Sixty-Three: Facebook Marketplace (05-13-2024)
Nothing in the world is more difficult than purchasing a mildly expensive item on Facebook Marketplace. The amount of groveling, stalking, and bargaining required to procure a used bicycle is rivaled only by the job application or networking experience.
As a child, there's a perception of uniform equality amongst adults. There's the grownups and there's kids, and the grownups are all in agreement to spoil the fun for the kids. By the time a person graduates college (or equivalent life milestone), they've realized there is a granularity to class that overcomes their naive dichotomy and ultimately scores all social interactions forever, with very little (statistically true) adjustments to occur in the future. A person's final place in life is strongly determinate. Typical encouragements given to kids, that they can become doctors or lawyers or any other profession with a high salary are eventually couched, usually by cost. My expectation that I would buy a bike to shorten my commute has been couched, though not by cost, but only seller indifference. No one seems to be motivated to part with their UNUSED BIKE!!!! YOU LISTED IT FOR SALE JUST LET ME HAVE IT!!!!!!
There's a lot of media focused on young adulthood, petering off around post-college age. HBO's (Ms. Dunham's) Girls is notable for its portrayal of a particularly fleeting cultural moment, and its courage to portray low-20s life outside of total babe-itude and sexual fantasy. There's other media too that portrays being a young, "burgeoning" professional person, but it never holds any particular cultural gravity. There's a deep shame in being young and newly independent. Blame perpetual shifts from generation to generation as starting salaries and economic dispositions shift from one cohort to the next. Rising rent and education costs continually skew the youth's spending towards new avenues of escapism, anecdotally it seems most young people penny-pinch for unglamorous vacations, often addenda to work travel or other minor experiential costs, concerts. I would really like to spend $250-$400 of my very limited disposable income on a bike, but it seems no one really wants to sell it to me. Is it because my facebook account is otherwise inactive? I'm too young for boomerbook, and therefore socially exiled from buying a used bicycle, literal garage sale fodder.
There's an adage among internet laymen financial discussors that for most Americans, a single unexpected expense, usually automotive or medical, will wipe away any savings and push someone from comfortable to paycheck-to-paycheck (poor). I'd argue that even a minor unexpected expense, like a larger grocery bill or work trip with delayed reimbursement, something to the tune of a couple hundred dollars, now has the same effect. I don't own a car, so my perspective on auto costs is skewed, and I don't go to the doctor, but I would be in a dangerous spot if my grocery costs increased from an ability-to-have-consistent-savings perspective. I've done some great budgeting to improve the no-car attribute (no car -> bike), but apparently it's a lazy-sellers' market.
One day I'll have $10k in a single savings account. I'm not sure what the fanfare will be at that point, besides remarking at a high number on a screen, a sum of paid labor debts owed to me that, ultimately, does not exist in any tangible form. My lack of investments, inherited social class, or outsized prestige essential means that my self-worth and efficacy in the professional world is carried by my allegiance to my employer, who otherwise sponsors my every move and has complete control of my fate and finances. If I was fired tomorrow I'd last until I could get another job, which would probably be a shift job at a grocery store. I often fall into this masochistic fantasy, which carries a sort of comfort. I don't feel as though being a shelf-stocker would be all that bad. At least it's easy right? And I could still bike to work, if someone sold me their bike.
Work and identity are confusingly intermixed in America. Zoomers are proud to divorce who they are from what they're paid to do, which is wonderful and a significant improvement to culture in a post-industrial economy, but when work doesn't pay enough to live a fruitful existent past 17:00, filling the other 8 hours with meaningful activities to form an identity around is impossible. I've been fed content of urban cyclists on Instagram recently. I'd categorize it in the same young-daredevil content tranche as urban explorers (urbex), graffiti, etc. Young men ride lightweight bikes at high speeds and zip between cars on narrow or busy streets. These aren't wheelie kids, they're bike messengers, coffee shop employees, bonafide hipsters off the saddle, and acrobatic deathwishers upon it. This doesn't mean to romanticize them, and I have no desire to become like these people, however, I feel the same masochistic comfort in imagining myself adopting the 1% risk of being turned into asphalt paint by a Suburban because I turned too fast racing my friend who likes vinyl and cold brew as I do imagining spitting in my bosses face then spending forty years organizing cases of frozen peas.
The company I work for, like many, is being run into the ground. It's nice to imagine a career somewhere that holds no pretense of respecting or caring about me. It's nice to think I could send a message to someone who wants to sell their bicycle, and they would sell it to me.