freagle

If you fundamentally believe that you are justified in harboring violent thoughts against working class capitalist subjects who have managed to become somewhat comfortable by spending 50 years of their lives working sacrificing community, connection, and respessing their own nature and desires, then I guess bye? My quarrel is with the owning class and the system they maintain.

Do you know what the rich call the people with $10M? The “comfortably poor”.

The comfortably poor and below are all in various positions of generational precarity. Yes, it feels absurd to say that $10M is poor when there are people living in squats. The reality is that the bourgeoisie are orders of magnitude richer than you imagine.

Don’t wish violence on people just because they are trying to escape generational poverty and have succeeded in managing a modicum of success at it.

Yeah, I wish my parents were better with money too. I don’t think it makes them bad people or that they made me poor or that they were being selfish.

The fact that you thought you made your family poor and you were to blame says a lot about the manifestations of trauma in your life. I didn’t feel that way with my parents, but I never knew their income or savings or retirement until they went through their divorce.

I’m sorry you went through what you went through OP. It sucks. And if it helps to blame your parents right now, I can’t stop you. I would say that the problem is the society and not your parents or you. Society impoverished you. Your parents are likely still true believers in liberal capitalism. They don’t understand the mechanisms. They are operating mostly ritualistically, and so are most of us, just kind of hoping a better life comes from the behaviors and emotions and beliefs that are drilled into us by our society and replicated by our extended family and social network.

The family that bought an investment property for their child have completely different relationships with money, completely different beliefs and emotions. My family was much closer to your family than your friend’s family.

That doesn’t make my parents shitty people or selfish or the root cause of my poverty. My parents were fucked by the same system that fucked me. They managed to get a step up on the ladder, it sounds like your parents did too. My dad’s only communicated financial thought during the divorce was “but how am I going to leave anything behind for my kids”. That’s his prime emotional directive and it informs everything.

If your parents cut you out of the will, then I would say they’re shitty. But I have a lot of empathy for the people in your story. Including you. You didn’t deserve whatever fucked you up so bad that you went through 2 years of depression feeling like you were to blame for financial troubles of your family. I am sure your parents had no emotional ability to understand what you were going through. I know it’s easy to think that they ought to have, but eventually we have give up the idea that our parents know what we’re going through and are aware of the causes and the solutions and realize that no one has that objective perspective and least of all our parents who are as much responsible for passing on the shit as they are deep in it themselves.

OK, so back to the topic at hand instead of trying to justify old people living in squats. You’re hard to keep track of.

The OP never asked for financial help. For me personally, I had never asked my parents for financial help and I had never received it. They also lived a life of credit cards and mortgages and saving for retirement. When I finally asked for financial help because my mental health made it difficult for me to keep working, it took months of emotional work on my end to get to the point of asking. And when I did, they gave me some money. But they didn’t volunteer it no matter how difficult my life was getting. I had to ask.

OP never asked.

I never even thought to ask for help with a down payment, because we were “broke”. My dad gave us grief over every dollar we spent. We never ONCE took a family vacation.

My family did take some family vacations, but we also got grief about money. And my parents have less money than OP’s parents. Granted, my parents aren’t as old, and my parents are still working, so maybe in 10 years they will be as rich as OP’s.

But I would not say that my parents impoverished me, or my siblings, some of whom are worse off than I am. They didn’t ask for money either. In fact, as siblings we find ways to loan each other some money to avoid having to ask our parents for money. Which is honestly really silly, since the prior generation has more money the current one does.

But no, OP’s parents did not impoverish OP with debt. OP didn’t ask for money and chose to tough it out. I did the same thing. I also blew shit tons of money on rent. I could have avoided that if I had asked for a down payment. But also, in 2014, my parents were still working through their lifetime of debt, so it probably wouldn’t have worked out for me if I had asked.

The reality is that his parents clearly have emotional trauma around money and OP will get an inheritance if the medical system doesn’t bleed his parents dry. His parents are totally out of touch with how the next generation is living financially, but that’s a mostly universal trait for people their age - they’re out of touch about how young people live along ANY dimension.

As for being selfish for living so comfortably, again, I’ll use my personal example. One of my siblings lives hand to mouth, massive debt, no strong employment prospects except bar tending, struggles with alcoholism and depression. Another of my siblings has saved 10s of thousands of dollars, but also has no strong employment prospects except front-of-house catering service. The first sibling lives in a rundown apartment, in a poor neighborhood, no vehicle, no family around, and very little comfort. The other sibling literally lives in our parents home, with their own vehicle.

They made their choices, they are content with their choices. My parents don’t get to decide how their kids choose to engage them. They would give the poorer sibling money if the sibling asked, but no ask is made. The second sibling chose differently and lives much more comfortably.

I feel for OP, having struggled with spending my retirement money as well, and currently staring down the potential for bankruptcy myself. But my parents are not to blame and they are not selfish for living a more comfortable life than me. I have agency in this whole thing. So does OP.

We all wish the trauma wasn’t passed down. The response to acknowledging that it was is grief. Anger is one of the stages. Acceptance and adaptation are the final stages.

I would not wish my grandmother, after raising multiple families and working until she was 70 to have to live in a squat. If you think that’s out of touch, perhaps consider how many people in America live in squats.

Then consider that the OP and the family in question are not people who lived in squats their whole lives but rather a family who worked to establish a middle class lifestyle which means sacrificing all of their time to make profit for the owning class. When you have spent your life doing that, you do that for a specific reason - to be able to retire and enjoy a few years of your health without being ground into dust by the machine.

That is literally what people who have been working for the past 40 years and those who came before them in the liberal world-order were striving for. They are trying to avoid being homeless and living in squats. Your argument that people living in squats don’t need 80k/year is useless in this context because living in squats in the US and Europe is not considered, by the vast majority of people, to be a healthy and enjoyable life.

Poverty is not a virtue. It does not have moral standing except in that it should be eradicated through a revolutionary movement. Just because others suffer from poverty does not mean that the entirety of the Western world isn’t individually striving for a better life.

I really don’t know why you think this worthy of debate. I wish apartments cost less than 5% of my income like they did the USSR. I wish we have and 90+% home ownership rate like they do in China and Cuba. I wish there a social safety net for the elderly like there is/was in parts of Europe.

That’s not the economy we live in here in the US. In the US you need money. And living below the poverty line is in no way. shape, or form what people are striving for when they work for 50 years straight without any real time to develop themselves as people outside of as capitalist subjects.

Again, you have to understand that these people are in their 70s. Saying that either they can live an impoverished lifestyle or they are living luxuriously is ludicrous and shows an ignorance about household finances.

Could they live on less? Absolutely! My grandparents did. And my parents are. And they have decent lives. But my grandmother is in constant pain and lives in a tiny apartment and cannot afford the mobility equipment she needs to get around so she wastes away in the darkness. Can people survive on that? Yes. Should they? I don’t think so.

We don’t live in a society where we have community housing and walkable cities and public services. The elderly have to fend for themselves and the only way to do that is with middle class salaries and no obligation to work. Some will work, but we are such fragile animals that an obligation to work or live in poverty and squalor is not a way to live.

Stop arguing that people should live mean hurried commodities lives and then die early or suffer for decades. Expect dignity for people as we age. It’s a shame what elders go through.

Well, I just found out that he’s 78 and still only has $2M in the account. So my guess is that he’s been working under financial anxiety for literally his whole life and has no chance of ever breaking free from the psychology of it.

Again, $2M is enough for a couple to retire on at 65. If you’re lucky, the medical system won’t bleed your parents dry and you’ll have a modest inheritance.

It’s been well documented for a while now that $72K/year in the US is the number at which people’s primary motivation for job hunting begins to shift from financial survival to living their life. And that was before COVID.

$80k/year is not unreasonable as a baseline expectation for a couple that worked their entire lives and wish to finally retire in peace.

Grandma should not be working retail at Macy’s or waiting tables at Denny’s.

Still working at 78 and only have $2M in the retirement account means that they have never been financially secure and just achieved it around 70.

Stop psychologizing the present day oligarchs in a vacuum. It’s not about the government protecting anyone.

This is the definition of government.

The reason oligarchs don’t have an incentive to build private armies over the last several centuries is because competing with other oligarchs through warfare DESTROYS CAPITAL.

It’s not about protection. It’s about waste. It’s less wasteful to win Bezos yacht in court than it is to bomb it and sink it to the bottom of the sea.

it’s only a matter of time before these Oligarchs start building private Armies

Just to be clear, this is why governments exist. Not to stop people from building armies because it’s bad. But to avoid the waste that comes from economic competition becoming militarized.

Bezos and Musk both make more money by NOT engaging in warfare with each other. But if warfare between them would give them an edge, then the government is the structure they create with other capitalists to rejigger the incentives so that Tesla doesn’t start bombing Amazon.

Bombing is a waste of capital.

But of course there’s the corollary - if Musk and Bezos get richer not bombing each other, then they could probably get more richer if they joined forces and bombed other people.

And that’s what the US military and CIA do. They are the military arm of the capitalists, so there is no need for private militaries. The capitalists all get together and bomb people not part of their in-group as a way of making themselves richer.

If the people of the US manage to gum up the works and stop the military from maximizing profit for the capitalists, then the capitalists will form private militaries and coordinate them to maximize their profits by bombing people not in their in-group. Today that means periphery, 3rd world, and socialist countries. Tomorrow that could mean the technologists against the financialists.

The reason social democracy doesn’t work is because it doesn’t change the power structure. It’s treating a symptom and not the root cause. By leaving the root cause untouched, the symptoms will always come back.

Are his parents still working?

$2M divided by 13 is $155k/year. That’s gross. They pay income tax on that. So they net something less.

But consider costs go up, particular for medical care but also for comfort - aging is not easy.

Then also consider that couples that scrimp and save their whole lives actually want to enjoy their retirement, so they can spend a little money each year on vacations instead of living like Spartans.

And then of course there’s planning funerals and burials.

But then. That 78 years is also inaccurate.

The peak year of death for women is 88. The peak year of death for men is 87.

Those averages include men dying in their 40s and 50s.

So now instead of $2M being $155k/year gross, it’s actually somewhere between $100K/year and $80k/year.

But they also aren’t going to spread it out totally evenly because they aren’t going to let actuarial tables drive their life enjoyment. So they’ll commit to under spending their first year but by the time they get to the end of the year they’ll realize there’s just too much life to experience while they still have their health and they’ll have a nice vacation, not Bezos nice, but nice. Maybe a whole month in France!

Yeah, $2M is the minimum for a decent life in old age and there won’t be a penny left for inheritance.

The US runs NATO. The US decided to put Nazi officers in charge of NATO. The US came up with Operation Gladio. The US decided to expand NATO to undermine MAD and try to win nuclear war like psychopaths. The US got NATO to attack a bunch of countries not in Europe despite claiming it’s a European defense force. The US had NATO dropping Depleted Uranium in civilian areas in Yugoslavia in a so-called war for humanitarian reasons.

NATO is literally just an American nuclear military staffed with fascists and deployed in Europe with zero legal accountability, zero democratic accountability, and zero reason to exist other than to project US power in the region.

Europeans have zero fucking control over what happens.

You can’t really be serious. You think a few local elections have anything to do with Venezuela?

I got news for you. The USA has been attacking Venezuela since GWB was in office. Literally every president has done something against Venezuela since then. Most of it has been coup attempts and collective punishment to starve the Venezuelan people. But no one gives a shit because even Mamdani says shit like Venezuela is a dictatorship.

No, Americans are JUST fine with bloodshed as long as the president follows a narrative that makes the US look like heros.

$2M is literally the minimum they need as a couple to retire at 65 and ALL of that money will be spent by the time they die.

They are not rich by ANY stretch of the imagination. In fact, they have just hit the bare minimum threshold to not die in cockroach ridden apartment while not being able to afford food.

Now, if your parents are 40, then you’re in luck! That means that for the next 25 years every dollar they earn is mostly discretionary (unless they have debts of course, like someone’s student loans).

If your parents are 50, maybe you’ll get a little bit of financial help.

But if your parents are 60, whelp, they can give you a few nice birthday gifts but that’s about it.

Are you asking there is generational trauma in the community of people that I habit the lands currently known as The Philippines???

Yes.

First off, what language do Phillipinos speak? Is that language native to those lands?

Second, who are The Phillipinos named after? Is that person from there?

Third, what happened during the Spanish-American war?

And that’s just a taste of how much generational trauma there is.

Jesus. Blame the fucking genocidaires and the billionaire kid fuckers instead

Oh yeah, wow. It would be terrible for the FBI to become authoritarian. What a strange and totally twisted way to run a national police force…