financing at a car dealership, for sure.

don’t believe me, go try it, you walk in ready to buy a car, and 4 hours and a ton of signing paperwork later, you start to wonder if it was all worth it lmao

Telling kids they can do anything is a gigantic lie and is pretty much socially required at this juncture. Setting aside the dishonesty, that sets them up for self-loathing when they actually make normal headway for someone starting in whatever social class.

The advertising blasting into our brains throughout the day is also a major contender. Past a certain age we all know it’s lies, but damn, it’s still lies, and sometimes it manages to subtly influence you anyway.

There was this mommy blogger in the early aughts who decided to have an “unassisted birth”, which is a thing where you just don’t have any medical care at all. She pontificated often about Big Obstetrics and how they always pushed you for C section because they got paid more, she called midwives “medwives”, and all sorts of other crunchy shit like that. She clearly was not terribly confident but was terribly obnoxious and holier than thou. Fine. I think she had NPD or BPD because of her behaviour personally. Just the nastiest person. She did all her own pregnancy care, which apparently was just writing weight down and taking vitamins and that’s about it.

Well at 33 weeks she went ripping into early labour, phoned her old midwife and while telling her quite rudely that she wanted an unassisted birth also asked her what to do. The midwife told her to go to ER and that she couldn’t help her because it was out of her scope. So she went screaming to ER, could feel baby sitting right at the perineum. The OB takes a look and tells her they have to do a section because baby is breech and obstructed. She began screeching at him that she only wanted to have a vaginal birth and told him he was “birth raping” her, and acted like a hysterical hyena. He managed to convince her how bad things were and that she needed to be delivered RIGHT NOW, and she finally consented and they took her up, and put her under general anesthesia.

She later wrote this vague blog birth story, baby had died because of congenital defects before she woke up, and she wrote a very long set of blog posts about All The Ways The Hospital Was Wrong without really going into why her baby died, and everyone fell all over themselves pitying her and telling her that she was so right about everything. She blogged about how the nurses were so terrible for trying to connect her with social work or grief groups, and when they offered her medication to dry up her breast milk she screeched that they were not supportive of her breastfeeding her 3 year old.

But later on the story came out that baby had a rare condition called sirenomelia, or mermaid syndrome it’s sometimes called. It’s a birth defect where the legs are fused together into the appearance of a mermaid tail. They have a lot of other defects, including no kidneys, no genitals, heart defects, etc. Sirenomelia is caused by untreated gestational diabetes. So not having prenatal care probably killed her child. That was damn deceptive, making everyone pity her when it was just her own obnoxious ignorance.

My dad used an education savings account to funnel my bar mitzvah money and birthday money in “for college”. Kept telling me I’m so lucky because my college will be paid off. Cheats on my mom, buys a Lincoln MKX, and flees to Russia instead.

I found that pretty deceptive ngl.