Yeah if I hadn't been able to find a job where I could sit silently and not have to engage the language part of my brain, I would not have been able to listen to various podcasts and videos that added up to thousands of hours before I called myself a socialist.
Otherwise I would just, you know, dislike war, taxes, Republicans, fundamentalists, and various bosses, and that would be the extent of it
But the bigger thing was getting betrayed by liberal politics during the recession, in a way that literally broke up and scattered my family and started to make me starve. I went from a relatively well-off boomer household to scrounging for nickels to add up to a sandwich, and stressed to the point of literal catatonia in the mornings- I actually couldn't be woken at all, by any means, several times a week. I haven't figured out what that's even called.
In the 90's they drilled into us that if you fucked your life up, you'd have to surrender your dignity and prosperity by collecting your free job at McDonalds. When I applied to around 400 fast food restaurants and retail stores and got 2 interviews in 2 years with no callbacks, it obliterated all of that trust in the system
It turned out that every authority figure in my life was aggressively pushing me down a path to utter economic and personal destruction because they actually thought they were helping. I finally decided to do the opposite of all the advice I was getting, and started immediately and dramatically benefiting from that
Thank you, that means a lot. I'm in a much better place now, but my partner and I both agree that every part of our clawback into stability and moderate prosperity was predicated on random chance after random chance, all stacked on top of the fact that we're white. We didn't finally get jobs and start sneering downward like a lot of boomers did, because we were so comically precarious and got absolutely unbelievably lucky. And one of the critical steps turned out to be working under racist pieces of shit who would have discriminated against us. (We got out of there asap and spent years helping a ton of other people escape too lmao, even people we didn't like, just to hurt that company as much as possible)
Like I finally got my first job because my partner happened upon a fucking reddit comment from someone looking for an employee. That guy very nearly died the prior year and wouldn't have been around to hire me. Then I got a temp job because someone was on leave, which meant I barely didn't get evicted. Then for my next job, they were about to hire some guy way more qualified than me, but he said something towards the end of the interview about it being a good stepping stone, so they took offense and hired me instead. Just that one offhand comment from some guy I will never meet was literally the only way I got over the poverty line and into the "middle class". Even if I was a total idiot I would probably still understand this because of the bizarre sequence of my life. By pure accident I threaded the needle through a 1-2% chance at doing fine, and I see everybody who stayed completely fucked over as equally or more deserving than me
If I had just like, been born 20 years earlier and walked into a good job at 18 or 22 with no economic disasters happening, I could have easily thought it was just a natural result of being smart and moral, or something. That seems like the default position that got broken apart for a lot of people in 2008 and 2020-2023
Honestly its fucked up that I know I'm unbelievably lucky to be in a similar spot to my parents, although they had pensions and shit (oof), when our childhood conceptions of "unbelievably lucky" was some kind of fucking celebrity status
And really it's been like 15 years since I could see my parent and siblings regularly and that probably won't ever fully resolve, luckily I have inlaws now
That sounds as if you are reflected and aware how chance and structures play a role in the proletarians individual employment success. That is good, too.
If I had just like, been born 20 years earlier and walked into a good job at 18 or 22 with no economic disasters happening, I could have easily thought it was just a natural result of being smart and moral, or something. That seems like the default position that got broken apart for a lot of people in 2008 and 2020-2023
Word.
and I see everybody who stayed completely fucked over as equally deserving than me
Also true. Both can be true, that stuff was hard, that you had to endure and do a lot and still not being totally in control of what will happen.
Your story is a good one, feel free to share how it is. Shared plight is one of the strong motivators of solidarity and socialism in my opinion.
Yeah if I hadn't been able to find a job where I could sit silently and not have to engage the language part of my brain, I would not have been able to listen to various podcasts and videos that added up to thousands of hours before I called myself a socialist.
Otherwise I would just, you know, dislike war, taxes, Republicans, fundamentalists, and various bosses, and that would be the extent of it
But the bigger thing was getting betrayed by liberal politics during the recession, in a way that literally broke up and scattered my family and started to make me starve. I went from a relatively well-off boomer household to scrounging for nickels to add up to a sandwich, and stressed to the point of literal catatonia in the mornings- I actually couldn't be woken at all, by any means, several times a week. I haven't figured out what that's even called.
In the 90's they drilled into us that if you fucked your life up, you'd have to surrender your dignity and prosperity by collecting your free job at McDonalds. When I applied to around 400 fast food restaurants and retail stores and got 2 interviews in 2 years with no callbacks, it obliterated all of that trust in the system
It turned out that every authority figure in my life was aggressively pushing me down a path to utter economic and personal destruction because they actually thought they were helping. I finally decided to do the opposite of all the advice I was getting, and started immediately and dramatically benefiting from that
Good to hear that you are at a somewhat better place currently. Good to have you here.
Thank you, that means a lot. I'm in a much better place now, but my partner and I both agree that every part of our clawback into stability and moderate prosperity was predicated on random chance after random chance, all stacked on top of the fact that we're white. We didn't finally get jobs and start sneering downward like a lot of boomers did, because we were so comically precarious and got absolutely unbelievably lucky. And one of the critical steps turned out to be working under racist pieces of shit who would have discriminated against us. (We got out of there asap and spent years helping a ton of other people escape too lmao, even people we didn't like, just to hurt that company as much as possible)
Like I finally got my first job because my partner happened upon a fucking reddit comment from someone looking for an employee. That guy very nearly died the prior year and wouldn't have been around to hire me. Then I got a temp job because someone was on leave, which meant I barely didn't get evicted. Then for my next job, they were about to hire some guy way more qualified than me, but he said something towards the end of the interview about it being a good stepping stone, so they took offense and hired me instead. Just that one offhand comment from some guy I will never meet was literally the only way I got over the poverty line and into the "middle class". Even if I was a total idiot I would probably still understand this because of the bizarre sequence of my life. By pure accident I threaded the needle through a 1-2% chance at doing fine, and I see everybody who stayed completely fucked over as equally or more deserving than me
If I had just like, been born 20 years earlier and walked into a good job at 18 or 22 with no economic disasters happening, I could have easily thought it was just a natural result of being smart and moral, or something. That seems like the default position that got broken apart for a lot of people in 2008 and 2020-2023
Honestly its fucked up that I know I'm unbelievably lucky to be in a similar spot to my parents, although they had pensions and shit (oof), when our childhood conceptions of "unbelievably lucky" was some kind of fucking celebrity status
And really it's been like 15 years since I could see my parent and siblings regularly and that probably won't ever fully resolve, luckily I have inlaws now
That sounds as if you are reflected and aware how chance and structures play a role in the proletarians individual employment success. That is good, too.
Word.
Also true. Both can be true, that stuff was hard, that you had to endure and do a lot and still not being totally in control of what will happen.
Your story is a good one, feel free to share how it is. Shared plight is one of the strong motivators of solidarity and socialism in my opinion.