my whole picture of the relationship between money and "labor" and "deservingness" shifted. at one point acidQC said "love is literally more real than money. if people love you enough they will literally give you money"
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and that got me thinking about camgirls and influencers and gofundmes and all these ways in which money shifts around even though nobody is like building a chair and selling it or whatever
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it's relevant background here that i've carried around for a long time a sense of guilt about having disappointed literally everybody who's ever tried to employ me. i don't feel like i've ever been paid for successfully doing the work i was hired to do
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and that sense of guilt, together with the three-way internal conflict i mentioned above, was really getting in the way of any of my attempts to think about how i should be making money. nothing seemed good enough
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it feels a lot easier to think about now that i am admitting to myself that the real stakes have nothing to do with not starving to death on the streets. acidQC said "the truth is the most important consequence of running out of money will be having to explain it to your parents"
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there were so many things i had to untangle here which is why i had to write for so long. one reason this had been hard to think clearly about is that "i have too much money and too many options for how to make more" didn't seem like a sympathetic problem to have
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my parents paid something like $175,000 of tuition to MIT out of pocket because they wanted me to have a good education and a good life. they were paying for all of my living expenses in both college and grad school. i never talked about this with anyone, really
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i had friends in college who would complain about money problems and i didn't know what they meant and was too embarrassed to ask. when they said they couldn't afford X i didn't know if they meant "that's not in my budget" or "i don't have the dollars in my bank account"
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the informal networks are actually pretty hidden and closed off -- some people figure out how to navigate them and to them if gets easier
it's always been an unspoken thing
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be real with me -- suppose you had to get a new person's intest enough that they would develop at least some feelings for you & send you small amount of money.
don't ask why, it's a hypothetical.
how long would it take you to succeed you'd say?
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I've given a lot of money -- probably close to 6 figures -- to people for support, and like a good 10-20% just straight up starts crying at $500 because it's not something they ever could imagine someone could "just give". it's shocking
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Even $100-200 a lot of people have trouble accepting can just be given. It makes a lot of working class kids, esp the ones who have that whole financial independence as proving yourself as self value thing, really uncomfortable or suspicious.
Rich fam kids actually take easier
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even if they aren't rich anymore because they were dropped by their family, something about rich ppl culture focuses more on favors, connection, etc. than money
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