Comment by salahadawi

15 hours ago

This makes me realize I should show my appreciation to organizers more. It’s easy to take events for granted.

During my grad school years, back when the world was less competitive, I organized a LOT of events. I liked giving to the community, I had space to do it, and my needs were taken care of.

Nowadays I feel like anything I do either needs to be either (a) getting me closer to opportunities to build a living or wealth OR (b) individual recharging time.

When my poke bowl costs $24 (yes, it actually did), and my job application acceptance rate has cratered from ~100% to 10% over the past 10 years, I don't really have space to give to the community for free anymore.

  • I think this is why all the community events and social things in my neighborhood are organized by a few wealthy retirees. The rest of us are too busy spending all our time breaking our backs trying to survive another week so that maybe when we are 80 we’ll be able to get involved with something.

    • A quick look at your comments history suggests you are in the US. Of course individual circumstances can vary but overall looking at median disposable income adjusted for purchasing power parity (median equivalised household disposable income), the US is the wealthiest non-tiny country in the world (tecnically this data only covers the OECD and Luxembourg, a country smaller than many US cities, is the wealthiest).

      https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2024/06/society-at-a-gl...

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Well, at least the organizers that care. There's definitely a class of grifter organizers that view events as an opportunity to profit from high entry fees and low production quality / relying on volunteers.