Maybe, being broken is exactly what we need to be?

Modern problems require modern solutions.

Or in my case, cheap problems require cheap solutions.

It's no secret that our economic situation is on the brink of collapse. And honestly, for me and a lot of people, we're already in the recession.

The government says we're still doing fine. But we all know just how reliable their data is. Which is to say, not reliable at all. Even more so if your government is like mine. Absolutely corrupt, incompetent, and so disconnected from reality they might as well live in another dimension.

For the past two years, more and more of my salary has been delayed at work. A work that barely paid enough for me to feed myself and my family, and sometimes even help my parents. Since around 2022, I've pretty much had no disposable income. The industry I'm in is in tatters. It got even worse after the current cursed president took the throne (yes, throne. Because he act like a king).

The world we knew in our childhood ended in 2019.

Well, moving on. Since my hobbies are playing games, writing, drawing, and sometimes making videos, I of course need a device that can support them. That means spending money on computer parts. And just as I said before, I barely have any disposable income. I'm very much a bargain hunter.

Anything I can cheap out on, I cheap the hell out of.

From a cheap, not-even-Bronze PSU, a second-hand HDD for storage, a cheap-brand SSD, refurbished RAM and CPU, and finally an ex-mining GPU. My main goal when building a PC is simply to have it turn on and work well enough to let me do what I need. You could say, I'm literally scraping the bottom of the barrel with this build.

My peripherals? They're the cheapest of the cheap too. A bottom-tier Logitech mouse and an unknown-brand keyboard. The only decent thing in my setup that I bought new is my LG monitor, back in the good days of 2017–2018. I also finally managed to save enough money to replace my dying PSU with a decent one after blowing through two shitty ones. Oh, and the Motherboard too. But just like before, they were the cheapest decent options I could find.

A bottom-tier Bronze PSU from Corsair and a bottom-tier A320 Motherboard from ECS.

With all that background, it should come as no surprise that I also bought the absolute cheapest headphones I could find two years ago. I just needed something that could make sound.

The exact headphones I'm currently still wearing while writing this article.

I bought them for around five bucks. The sound they produce is meh, the mic is so quiet it might as well not exist. And this exact headphones have been broken for about a year. The mic is dead, and the speaker on the left side became loose after I dropped them. Now the audio balance is completely off.

For months, I left them as they were and just lowered one side to compensate, with unsatisfying results. But everything changed after I fell off my bike a few weeks ago.

One day, I came home from overtime and hit a rock with my bike. I fell onto the road, but since I was riding pretty slowly, both the bike and I were fine. It was also nighttime, so there wasn't any traffic.

I was so tired that day that I just lay there on the asphalt for quite some time. Just Lying there, folding my hands and closing my eyes, contemplating my life's choices. I didn't care that my clothes were getting dirty or how hard the road was. I truly felt exhausted, not just physically, but mentally.

It was at that moment a dumb thought suddenly crossed my mind.

If the speaker on the left side of my headphones being loose was the problem, then I just needed to loosen the right side too to balance things out.

So I got home.

I checked the headphones and found there was no way to disassemble them without breaking them. Just what you'd expect from something that cheap.

And so...

I hit them against the table.

Again.

Again.

And again.

And again until I heard something break inside.

And now both speakers are loose.

With both sides now broken, they can finally do their job properly.

Once again, the world has changed. It's no longer the world of two decades ago. So many things that used to work are now broken. A job is no longer something you aspire to climb up, just having one is already a blessing. Getting people to see what your hobbies produce is no longer just about consistency, but also about the blessing of the almighty algorithm. Niches that used to belong to passionate people are now crowded by those who are only in it for the money.

If I started listing all the new problems we face in this new era, there would be no end to it.

Sometimes I wonder.

In this new broken world, maybe resisting isn't the right way to face it.

Maybe, just like my headphones, I need to smash my old way of doing things before they can finally work again in this dystopian society. Which are both easier and cheaper than persisting.