It is not necessary to impose on our heads economic decrees with a desperate frequency of three times a week, to recite that surviving the Israeli summer is not an easy experience, even without having to look for a gray market escort every time we want to fill a car tank.
You know, the unbearable humidity, the jellyfish that ruin our immersion experience at sea, and too much freedom for children, that no lasting staring at the tablet will be able to contain. To despair far more than any oppressive wait in line for a meeting with a pen.
The term cost of living has long become a cliché here, along with other plowed terms such as: elections, queues at Ben Gurion Airport and security tensions, but it seems that right now, the ability to exist here for the average family reaches levels of impossible task that even Tom Cruise and his team Would not be able to solve.As a father to two small children and objects in summer activities, which do not include turning off the air conditioner at home and sitting in a circle while sweating collectively as something fun, the business becomes complex on the verge of panic.
It starts with the costs of the summer camps, thousands of shekels for a few hours, and continues with every attempt to produce a pleasure that was once reasonably priced, and today requires someone to sign a letter of guarantee.
This is only for entering the pool with the children, for which we will pay up to 125 shekels per person for a few hours of sun on yellowing grass and chlorine-soaked water and toddler urine.
Going forward, food prices are also breaking records on the border of pigs, rather than on children’s hunger.
For an average fruit smoothie you will have to part with up to 30 shekels - until a year ago it would have scratched the 20 shekels.
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A simple toast at the buffet, which cost NIS 16 the previous summer, jumped to NIS 28.
The yellow cheese, for those who are wondering, is still the same cheese.
The prices of shawarma have been widely discussed, but the prices of all street food have jumped significantly - chickpeas, falafel and sausages.
Even to purchase a dry pretzel, you will need the approval of your mortgage adviser.
shopping in the supermarket?
A few hundred shekels were added to the shopping cart, even without adding anything new to the regular consumption.
Abroad? You laughed at the bank manager. The prices are disproportionate, not to mention the endless queues and the fact that chances are your suitcase will find itself lonely at a foreign airport that no one has heard of.
A vacation in Israel?
It is cheaper to book a room at Waldorf Astoria in New York in October, than the price required here for a vacation.
And of course, the exorbitant fuel prices that force any average family to have a special meeting on whether to drive the car at all, or just settle for hitchhiking and increasing cardiopulmonary endurance by walking long distances.
It all boils down to all the dramatic rises we have absorbed in recent months, from soaring interest rates to mortgages, food, electricity and water, which will soon rise further, and only continue to increase our deficit and increase anxiety.
At the end of another over-ironing on credit, and assuming that mass migration to another country is not an option, the question that should dominate the agenda ahead of the upcoming election is: How do we manage to survive here in an impossible economic reality?
The cost of living has become another tiring term from the news to a phenomenon for which we all pay the price, literally.
And right now we have mostly a "missing country" - missing any solution and answers for citizens who do not know how they end the month.
Were we wrong?
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