• swelter_spark@reddthat.com
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      4 hours ago

      I think OP is speaking about their own situation. Americans in other circumstances have other ways of getting to stores and back.

    • Crankenstein@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      As a poor American who had to move back in with family out to a rural nowhere town and then had their car break down yet can’t afford to get it running again, it absolutely fucking sucks.

      I literally cannot go anywhere. I’m surrounded by fields. The closest store of any kind would be an hour’s walk just to get there traveling on 55+mph highways for 80% of the trip with no sidewalk, just a 1ft gravel shoulder between the road and 4ft deep ditches filled with god knows what.

      I haven’t had social interaction that isn’t the two family members I live with, and I don’t even want to get started on how they are absolute drains on my already failing mental state.

      Plus, now that I don’t have a car, even if I do finally get a bite on my job search, which has been going for more than 6 months now, I have no transportation to get to work. I can’t work from home due to the country bumpkin internet either.

      It seriously just feels like waiting to die out here.

      • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
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        13 hours ago

        Sounds awful. Your situation is extreme (ah rural America!) but I won’t deny there’s something freeing about cars. These days I hate cars with a passion, and I’ve always lived in big European cities where they’re completely unnecessary, but even I had a car when I was 20, and I loved it. But then a couple of years later I got rid of it, and that also felt like freedom and I loved that too… Anyway, just an anecdote. As for your situation, good luck, you’ll find a way out of there.

        PS off-topic: I’ve always found “good luck” to be a bit lacking for these contexts, in French there’s the much better “bon courage”, sadly untranslatable but much more appropriate in your case.