Come with Me If You Want to Survive an Age of Extinction

Long ago I started only using browsers in private/incognito mode with ads blocked with the idea that I was preserving my privacy in some meaningful way. It's been a few years since I realized this alone was a futile exercise because there's a lot of money paying for a lot of resourceful people whose raison d'etre is to poke holes in my fig leaf. It's small consolation to know that what I'm doing might work for the long tail of sites while doing nothing to hide me from the big players.

Of course there is such a thing.

Lifestyle inflation is a known phenomenon which you (and your spouse) can choose to avoid if you prioritize it, not some immutable rule of nature.

If the treadmill of accumulation that lets someone believe "there's no such thing as enough" ever stops, I think they would be shocked at how quickly they realize what enough actually means.