You are not your job

But that's kind of beside the point isn't it? If you've spent years of your life learning specific skills to offer some benefit to society, and suddenly the society decides they need far fewer people with those skills (and thus don't want to employ you), that just fundamentally has to suck for a lot of people.

Saying "cheer up, you can just compensate with this other skill" is just ignoring that fundamental reality. And I think we've all met people who were diligent and technically competent but "a bit weird", but found a refuge in tech (note: I'm not necessarily talking about "assholes" here). Those people are going to have an even harder time, and that's not because of their "toxic" identification with their job (i.e. source of income and primary form of service to society).

And I hesitate to mention this, but I don't feel I'm in this situation. I just see it happening to people in my industry and worry about the future.

Likewise not having a smartphone means you're less able to participate in the economy, and can in fact impair one's social life as most things are coordinated via group chat these days.

If you want to go live like it's 1910, that is an option, but unless you're willing to become Amish you will find it socially isolating and surprisingly expensive. It will not fix your economic woes, it will simply swap them for the economic woes of yesteryear and you'll learn first-hand why we developed things like washing machines.

IMO the real culprit is the financialization of everything over the last 50 years, and lax anti-trust enforcement. Since the 70s, every excuse in the book has been used to not pay workers more. Your house is now an asset! Your company-managed pension is now a self-managed 401k! You can get loans for everything under the sun, endless credit! Why care about the total cost of goods when you can just pay it off in installments? Anything but actually paying the middle class a bigger piece of the pie so they might be able to buy something with actual savings like we're taught to do as kids. Competition to bring down prices? Nope, we're approving every corporate consolidation from now until the end of time and bailing them out with taxpayer money when they fail! They jumped the shark a bit proposing 50 year mortgages to fix the housing crisis.

It's always sold to the public as "freedom", because the public is/was the most gullible entity. Mediocre people love pretending that they're the masters of their own destiny.

The net effect is that there is no adjustment to lifestyle you can make to offset the rising cost of everything without sacrificing your ability to prosper in the first place. If there were, West Virginia would be prospering right now. You can go full Diogenes if you like, that's all romantic until you get sick, and God forbid you have dependents who look to you for food and healthcare and you tell them that you can't provide it because that would require lifestyle inflation.

Evolutionary history is of course always difficult. I think the loneliness part comes mostly from the kurzgesagt video on loneliness, as well as some other stuff here and there. Rate of infanticide is roughly correct with quick Google. Rest of tribal stuff is from a variety of books and high school social anthropology. I think I actually have the "reasoning for infanticide" part from sex at dawn, of all places.

I'm always scared to run a deep research service to find the counterpoints after I type this kind of stuff out, but feel free to do so for me and dress me down. At least survivorship bias is a classic that's pretty much always worth keeping in mind on any topic.

What can I say? Retail does not provide a living wage.