Shrinkflation & Decay

~securesakelayer

Shrinkflation:

In my early 20s, I visited my childhood home again about a decade after we had moved out. This was the suburban single-family home that defined every aspect of me growing up. From my birth, to my almost teenage years, that house was part of it. Within the walls, it stored a memory bank that I had mostly forgotten about. Helped with the entropy of time, recessing memories of childhood abuse, and the lack of physical experience seeing the neighborhood again as reminders, I was flooded with feelings.

But only one feeling truly defined that visit: the feeling of being small.

The backyard that I had considered to be large enough to be an entire playground was instead a suffocating little prison. The hallway that felt like it took an entire minute to walk through was instead quickly traversed and cramped. The front yard which had such tall walls protecting the house from the rest of the neighborhood was instead revealed to be just tiny baby gates. And the neighborhood itself seemed smaller than I remember... and time had definitely decayed it.

"But when you're small

You can't walk down the hall

When you're small

You're not very big at all"

-MGMT

Decay:

I realize that this was a lower class neighborhood when we lived in it. A neighbor was raided by police one day for having a meth lab. Graffiti was uncommon, but had made a mark in places. And we had a fair share of trashy and unsafe neighborhood drama, like rocks thrown through windows during disputes.

Today, this neighborhood would be considered middle class. Middle class being a kind of exotic species, that is.

Just like The Simpson's initially airing in the 80s making fun of Homer for being poor, the same socioeconomic status today firmly establishes Homer Simpson as upper class.

Despite that increased status, the decay creeping into the neighborhood makes everything seem more awful. A tense paradox of higher SES but lower QOL. And the unnerving disparity between brick walls collapsing in on themselves contrasted against newly built city signs.

"The old neighborhood was so alive

And every kid on the whole damn street

Was gonna make it big and not be beat

Now the neighborhood's cracked and torn

The kids are grown up but their lives are worn"

-The Offspring

Fast forward years later to today, and I hold a Ritz Cracker in the palm of my hand. As a child, these same crackers were so wide and thick. Now, they appear more like coins that I could easily hold half a dozen at a time. So tiny, insignificant.

This isn't from body dysmorphia at all. I am not a big or tall person, my hand size is probably smaller than average for adults, and my fingers are soft and skinny. Despite that, the shrinkflation makes everything look microscopic. It makes me feel so gigantic, like a God overseeing all these trinkets.

Shrinkflation aside, the financial decay is also unbelievably obvious. The minimum wage adults I knew in the later 2000s earned around $7 an hour. For an hour of work and a time machine, they could buy only a bag of chips in the present. And that bag would be evenly split among chips and compressed air.

As I look at that Ritz Cracker, all the thoughts of my childhood home, the shrinkflation, and the neighborhood decay force their way into my brain. The winning simulation my brain runs is the devastation that 2008 brought upon us... and how many people accepted it as a noticeable loss to live with. Post-COVID, we're begging to go back to those 2008 times since losing access to owning a home is much, much easier than losing access to a cheap and filling bag of chips, or crackers, or candy.

What a miserable, shrinking decay to bear witness to. The next development appears to be us scraping people's feet skin off, frying them in oil, gnawing on them, and fondly remembering the time when we had access to Doritos sometimes. Those Doritos built from pesticide potatoes, flavored with seed oils, and dyed with artificial colorings. It was always poison, the good memories are all built on delusion.