I don’t know, it doesn’t seem far off.

Years ago when I was on Medicaid I spent about 2 weeks in the hospital. They took my appendix out and after looking at it and running some tests found out that I had some rare parasite. I was in excruciating pain at the time, throwing up blood a few times a day and just withering away. There was a pill that I was waiting to get that would’ve killed the parasites which could’ve been given to me after my 4th day there when they confirmed what I had. I spent the rest of the 2 weeks being doped up on morphine and an array of fluids until I couldn’t take it anymore and left the hospital ‘AMA’.

I went to a different hospital and got the medicine I needed almost immediately.

I did throw up again though when I got a ~$60k bill from my 2 week stay at the first hospital. Again they took out my appendix, ran some test, and pumped me with opiods for 2 weeks without treating my actual issue.

You could always just boot up a windows VM and set up a shared folder to code on Linux/test on windows if your application has issues running on Linux.

To add to this, most companies in the us have a waiting period before certain benefits kick in, like health insurance. So if you want to switch jobs for whatever reason, you better be extra careful for the first 3 months of your new job. Unless of course you want to pay $1,000 a month to keep your insurance through cobra, or go through the cluster fuck runaround of getting insurance on your own. So especially when your insurance cover your whole family, it’s a nightmare.

I don’t even have any regular friends and wouldn’t even begin to know how to make one.

I used to have a lot of friends, then I got clean.

I’m just not good at talking in that perspective. I can talk about specific topics but seem to lack the ability for small talk that making friends seems to require. In the past 6 years I thought I made a friend once, we worked together for a while and would talk a couple times a day, I was a little more advanced in my career so I would often help her with projects/teach her stuff, I even opened up a bit and let out my weird thoughts occasionally. It was good, then one day she just stopped responding.

I’m very content with having my wife and son as my best friends, but an actual friend would be nice.

It used to be various substances but now it’s making sure my kid has all the happiness and love that I wish I had growing up and the smile on my wife’s face when she sees how happy I’ve become

Ideally, in the middle of nowhere on a decent size farm with a water supply, raising my son to be a self reliant 2nd generation farmer. Hopefully another kid or two. I like growing vegetables, it makes me happy. My 1/8 of an acre doesn’t give me much room to work with but I do what I can on it.

Hopefully at least, in a slight bigger house with another kid and a couple acres to work with. Doing some farmers markets and able to freelance/do side jobs to supplement my income so I have time to manage those couple acres and spend time with my family.

Most likely, still living on the same property, working the same job doing the same thing.

My wife was telling me a story about her friends friend, who lives in an HOA neighborhood and had a big tree that was rotting in their yard and was causing concern about it falling over. Apparently they went to the hoa for approval to cut it down and they said no for one reason or another, then started fining them for it. Then a while after they collected a good deal of money off the fines said they could cut it down but they had to use a specific company who happened to be owned by a relative of the head of the hoa and charged them a lot more than they should have.

This story was passed down the lane and I don’t even know the couple, but it doesn’t sound far fetched.