an impromptu tattoo removal for Bart that consumes their Xmas present money, and Homer doesn’t get a holiday bonus, they are unable to purchase any Christmas gifts and Homer is forced to shop at the 66 cent and below store.

I guess what the tweet is getting at is still true, that the Simpsons embodied a typical suburban existence that is becoming less and less possible. But even in that embodiment, the Simpsons were barely hanging on to middle class status in the show, and little bumps along the way threatened to throw them off of it at any moment.

Edit: or maybe they weren’t saying that things weren’t hard for the Simpsons, but rather that their standard of living is now impossible for someone of Homer and Marge’s background

I think this attitude is still around, too. I have a modest home and a kid on the way, and it seems like everyone expects me to be climbing some corporate ladder right now.

It’s like this brain diseased, “chase a dream that you didn’t conceive for yourself” mindset.