points by articulatepang 11 hours ago | 0 comments
Hey, sorry to hear about that crazy bill and hope your daughter is doing well. I agree that your example is a basic need that I ignored. Many of us work to make sure we’re able to pay for healthcare if things go badly wrong.
However, even in countries with socialized healthcare, or even among people who easily have enough wealth to pay for healthcare, we see that they continue to work, beyond what can be explained by a desire to take care of basic needs.
So I think my original argument still stands: it appears that humans have a desire to accumulate status and exclusive goods, even when their basic needs are satisfied. Let me know if you disagree!
The cost of somewhere to live has gone up so much that even people like me, with an absurd amount of cash in the bank account, can't leave work and try to survive because it would be wiped out by 3 years of rent.
How many average laborers in a country with fully socialized medicine can afford a decade of rent off their current savings? How many could do that even if they magically found a way to cut other expenses in half?
I could eliminate my electric bill, my internet bill, my grocery bill, all my bills other than rent, and the money saved per year would pay for an extra month or so of rent. That is the entire problem. No amount of frugality can paper over this systemic problem.
When my mother raised us in poverty, it was necessary to play games with utilities, which ones you cancelled which months, to make ends meet. This was actually worth doing, because skipping the $20 cable payment one month was about 1/10th of the monthly house payment. A year of skipping cable could pay for a month of rent. If I skipped a year of much more expensive cable internet, I could not use that to pay even a single month of rent. There's a lot of dumb money being spent, with my personal pet peeve being cell phones, but if a person "doesn't need" the newest iPhone and went without to be frugal, often they haven't even gotten back a single month's rent. What the fuck is the point of living in serious poverty just so that you can extend your rent runway by less than 10%?
The only people in current society who can actually afford to survive off the wealth they have accumulated are called capital owners and you will find that indeed, they are rarely doing things they don't "want" to do, and no, the time they spend really shouldn't be considered "work" since they sign their own paychecks most of the time.
Running a business is work, but if I get to decide what my business does, I don't get to then insist that my side hobbies that I've started doing under the name of my business are also work.