Near the end of that amazing book by the writer and chef Eddie Huang, he talks about his idea of a neighbourhood restaurant.
Im going to paraphrase here but the essence of a neighbourhood place is one where everyone is welcome. you don’t need to buy anything , and you especially don’t need to make a purchase in order to use the wifi. In other words, the young who often don’t have Money would still be welcome to come in to a neighbourhood joint, because there are so few other options for them. Huang’s sense of generosity is not limited to the customers. He expects his staff to leave him and get better Jobs. Sadly in the real world we don’t put these selfless ideas in to practice. Not only do we expect to have to pay for things that should be free, we are expected to look up to people who go to all these supposedly cool places for free and get paid to promote them to people like you. I’ll save what I think about Instagram for another post. What I’ll say here is I’m tired of people being made to feel they’re not good enough because they haven’t been to some restaurant, or bar, that’s overrated anyway… It’s not only women who do this, although it’s easier for women to simply use their image to get paid to sit around in a Jacuzzi.
Lets face it, these women are getting paid, and if you think I’m lying, when was the last time you saw a typical Instagrammer simply doing something nice for somebody else, not because it was for money, or for more followers, just because they could help someone who maybe doesn’t have the same high-level public image that they are fortunate to have themselves. You can be sure I’m not bitter about this.
The truth is, I can remember when I couldn’t get a date. If you don’t have money, it’s going to be really hard to get a girl interested in you. Then when I was thirty I was finally able to take women out, but we could only share a dinner somewhere or maybe just have a starter each and then leave. As quaint and funny as that sounds, I’d have loved to have been able to do more with women at that time. Being poor is romanticised by people who have money but I’ll be honest it’s really not that much fun.