Widespread starvation.

As long as the “working masses” can still feed their children, the vast majority of us bow to whatever authority wants to rule them.

It’s the same here in Germany.

Status condition recovery items are even worse, because you have to stock them, just in case there’s ever a fight that you really need them in, but then finish the game without ever having needed even a single one.

Sure! But it’s not particularly sophisticated. Other than staple recipes (like e.g. vegetables stews) I learned while growing up, when there’s a product I was previously dependent on buying ready-made that gets enshittified by the food industry so much I’m unwilling to pay the full asking price, I start looking into the recipe for it and experiment to calibrate quality, time efficiency, and material cost to the exact tradeoff I consider best for me. Frozen pizza vs self made pizza being one example.

My joy in cooking, aside from the above optimization process I find fun, comes from knowning I pay less money to eat a better quality (and almost always less unhealthy) meal than I’d otherwise be able to. Once I have a recipe dialed in, it also requires virtually no thinking to get done, which is the opposite of my daily work; that’s the “unwinding” for me. I can then also combine it with listening to some audiobook or TTRPG actual play / podcast.

Due to this depth-first approach my actual list of recipes isn’t incredibly large, but it’s enough to never get boring by now, at least.

Off-what? You mean in meatspace?

Jokes aside: Reading. Designing and playing Pen&Paper RPGs. Cooking.

Yikes. I mean, I get that not everyone’s threat model requires isolating every agent harness into its own microvm jail with externally filtered network access and no [persistent filesystem] write access to anything but allowed project files, but that’s…

That’s “running with weapon in hand at a secret military facility and hoping the guards won’t shoot you” levels of stupidity.