I grew up low class, and expected my life to be hard - only I didn’t process it as “hard”; it was just how life *was.* I was going to have to spend the rest of my life doing minimum-wage physically-hard labor, and then getting pregnant. That was the plan, but more importantly-
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Nobody had to give you your job. Nobody owes you anything. You are incredibly fortunate to be living this far into an advanced civilization at all. This is a matter of perspective - and sure this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to improve your life, but the entitlement is bizarre.
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Maybe not bizarre. Just as I was grateful by paying a lot of attention to the state of past humans, I think a lot of the dissatisfaction with living conditions comes from paying attention to the more fortunate. We have some idea that inequality is *inherently* wrong.
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There’s a good chunk of people who would like to lower the wealth of the very rich even if this benefited nobody else, even if the wealth didn’t get redistributed at all!
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Not disagreeing with you necessarily. But, when I have tried being grateful in a vacuum it feels fake and empty. I will feel the gratitude for my existence I have if say I know someone diagnosed with cancer. Could be a Salience problem for me.
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All the advice I heard about "gratitude" fell flat for a long time, until I rephrased it as "appreciation". Gratitude implied a sort of "gee, thanks for what I have. I guess it could be worse" framing to me. But I can appreciate every nice thing I have.
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In addition to the dissatisfaction that comes from comparison to others, I think that many aspects of being working class in America now chip away at emotional wellbeing in ways that aren't captured by just looking at the material standard of living.
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Low-wage service jobs involve unpredictable scheduling and socially stressful situations that factory work doesn't. And although survival needs might be more attainable than before, people get priced out of things like access to spaces for socializing and medical care.
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Maybe they should read a book or two? Or take a good look at the world?
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Who are you and why do we have the same brain?!
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One of the paradoxes is that declining living standards and rising economic inequality in America are linked in no small part to outsourcing / globalization which raises global living standards and lowers global economic inequality.
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Totally correct here. We need more people to debunk this widely believed myth that globalisation has lead to rising inequality when all the hard data has concluded that it has to global inequality falling significantly due to and high economic growth in developing countries.
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