For me, two points:

(dating myself here) Minimum wage used to be $5.75 when I was in high school. I worked my ass off for an entire summer. I fuckin hated it, but we all gotta hustle. Around my last shift, I came out to the parking lot, and someone had done my car dirty with a hit'n'run. No note, no CCTV, nothing. The damage was in the neighborhood of $2k, which is exactly everything I had saved up that summer.

I worked my ass off 300 hours to break even. It might as well just have been some community service work release program. Fuck capitalism.

The other is when I was older, post-grad. I had a shitty job where I had to pony up for own health insurance plan with high deductibles. I started having random tingling in my joints, so I did the responsible thing and had it checked out. I got sent to several specialists who ran a battery of tests. I'm already in the hole, $3k out of pocket, and all I got was, "We're not sure what's wrong."

The tingling lingered, and I started looking up information for myself on alternative, holistic sites. Someone had listed similar symptoms and said it was just a vitamin deficiency. That couldn't be it, right? Well I ordered some supplements, and within a month, the tingling was gone.

$3k down the hole. Fuck capitalism.

  • The_word_of_dog [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    2008

    Banks stole my families home.

    2009

    Amazon fucked my dad's business into the ground with undercutting and lawyers

    2010

    My first taste of minimum wage work

    2012

    Mental breakdown following two years of working two jobs with abusive bosses leading to me getting evicted from my apartment and them suing me for 8k in back rent

    2014

    Now a drunk, became radicalized at a bar and have kept those comrades close to me since.

    • NeoAnabaptist [any]
      ·
      4 years ago

      Damn, that was like a road-to-Damascus event in a random bar or you were going there all the time and seeing rad randos?

      • The_word_of_dog [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Being said, learning about this stuff helped me be able to understand wtf happened to myself and my family.

        So it was definitely a turning point in figuring out who the fuck I was in society.