What’s for dinner tonight – disappointment and Cup Noodles again? We know you work 70 hours a week between at least two jobs, but the gruesome phantom that is your student debt guarantees you’ll be living in substandard conditions until your 60th birthday.
Why not download some meaningless apps to collect points or stars or pennies or whatever? It will at least distract you from the fact you will never be able to afford a house or even a decent apartment, or like, dinner tonight.
You’ll certainly never be able to afford NOT clicking an ad promising some frugal “life hack.” So below are five ways to feast on the crumbs from the table of late capitalism:
Walk Everywhere: What do you mean you are tired, have blisters, work four jobs, and can’t afford shoes with arch support? Just stop driving or taking public transportation and walk. If you think that this suggestion is ableist, well, of course it is. It’s classist, too. So is your student debt!
Rebates: There are a gazillion phone apps to find you rebates on purchases you weren’t really going to make in the first place. That’s the beauty of rebates – you must make purchases first, which means you need more than $.67 in your bank account if you are going this route.
I guess it’s nice to get fifty cents back on that $30 tablecloth you bought on HellMart.biz? Fifty whole cents for your trouble… which isn’t even a drop in the bucket for your student debt, more vast than every drop in every ocean combined.
Sleep All the Time, Till You Die. Sure you could take online surveys or work as a mystery shopper to make $1 here and there paid through PAYPAL ONLY. Just remember that keeping your cell phone charged requires electricity, and do you really need that bill to get any higher? Then traveling to stores to buy certain merchandise or evaluate what’s on the shelves will require gasoline or a bus pass. Really, you should just sleep. Then one day you’ll be dead.
Sell Your Data: It’s an open secret that seedy marketing companies are selling your email address, phone number and other information at a profit. That’s why you get so many garbage phone calls and scam emails. Even big name companies like Google and Facebook are in on the racket. It’s time to redirect the flow of income off your privacy back into your pocket!
Here’s a list of shady firms that will pay you every time you text them your Social Security Number, or that of a loved one. They will Venmo you $.50 per number in 6-8 weeks. They’ll also pay you in pennies for your bank account information, blood type and any gene sequencing information you may have. Get texting, mush!
Use Your Body: Literally everything costs money, but your body belongs to you. Why not use it to make a few cents? Consider Fantine from Les Miserables, because if anything makes you sympathetic to the causes of the French Revolution, it’s the mind-boggling number of zeroes in the amount you owe in student loans.
UNFORTUNATELY there’s less of a paying market for your hair and teeth these days, and I don’t think we can legally advise you to enter into prostitution on this site. But your body generates so much useful stuff every day, there’s got to be a way to make it work for you! Why buy expensive hair products when you can tame that cowlick with all-natural, old-fashioned spit? And that leak in your car’s radiator can always be topped off with tears while you put off going to and thus paying a mechanic.
Need an antiseptic for a work-related injury? Use tears. Face toner? Tears. Wash your clothes in tears. Brush your teeth with tears.
You have so many tears inside you. So many tears.
