making my own coffee as a form of gta money glitch

I will give one ex­cep­tion to the rule I’m about to make, which is that you may likely be in sit­u­a­tions wherein you have to like, or­der at a cafe, be­cause you need some­where to sit while you talk with friends, or write, or code or what­ever. In that case, you’re tech­ni­cally just pay­ing five bucks for the right to sit in a pri­vate es­tab­lish­ment, be­cause pub­lic spaces aren’t real and so­ci­ety is crum­bling and so on. I will not talk shit about that.

Exception suc­cess­fully made. It’s now time to be provoca­tive:

Should you have the abil­ity and time to make it your­self, you should prob­a­bly stop or­der­ing cof­fee.

No, like, for real. If you’re like me, you prob­a­bly get a cup from a nice cafe, so it’s not go­ing to be cheap. I’m talk­ing like, big-ass 16oz deals, from 7-8 dol­lars a day… mean­ing, when added up for every day, hun­dreds of dol­lars a month. That’s im­por­tant, be­cause if you were like my dumb ass, once upon a time, you could tell your­self that you should only do that, be­cause you can’t af­ford to make cof­fee cor­rectly.

Except, no? No, ac­tu­ally, if you do the math, you might only be able to af­ford do­ing that!

A good hand grinder ^{[1] Link to foot­note 1} is any­where from 80-100 bucks. A dig­i­tal scale good enough to tell you when you’ve put in the cor­rect amount of wa­ter is 20 bucks, and the ket­tle you’d be pour­ing wa­ter from is an­other 80. The nicest cof­fee you can get lo­cally will usu­ally be around 15-20 bucks, and the ac­tual thing you use to make the cof­fee can be as lit­tle as 15 dol­lars. That sounds like a lot of money al­to­gether, be­fore you re­mem­ber that with the sole ex­cep­tion of the cof­fee and what­ever fil­ters you use, all of those things I just men­tioned are one-time pur­chases, with some cof­fee mak­ers like the Chemex be­ing so per­ma­nent, you can prob­a­bly give them to your kid, once you’re old and made of dust or what­not.

It’s re­ally cheap! That’s kind of why smug cof­fee peo­ple get to be so smug in the first place; you can dump hun­dreds into a good cof­fee setup, and it’ll still pay for it­self very, very quickly.

I’m not even par­tic­u­larly good at mak­ing cof­fee. I use an Aeropress, be­cause Aeropress fil­ters cost lit­eral cents per serv­ing, and they’re de­signed to be nearly id­iot-proof. I, uh, prob­a­bly should have got­ten the Aeropress Go, since it has an even smaller like­li­hood of me, say, ac­ci­den­tally slip­ping off the mug I’m press­ing into, but it does work and it is cheap. That I can, from time to time, make le­git­i­mately good cof­fee is nice, and be­ing able to get my own cof­fee beans to do it with means I’ve got­ten a huge re­spect for ex­tremely light-roasted cof­fee, but that’s not why I do it. I do it so that, when I see a big, dumb pair of grandma glasses, ^{[2] Link to foot­note 2} I can go and I can or­der the grandma glasses, and my wal­let can’t stop me by not hav­ing money in it.

Think of all the dumb shit you could be hav­ing right now, that you don’t have, be­cause you tell your­self it’d be ir­re­spon­si­ble, or what­ever. Be re­spon­si­ble with mak­ing stuff you in­gest in your day-to-day life, and then, no­body can stop you.