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Yeah it's almost certainly this. In Western culture, and probably others, your job is closely tied to your identity. Even if you don't feel so yourself, it gre
by mjr00 4y ago
Yeah it's almost certainly this.
In Western culture, and probably others, your job is closely tied to your identity. Even if you don't feel so yourself, it greatly affects how others perceive you. After all, when you meet a new person, one of the first things you ask them is, "What do you do [for a living]?" If you're living off passive income, answering that question can be complicated. So you just make up something like "being a consultant" or "doing online sales."
It's pretty similar with generational wealth. I know someone who has been working doing script reviews in Hollywood for 10 years now. It's definitely paid work, but maybe a few thousand a month; the rest of their lifestyle is financed by their parents, who run a real estate business. But it's a lot easier, socially, to say "I'm a script writer and reviewer" than to say "I don't work, my parents pay for everything."
- JohnFen 4y ago> After all, when you meet a new person, one of the first things you ask them is, "What do you do [for a living]?" Not in my part of the US. I've rarely been asked, and have never asked unless it was pertinent to an ongoing discussion.
- adamsmith143 4y agoWho are they fooling? No one buys that you can have a brand new Mercedes and live in a high rise apartment by "reviewing a few scripts" every few months.
- mjr00 4y agoSure, but he has a Civic from the mid-2000s and lives in a typically-priced LA low-rise rental apartment in an okay-but-not-amazing neighborhood. Funnily enough, he's dating a girl in a very similar situation who currently has an occupation of "pet sitter." If you actually sat down and did the math, it'd be obvious. But most people don't think that hard about it, and will accept an answer of "I'm a script writer" in the context of e.g. telling a Tinder date what you do for a living.
- ghaff 4y agoAnd script doctors etc. can actually make quite a bit of money so a vague working on scripts isn’t an obvious red flag.
- edgyquant 4y agoThis is making a likely wrong assumption and then philosophizing about how our society is bad and this false assumption proves it. I grew up poor, most of my friends are not college educated and they come from dirt poor areas and have never had a decent job. Yet they fall into this category as well. It’s really easy to make money hustling in the day to day. For instance one friend builds picnic tables, scraps metal and does the occasional moving/painting job.
- mjr00 4y ago> I grew up poor, most of my friends are not college educated and they come from dirt poor areas and have never had a decent job. Yet they fall into this category as well. It’s really easy to make money hustling in the day to day. For instance one friend builds picnic tables, scraps metal and does the occasional moving/painting job. The key difference is that if you offered any of those people a $100k/year office job they would take it in a heartbeat. The kind of people we're talking about can support their upper-middle class lifestyles without a fulltime job because of passive income or generational wealth.