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.

  • SoyViking [he/him]
    ·
    4 years ago

    I had always been leftish-leaning. I was the kind of radlib succdem who thought that if just those slightly to the left of the official social democratic party got enough votes to lead a government coalition then everything would be fun. I was young and naïve and I didn't know what I was doing.

    What brought me to realise that the system is fundamentally evil and incompatible with human happiness was two things. One structural, the other personal.

    The 2008 financial crash was a big eye opener for me. The right wing liberal government has just bragged about how we would be able to buy the entire world and how the economic textbooks would have to be rewritten as we had now entered a new phase of crisis-free capitalism. And then it all came tumbling down. It had all been built on lies and the adults in the room, the fiscally responsible people who was supposedly extremely smart and knew everything about the economy didn't know what to do. The people whose recklessness caused the crash walked away free from responsibility while good people lost their jobs and had their meagre benefits cut by austerity politics. Austerity politics championed by the very social democratic led coalition who were supposed to be the lesser evil.

    About the same time I had what I now believe to be a clinical depression. Years and years of undiagnosed ADHD and avoidant personality disorder finally threw me into the abyss at about the time I was supposed to finish my university degree.

    I had always been a quiet bookish kid. I was too shy and anxious to form the kind of relations I wanted with my peers. It really sucked growing up and going to university with very few friends, no girlfriends, a constant sense of social anxiety etc. But I clinged to the hope that at least I would be rewarded for my nerdiness with a high-paying job and The Good Life™ once I finished college.

    And then my brain stopped working. I fell into a black hole and couldn't do anything but stay at home all day. I couldn't finish the very last part of my education and I dropped out without a degree.

    I still have the student debt though. A colossal hopeless heap of defaulted debt that just keeps growing because of the insane interest rates they slap onto it as a punishment for defaulting. And I don't have access to the kind of high paying job that would allow me to pay it back either. I'm stuck in this debt trap for life.

    I will never have the good life. Life is going to suck until the day I die. And for what? What crime did I commit that warrants life-long punishment? — Trying to do what all the politicians and businessmen wanted me to do, for trying to get an education but failing because of mental illness that is completely outside of my control.