The other thing that makes this tricky is that any given event or phenomenon may not happen everywhere all at once. Just think of the popularity of a pop song, for example. It might have started in New York, and spread westward as more radio stations started playing it. Then it kind of died out in New York just around the time it was picking up steam in LA, or whatever. When you read about these things they often make it sound like one day someone played the song on the radio and then it was on every radio in the country simultaneously for the next 10 weeks before falling off the charts. But of course, that’s not how it actually happens. So it can definitely be hard to contextualize some of this stuff. And getting an accurate picture can be hard because we may not have all the details.

I respect that you have to make decisions based on your own financial situation. For me, getting a few things for less money with the possibility that you might suddenly get hit with a big charge for something you didn't actually sign up for voluntarily is not worth it. To me it's like putting off fixing a car problem. You're saving money in the short term, but it could cause other much more expensive (or fatal) problems later. It's just too much risk for me. (But I have also been in a position where I had to put off a car fix because I simply didn't have the money. It absolutely sucked.)

In any event, despite knowing that they'll try to get you to join Prime at every interaction, and despite trying not to do it, I accidentally clicked on the "Yes, sign me up for Prime even though I've been telling you no for literally years" button instead of the "No, just take my money and give me my stuff" button. It instantly signed me up for Prime. It didn't add it to my cart, or take me to checkout, or ask, "Are you sure? It's going to cost you $x per month." That was the really shocking part to me. The button didn't say, "One click purchase" or whatever they sometimes say when you're viewing a product. Absolutely no indication that it would be immediate and irrevocable.

I immediately canceled and had to go through 5 "Are you really really sure you want to cancel?" and "Can we just suspend it for now?" pages before I actually got to cancel. Not the worst I've seen, but certainly scummy and deceptive.

I don’t need to have attempted any of those things to know that what I experienced was sub-par. I’ve heard better singers, seen better movies, and read better books.

If what you said were true, only movie directors would be able to criticize movies. That’s not helpful.

That was caused by your baby, not by the devices. 2 people in a small apartment together with their own devices watching what appears to them to be a movie-sized screen would definitely be something many people would like. No big device on the wall. No shaking the people in the apartment next door with your sub-woofer. And you can still comment to each other all you want. (Obviously the price will need to come down for that to be common.)

1) My job is here and they won't let me work remotely. While I don't need this specific job, I've lived in cheaper areas and the jobs available were few and far between. You can find them, it's just a huge pain in the ass and they don't treat their employees nearly as well. I've even worked for myself, but it's a lot more work and not everyone is cut out for it. I threw in the towel after 5 years because it was burning me out so much.

2) My spouse has medical issues that even the best doctors in the big cities are having trouble treating. There's no way they'd be able to treat her in the sticks. You just can't get the types of services needed for some things in lower-cost-of-living areas.

Like other Rust Belt cities, Gary's once thriving steel industry has been significantly affected by the disappearance of local manufacturing jobs since the 1970s. As a result of this economic shift, the city's population has decreased drastically, having lost 61% of its population since 1960.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary,_Indiana

Long version: Plenty of good advice here, but I wanted to add something that helped me in this regard. I grew up in a household where everything was criticized for any and all reasons, most of which could be boiled down to "I feel bad and in order to make myself feel better, I'm going to do something that makes you feel worse than me." Being born into that kind of atmosphere makes it very difficult to understand that a) it's not normal, and b) criticism (when used appropriately) isn't about making a person feel bad, it's about trying to improve something. It was just never used appropriately in my household growing up.

So many (way too many) years later, I started getting into the skeptical movement. What initially attracted me was that it was about tearing apart stupid ideas (so pretty similar to what I grew up in). Someone would claim to have a photograph of Sasquatch or a UFO, and people would show how the photo wasn't what it claimed. But it was a lot deeper than that. There were doctors debunking bogus medical cures, and people pointing out that businesses were scams, etc.

That was all well and good, but as I read more and more about how to get better at spotting these sorts of things I read a lot about cognitive biases and logical fallacies. Something soaked in because I found as I understood my own thinking better, I had a better understanding of what could and likely couldn't be other people's motivations for saying the things they said. Whereas before I might think, "Oh that person's just saying x because they dislike me," or "because they're jealous that I have y," or whatever, these days I'm better at saying, "Well, they might just be saying that because they don't like me, or it could be they don't have the same experience as me, and don't understand my motivation for why I think like this. I can try explaining my motivation and see if they understand or not. And maybe they'll understand or maybe they'll explain something to me to help me understand their point of view." (It's more complicated than that, but it's hard to explain in a comment.) Anyway, a lot of the pain of getting criticized evaporated when I could reason better about other people's motivations.

I remember thinking it was odd that the engineer would think it was OK to be chatting with friends while he was supposed to be working, but I also thought it was odd that the boss was so pissed off about it. It’s not like we didn’t (physically, IRL) chat among ourselves about non-work stuff, too. As long as we were getting our work done, who cares? Now everyone has chat and social media on every device, include their own that they bring with them anywhere, including work.

I also remember that when I was a kid, I was never supposed to interrupt my father at work by calling him, unless it was an absolute real emergency, like the house burning down. Times have changed!