> disinterest in cooking and a desire to avoid the time spent during food preparation
You say this like it's a feature not a bug.
> Grocery shopping for one is frustrating
Like other valuable skills, you can get better at it.
You say this like it's a feature not a bug.
> Grocery shopping for one is frustrating
Like other valuable skills, you can get better at it.
I think it sounds more like they are saying that it's a preference. Preferences are generally neither features nor bugs (though they can be useful in some situations and frustrating in others).
Going out to eat may be tastier, but it's generally more expensive. When it's not more expensive (than Soylent) it's often to some degree a mixture of the following:
1. Not vegan
2. Not tasty anyway (i.e. fast food)
3. More time consuming (the place that you like is far enough away)
I'm certain you can find other potential reasons.
Each of these may affect different people for different reasons and to different amounts (e.g. some may not care about vegan).
Ultimately, it's up to each person to decide on their own personal preferences, and the weigh their own perceived costs. For some, that may result in Soylent being a preferred option for some meals (these preferences are dynamic). For others, it's never a preferred option. That just seems like part of being human, to be honest; no sense for either side to get upset at the other.
As far as I'm concerned it is a feature. So many hours are completely wasted in meal prep that I could spend doing literally anything else. Like reading a book or not cooking.
>Like other valuable skills, you can get better at it.
I don't see how I can feasibly remove every other grocery shopper from the store when I go shopping. Or people who stop in the middle of the isle preventing traffic flow in both directions, kids acting up [0], the choice between annoying small-talk with the cashier or the annoyance of the faulty self-checkout machines [1]. People rushing around corners, nearly hitting people. The annoyance when the singular item you're searching for is out of stock that day. The store now has mounted televisions spamming ads for products on every other isle - now I get to shop with headphones on, yay!
I have control over nothing. There is nothing to get better at. Like driving (another annoying but necessary thing), it is something that so many people do without consideration or thought of others that the entire experience is ruined. I don't mind driving. I hate driving with other people on the road who cut across traffic, fail to signal, randomly brake for no reason, and otherwise drive like they are the only person on the road. Grocery shopping suffers the same fate: it sucks because everyone else seems to suck at it. And unlike driving on an empty road at two in the morning, there aren't many places I can go shopping for groceries at two in the morning.
It takes me less than ten minutes to purchase a week's worth of groceries. I've purchased the same exact things week in and week out for the past three years. I practically have my weekly trip down to a science. It seems to be that nobody else has figured out how to shop for groceries.
If you have a fix for removing other people from the equation that isn't illegal, I'd love to hear it.
[0] Kids act up, that's fine. I grew up with younger siblings. The difference is my mom would at least make an attempt to get them to stop throwing a tantrum in the middle of an aisle. It seems some parents have given up on the parenting part altogether.
[1] "Please bag your item." when the item has already been bagged. Continue until the clerk watching the self-checkouts comes over and kicks the machine out of the error loop. No way to enter "x20" of an item, I regularly purchase two dozen individually-packaged cans of chili. So I get to scan one of them 24 times and hope I don't lose track as there is no way to count how many I've already scanned.