What I’ve learned here is that there’s literally nothing anybody can say short of “everything is horrible and we’re all gonna starve to death” that will appease some people. Offering any type of solution, mitigator, or encouragement is condemned. If you bring up how you couponed and ate out (maybe?) once a month and drove around in a car with no AC all summer in your 20s, you get told you “just don’t understand what kids these days go through.” If you bring up how other generations weathered economic calamity throughout history and encourage people that they, too, have the power to survive this, you get told you want everyone to live like it’s the Great Depression and be happy about it. If you tell someone it’s cheaper to make a burrito at home than DoorDash Chipotle, you get accused of demanding they live off rice and beans. (Which is ironic considering this whole thing started because someone was complaining about paying $20 for…rice and beans.) If they scream that ground beef is $12 a pound and you point them to a store that has it for $5 a pound, you get told that’s subpar beef and would NEVER feed their family of eight, five of which are teen boys, what are you, a monster?! If you agree that prices are insane and we have deep systemic problems that need fixing but that, in the meantime, perhaps people can save money with some simple changes, they just ignore you said the first part and accuse you of telling everyone to eat cake. If you bring up those deep systemic problems and what it would take to fix them, everyone ignores that tweet because nobody *actually* knows how to realistically go about uprooting the welfare state, curbing government spending, getting the national debt under control, or dealing with foreign threats without spending money - most if not all of which would take the participation of our deeply broken Congress. And in all of it, you get accused of sending a terrible political message to socialism-loving young people, and that the “correct” political message is to fuel mass hysteria over prices and let Iran have nukes so milk will magically come back down to 2005 prices. Which wouldn’t work because the issues are so much deeper than that and we’d wind up with egg all over our faces, but whatever. They will find a problem with whatever you say because anything short of “you should be able to live at 23 without budgeting, penny-pinching, or sacrificing” (which literally no generation has ever done but okay) or “no one should have to give up a single creature comfort to buy food” is considered “bad political messaging” to the youths. There’s no winning for anyone here because the point is not to have a conversation or to offer people hope. Many in the outrage mob don’t even see when someone is agreeing with them on the underlying issue but merely offering an alternate angle from which to approach it. They just want to be angry and they want everyone else to declare Doomsday with them and when someone doesn’t, they throw a fit. Which, apparently, is considered GREAT political messaging.