This is a quick one.
This month the Switch 2 launched. It's been selling big. I personally am not buying one because I'm effectively priced out and too broke to buy one. I really hate that Nintendo opened the door to $80 games, too.
But hey, for those that bought one and enjoy it? Have fun with it! On paper for me, it fixes everything I hated about the original Switch. If I had more disposable income I'd sure as hell buy one too.
This isn't about what I think of the Switch 2, though: Rather it's about how some people just have this reaction to a bunch of people buying it, wondering where everyone found all this money, and worse, shaming them for buying one, usually followed up with something like "so you'll buy a Switch 2 but you won't give money to $SomeCharityHere, I see how it is".
I say this from the perspective of someone in the US, but please: sod all the way off with this mentality.
The last few months have been grueling if you're someone who's not white, not cisgender, not able-bodied, and not a dude. Things didn't go well last election, and the minute it was called for the current administration, at least for me, I went into survival mode, and that means both mental and physical.
Years ago, as I was effectively killing myself at the tail end of high school and entry into adulthood as a T1 diabetic, my doctor had to beat an important lesson into my head: You first, then everyone else. I know, it sounds greedy on the surface. But the intent of the message was that you're not going to be helpful to anyone if you're dead because you put your own mental and physical health on the backburner so many times that it ends in you dying or severely incapacitated.
And since the election went the way that it did, putting people like myself and many of my friends in danger, we're now locked in survival mode because our lifelines could be cut at any time, and that is not--and I cannot emphasize this enough--is NOT a comfortable thought to have to live with. Our mental health as at an all-time low, because the adage that tomorrow is not guaranteed is landing a lot harder than it usually does these last few months.
If buying yourself a treat, or a distraction like a Switch 2 helps you through a mental tailspin and helps you relax, by all means. That's what Animal Crossing did back in 2020 when we got violently hurled into this pandemic we're in. It helped a LOT of us (myself included) process all of the goddamn everything that was happening around us.
It is not your place to give someone grief because they don't have the mental capacity to put themselves on the back burner for your cause, and shame everything they do because of it. Lots of people are at their mental breaking points with all of the everything going on with each passing day, and if purchasing themselves a little distraction will help keep them from crossing the despair event horizon and/or causing harm to themselves, that's entirely valid, and I will reiterate: It is not your damn place to shame them for it.
Leave them alone. Let people enjoy things.