Social Lounge Started Sep 26, 2026 5:39 AM

Crypto will not save you from financial burdens. Not for the average Joe anyways.

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Sep 26, 2026 5:39 AM
#1
autonomy liberty personalfinance

Most people want larger pay. Higher minimum wage, another job, both partners working jobs, etc, anything of anything to have more to be able to spend what they need and want to survive and thrive. Very ask themselves if they can spend less and still have the same lifestyle.

What if a major part of that spending came down to the fact that people spend on generic, commercial brands rather than doing things for yourself. Clothes, cleaners, foods, insecticides, fridges, heaters, boilers AC, and everything in between can, for the most part, be made easily at home with the right tools, and with the right mindset and will to learn and try what you learn.

I'll use fabric softener as an example. You know how much so you spend on a bottle. How often you have to buy one. It will only take you but a few minutes or less to figure out how much you spend a year for fabric softener. You know you love those soft towels. Right?

What if I told what you are feeling as soft isn't the towel that is soft, but a thin wax that has covered the fabric. This waxy stuff, is what give you that feeling of softness. Add in the smell of artificial flowers and you'll be convinced it was clean. Unfortunately that is just an illusion that you have been scammed.

Every single time you use fabric softener, you add this wax to your fabrics and it starts to build up. No matter how many times you wash it, you start to notice that your towels are getting crustier and brittle and just plain eh. You don't want it anymore. You think that this towel is done for it's money. It doesn't even absorb like it used to.
So you buy a new towel and throw the old one away or tear it down for other uses. But what if you didn't have to buy a new towel? What if you could stop buying fabric softener and still keep your towels soft?
You see, every time you washed it with fabric softener you have been trapping gunk in your own clothes and stuff with this waxy coating. It also makes it water proof preventing it from actually getting cleaned. Yup, the thing you bought to absorb water is now water proof. Why are you doing that?

It even gets into your filters on your drier. This wax covers the filter preventing air flow because there is a fine thin layer over it. Just take a dró of water onto your drier filter and see for yourself how bad it is. If water sits at the top not going through the tiny slits you got an issue with the fire department waiting to happen. That same wax is also covering your sensors, preventing your drier from knowing when to stop properly in time when enough is enough. Instead it goes on another 30 minutes and you none he wiser. But it all started with that fabric softener.

So why did you learn? What will you do instead?

I'll tell you what to do. Go to you kitchen and pull out a bottle of vinegar and you will be holding the only you need to make fabric softener. All you need to do the next time you wash your clothes or whatever, is add half a cup of viniger into the wash.

⚠️ Warning ⚠️: DO NOT MIX WITH BLEACH! Mixing bleach with vinegar will cause a chemical reaction producing heavy toxic gas that can land you in serious health problems, landing you in the hospital, or even death 💀 ⚠️

Just respect the two chemicals apart. Never mix.

If you have already added bleach let the entire was go all the way on its own from the beginning, and then after it's done, retry the wash but with just vinegar.

But won't vinegar smell!?

Vinegar is volatile meaning it will evaporate, and the smell will be completely gone too. Meaning no fresh softener smell. If you still want that fresh smell, just buy some essential oils and lay a few drops on a small wash cloth and throw it in the drier or with the washer if you don't have a drier. If you got a back yard, hang your clothes to whiten and brighten your clothes.ñ even colored ones too.

That's all you need to do. Vinegar will remove that wax and give your clothes a real soft feel. And because you won't have that wax anymore, your clothes will actually be cleaned. And bonus is that you don't need to use it as often, especially if you use this method with the recipe for your own 14usd bucket of detergent that you will last you all year or for 300 loads, made in 30 minutes in your own kitchen. You can find that recipe on my substack at yayogerardo.substack.com

Now do the math. How much is vinegar? How often do you use fabric softener before vs now? How much will you save if you buy vinegar instead of fabric softener? Did you know you can also make your own vinegar cheaply?

This is just one method of many that you can start using now. The method is to DIY as much stuff as you can, reducing your spending dramatically once you learn and apply all that you can. Then you don't have be working 2 jobs. Eventually many of the things you need will be made from a couple handfuls of ingredients and solutions to making your very own cleansers. And more. The less spend the more you save. And it starts with one little thing, one little step towards autonomy, towards needing less from anyone or any corporation with ridiculous inflated prices.

Each step you take to becoming less dependent starts with you spending smarter. Don't ask what brand do I need. Ask yourself what do I need to make it myself? What do I really need to do the exact thing that needs to be done that commercial brands already do? What ingredients do I get? And yes, bulk buying is cheaper in the long run. It will save you trips to the store and gas. More time with the fam or video games. Or whatever it is you do.

You don't need to hold crypto to save yourself from financial burdens. You just need to lean towards an autonomous living style, like your ancestors used to do with practical methods.

Thank you.

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Replies

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Sep 26, 2026 10:55 AM Edited Sep 26, 2026 5:45 PM
#2

@yayogerardo
The most valuable currency is time because you can never buy that back not for any price.

The most ideal lifestyle in my opinion costs very little money, a literal pittance.
So I think people need to wipe the idea that money is the essence of life, the fungible resource of all satiety and enjoyment, and the fuel of every endeavor.

Rather money is a crude and savage weapon, the scourge off all wars and dungeons, the cruelty of man made quantifiable. That's the weight it needs to carry because it is that ugly. People think its a sexy thing but its not its fucking horrible.

So hoarding money is the same thing as hoarding weapons. Its not a good thing to do, but it might help to protect yourself, and to protect your real wealth. But thinking that its the essence of our life is so perverted and wrong and bad and I for one want no part in that!

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Sep 26, 2026 12:17 PM
#3

@Nebuchadnezzar_II It's entirely possible to live without money; many have walked the path. It's not for all, so then the next best thing is to live on very little money. I'd rather have a as little interaction with the system as possible (no debts, no big spenditure, no need for consumeristic habits) a little money, and lots of time to live a creative, productive life where i can do the things i enjoy, earn the MRX on the side.

I would say the next valuble thing after Time is Health and Skills. With these we cannot be stopped. Without them we will not cease needing the system's crutches.

The magic of it all is that it takes a 1 degree shift in basic management of our daily lives. Like Yayo's post here outlines, a small shift can save time, energy, money and reliance on this addictive system-world.

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tell em all to sniff ya nutsack

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Sep 26, 2026 1:01 PM
#4

short answer : Crypto = gamble. Gamble = win big or lose big

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Cryptocurrencies are weird

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Sep 26, 2026 1:56 PM
#5

I also use vinegar instead of fabric softner.

The average joe (at least in the US) isn't destitute because of spending habits. You're not going to afford a down payment on a house by swapping fabric softer for vinegar. You're not going to afford a down payment on a house if you entirely eliminated your spending and doubled your income. Good spending habits can improve your financial situation, but telling people to eat ramen noodles is not a solution to the problem, because the problem is a broken financial system, not bad spending habits.

As an analogy: within software construction you want fast software. Sometimes you can eliminate unecessary operations that the compiler added (because the compiler imperfect). This is called micro-optimizaion. You can improve performance by a few percentage points, say as much as 3%. You will never be able to micro-op your way to e.g. finding the prime facrors of an integer in log(N) time because the problem is not an imperfect compiler, its that the algorithm used is too slow. You'll need a quantum computer and shor's algorithm to solve that problem.

Similarly, you can "micro-op" your spending (and I do), but it can never resolve a broken financial system. No amount of personal budgeting will adjust wages for inflation, or stop the legal authorities from siezing your assets, or make your savings account retain its value over time. You need crypto to solve that problem.

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Sep 26, 2026 3:48 PM
#6

@bulletbill22 You're arguing against a position I didn't make.

The fabric softener was an example, not the proposed solution to the financial system. The point wasn't that replacing one bottle of fabric softener with vinegar is going to produce a down payment on a house. The point was the principle demonstrated by doing it: a thing you were previously purchasing doesn't necessarily need to be purchased at all.

That's different from telling people to buy cheaper products, eat ramen, or become better at budgeting. The question is whether the product needs to be a commercial purchase in the first place.

Apply that principle beyond fabric softener: detergent, shampoo, deodorant, cleaners, repairs, food preparation, and whatever else can reasonably be made, repaired, reused, substituted, or eliminated. Each individual example is small. The cumulative reduction in things requiring money is the point.

And this isn't an argument that personal consumption changes inflation, wages, monetary policy, or asset seizure. Those are different problems. The argument is that people can reduce how much of their material life depends on those systems.

That's also why I don't see DIY autonomy and crypto as competing answers. Crypto addresses one set of dependencies. Producing things yourself addresses another. One doesn't invalidate the other.

The larger question is why access to the necessities of life has to remain mediated by money and financial institutions at all. People don't need a financial asset in order to produce soap, grow food, build something, repair something, or make something useful. The physical capacity to produce goods is separate from the financial system used to account for them.

If that financial system disappeared, people would still have to eat, build, repair, grow, manufacture, transport, and maintain things. The productive work doesn't disappear merely because the monetary layer does.

And if productivity increases, that doesn't inherently require people to spend the additional productive capacity working even more hours to generate more money. It can instead mean that the amount of necessary labor per person falls.

So the argument isn't "save money and you'll escape the financial system."

It's: reduce the number of things you require the financial system to provide in the first place.

The vinegar was one example of that principle. You treated the example as though it were the entire argument, which is why your response ends up addressing a claim I never made.

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1 thanks - Nebuchadnezzar_II - 0 tippers
Sep 26, 2026 6:00 PM Edited Sep 26, 2026 6:02 PM
#7

@BraveSmoke
The magic of it all is that it takes a 1 degree shift in basic management of our daily lives.

Yes, and also a shift in the perception of value.

Modern commercial culture has little deeper perception of the value of something than the price tag attached. So a $200 meal is 10 times better than a $20 dollar meal.

But in reality, the very finest, most opulent places and products are actually very natural and simply enjoyed/ obtained. So the idea of 'enjoying money' more often than not robs society of greater enjoyment.

But the magic is the same because it only takes a subtle shift in perception to see past that.

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You are the only light

blog: freedomthemoon.netlify.app
game: evoverse.onrender.com
UK GIS: https://pub-6199d7cd0f754c4f8987b0455ceb6161.r2.dev/index.html
github: moonboi420

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Sep 26, 2026 6:48 PM
#9

@BraveSmoke

The less life requires money, the less power money has over life.™

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When I am still, the world moves with me.

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Sep 26, 2026 9:18 PM Edited Sep 26, 2026 9:22 PM
#10

@yayogerardo Some count dollars. Some count calories. Some count macros. Very few count chemicals. The only true measure of wealth, is one's health. Money means nothing if a person is too broken to enjoy life

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principles over profit

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Sep 27, 2026 2:37 AM
#11

@bulletbill22 I stopped using the dryer because I've found it degrades clothes faster and I wash everything on delicate. I use way less detergent than it calls for and when athletic clothes smell, baking soda clears it up. I have never used fabric softener. Should I try vinegar? It makes your clothes feel nicer?

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