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The idea of slowing down and finding joy in small routines assumes you've already escaped the constant anxiety of bills. It’s hard to be at peace when your base
by coffeecoders 1y ago
The idea of slowing down and finding joy in small routines assumes you've already escaped the constant anxiety of bills. It’s hard to be at peace when your baseline reality is a few paychecks away from chaos.
There’s a quiet cruelty in how modern economies make stability feel like a luxury. Owning a home, having savings, or even time to be bored used to be normal milestones, now they are privileges. Until the basics are within reach again, the “boring” life will remain a fantasy for many who’d give anything for that kind of peace.
Most of us here work in tech and make six figures, but not everyone has that luxury.
- IAmBroom 1y agoMoney doesn't create happiness, but the lack of money can create unhappiness.
- coffeecoders 1y agoThis line is often used to downplay how much economic stress shapes mental health.
- rafabulsing 1y agoHow does "lack of money can create unhappiness" downplay the effects of economic stress on mental health?
- saulpw 1y ago"unhappiness" is quite minimizing of trauma, burnout, and suicide. It's like saying "losing a child can create unhappiness".
- rafabulsing 1y agoI don't know, I really don't feel like it is. I think it's pretty clear that the choice of "unhappiness"/"sadness" is to clearly put it in opposition to the popular "money doesn't bring happiness" cliche, not out of some absolute claim on the magnitude of the suffering the lack of money could bring (so, merely sadness, but not agony, desolation, suffering, or any other stronger negative emotion one could choose). It just makes the propositional logic of the sentence clearer: X might not imply Y, but !X implies !Y
- saulpw 1y agoI'm glad the sentence structure is pleasing to your logical brain. As a counterpoint, my family has generational trauma from decades of economic stress and that cliche feels minimizing to me.
- rafabulsing 1y agoI live in a third world country, and although I'm (by our standards) doing pretty well right now, both my parents come from very little. My mom, as a young woman, at one point even lost everything she had in a fire. I was fortunate enough (through their hard work, and undoubtedly some luck) to mostly experience economic stability growing up, though we did still go through a rough patch when I was a kid. The person I'm engaged with, and their family, had/has it even worse, and it's not hard to see the ways it affected and still affects them. My point being, I'm no stranger to a family history of financial hardship. I'm sorry for whatever you and your family have had to endure. But, politely, screw off with the implication that the only way I feel the way that I do/say the things that I say are fruit of some privileged upbringing that couldn't possibly understand money problems.
- baal80spam 1y ago> There’s a quiet cruelty in how modern economies make stability feel like a luxury. Owning a home, having savings, or even time to be bored used to be normal milestones, now they are privileges. Ehh, I don't know. Didn't people for vast majority of our history worry about what (if anything) they would eat not even next month, but next week?
- coffeecoders 1y agoSure, for most of human history, survival was a daily concern. It's just unnatural that in a time of record productivity and abundance, many still feel the same survival anxiety. My point isn’t that we’re worse off than pre-industrial farmers. It is that progress was supposed to free us from that precarity, not repackage it with Wi-Fi and subscriptions.