Life of Consumption Part Two

Life of Consumption
For a while, I didn’t think of it as a problem. It just felt like life getting better.
A nicer dinner here. A more interesting place there. The occasional splurge slowly becoming routine. At some point, we stopped asking if we should go out and started asking where.
Nothing felt excessive in the moment.
Which is usually how excessive things start.

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At first, it’s not about money.

It’s convenience. Then experience. Then taste.

You learn the difference between good, great, and memorable. And once you cross that line, it’s hard to go back.

Casual places feel… less interesting. Not worse. Just less.

And slowly, your baseline shifts—just enough that going backwards feels slightly offensive.

Then there was a multiplier I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. We were spending in USD, but often in Malaysia. The exchange rate made everything feel cheaper than it actually was. What felt like a “nice but reasonable” dinner to us landed very differently for friends earning in MYR.

Same table. Same meal. Very different realities.
That gap is easy to ignore when you’re the one benefiting from it.

At some point, I started to feel a low-grade pressure. My income was solid. Which made it confusing that it didn’t feel like enough.

Nothing we were doing looked reckless. Just a steady stream of reasonable decisions that somehow added up to something heavier than expected.

It wasn’t any one dinner. It was the accumulation—and the expectation.
Once something becomes normal, it stops feeling like a choice.

At first, this felt like a personal problem.
It wasn’t.
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The Hidden Cost: Friendships

This started to bleed into our friendships in ways that felt… off.
Two nagging feelings kept showing up.

The first was subtle.

Does constantly talking about eating out—especially at nicer places—leave a bad taste with the people you care about? Most of our friends were still operating in a different rhythm—eating out was for celebrations, not every month. And yet we kept bringing it up, inviting them along like it was no big deal.
It probably wasn’t malicious. But it may have been careless.

And the FX gap made it worse. What felt “normal” to us could feel extravagant—or uncomfortable—to them. Same invite, very different cost.

What made this more complicated is that this wasn’t new. Some of our earliest bonding moments with this group were exactly this—eating out every weekend, partying like it was cheap.

At some point though, reality caught up.

I remember asking Cat how this was even sustainable. My income—already solid from working in IT—was starting to feel the pinch. Which raised a slightly awkward question:

how is everyone else affording this?

That conversation, uncomfortable as it was, ended up becoming the foundation for a stronger friendship. We could finally be honest. No more pretending. No more trying to keep up with the Joneses.

The second feeling was harder to shake.

I felt almost… compelled to try all these fine dining places (especially with the FX rate compounding the issue). And naturally, I wanted to share these fine dining experiences with our closest friends.

But not everyone was that interested. Or at that frequency. Or that price point.
That’s when things started getting weird.

I’d invite them anyway. Then I’d rationalize. Maybe the easiest way to make it work is if I just paid. Which sounds generous until you think about it for more than five seconds.

It removes the friction. But it also changes the interaction.

At some point, it stopped feeling like we were sharing a meal and started feeling like I was buying the experience.

And if I’m being honest, something uncomfortably close to buying the friendship.
That realization didn’t hit all at once. It crept in. And once it was there, it was hard to ignore. I still don’t fully know how to process that feeling.

The most dangerous part of consumption isn’t the spending. It’s how quickly it becomes invisible.

How something that used to feel like a treat becomes a default.
How something you chose becomes something you assume.
How something shared starts to separate.

I still enjoy great meals. That hasn’t changed. But I’m more aware now of the second-order effects—the ones that don’t show up on a receipt.

The hardest part isn’t deciding whether something is worth the price. It’s realizing how easily those decisions compound into something you didn’t explicitly choose—

and how that something can quietly reshape the way you relate to the people you care about, without you fully noticing when it happened.

For #ELF#