Life is so insane right now that mental illness is the only rational response.
Folks say just get on food stamps or medicaid, but it's not that simple. At that level of destitution you may not have a phone, an address, basic ID/documentation, or even a means of getting to the office to apply. Means-testing makes the process so drawn-out and convoluted, that many folks (including myself) don't even bother, because there are more immediate things to worry about (once again speaking from experience).
After years of destitution, I finally managed to make a bit more than twice the FPL and I was still struggling (but significantly better off). Just recently I lost that job for reasons outside my control and after my unemployment runs out I'm back where I started. Everyone I know has a similar story. Any data that says that poverty is decreasing in the US is detached from reality.
Yet “mental illness is the only rational response.”
Happiness = Reality − Expectations
Most of material Reality is fine. The part of Reality that’s broken is spiritual/emotional. The expectations causing unhappiness aren’t for more money or stuff, they’re subconscious, millions of years deep, baked into the species of tribe, offspring, transcendence, cosmic order.
Leftism spent half a century screaming that those instincts are bigotry, that family is oppression, that religion is a mental illness, that wanting roots or rituals or a legacy is fascism.
You can’t propagandize the human soul out of its own operating system. The subconscious still demands what it demanded in 200,000 BC. We just demolished every institution that used to answer the call and replaced them with therapy, porn, and corporate pride slogans.
That’s the real insanity. Not climate change or late-stage capitalism. The soul shows up for duty and the building’s condemned.
Averages are just that - averages. They say nothing about any given individual’s experience. And probabilities aren’t assurances of a particular outcome. Just because the average person is more likely to face obesity than starvation doesn’t mean that there aren’t millions of people facing starvation in the world. Your argument is based on an incorrect use of statistics.
The bottom decile in all western countries has a objectively better material conditions yet I don’t dispute they may feel less “Happiness” which the formula explains and if you drill into the components of Reality which are causing the unhappiness and it’s absolutely non-material as I explained.
Life is fucking easy. One push ordering for almost anything. Cushy houses with hvac.
We make life hard by buying into the narrative that it's hard and we're all helpless. This cheats us out of our development and ability to handle real conflict.
This easy life you describe requires mountains of people to support it, who themselves are mostly being crushed by it.
Also a lot of low-paying jobs are customer service in some way. Smiling is sort of a prerequisite for getting paid.
Like for anything in life, it depends on the market you're in, and where you are situated on the acumen distribution (low acumen drivers don't make a lot, while high acumen ones do). Narrative thinking likes cherry picking the worst cases and then representing those stories as normal. But reality is always a bit more complicated.
Many Lyft drivers are immigrants, either between jobs, or are doing it full time. I don't directly ask them how much they make, but I tell them in my homeland of Canada, if you're on welfare and disability, you make CAD$x and it's good enough money for a single person. Most Lyft drivers are like: "that's way, way less than what I make doing this." (some tell me they make US$3-4k/month, working 6 day weeks. This might sound like too little, but realize that not all COL is the same, and for an immigrant, this is a great gig with optionality -- you can always turn off the app).
Then you might say, oh, they're blind to the depreciation hit their cars are taking. But good, high acumen, Lyft drivers often drive second-hand Priuses which depreciate slowly and have great mileage, and they track expenses like a hawk. If you go to the Lyft subreddit, good drivers know all the tricks -- optimize for high yield windows, avoid dead miles, avoid blind quests, and the cap hours deliberately. It's the ones with less acumen that drive a new car with low MPG on financing, and don't optimize.
So don't generalize and catastrophize (catastrophizing amplifies depression -- in cognitive behavioral therapy, they teach you to guard against that). Just stop it. Everything in life is a distribution.
I'm not saying driving a Lyft is aspirational, but for some immigrants who are doing it to support their family, it's a less-bad option than many others.
I even had a few drivers pushing me to get married (I'm single) because they said, once they get home from a day of driving, they get to go back to family. "It's less lonely," they tell me. In some ways they're happier than I am, even though I make nominally more than them.
Has this approach of ordering people to feel or think a certain way ever actually worked for you? Do you think this is a good way to have a respectful discussion with someone?
> some tell me they make US$3-4k/month
So let's run with that number, say 3.5k/month average. That's $42,000/year: They're independent contractors, so they have independent employment tax which is about 2x of standard w-2 taxes. A quick online calculator tells me that would amount to 8,370.90 in my state. The lions share is federal medicare and social security tax though; state tax on this is practically nothing here.
* They must have a car. Quick search says a 2024 prius is around $25k. Monthly payments at 9.6% (prime rate for a used car, all new immigrants start out with perfect credit, right?) at 60 months is around $550. Let's say insurance is $100. Ignore fuel and maintenance for now.
* So now we have 2800/month after taxes and 650/month just to work. The remaining 2150 needs to cover everything else. Food, housing, utilities.
* This doesn't even consider health insurance. Let's hope they qualify for a subsidized plan, because they sure can't cover it on this income. I guess they have the "don't get sick" plan that's so popular these days.
Oh and all this for working 6 days a week. Which if that's the case they're not clocking 8 hours days. Even conservatively you should assume that's 10 hours a day.
And on top of all that you said they're supporting a family?! So 3 or 4 people on 2150/month?
All that so they can work 60 hour weeks, barely see their wife and kids, and be one accident or medical emergency away from total financial ruin.
But you're right, they're rich in spirit and after all, isn't that what really matters? They really do have it so much better than you.
Imagine how much worse it is for people who don’t make as much as I do.