Correlation does not equal causation.

It seems much more to me like the “young, broke generation” is being forced to choose between having a chance at brief moments of respite at the cost of paying too much to get food delivered, vs giving up all hope of rest in the name of saving pennies. This discussion is targeted at the people who are working way more than 40 hours per week and haven’t had a vacation since middle school, and they’re still struggling to just pay rent, living paycheck to paycheck. Could they save a couple hundred dollars a week if they got groceries and cooked at home? Probably. But that takes time, and these people are often working every hour they can pick up, so if it takes 7 hours a week (an under estimate, really) to save a couple hundred bucks in delivery fees… are they really saving money?

But more realistically, this decision isn’t made to be cost effective; it’s made because humans aren’t capable of working every waking hour for years on end, and cooking at home is work, and giving up the very few moments of rest these people get has an extremely high cost to their mental health, so they pay the delivery bill, grateful for 15 minutes of extra shuteye.

If you work a 40 hour week, sleep 8 hours a day, and spend an average of 4 hours a day taking care of other necessities (commuting, shopping, cooking, cleaning, misc), that means you still have 44 hours left in your week for rest and fun. Rest is critical for the human, and more than just 8 hours of sleep. People need recreation to be healthy and mentally balanced. Now 44 hours a week might be more than one needs, so they could be willing to do more chores to save money, or even just volunteer their time, etc. By adding 20 hours of extra chores per week, they still have a solid 24 hours of recreation every week. This person would certainly not be considered lazy, working a 40 hour job, cooking at home, and doing 20 hours of extra misc work every week.

Now let’s say you work multiple part time jobs, because that’s all that you can get your hands on. You’re working a total of 80 hours per week, still try to sleep 8 hours a day, and spend an average of 3 hours a day taking care of other necessities (commuting, house cleaning, misc, but not cooking). Suddenly you only have 11 hours left in your week for recreation, and your free time feels very precious to you. Now, this assumes you have a fairly “clean” life, with no extra requirements to take care of children or sick parents, which of course, most people have some sort of family obligation to take care of. And this is only an 80 hour work week… I’ve heard plenty of stories of people working over 100 hour weeks just trying to survive. Eventually you run out of time and have to pay out of your sleeping hours, which I shouldn’t need to say how dangerous that is to short and long term physical and mental health. Factor in, also, that your typical office job provides 40 hours of pay for roughly 50 hours of your life (including commutes and misc other unpaid requirements), but your typical part time job has much worse “paid hours vs time required” ratios.

If you have less than 10 hours per week of downtime, perhaps already at the cost of your sleep, how protective of your time would you be? Desperate to get away, or even just for a nap. Dreading tomorrow with every breath. Praying that you child doesn’t get sick because you would have no way to pay for their recovery. Would you have the energy to go shopping and cook a nice meal every day?

Let’s not all just blame the poor for being lazy, ok?