And those are the lucky ones.
The rest get paid meagerly while inflation and rent gobbles up any earnings they have so they work numerous jobs to scrape by.
Most of the country lives paycheck to paycheck.
I love your idealism but I think most people would be happy to see everything collapse at this point.
Hmmmmmmm
> From my experience the best minds tend to work on important problems
My experience is that you're incorrect.
What I see is tons of people living the same template: pick secure, well paid job, no matter how meaningless. Even when they take a risk to spin some startup, very often goal is to sell off and retire, with little interest in what they actually do.
Then these people get depressed and complain how life is bleak, capitalism cruel and everything should collapse.
Personal experiences is anecdotal. There's hard stat's that say that a majority of this country does not live like you do.
Btw I'm not from USA and reading HN recently, I'm kinda happy about it, because it seems only options on your side are: starving, prisoner of job, sell-off with guilt trips/existential crisis, demoralized billionaire. Is there anyone left in the US, who simply enjoys life as it is?
I obviously dramatize here a bit, but literally a few comments earlier someone wrote to me, that, he/she didn't consent to be alive. Really dystopian thread.
I notice financially privileged people tend to advocate for a 'dont worry be happy' 'everythings going to be alright' mode of living life because theyre shielded from the brutality of the world by their money or their families money.
It's the same reason financially privileged people never admit that they had help from their family and always claim that they made their money themselves.
Because they're completely unaware of what it really takes to make it in life without any help from anyone and I suspect feel a little guilty how easy their life has been compared to others and want to connect with, and associate with people who actually made it on their own.
If you have ever been poor or financially struggling, you would realize 'don't worry be happy' is not a functional way of living life if you don't have family money....at least in America.
The real advice is to fight tooth and nail to try to get oneself and family to financial safety.
May I have my happiness-pass now please? :-)
> The real advice is to fight tooth and nail to try to get oneself and family to financial safety.
It is. My parents surely did and I'm also going to (btw calling this privilege and guilt tripping over fact, that somebody's parents are decent human beings is kinda weird).
This is how life works. No reason to obsess over some places being shitty. There's less of them than a few generations ago (fun fact - my city still has its old beheading stone. Thankfully not used for couple hundreds of years).
That's a rough start. Did they retire? What do they do now?
What's funny, they will tell you, that factory wasn't bad compared to work in the field they did with their own parents. It also got them place in block of flats - objectively kinda crappy, but everything was crappy back then.
What happened to them after the fall of socialism?
Nothing exciting, but they always provided for the family and helped us to start adult life however they could.