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(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 22 May 2025
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I'm saying that whatever it was your grandparents had 50 years ago, the costs (including opportunity costs) are totally different.
I can work an hour at McDonald's, for $18, and earn enough to buy 10 pounds of tomatoes at $1.80/lb. Growing 10 pounds of tomatoes is gonna take me a lot more than an hour of work, even if the land is free. The tradeoffs for me in this moment are going to be different from what your grandparents faced in the 70's.
Either way, whether it's worth the effort to drive for Uber depends on whether you already own a car. Whether you can publish a cheap indie game on the app store or steam depends on whether you already own a laptop. And whether it's cost effective to grow your own food depends on whether you have access to land, sun, soil, and water.
For small scale food gardening it absolutely matters. Picking berries, planting seedlings, spreading compost, getting rid of pests (either through pesticides or things like ladybugs), productivity per worker hour depends a lot on the scale. It's really, really hard to be cost competitive with the grocery store in just pure worker hours, even if your own time is worth less than $5/hour.
I mean they gardened 10 years ago and I garden now. It's not that expensive.
I never said this was supposed to replace your full time job. And you can count labor costs per hour if you want but it doesn't count for literally every other task I have to do to continue living other than my actual job. Like I don't do an hour analysis breakdown of cooking a good meal from home. If I calculated cook time, cleaning, prep it would work out bad too. Yet it's still financially cheaper to eat at home. Because my domestic labor isn't compensated.
If i have $10 I can grow you more than $10 worth of grocery store tomatoes. If I pretend it's a job it'll be less per hour of course, but if I don't have another way to monetize that time it's a net gain. Honestly thinking of every facet of living life in terms of hourly wages is fucking depressing.