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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i recognize that i'm speaking from a position of extreme privilege here but this wasn't all upside. my parents took care of me materially at the expense of taking care of me emotionally. it took me until this trip to even kinda experience the money they spent as an act of care
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acidQC said - the rest of these have been paraphrases but this one is a direct quote:
"your parents created a world for you where the most real thing was how they felt about you. they successfully used money to make everything else less real by protecting you from it"
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and like i kinda get why they did that but it led to me being incredibly sheltered in a bunch of ways. they never even made me do chores. i was very spoiled and in retrospect it wasn't good for me
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anyway i could keep going a lot of stuff came up but i feel like i successfully resolved a big confusion that was preventing me from making progress on my life and that feels nice. i feel like i am a little bit more confronting the "actual stakes" wrt money
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the stakes are that the less money i make the harder it'll be for my parents to retire. my dad literally told me that. he said he was holding off on retiring because he was worried about me
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a few days later i wrote:
"this was never like... this was never a one-player game, it was always a multi-player game and i spawned already in a guild containing my parents who had already been playing for 30 years"
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the other stakes are about dignity. acidQC said "you need dignity much more than you need money" and that sort of blew me away a little. like... shit
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like when i explain my current life circumstances to myself in a matter-of-fact way it does not look good. i literally have no job, no gf, no friends (in the sense of people i interact with irl regularly), no community, no mission, no purpose, no team, no religion...
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you are blessed (by your circumstances) have the freedom to do whatever you want to do (which is write, apparently?), and for many, many people, that freedom is the only thing they truly want.
you get to decide your mission, choose your own purpose. Winner.
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look people think they want it but i'm here to tell you that freedom sucks and i want less of it
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if you want a little less freedom, get a job and give me like $10,000. that’ll do it
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you could easily achieve that by paying your parents back and getting a job
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^^^ literally
Read Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom
(tldr; Freedom without social fabric is anxiety inducing and makes people crave totalitarianism, destruction, domination, literally anything to deal with the anxiety)
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(real freedom that's worth having requires deep connection and support)
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im acc very fascinated by you, god i wish i was this out of touch
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