i’m not actually awake enough to go Deep with this so i’ll attempt to keep it brief
so the barnes and noble thing where they fired all their full time employees recently. obviously, terrible thing, sympathies, fuck capitalism, etc, but like.
for me specifically, that’s like “welp, another timeline shot”. cos if i had not quit my job there due to snow and crazybrains, one of me in the multiverse was still working there and probably full time or managerial at that point, so like… that one of me was fired along with the rest of them, and is probably now struggling to make rent or whatever.
and like. the thing i’m trying to say is. that’s capitalism. you can’t trust anybody, you can have a few good years or a lot of good years and then get fucked over just the same. you have to give your life to people you can’t trust.
and i’m so *bad* at not trusting. and that’s why i’m so bad at capitalism. actively not trusting takes a lot of spoons and fucks me the hell up. my default state is trust, and in a lot of timelines that’s killed me already, and it’s going to get me in a fair number of the rest.
and i hate that. i don’t know what to do with it, trying to be less trusting is… it’s different than trying to be less empathetic? it’s not “if i do that it will make me a Bad Person”. it’s that i *forget*. i don’t have a… a dimmer switch for trust. it’s all or nothing. and that just utterly does not work for capitalism and i *hate* it :-(
>>that one of me was fired along with the rest of them, and is probably now struggling to make rent or whatever.
[…]
you can’t trust anybody, you can have a few good years or a lot of good years and then get fucked over just the same<<
Hmm. I’m having a hard time verbalising my thoughts here…like, there’s generally only so much that somebody can fuck you over financially if you’ve had some good years to prepare in. But I guess the ability (or lack of) to go “I should use these good years to prepare for the inevitable fucking-over attempt” is in fact the problem (or a large part of it, anyway)?
(It seems like costs of living vary a *lot* from one set of circumstances to another, and figures that seem unrealistically high to one person can seem unrealistically low to another. But in the circumstances that *I’m* familiar with, a full-time minimum-wage job is enough money to support two pretty-careful people or 1.5 moderately-careful people. So if one *doesn’t* have dependents (but does have roommates for the bulk discounts), for every year one can hold on to a full-time job, one can live for 6 – 12 months after getting laid off. Longer, if one manages to obtain a job that pays more than minimum wage.)
(I guess it’s a variant of the idea of fuck-you money, one that focuses on the possibility of *them* telling *you* to fuck off rather than the other way around. “Fuck-me money”?)
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I was just talking to Mom earlier today about how I’m not sure I’m ever going to be *able* to trust that an income won’t just disappear one day, that even in the better possible scenarios for a decade from now where I’ve gotten some cushy job in an accounting firm or something, I’ll probably still be living on the 2028-dollars equivalent of $1k – $1.5k/month and agonising over every expenditure and squirrelling away every spare cent for the winter.
Which is the opposite of the psychological issues you usually hear about poor people developing (and which you have yourself, right?), where they feel like there’s no point in saving because *savings* always disappear no matter what you do. I think this is because those people tend to have spent an extended and/or formative time as living-paycheck-to-paycheck!poor, whereas I spent mine as living-primarily-off-of-dwindling-savings!poor. Different kinds of poverty lead to different adaptations.
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#fun* fact: my parents ran out of money around the end of February (depending on how you count) #*not actually fun #it’s up to me and Brother to keep things running #(mostly Brother since he has more savings and more income) #((and the reason he has more savings is *because* he has more income)) #venting cw? #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers
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