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I’ve worked in the fast food industry for 14 years—about half my life Can someone give me an anecdotal example of how this could come to be without some fault

I’ve worked in the fast food industry for 14 years—about half my life Can someone give me an anecdotal example of how this could come to be without some fault in Brown's decision-making process? For starters, I've always heard that commute time is inversely proportional to career mobility. I made it a rule not to work anywhere farther than half an hour away. And that is the absolute maximum which was necessary when I lived rural area. Currently, I work remote, which has indeed provided more time for further career training. My mother has worked at the same minimum-wage food joint for almost eight years. She tells me it's because she's "comfortable" and friends with everyone there. Personally, I think it affords her the time and lack of responsibility needed in order to engage in non-moderated drug use. This was certainly the reason she was usually unemployed and unable to provide the most basic resources for me as a child. If I bring up this or her other time-sucking addictions such as mobile gaming / simulated gambling, she becomes very defensive. Regardless of the reason, comfort breeds complacency. Complacency leads to not making a meaningful change to your career trajectory in a 15-year period. As someone who grew up in relatively abject poverty, most of the positive things in my life have only come from within, due to my determination to succeed despite numerous setbacks. Sometimes I find myself having difficulty empathizing with people who seem reasonably intelligent but have been in the same situation for 10-20 years.

Tehdasi 7y ago
Well see the just world theory says that if they have spent 10 years in a low wage job then they obviously have a character flaw that makes them unsuitable for any higher position in society so certainly we don't need to look at any other factors apart from that to know that we won't employ her for anything else. /s
astronautjones 7y ago
> My mother has worked at the same minimum-wage food joint for almost eight years. She tells me it's because she's "comfortable" and friends with everyone there. Personally, I think it affords her the time and lack of responsibility needed in order to engage in non-moderated drug use. This was certainly the reason she was usually unemployed and unable to provide the most basic resources for me as a child. If I bring up this or her other time-sucking addictions such as mobile gaming / simulated gambling, she becomes very defensi a lot of society's problems come from people in power and/or wealth projecting their anecdotal, perhaps personally bitter experiences (like yours with your mother) onto everyone that isn't making a healthy wage. It's over 40 million people, we are not all like your mother.
- d-d 7y ago
  Success is a powerful drug that can cause very convincing delusions.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  I hope I don't come across as projecting. I am just sharing my own experience in poverty. I am still not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination and I have no support network. Obviously everyone is different. This is why I asked for other points of view for a better sample size.
  - oarsinsync 7y ago
    I come from a poor family. My parents made a point of never spending any more than the bare minimum amount of money on me, and both had to work full time jobs. I would make my own way home from school every day from the age of 7. I would make my own way to school from the age of 11. School was a 90min bus ride one way, or a 30 min drive (60 min round trip, x2 for start+end of day). That doesn't change that I had both parents and teachers who cared about me, educated me, disciplined me, and enabled me to succeed. > As someone who grew up in relatively abject poverty, most of the positive things in my life have only come from within, due to my determination to succeed despite numerous setbacks. There is nothing about my success in my adult life that has only come from within. Even my determination isn't mine and mine alone. Everything about my success is down to the opportunities that were afforded to me, to enable me to have that determination and outlook. My parents, my teachers, and my peers throughout my upbringing and adult life have all played a part. Nobody exists in a vacuum. I am immensely privileged to have had the amount of support I have had. I expect the vast majority of commentators on this board have had similarly privileged lives. The people stuck (either by 'choice' or by 'circumstance') most likely have not. At the risk of sounding like a <insert pejorative du jour here>, check your privilege, appreciate it for what it is, and try not to look down on those that didn't have the same opportunities that you did.
    - soulofmischief 7y ago
      Nobody exists in a vacuum. You're arguing a strawman. You are introducing absolutes into a conversation which was purposefully framed as fluid. For example, I said most of the positive things. Your post is built upon the premise that I believe all positive things in my life came only from within, however you said the word only, not me. I am immensely privileged to have had the amount of support I have had. That's great... almost comes off as bragging, but okay... check your privilege, appreciate it for what it is, and try not to look down on those that didn't have the same opportunities that you did. ...Seriously? You are literally coming from a place of higher privilege and looking down on me. You are projecting your own fortune onto me and consequently expecting the same attitude. I have not had such fortune as you, in fact most people haven't. I don't need to check my privilege, I am aware of everything I have and wake up every day thankful I don't live in a place like Saudi Arabia. But we aren't talking about Saudi Arabia. We are talking about America, and our conversation about privilege is relative to America. And relative to America, I have lived in abject poverty for most of my life.
godelski 7y ago
One time I was trying to put up a picture frame. I lost my measuring tape so I was just kinda eyeballing it. I put up a nail, then the frame. It wasn't right, so I pulled it out and redid it. When I pulled out the nail I bent it a little. I'm not very good at this so it took me a few times, especially since it wouldn't go in straight now (I straightened it out as much as I could). On my third try the nail broke. So I grabbed a new nail and finally got the frame up. Luckily it is large enough to hide my mistakes haha. Personal agency isn't all that there is. It wasn't the nail's fault that it broke. I bent it and kept hammering it down. I pushed it beyond what it was supposed to be used for. Sure, a different nail would have survived, but in the end it was my fault. A roofing or masonry nails would have probably been able to put up with the abuse (but caused bigger holes), but I was using a drywall nail. Was it the right nail for the job? Eh, in the end it worked out and my picture hasn't fallen down. I mean I don't have any expensive pictures or frames, so I'm still just going to grab whatever nail looks like it will work from my box. But I also have two measuring tapes now.
natalyarostova 7y ago
Lots of these people are just really stupid. They’re the inverse of the Stanford CS wiz. It’s not their fault. They have trouble with basic discounting and planning on a fundamental intellectual level. Part of a functioning society is to afford those without the intellectuals means to have some modicum of comfort beyond subsistence work.
- quaice 7y ago
  Intelligence has very little to do with the majority. Geographical location, overall family health, education, peer pressure, inherited ignorance... These are all things that can put people at a great disadvantage. It's easy to cast judgment with little to no intimate knowledge of these people and situations. It's even easier to think oneself better than others when you can't recognize your own privileges. It's easy to mistake ignorance for lack of intelligence, which in itself is just ignorance on your part. We can't fault one another for ignorance, and casting judgment serves nothing but your own ego.
  - natalyarostova 7y ago
    I’m not judging anyone. Judgement is a moral action. I’m recognizing the self evident truth that for many people they fundamentally lack the ability to plan and take care of themselves properly or thoughtfully with regard to the long run. It’s not about thinking we’re better than them — which is an ambiguous moral statement. It’s recognizing we have a substantially greater ability than them and viewing that as a responsibility we owe to those in society less capable, and then to take care of them.
    - soulofmischief 7y ago
      I guess people may have found your presentation abrasive, but it was just blunt. I wouldn't call most people stupid. In fact, most people are of average intelligence and by definition are not stupid. We can't be overreaching in our expectation of the mental prowess of evolved apes, everything is relative.
vector_spaces 7y ago
The dominating terms in the calculus of a person's economic circumstances aren't intelligence, will, or moral righteousness. If you don't start out with wealthy family or relatives to bail you out of emergencies, unexpected expenses of just a couple hundred dollars are devastating and can take months to recover from. Not to mention all the more subtle network driven benefits like getting your foot in the door somewhere or training in professional culture norms and lessons in navigating bureaucracy When you work a physically demanding low wage job without that fallback, thinking about anything but survival (literally feeding yourself and loved ones -- sometimes including parents) at the end of the day is unlikely. And the smallest lapses in judgement end up being far more catastrophic. This was my reality for about a decade. I worked in the San Francisco Bay area in grocery stores and restaurants, and held multiple full time minimum wage jobs concurrently. I had PTSD from a young age, didn't prioritize my formal education after high school (let alone during school), self medicated with drugs and alcohol. Certainly made bad decisions. I randomly picked up a trigonometry book in my early 20s, was excited by the fact that, given some agency in how I approached the material I could, in fact, understand it -- and eventually self taught up to calculus before deciding to go back to school. I was accepted to UC Berkeley as a transfer student when I was about 26, transferred and studied pure math... While still working two jobs to survive, dealing with housing insecurity as my landlord started aggressively raising my rent, and figuring out how to best allocate the $300 or so leftover after rent and bills were paid. So yeah, I ended up dropping out. I spent a couple years coming home from my very physical near min wage jobs exhausted but still stayed up late into the night teaching myself to code by building shit in Python and Node, learning SQL and CS concepts. Doing this was not the cake walk the manic learn-to-code survival bias narratives on Medium might have you think. It took years and involved significant sacrifice to my health to forgo the sleep that I did, and ultimately my success boiled down to someone taking a chance on me. Now my financial calculus is drastically different. Make no mistake though: if I were much older, had a child, were non-white, non-male, had a more severe disability, or had any more unexpected critical expenses over a few hundred dollars, it's entirely possible I would still be broke and toiling away in kitchens I was able to change my circumstances, but it took many, many years, and a lot of backtracking whenever circumstances (even plenty beyond my control) shifted. And it required me to effectively make the best possible decision at all times. One thing I find interesting about your question is the implication that fallibility in someone's decision making process means they deserve poverty, and all the horrible shit that comes with it (like housing and food insecurity, and even bring forced to contend with dangerous conditions during pregnancy). I am no less fallible in my judgement today than I was when I was broke, the difference is that today I can afford to make bigger mistakes. Anyway, I hope if anything my story helps you re-evaluate that particular point.
mrtksn 7y ago
The same can be argued for anybody. For example, Engineers who don't start their own companies are at fault when the company they work for goes tits up and they are unemployed at an advanced age and unemployable because of their outdated skillset. The truth is, I think, nobody perfectly optimizes their prospects. People are people and people like to be in their social groups and compete in their social groups, which puts you on a track to a specific future. Kids from middle-class families don't have to abandon their social circle to become white-collar workers, they can just be comfortable with their friends and "fail" and become a depressed white-collar worker in a not so cool company with only O.K. salary. There are numerous movies about people on this path. When kids from an affluent background choose to stay comfortable with their friends, they "fail" and become spoiled brats. Usually portrayed as d-bags who don't live a fulfilling life and simply spend their daddies money on drugs and luxury. When a kid from a lower-income background chooses to stay comfortable with their friends, they end up just as miserable but they also have survivability issues. This is why "going to college" is such a monumental part in life: It gives you an option to change social circles and if you still fail, at least you can fail in a bit more comfortable house and car. I hear that college is inaccessible for many Americans, maybe they should fix that. Equal social comfort opportunity can create a much more just society.
- pm90 7y ago
  Not sure why you’re being downvoted as this is pretty accurate. American success has been predicated on the availability of these social goods which can change peoples lives.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Perhaps because of arguing that people choose this state. Some do, but many (most) are thrust into a particular direction.
    - mrtksn 7y ago
      Interesting, but I don't think that I said they choose it as if they choose fries over nuggets when asked. What people choose is how comfortable they would like to be against their odds and people who choose to have nice social lives in their current circle end up staying in this circle. Each circle have different failure modes, I won't argue that the lady in the article failed in her circle, she just didn't move up in the ladder. Failing in the low-income circle doesn't look like that, failing in that circle is overdosing in a meth den or ending up in jail. She actually seems to be doing fine but probably could have been doing much better if she had chosen to abandon her original social environment. The life might give you fries but you can refuse that, stay hungry for a bit more and demand nuggets if that's what you want, ignoring your friends rolling their eyes for you being a drama queen. You may have to endure sitting on another table, being left alone by your friends who had their launch and left. This is the price you pay for jumping social circles and eating in a college cafeteria usually eases the pain.
iliketosleep 7y ago
The woman in question seems neither comfortable or complacent. She needs the money to pay for her day-to-day expenses and has a long commute. With her type of work experience, it would be difficult to find a more lucrative job. I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with her decision making process. She's simply been doing what is necessary to get by under difficult circumstances. I've met some capable and hardworking people who are like her. The sad truth is that some people simply just start off in a tough situation, work hard, and never get a lucky break. On the other side of the coin, I've seen people who have worked at a small company because nobody else will hire them, the company gets aquired and the old boss retires, and they end up in a cushy situation a the big company. In fact, I've seen this happen multiple times and it was definitely not the master plan of these individuals. It was just a lucky break.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  The sad truth is that some people simply just start off in a tough situation, work hard, and never get a lucky break. Your tone implies that I don't understand the disparity of the human condition. I lived my entire life very impoverished and at times homeless. I come from a very abusive household and grew up in a rural area with little prospects. I've never caught a break. I saw a way out, computers, and I took it. I was able to pivot to a better career by building skills in my free time.
  - cixter 7y ago
    But should it really have been that hard for you? Massive creds for managing to pull yourself out, but it seems unfair and petty to wish upon others the same hardship you've had.
    - afiori 7y ago
      soulofmischief wished no kind of hardship, he is preaching an idea of taking responsibility for improving your life. I personally have not read any moral judgment in his comments; just a simple fact that, in many cases, if you want to improve your life you need to do it yourself. This together with a conjecture that in most cases the average person has indeed the possibility of upward mobility. A conjecture that was posed with an invite to hear opposing view. A discussion of how much we should expect help from outside is important (and I believe soulofmischief would agree), but it is not relevant to how to improve your own life in the situation that help does not exist yet. Personally I think we should separate the morality issue of being poor/rich from the mechanics of how people become/remain poor.
robbiep 7y ago
The danger with this type of response is that it’s perfectly reasonable, but it’s also sociopathic. I’m an emergency room doctor (part of the time). Due to the advantages I had of birth, gender, country of origin etc, I live a great life, most of which has been because I took every advantage; cf. many of my peers from school who squandered it. I also work in emergency departments, in a country where anyone can come to the emergency department for treatment, and I am continually frustrated by the lack of agency many people display in changing their circumstances. Many, many problems in many people’s lives could be solved by slicing the Gordian Knot - but neither society or you benefit from such a pessimistic view of others
- konradb 7y ago
  When you say slicing the Gordian Knot (and fixing the lack of agency), what would be some examples?
  - robbiep 7y ago
    You may have experienced this but being an outsider sometimes allows ‘clear’ perspectives on optier people’s issues. Ie a person in a relationship with someone clearly toxic. Or experiencing domestic abuse. The external answer is ‘leave’, the person doesn’t. The obese patient - walk, change diet. The representing twenty year old with third presentation cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome - pretty much every time you smoke pot you are going to experience abdominal pain and vomiting, you cannot smoke! How are you not getting the message! The person spending 5 hours on a bus to work 2 shifts... ?? Is this a rational choice?
    - soulofmischief 7y ago
      It's not a rational choice. There has to be some level of personal agency in this decision. Ms. Brown is only 28.
- afiori 7y ago
  This whole thread was started as a discussion on personal agency.
abvdasker 7y ago
> I made it a rule not to work anywhere farther than half an hour away. And that is the absolute maximum which was necessary when I lived rural area. To me it sounds like you're saying, "why doesn't she live closer to her workplace?" which carries with it a kind of subtext of blame. Reading the article a few possible explanations for her choice come to mind. The author mentions she lives with her boyfriend's parents. Probably this is the cheapest possible living arrangement available to her. Living closer would probably require her to live independently, which tends to be more expensive. This may be compounded by more expensive rents closer to her place of work, which turns out to be a common problem for the working poor and an age-old cruelty of capitalism: Poor people have higher transportation costs -- both in terms of time and money -- because they can only afford to live far from urban centers where their jobs usually are. It's just one of the many ways the old saying "it's expensive to be poor" turns out to be objectively, measurably true. It's also totally possible that none of the above applies and the author is not being smart with her money, or may have a drug habit, or may be "complacent". But we certainly shouldn't assume these things about her, because we just don't know her circumstances. Apologies if this comes across as pedantic, but I think the mistake you may be making is projecting your narrow personal experience of your mother's problems onto a complete stranger, whose circumstances seem quite different than your mother's based on the article (the admittedly limited information we have about the author's situation). It's heartening to see that you recognize your perspective may stem from your own problems with empathy. The author David Foster Wallace has written much (an understatement) about empathy and awareness, but probably the best short work of his about these subjects is this speech. I still find it to be a really good reminder of all kinds of things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  Apologies if this comes across as pedantic, but I think the mistake you may be making is projecting your narrow personal experience of your mother's problems onto a complete stranger, whose circumstances seem quite different than your mother's based on the article I'm confused by the tendency of you and other users to call a post which is literally asking for other anecdotes of economic struggle to be projecting and indicative of a narrow mindset. I was simply providing my own data point to start. The very act of asking for other perspectives is not what I would call narrow-minded. This kind of response is why people are afraid to open up to others. In fact, in this entire reply thread only one user bothered to actually share a story of economic strife, which even acknowledged fault on their part (no one is perfect). Meanwhile, tons of comments criticizing me for my point of view when I am literally asking people to change it. One user even called me sociopathic and then proceeded to offer an even more callous point of view while relating that they do not come from a position of poverty at all. It's heartening to see that you recognize your perspective may stem from your own problems with empathy. No, that is not what I said. I do not have problems empathizing with others, and I do not appreciate that extrapolation. This is a very specific situation I have trouble empathizing with. David Foster Wallace was a great author and the world misses him.
danans 7y ago
> anecdotal example of how this could come to be without some fault in Brown's decision-making process? You've really never made 1 bad decision, or 10, in your life? I have plenty of bad decisions, total screwups even, in my history. Some of them were from being petulant, or naive. Some because I was depressed. Yet I'm a white collar educated professional, I'm part because I made some good decisions, and also because that's the environment I was born into, so I was taught how to succeed in that world. Why do we expect the poor to be paragons of perfect decision making, when the more privileged can make a normal human level of mistakes and still retain their position?
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  I make bad decisions every day. How does that have to do with anything? Ms. Brown has had 14 years to come up with a career trajectory. I don't think she has ever bothered in that time to visit a career consultant after realizing she couldn't figure it out on her own. Random fluctuations in decision quality average out over time to reveal a smooth function of decision-making prowess.
  - cixter 7y ago
    When would she have time to do this? Also (and I feel like I'm grasping at straws getting this point across), when your whole existence revolves around just getting to work and back, is it fair of us to require people to have the horizon and insight to understand how to progress their situation? The underlying problem is that exploitation of poor people by these massive corporations lines the pockets of the already extremely wealthy, while it keeps people like Ms. Brown in a constant struggle to keep her head above water.
    - soulofmischief 7y ago
      when your whole existence revolves around just getting to work and back, is it fair of us to require people to have the horizon and insight to understand how to progress their situation? The implication is that I expect people of reasonable intelligence to do whatever, and I mean whatever, they have to do within ethical boundaries in order to increase their economic opportunities. I don't need a crash course in the history of racial socioeconomic exploitation in the US. Ask any successful black entrepreneur in the US if they agree with me.
timwaagh 7y ago
She's likely not too bright. Of course there's going to be problems with her decision making process. Can she be blamed for it? Not really, because intelligence is mostly genetic.
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  How do we increase intelligence over time? Purely mutational, or do you believe it can be passed down epigenetically similarly to weight?
  - timwaagh 7y ago
    I don't know whether we do increase in intelligence anymore there are problems that increase in the most intelligent populations that might put a limit on it. As to whether some part of intelligence can be accounted for with epigenetics I'd bet on it as it's a complex trait but you'd have to ask a researcher.
    - soulofmischief 7y ago
      At least for now, we can still optimize information density and distribution. We stand on the shoulders of giants, but we need a way to get more people onto their shoulders so that someone else might stand on ours.
- topologistics 7y ago
  You're going to get downvoted for saying something objectively true. I, on the other hand, desire social accolades. The emperor's new clothes are beautiful.
  - timwaagh 7y ago
    It doesn't matter how many people downvote if I get a reaction like this. Have a great day, sir.
shrimpx 7y ago
Genuinely curious: given that you grew up in abject poverty, how did you end up with a great education? That to me is the crux of this whole issue at hand. Kids who grow up in real abject poverty have negligent parents, go to bad schools early on, get pulled out of school, etc., setting them up for failure beyond their reasonable ability as adults.
- pnutjam 7y ago
  Haven't you seen Matilda? :D
- soulofmischief 7y ago
  I taught myself to read around age three by reading the same book every single day and recalling the memorized sounds from when it was read to me and fitting them to the letters. I taught myself arithmetic at the same age from playing video games. I was reading novels before public school. I didn't go to preschool, but I did go to a local Head Start after qualifying. I went to 5 kindergartens because I kept getting handed around relatives, and at one point I was even kidnapped by a relative before again being rescued and changed schools. After finally staying in one place for more than a few weeks, teachers saw that I had arithmetic down and put me in a mathathon. I came in second because I was a brat and didn't want to use counting blocks, preferring to rely on mental math. This planted the seed for the person who beat me to become a childhood rival, which helped immensely in my extra-curricular pursuit of education. We were always neck to neck in scores for everything. We each read 2-3 books a week to compete in Accelerated Reader scores. I think having a rival really made a difference in my motivation. One issue with children is they often lack motivation of any kind, and if you look towards their parents you will see the same thing. The motivation to best my rival was really an internal motivation to prove to myself that I could be great at anything I put my mind to. I don't know where this internal motivation comes from. Is it something that can be consistently instilled in others? I went to a similarly large number of middle and high schools, bouncing around a lot between family members, my atheism being a point of contention among my relatives. I actually attended both the worst-ranked high school in my state which is often ranked worst in education in the country, so basically one of the worst high schools in the country, and I also attended one of the top dozen elite high schools of the country. The disparity is indescribable. On the bad end, half of my classes were a revolving door of substitute teachers with no curriculum given to them, the other half were just the teacher yelling over students who were yelling over each other, throwing things, smoking cigarettes, and playing music on their phones in the middle of class. Regular police raids and schoolwide body searches. Massive school board corruption. And I do have sympathy. I want them all to succeed and be happy. The heat map for high test scores very often conspicuously radiated from my position in the classroom. In the end, it really came down to the desire to learn. I was not allowed to use the computer for anything not school related for most of my childhood (it's the devil's silicon), and so I learned how to hack computers, sideload applications, circumvent firewalls, gain root access, etc. so that I could sneak out in the middle of the night and learn about things that interested me like 3D modeling, graphic design, music, programming, and general web geek culture. After school, my idea of a fun time was hanging out at the library. I even had dates there. My entry into an elite boarding school was entirely merit-based and paid for by the state. The school is open up to anyone in the country however and there are other schools just like it.

Tehdasi 7y ago

Well see the just world theory says that if they have spent 10 years in a low wage job then they obviously have a character flaw that makes them unsuitable for any higher position in society so certainly we don't need to look at any other factors apart from that to know that we won't employ her for anything else. /s

astronautjones 7y ago

> My mother has worked at the same minimum-wage food joint for almost eight years. She tells me it's because she's "comfortable" and friends with everyone there. Personally, I think it affords her the time and lack of responsibility needed in order to engage in non-moderated drug use. This was certainly the reason she was usually unemployed and unable to provide the most basic resources for me as a child. If I bring up this or her other time-sucking addictions such as mobile gaming / simulated gambling, she becomes very defensi a lot of society's problems come from people in power and/or wealth projecting their anecdotal, perhaps personally bitter experiences (like yours with your mother) onto everyone that isn't making a healthy wage. It's over 40 million people, we are not all like your mother.

d-d 7y ago
Success is a powerful drug that can cause very convincing delusions.
soulofmischief 7y ago
I hope I don't come across as projecting. I am just sharing my own experience in poverty. I am still not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination and I have no support network. Obviously everyone is different. This is why I asked for other points of view for a better sample size.
- oarsinsync 7y ago
  I come from a poor family. My parents made a point of never spending any more than the bare minimum amount of money on me, and both had to work full time jobs. I would make my own way home from school every day from the age of 7. I would make my own way to school from the age of 11. School was a 90min bus ride one way, or a 30 min drive (60 min round trip, x2 for start+end of day). That doesn't change that I had both parents and teachers who cared about me, educated me, disciplined me, and enabled me to succeed. > As someone who grew up in relatively abject poverty, most of the positive things in my life have only come from within, due to my determination to succeed despite numerous setbacks. There is nothing about my success in my adult life that has only come from within. Even my determination isn't mine and mine alone. Everything about my success is down to the opportunities that were afforded to me, to enable me to have that determination and outlook. My parents, my teachers, and my peers throughout my upbringing and adult life have all played a part. Nobody exists in a vacuum. I am immensely privileged to have had the amount of support I have had. I expect the vast majority of commentators on this board have had similarly privileged lives. The people stuck (either by 'choice' or by 'circumstance') most likely have not. At the risk of sounding like a <insert pejorative du jour here>, check your privilege, appreciate it for what it is, and try not to look down on those that didn't have the same opportunities that you did.
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    Nobody exists in a vacuum. You're arguing a strawman. You are introducing absolutes into a conversation which was purposefully framed as fluid. For example, I said most of the positive things. Your post is built upon the premise that I believe all positive things in my life came only from within, however you said the word only, not me. I am immensely privileged to have had the amount of support I have had. That's great... almost comes off as bragging, but okay... check your privilege, appreciate it for what it is, and try not to look down on those that didn't have the same opportunities that you did. ...Seriously? You are literally coming from a place of higher privilege and looking down on me. You are projecting your own fortune onto me and consequently expecting the same attitude. I have not had such fortune as you, in fact most people haven't. I don't need to check my privilege, I am aware of everything I have and wake up every day thankful I don't live in a place like Saudi Arabia. But we aren't talking about Saudi Arabia. We are talking about America, and our conversation about privilege is relative to America. And relative to America, I have lived in abject poverty for most of my life.

godelski 7y ago

One time I was trying to put up a picture frame. I lost my measuring tape so I was just kinda eyeballing it. I put up a nail, then the frame. It wasn't right, so I pulled it out and redid it. When I pulled out the nail I bent it a little. I'm not very good at this so it took me a few times, especially since it wouldn't go in straight now (I straightened it out as much as I could). On my third try the nail broke. So I grabbed a new nail and finally got the frame up. Luckily it is large enough to hide my mistakes haha. Personal agency isn't all that there is. It wasn't the nail's fault that it broke. I bent it and kept hammering it down. I pushed it beyond what it was supposed to be used for. Sure, a different nail would have survived, but in the end it was my fault. A roofing or masonry nails would have probably been able to put up with the abuse (but caused bigger holes), but I was using a drywall nail. Was it the right nail for the job? Eh, in the end it worked out and my picture hasn't fallen down. I mean I don't have any expensive pictures or frames, so I'm still just going to grab whatever nail looks like it will work from my box. But I also have two measuring tapes now.

natalyarostova 7y ago

Lots of these people are just really stupid. They’re the inverse of the Stanford CS wiz. It’s not their fault. They have trouble with basic discounting and planning on a fundamental intellectual level. Part of a functioning society is to afford those without the intellectuals means to have some modicum of comfort beyond subsistence work.

quaice 7y ago
Intelligence has very little to do with the majority. Geographical location, overall family health, education, peer pressure, inherited ignorance... These are all things that can put people at a great disadvantage. It's easy to cast judgment with little to no intimate knowledge of these people and situations. It's even easier to think oneself better than others when you can't recognize your own privileges. It's easy to mistake ignorance for lack of intelligence, which in itself is just ignorance on your part. We can't fault one another for ignorance, and casting judgment serves nothing but your own ego.
- natalyarostova 7y ago
  I’m not judging anyone. Judgement is a moral action. I’m recognizing the self evident truth that for many people they fundamentally lack the ability to plan and take care of themselves properly or thoughtfully with regard to the long run. It’s not about thinking we’re better than them — which is an ambiguous moral statement. It’s recognizing we have a substantially greater ability than them and viewing that as a responsibility we owe to those in society less capable, and then to take care of them.
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    I guess people may have found your presentation abrasive, but it was just blunt. I wouldn't call most people stupid. In fact, most people are of average intelligence and by definition are not stupid. We can't be overreaching in our expectation of the mental prowess of evolved apes, everything is relative.

vector_spaces 7y ago

The dominating terms in the calculus of a person's economic circumstances aren't intelligence, will, or moral righteousness. If you don't start out with wealthy family or relatives to bail you out of emergencies, unexpected expenses of just a couple hundred dollars are devastating and can take months to recover from. Not to mention all the more subtle network driven benefits like getting your foot in the door somewhere or training in professional culture norms and lessons in navigating bureaucracy When you work a physically demanding low wage job without that fallback, thinking about anything but survival (literally feeding yourself and loved ones -- sometimes including parents) at the end of the day is unlikely. And the smallest lapses in judgement end up being far more catastrophic. This was my reality for about a decade. I worked in the San Francisco Bay area in grocery stores and restaurants, and held multiple full time minimum wage jobs concurrently. I had PTSD from a young age, didn't prioritize my formal education after high school (let alone during school), self medicated with drugs and alcohol. Certainly made bad decisions. I randomly picked up a trigonometry book in my early 20s, was excited by the fact that, given some agency in how I approached the material I could, in fact, understand it -- and eventually self taught up to calculus before deciding to go back to school. I was accepted to UC Berkeley as a transfer student when I was about 26, transferred and studied pure math... While still working two jobs to survive, dealing with housing insecurity as my landlord started aggressively raising my rent, and figuring out how to best allocate the $300 or so leftover after rent and bills were paid. So yeah, I ended up dropping out. I spent a couple years coming home from my very physical near min wage jobs exhausted but still stayed up late into the night teaching myself to code by building shit in Python and Node, learning SQL and CS concepts. Doing this was not the cake walk the manic learn-to-code survival bias narratives on Medium might have you think. It took years and involved significant sacrifice to my health to forgo the sleep that I did, and ultimately my success boiled down to someone taking a chance on me. Now my financial calculus is drastically different. Make no mistake though: if I were much older, had a child, were non-white, non-male, had a more severe disability, or had any more unexpected critical expenses over a few hundred dollars, it's entirely possible I would still be broke and toiling away in kitchens I was able to change my circumstances, but it took many, many years, and a lot of backtracking whenever circumstances (even plenty beyond my control) shifted. And it required me to effectively make the best possible decision at all times. One thing I find interesting about your question is the implication that fallibility in someone's decision making process means they deserve poverty, and all the horrible shit that comes with it (like housing and food insecurity, and even bring forced to contend with dangerous conditions during pregnancy). I am no less fallible in my judgement today than I was when I was broke, the difference is that today I can afford to make bigger mistakes. Anyway, I hope if anything my story helps you re-evaluate that particular point.

mrtksn 7y ago

The same can be argued for anybody. For example, Engineers who don't start their own companies are at fault when the company they work for goes tits up and they are unemployed at an advanced age and unemployable because of their outdated skillset. The truth is, I think, nobody perfectly optimizes their prospects. People are people and people like to be in their social groups and compete in their social groups, which puts you on a track to a specific future. Kids from middle-class families don't have to abandon their social circle to become white-collar workers, they can just be comfortable with their friends and "fail" and become a depressed white-collar worker in a not so cool company with only O.K. salary. There are numerous movies about people on this path. When kids from an affluent background choose to stay comfortable with their friends, they "fail" and become spoiled brats. Usually portrayed as d-bags who don't live a fulfilling life and simply spend their daddies money on drugs and luxury. When a kid from a lower-income background chooses to stay comfortable with their friends, they end up just as miserable but they also have survivability issues. This is why "going to college" is such a monumental part in life: It gives you an option to change social circles and if you still fail, at least you can fail in a bit more comfortable house and car. I hear that college is inaccessible for many Americans, maybe they should fix that. Equal social comfort opportunity can create a much more just society.

pm90 7y ago
Not sure why you’re being downvoted as this is pretty accurate. American success has been predicated on the availability of these social goods which can change peoples lives.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Perhaps because of arguing that people choose this state. Some do, but many (most) are thrust into a particular direction.
  - mrtksn 7y ago
    Interesting, but I don't think that I said they choose it as if they choose fries over nuggets when asked. What people choose is how comfortable they would like to be against their odds and people who choose to have nice social lives in their current circle end up staying in this circle. Each circle have different failure modes, I won't argue that the lady in the article failed in her circle, she just didn't move up in the ladder. Failing in the low-income circle doesn't look like that, failing in that circle is overdosing in a meth den or ending up in jail. She actually seems to be doing fine but probably could have been doing much better if she had chosen to abandon her original social environment. The life might give you fries but you can refuse that, stay hungry for a bit more and demand nuggets if that's what you want, ignoring your friends rolling their eyes for you being a drama queen. You may have to endure sitting on another table, being left alone by your friends who had their launch and left. This is the price you pay for jumping social circles and eating in a college cafeteria usually eases the pain.

iliketosleep 7y ago

The woman in question seems neither comfortable or complacent. She needs the money to pay for her day-to-day expenses and has a long commute. With her type of work experience, it would be difficult to find a more lucrative job. I don't think there's anything fundamentally wrong with her decision making process. She's simply been doing what is necessary to get by under difficult circumstances. I've met some capable and hardworking people who are like her. The sad truth is that some people simply just start off in a tough situation, work hard, and never get a lucky break. On the other side of the coin, I've seen people who have worked at a small company because nobody else will hire them, the company gets aquired and the old boss retires, and they end up in a cushy situation a the big company. In fact, I've seen this happen multiple times and it was definitely not the master plan of these individuals. It was just a lucky break.

soulofmischief 7y ago
The sad truth is that some people simply just start off in a tough situation, work hard, and never get a lucky break. Your tone implies that I don't understand the disparity of the human condition. I lived my entire life very impoverished and at times homeless. I come from a very abusive household and grew up in a rural area with little prospects. I've never caught a break. I saw a way out, computers, and I took it. I was able to pivot to a better career by building skills in my free time.
- cixter 7y ago
  But should it really have been that hard for you? Massive creds for managing to pull yourself out, but it seems unfair and petty to wish upon others the same hardship you've had.
  - afiori 7y ago
    soulofmischief wished no kind of hardship, he is preaching an idea of taking responsibility for improving your life. I personally have not read any moral judgment in his comments; just a simple fact that, in many cases, if you want to improve your life you need to do it yourself. This together with a conjecture that in most cases the average person has indeed the possibility of upward mobility. A conjecture that was posed with an invite to hear opposing view. A discussion of how much we should expect help from outside is important (and I believe soulofmischief would agree), but it is not relevant to how to improve your own life in the situation that help does not exist yet. Personally I think we should separate the morality issue of being poor/rich from the mechanics of how people become/remain poor.

robbiep 7y ago

The danger with this type of response is that it’s perfectly reasonable, but it’s also sociopathic. I’m an emergency room doctor (part of the time). Due to the advantages I had of birth, gender, country of origin etc, I live a great life, most of which has been because I took every advantage; cf. many of my peers from school who squandered it. I also work in emergency departments, in a country where anyone can come to the emergency department for treatment, and I am continually frustrated by the lack of agency many people display in changing their circumstances. Many, many problems in many people’s lives could be solved by slicing the Gordian Knot - but neither society or you benefit from such a pessimistic view of others

konradb 7y ago
When you say slicing the Gordian Knot (and fixing the lack of agency), what would be some examples?
- robbiep 7y ago
  You may have experienced this but being an outsider sometimes allows ‘clear’ perspectives on optier people’s issues. Ie a person in a relationship with someone clearly toxic. Or experiencing domestic abuse. The external answer is ‘leave’, the person doesn’t. The obese patient - walk, change diet. The representing twenty year old with third presentation cannabinoid hyperemesis syndrome - pretty much every time you smoke pot you are going to experience abdominal pain and vomiting, you cannot smoke! How are you not getting the message! The person spending 5 hours on a bus to work 2 shifts... ?? Is this a rational choice?
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    It's not a rational choice. There has to be some level of personal agency in this decision. Ms. Brown is only 28.
afiori 7y ago
This whole thread was started as a discussion on personal agency.

abvdasker 7y ago

> I made it a rule not to work anywhere farther than half an hour away. And that is the absolute maximum which was necessary when I lived rural area. To me it sounds like you're saying, "why doesn't she live closer to her workplace?" which carries with it a kind of subtext of blame. Reading the article a few possible explanations for her choice come to mind. The author mentions she lives with her boyfriend's parents. Probably this is the cheapest possible living arrangement available to her. Living closer would probably require her to live independently, which tends to be more expensive. This may be compounded by more expensive rents closer to her place of work, which turns out to be a common problem for the working poor and an age-old cruelty of capitalism: Poor people have higher transportation costs -- both in terms of time and money -- because they can only afford to live far from urban centers where their jobs usually are. It's just one of the many ways the old saying "it's expensive to be poor" turns out to be objectively, measurably true. It's also totally possible that none of the above applies and the author is not being smart with her money, or may have a drug habit, or may be "complacent". But we certainly shouldn't assume these things about her, because we just don't know her circumstances. Apologies if this comes across as pedantic, but I think the mistake you may be making is projecting your narrow personal experience of your mother's problems onto a complete stranger, whose circumstances seem quite different than your mother's based on the article (the admittedly limited information we have about the author's situation). It's heartening to see that you recognize your perspective may stem from your own problems with empathy. The author David Foster Wallace has written much (an understatement) about empathy and awareness, but probably the best short work of his about these subjects is this speech. I still find it to be a really good reminder of all kinds of things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI

soulofmischief 7y ago
Apologies if this comes across as pedantic, but I think the mistake you may be making is projecting your narrow personal experience of your mother's problems onto a complete stranger, whose circumstances seem quite different than your mother's based on the article I'm confused by the tendency of you and other users to call a post which is literally asking for other anecdotes of economic struggle to be projecting and indicative of a narrow mindset. I was simply providing my own data point to start. The very act of asking for other perspectives is not what I would call narrow-minded. This kind of response is why people are afraid to open up to others. In fact, in this entire reply thread only one user bothered to actually share a story of economic strife, which even acknowledged fault on their part (no one is perfect). Meanwhile, tons of comments criticizing me for my point of view when I am literally asking people to change it. One user even called me sociopathic and then proceeded to offer an even more callous point of view while relating that they do not come from a position of poverty at all. It's heartening to see that you recognize your perspective may stem from your own problems with empathy. No, that is not what I said. I do not have problems empathizing with others, and I do not appreciate that extrapolation. This is a very specific situation I have trouble empathizing with. David Foster Wallace was a great author and the world misses him.

danans 7y ago

> anecdotal example of how this could come to be without some fault in Brown's decision-making process? You've really never made 1 bad decision, or 10, in your life? I have plenty of bad decisions, total screwups even, in my history. Some of them were from being petulant, or naive. Some because I was depressed. Yet I'm a white collar educated professional, I'm part because I made some good decisions, and also because that's the environment I was born into, so I was taught how to succeed in that world. Why do we expect the poor to be paragons of perfect decision making, when the more privileged can make a normal human level of mistakes and still retain their position?

soulofmischief 7y ago
I make bad decisions every day. How does that have to do with anything? Ms. Brown has had 14 years to come up with a career trajectory. I don't think she has ever bothered in that time to visit a career consultant after realizing she couldn't figure it out on her own. Random fluctuations in decision quality average out over time to reveal a smooth function of decision-making prowess.
- cixter 7y ago
  When would she have time to do this? Also (and I feel like I'm grasping at straws getting this point across), when your whole existence revolves around just getting to work and back, is it fair of us to require people to have the horizon and insight to understand how to progress their situation? The underlying problem is that exploitation of poor people by these massive corporations lines the pockets of the already extremely wealthy, while it keeps people like Ms. Brown in a constant struggle to keep her head above water.
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    when your whole existence revolves around just getting to work and back, is it fair of us to require people to have the horizon and insight to understand how to progress their situation? The implication is that I expect people of reasonable intelligence to do whatever, and I mean whatever, they have to do within ethical boundaries in order to increase their economic opportunities. I don't need a crash course in the history of racial socioeconomic exploitation in the US. Ask any successful black entrepreneur in the US if they agree with me.

timwaagh 7y ago

She's likely not too bright. Of course there's going to be problems with her decision making process. Can she be blamed for it? Not really, because intelligence is mostly genetic.

soulofmischief 7y ago
How do we increase intelligence over time? Purely mutational, or do you believe it can be passed down epigenetically similarly to weight?
- timwaagh 7y ago
  I don't know whether we do increase in intelligence anymore there are problems that increase in the most intelligent populations that might put a limit on it. As to whether some part of intelligence can be accounted for with epigenetics I'd bet on it as it's a complex trait but you'd have to ask a researcher.
  - soulofmischief 7y ago
    At least for now, we can still optimize information density and distribution. We stand on the shoulders of giants, but we need a way to get more people onto their shoulders so that someone else might stand on ours.
topologistics 7y ago
You're going to get downvoted for saying something objectively true. I, on the other hand, desire social accolades. The emperor's new clothes are beautiful.
- timwaagh 7y ago
  It doesn't matter how many people downvote if I get a reaction like this. Have a great day, sir.

shrimpx 7y ago

Genuinely curious: given that you grew up in abject poverty, how did you end up with a great education? That to me is the crux of this whole issue at hand. Kids who grow up in real abject poverty have negligent parents, go to bad schools early on, get pulled out of school, etc., setting them up for failure beyond their reasonable ability as adults.

pnutjam 7y ago
Haven't you seen Matilda? :D
soulofmischief 7y ago
I taught myself to read around age three by reading the same book every single day and recalling the memorized sounds from when it was read to me and fitting them to the letters. I taught myself arithmetic at the same age from playing video games. I was reading novels before public school. I didn't go to preschool, but I did go to a local Head Start after qualifying. I went to 5 kindergartens because I kept getting handed around relatives, and at one point I was even kidnapped by a relative before again being rescued and changed schools. After finally staying in one place for more than a few weeks, teachers saw that I had arithmetic down and put me in a mathathon. I came in second because I was a brat and didn't want to use counting blocks, preferring to rely on mental math. This planted the seed for the person who beat me to become a childhood rival, which helped immensely in my extra-curricular pursuit of education. We were always neck to neck in scores for everything. We each read 2-3 books a week to compete in Accelerated Reader scores. I think having a rival really made a difference in my motivation. One issue with children is they often lack motivation of any kind, and if you look towards their parents you will see the same thing. The motivation to best my rival was really an internal motivation to prove to myself that I could be great at anything I put my mind to. I don't know where this internal motivation comes from. Is it something that can be consistently instilled in others? I went to a similarly large number of middle and high schools, bouncing around a lot between family members, my atheism being a point of contention among my relatives. I actually attended both the worst-ranked high school in my state which is often ranked worst in education in the country, so basically one of the worst high schools in the country, and I also attended one of the top dozen elite high schools of the country. The disparity is indescribable. On the bad end, half of my classes were a revolving door of substitute teachers with no curriculum given to them, the other half were just the teacher yelling over students who were yelling over each other, throwing things, smoking cigarettes, and playing music on their phones in the middle of class. Regular police raids and schoolwide body searches. Massive school board corruption. And I do have sympathy. I want them all to succeed and be happy. The heat map for high test scores very often conspicuously radiated from my position in the classroom. In the end, it really came down to the desire to learn. I was not allowed to use the computer for anything not school related for most of my childhood (it's the devil's silicon), and so I learned how to hack computers, sideload applications, circumvent firewalls, gain root access, etc. so that I could sneak out in the middle of the night and learn about things that interested me like 3D modeling, graphic design, music, programming, and general web geek culture. After school, my idea of a fun time was hanging out at the library. I even had dates there. My entry into an elite boarding school was entirely merit-based and paid for by the state. The school is open up to anyone in the country however and there are other schools just like it.