Well, don’t be too hard on yourself. Life is a journey, and I can only hope that you are smarter now than when you were younger:-).
Also, things CHANGED, like A LOT since then (the pandemic accelerated a lot of it) - and what’s more, as the documentary Inequality for All (that link lets you watch the entire thing free) reveals beautifully, they had been steadily changing for almost 50 years but for various reasons people did not (want/choose to) realize that (e.g. the rise in women outright wanting to work rather than be restricted to solely be allowed to work as a homemaker happened independently, so “the economy getting harsher” did not seem the primary explanation for why people were switching to 2-person income).
The sheeple did not want to know, but also their leaders (politicians etc.) themselves chose to close their eyes to what was happening, as it happened - even as they were paid (bribed) to do. (btw I would rephrase what you said as “prioritize your career stability” - b/c while money is useful, it does not seem to me to be worth selling your soul for, like at all costs - but yeah, ensuring that your basic needs are going to be met is 100% something that people need to be told, despite how colleges are trying to sell the opposite BS just to fill their own bank accounts)
That said, I’ve seen people leave tech / office work and become literal janitors - it royally sucks when they lose their health insurance and the boss won’t even look them in the eyes as he tells them that fact - but depending on your personal circumstances, you gotta do what works for your own mental health.
The American Dream died for many people (even most younger ones?) a long time ago, and what remains is its animated corpse that occasionally moves but for reasons other than “life”. I hope you find a way to improve your own circumstances, as much as you can anyway.
While no politician is perfect, Elizabeth Warren literally wrote the book on the two income issue and I was all for it. As someone who is perpetually single I see first hand how our obsession with “family income” as a proper metric of economic health of workers is bullshit.
People like me are completely left out of the picture and are “forced” to live like college students indefinitely… Renting basements and having random psycho roommates…
She is very smart. I mean duh, literal PhD professor and all:-).
What I know about the situation is that way back in the day, having a family was something that the US government decided needed to be incentivized, hence tax breaks were offered to those who participated. While WAAAAY back in the day before that, like feudal England times, marriage - as in certificates, formalized ceremonies where people would travel to attend, divorce prohibited under the law and such - was only for royalty, whereas nobody gave a crap about peasants. The latter just said “let’s do it” and shacked up together, and that was that. That doesn’t negate the very real experiences they lived - just that the government did not get involved down to that level, b/c the peasants were basically the “property” of the landlord, so if e.g. an injustice was done, it would be up to them to right it (assuming they were not the cause of it in the first place, or too bored/scared/drunk/horny/whatever). Maybe that is all in the book - probably, or at least she surely knew the back-story as she wrote:-).
Anyway my point is that ever since radio and especially TV, politicians have gotten really good at pulling the wool over people’s eyes - and surely they did quite a job of that before then too:-P - and I don’t think the politicians even cared about family income vs. non-family income, so much as it likely seemed a great way to hide the real truth: that a massive transfer of wealth from the common man was being increasingly shifted into the hands of a few. Calling it “family” allowed them to basically double the amount someone could receive before wondering why they were not doing well off (except it’s so complex b/c they WERE doing well-off, but that was b/c the USA wasn’t bombed all to hell during the World Wars, and also technology especially medical care had improved tremendously; also, women do not earn equal to men so really it’s not “double” and more like 1.7). And then after that there are so many other tricks too - e.g. people having to work longer hours to meet the same standard, or old people having to refinance their mortgages to pay off their kids college or house loans or whatever, and all the while they had people convinced that even though they were NOT okay, that somehow it was mysteriously just them in isolation, rather than a major societal upheaval affecting us all (though not equally).
I am not very smart, and not very well educated in these matters - really - but that much at least I see. What the forces of globalization and mechanization mean, essentially, are that most humans are now irrelevant (to the REAL “Humans”, the powers behind this little democracy plutocracy of ours), so we can just fuck off and die - if not all then at least most of us. The pandemic made this crystally clear, to anyone who was listening.
So yeah, if we aren’t one of THEM then we are merely peasants, and can only get by as best we can. The only thing I can add is that not all places in the USA are moving towards this end at equal rates - e.g. women in certain states cannot receive life-saving medical care if it involves the uterus in even the most tangential of ways (like an ectopic situation), but women in more liberal states still can. Not everyone can pick up and move, thus many will simply (and fully, I mean literally in every sense) die instead.
Well, don’t be too hard on yourself. Life is a journey, and I can only hope that you are smarter now than when you were younger:-).
Also, things CHANGED, like A LOT since then (the pandemic accelerated a lot of it) - and what’s more, as the documentary Inequality for All (that link lets you watch the entire thing free) reveals beautifully, they had been steadily changing for almost 50 years but for various reasons people did not (want/choose to) realize that (e.g. the rise in women outright wanting to work rather than be restricted to solely be allowed to work as a homemaker happened independently, so “the economy getting harsher” did not seem the primary explanation for why people were switching to 2-person income).
The sheeple did not want to know, but also their leaders (politicians etc.) themselves chose to close their eyes to what was happening, as it happened - even as they were paid (bribed) to do. (btw I would rephrase what you said as “prioritize your career stability” - b/c while money is useful, it does not seem to me to be worth selling your soul for, like at all costs - but yeah, ensuring that your basic needs are going to be met is 100% something that people need to be told, despite how colleges are trying to sell the opposite BS just to fill their own bank accounts)
That said, I’ve seen people leave tech / office work and become literal janitors - it royally sucks when they lose their health insurance and the boss won’t even look them in the eyes as he tells them that fact - but depending on your personal circumstances, you gotta do what works for your own mental health.
The American Dream died for many people (even most younger ones?) a long time ago, and what remains is its animated corpse that occasionally moves but for reasons other than “life”. I hope you find a way to improve your own circumstances, as much as you can anyway.
While no politician is perfect, Elizabeth Warren literally wrote the book on the two income issue and I was all for it. As someone who is perpetually single I see first hand how our obsession with “family income” as a proper metric of economic health of workers is bullshit.
People like me are completely left out of the picture and are “forced” to live like college students indefinitely… Renting basements and having random psycho roommates…
She is very smart. I mean duh, literal PhD professor and all:-).
What I know about the situation is that way back in the day, having a family was something that the US government decided needed to be incentivized, hence tax breaks were offered to those who participated. While WAAAAY back in the day before that, like feudal England times, marriage - as in certificates, formalized ceremonies where people would travel to attend, divorce prohibited under the law and such - was only for royalty, whereas nobody gave a crap about peasants. The latter just said “let’s do it” and shacked up together, and that was that. That doesn’t negate the very real experiences they lived - just that the government did not get involved down to that level, b/c the peasants were basically the “property” of the landlord, so if e.g. an injustice was done, it would be up to them to right it (assuming they were not the cause of it in the first place, or too bored/scared/drunk/horny/whatever). Maybe that is all in the book - probably, or at least she surely knew the back-story as she wrote:-).
Anyway my point is that ever since radio and especially TV, politicians have gotten really good at pulling the wool over people’s eyes - and surely they did quite a job of that before then too:-P - and I don’t think the politicians even cared about family income vs. non-family income, so much as it likely seemed a great way to hide the real truth: that a massive transfer of wealth from the common man was being increasingly shifted into the hands of a few. Calling it “family” allowed them to basically double the amount someone could receive before wondering why they were not doing well off (except it’s so complex b/c they WERE doing well-off, but that was b/c the USA wasn’t bombed all to hell during the World Wars, and also technology especially medical care had improved tremendously; also, women do not earn equal to men so really it’s not “double” and more like 1.7). And then after that there are so many other tricks too - e.g. people having to work longer hours to meet the same standard, or old people having to refinance their mortgages to pay off their kids college or house loans or whatever, and all the while they had people convinced that even though they were NOT okay, that somehow it was mysteriously just them in isolation, rather than a major societal upheaval affecting us all (though not equally).
I am not very smart, and not very well educated in these matters - really - but that much at least I see. What the forces of globalization and mechanization mean, essentially, are that most humans are now irrelevant (to the REAL “Humans”, the powers behind this little
democracyplutocracy of ours), so we can just fuck off and die - if not all then at least most of us. The pandemic made this crystally clear, to anyone who was listening.So yeah, if we aren’t one of THEM then we are merely peasants, and can only get by as best we can. The only thing I can add is that not all places in the USA are moving towards this end at equal rates - e.g. women in certain states cannot receive life-saving medical care if it involves the uterus in even the most tangential of ways (like an ectopic situation), but women in more liberal states still can. Not everyone can pick up and move, thus many will simply (and fully, I mean literally in every sense) die instead.
The USA is not a first-world nation anymore.