Last year I went from making $20K/mo to <$2K/mo, for quite a while. As my money was drying up, I didn’t have a lot of options. I had credit but I didn’t want to use it. I had a kid, but I couldn’t promise him future school supplies. I was a “professional” type, so I could get house sitting gigs (via online) far and wide. I drove 10 hours for some of them and gigged online, still collected $1900/mo pre-tax from a client — I’d have to make good on the taxes eventually. Eventually I found a gig back in SF, starting salary was $200K. Then I landed a consulting gig at $250K. I finally took an FTE role at $200K with a 20% bonus and strong promotion probability. I made it. That part of the story took 18+ months and I struggled to make sub-rental deposits.

I’m 50 years old. I had no one to draw from, I had no more debt I could create, aside for obscene %APR credit card options.

Now imagine that I can’t draw 6 figures, I still pulled $2K in my worst months, I still had to move out of my home and live in my car and visit my partner who crashed on couches from friends who could only reasonably accommodate one of us… my ex- let me visit my kid as much as possible and sleep in his bedroom, but I couldn’t land a 6 figure job at the end of the narrative. The options aren’t awesome, nor sufficient, and the cruelty and neglect, even from other friends, is mortifying. It was really fucking hard for me, but I’m fine again. I don’t see how it’s humane for the likes of those who don’t have my arc as their probability. My European friends shake their heads and know the US is really broken.