Year 1, you have $X dollars with $Y - 1 purchasing power.
Etc.
$Y > $Y - 1
Inflation is an anti-feature.
> What can it do for me?
It really sounds like you’ve never held Bitcoin. HN can change that for you really quickly if you’re open to it.
Currencies compete, and ones with inflation which punish holding the currency over the long term are fundamentally less user-friendly.
As long as inflation is low enough, people don't really care about it in general because there salary increases as much (and given than the average American has much more debt than saving, the inflation is actually a gift to them).
So I talked about workers, but how about investors and entrepreneurs? Say I have $10 million today sitting in a bank account. I can either let it sit idle, losing value to inflation every year, or invest it somewhere where it can create value. Now if the value of my $10 million increases in real terms (meaning that my purchasing power will naturally increase when time passes) the most rational thing to do is not to invest that money. It's actually unlikely that my investment will pay off anyway, because the amount of money spent by people will decrease year after year (because that's what deflation means).