A pretty gruesome title, but death by a thousand cuts was actually a form of torture employed just a few hundred years ago, from the 900's to as recently as the 1900's, reserved for traitors or some other crime deeded extremely heinous in China. It's nowadays also a Taylor Swift song (what isn't?) and describes love and heartbreak over an extended period of time. Of the two, I'd prefer the latter.
Death by a thousand cuts is also what it feels like to be a consumer/homeowner/normal human being in today's society. Everything costs money, of course, but the expenses really pile on due to certain parts of life, like buying a house: I just received back to back emails soliciting for a home warranty (do I really need it? It's different than homeowner's insurance), for a city special tax (on top of the other taxes that they are paying), and later this week I must pay the condominium fee, the storage supply fee, and oh, of course, how could I forget the mortgage, the main course of the thousand cut smorgasbord of poo-poo platters. It just feels like you the business world of graft, corruption, expenses, fees, whatnot won't give you a big bill that you get hit with all in one lump sum, but instead over the course of time extract as much money as possible from you like taking monthly (involuntary) blood donations. It's all designed that way of course: people might balk at the high price if they put all the expenses up front, so the subscription model breaks down the money into small payments whose dollar value seems much less than the big scary number earlier, but it's actually more insidious.
Car repairs; don't go to the dealer; they try to bleed you. Independent auto shops: some will try to bleed you too. When buying my next car, it's good to remember that price of buying the car is just the beginning of the price of owning that car: haven't even thought about gas, car insurnance, repairs yet.
The biggest thousand-cut generator, of course, is having children. From the day they are conceived (even before they are born, and sometimes even before conception wth pre-natal treatments) they require expenses, from medical costs of giving birth to diapers to baby food to childcare to education costs to.......it's mindbloggling how many of those costs are. The reddit forums of people against having babies (the childfree subreddit) are very adamant that these are unnecessary costs, it's better to save all your money doing something you love and having all your time to yourself instead of always having to attend to the kid and for the first few years always having a faint smell of feces in the air, the planet doesn't need any more kids any way, and that parents who regret having kids is becoming an epidemic (kind of like pet owners who adopted a pet during the pandemic, now there's a surge of pets being given back and getting abandoned). It does really sound compelling.......until you talk to the other spectrum of people who have kids who couldn't have imagined not having kids and love every second of it (my friend who I talked to today being an example, who I would have thought was a little selfish and stingy about his time, but who says he loves being a parent every day), and parents who love their kids "200 percent" and who profess that having a kid changed their lives. So who's right? It's kind of hard to tell, and both sides are compelling. Am I desirous of a death of a thousand cuts? No. But I'm just as afraid of not risking something bigger than myself for fear of suffering the death of a thousand cuts and missing out on something that's bigger than just me (of course the childfree subredditors would say this is just an illusion and that you become a slave for life to this kids in exchange for that 2 minutes a day of a smile that the kid gives you, but hey that's just like their opinion, right? - Big Lebowski)
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