Here’s some numbers.
Minimum wage in my country is 1672 HUF. With taxes (33%), that’s 1120 - 2.71 euro. With legal 160 hours, it comes out at 179 000 HUF per month after taxes.
Monthly income working for a pharmaceutical company as an MSc holding research chemist is 552 000 HUF/month (369K per month after taxes), assuming 160 legal working hours we get 3450 per hour, with taxes 2311 - 5.59 euro.
My current gaming rig, upgraded piecemeal every few years, would come out at…
(Ryzen 5 5500 - 37K,
Nvidia 1050 Ti 4GB - 68K,
MSI MPG B550 “Gaming Plus” 53K,
16Gb Kingston 3200 DDR4 - 15K,
500GB CT500BX500SSD1 SSD - 12K,
WDC WD10EZEX-22BN5A0 HDD - Cannot find, random WD 1tb HDD gives 22K)
So, total… 207 000 HUF. We havn’t considered the monitor, which should be about 50Kish as well, but we can ignore it assuming you already got one.
A minimum wage worker makes 1120 per hour.
A MSc university-taught chemist working for big pharma as a research chemist makes 2311 per hour.
My rig takes 200 hours for a min wage worker and 100 hours for someone with my qualifications (even if I’m academia with even worse pay).
And my rig plays Warthunder on low/ medium-low settings and gets regular FPS drops and buildings pop in all jarring in ASB when flying low (super fun when diving on a guy).
And this is assuming we’re not spending our money on anything but gaming! (ignoring desires to put aside money to save up the 10K euro needed to escape towards a more civilized country west of wien and north of tarifa.)
Rent… if you live within 30 km commute of the only place with reasonable jobs you get… on average 250 000 HUF/month. Notice it’s higher than min wage? Notice it’s half a MSc Chemist’s income? If we’re accepting crappy public transport that takes 1+ hours to get to where you want and shady neighbours, we can find rent for 180K per month for a 1 bedroom somewhere like the 18th district.
If you live 60+km commute (thank god for work for home for me…), you’re looking at a “more reasonable” 80-150K rent per month. Still bulk of your money is gone on rent, food, travel and sustenance even with a good paying job in big pharma (and even more so as a grad student/candidate or min wage worker.)
You feel severely out of touch.