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.
*nods* Yeah, basically. There’s the paycheck-to-paycheck versus dwindling-savings thing, there’s the fact that I just plain tend to be a little more interested in buying shinies than you do (as demonstrated on Flight Rising), and… like, the trust thing from my OP, it’s not just that it’s exhausting and takes spoons I need to work. It’s that… *tries to word*… It’s almost a cognitive dissonance thing. The whole way I’m wired around trust is either/or. Working for The Man while simultaneously distrusting The Man is a fundamental skill of late-capitalism millennial life, and it – it fritzes me out. It’s not something I can maintain for more than a few months. It’s – you know more about thought experiments than I do, there probably is one about this, but it’s like trying to actively believe two contradictory thoughts at once, “Black is black” and “Black is not black” or something (I don’t know, I’m not terribly coherent), *all the time*. If I… if I let myself notice that my employer is not trustworthy, that they’re a capitalist entity and therefore going to fuck me over as soon as it suits them to do so, I can’t… I go straight to “well fuck them first” and I quit. I can’t seem to do a headspace where they’re going to fuck me over but I can stay and work till then. :-(
#fuck everything #i dont know that this is surmountable #because i do know that i always fundamentally *want* to trust people and think the best of them #(in topics for a separate post its so infuriating that these characteristics are always mentioned as making me a Good Person) #(i did not choose them and if i could choose i would not have them) #(its just brain wiring like my ability to feel awe) #(fucking brains can i just have a robot body now and reprogram myself) #:P
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#now that I’m thinking about this here is another conversational thread I was in for which the last comment was not mine #(note: thread is from March-April 2018) #I actually *do* have a spare copy of this but it would be weird to have to go digging around in my tumblr-utils output just to #finish reading this thread #no other such threads come *immediately* to mind but there probably are some #if I come across any while formatting the WordPress archive and they haven’t rotted yet I will reblog those too #adventures in human capitalism #venting cw? #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #The Last Tumblr Apocalypse #I’m going to tag these reblogs #conversational aglets
Brinens and Things 
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