There are way more factors at play here rather than a simple wage hike. The war in Ukraine caused a global shortage of wheat and a few other staple crops and fertilizer. The oil embargo on Russia also caused gas prices to climb even further.

Climate change has also quietly eroded some of the world’s farmland causing a bit more food scarcity. Japan for instance recently couldn’t produce enough rice to feed everyone which caused it to import it for the first time in a long while. I got to see this first hand with some ramen shops no longer being seen as “affordable” due to their bowls climbing above 1000 yen.

In the US we had the bird flu wiping out a huge amount of eggs and chicken, there was even a time when I’d see a 1 dollar surcharge on my local restaurant for any dish that uses them. The consolidation of the restaurant wholesale food market by Sysco and US Foods is also creating a chokehold on their prices. Trump’s fiscal and international trade policies have wrecked a lot of the economy causing huge spikes in inflation too. Besides that we have plain old corporate greed with them taking advantage of all this as a smokescreen to crank up the cost of their food.

It’s more than that. I see it as insurance for humanity if we started permanently settling the moon. Then not even an asteroid could wipe us out.

For sci-fi check out The Interdependency Series by John Scalzi. It’s about an interstellar empire that can only navigate through wormholes that are now closing up. The last emperor foresaw this and is trying to save as many humans as possible while fending off political rivals and assassins.

For a similar series check out Foundation from Isaac Asimov. It’s more of an anthology of stories over the course of a millennium but Asimov has a brilliant way of piercing the story together through the vast gaps in time.

I haven’t seen anyone recommend The Expanse here so I’ll go ahead and do it. The show is a faithful adaptation given the complications that came from having to change networks and deal with some… Problematic aspects of some of its actors. The book series however goes into greater detail and goes beyond the 6th season to some of the best parts of the story in books 7 through 9.

My current fantasy fix is the Cradle series by Will Wight. He’s not as well known as Sanderson but he’s a diligent writer and has some interesting world building and magic concepts. If you want to start off light with him you might want to check out his Traveler’s Gate series, it’s only three books long but has great pacing.

The Powder Mage series is a very decent military grimdark fantasy that features a world with 17th century technology and some interesting magic systems. The story’s decently written but it’s the battles that caught my attention the most. It’s always interesting to read about how some mage soldiers do a line of gunpowder like they’re sniffing coke to make bullets travel unfathomable distances and snipe out enemy generals on the battlefield.

He won’t. Just toss him as a lost cause like George RR Martin and Scott Lynch and move on. You’ll feel a lot better when you finish a different series that took way less time than what Rothfuss did writing his only 2 novels in the series.