i need to scream in a place that the post can't travel as far

[doodlemancy]

today was a bad day. i hurt a lot and some asshole stole a package with an ink cartridge off my porch so i had to browbeat Amazon into replacing it and i'm just in a real bad mood and then i Saw Something. someone whose opinions and levelheadedness i generally respect shared this post into my bluesky feed. and i just. need to scream. this person is already getting shredded to bits for this opinion and i don't think they need to be shredded any further. i just. it's part of a trend that's been driving me nuts, that i've been trying to bite my tongue about, and i need to rant a little about this... this thing i keep seeing. this thing where people (mostly american liberals/ the"center left") just... really really feel the need to tell everyone that OBJECTIVELY the economy is good right now, according to Numbers.

hi here's the thing:

it does not matter whether or not that is true, and you should shut the fuck up.

it does not matter that the economy is objectively better by the bullshit standard of "the median is doing better" or "we're technically earning more than our parents were." what matters is what real people are really experiencing on a daily basis and what they are experiencing on a daily basis is:

• rent is high and keeps getting higher. before i was born, you could rent at least a shitty apartment with a part-time crappy job. now there is no FULL TIME minimum wage job that will pay rent and leave you with anything. anywhere. that is not a thing.
• the cost of college is ridiculous and tons of people are perpetually being crushed in the jaws of student loan debt.
• the cost of everything keeps getting higher and higher in general. raises literally don't matter bc they just end up divvied up between your landlord, your power company, your ISP, and fucking Netflix if you're still bothering.
• the cost of healthcare has gotten more and more out of control since the early 90s. it's literally the #1 way people go bankrupt.
• homelessness is skyrocketing, it is a very obvious visible problem and nobody is fucking doing anything about it (except sending the police to beat them up and steal their stuff)
• it takes months to find a job, partly because there are tons of fake job listings now!!
• even goddamn fast food isn't cheap anymore
• we spend a LOT of our time working or exhausted from working
• nobody gets any vacation time. even the jobs with the best vacation time pale in comparison to jobs in countries with more humane laws about time off
• employers habitually under-employ people just enough to keep them from getting benefits and to keep workplaces running on skeleton staff so everyone is exhausted all the time
• shopping also sucks more as a result of everything being Fuck Off Expensive and stores being understaffed
• everything is made to break down in a few years. appliances, furniture, electronics, clothes-- nothing is made to last and we all constantly have to replace big-ticket items that used to last longer. even if you shell out for the nice thing, you're gambling.
• we are all constantly being pummeled with scam messages, and when employers or companies we've purchased things from or whatever screw us over it's hard for a lot of people to figure out who to complain to or how to get help
• having kids is kind of just logistically impossible for a lot of people now
• poor people are legit getting screwed on our taxes while the rich fail to pay their fair share and we all fucking know it

when you tell people that AKSHULLY, the economy is VERY GOOD and BETTER THAN EVER, no matter how technically true it is, (and frankly... i don't buy that it is, but i'll humor the notion for a moment) all you are going to do is piss off poor people across the entire breadth of the political spectrum. it will not convince working-class right wingers to vote blue. it will not convince working-class leftists that dems are trustworthy, or on even vaguely the same side as us, or... literally live on the same planet as us. because you are saying something that literally does not matter in the face of their lived experience, and worse than that, you're minimizing how fucking miserable they are, to their faces. at best you sound like an alien and at worst you sound like an asshole. it's like saying "well, this is a historically much less destructive flood season than usual" to someone who's crying because their basement is currently a lake, or telling someone with terminal cancer that yeah, that sucks, but the survival rate for their type of cancer has increased significantly in the last couple of decades. shut up! shut up! shut up! shut the fuck up, you fucking annoying little nerds.

"things are better than they ever were" is a fucking useless thing to say when everything is this bad. "it could be worse!" isn't an inspiring message, it's something you say, semi-jokingly, to self-soothe when EVERYTHING IS TERRIBLE. people who are going through hell don't' generally like to have their feelings about it minimized! like genuinely i do not understand how centrist libs want me to feel when i read or see or hear these headass The Biden Economy Is Great articles-- how am i, a desperate, terrified disabled person with an income of less than 4 figures per month, expected to react? how are my overworked, underpaid, exhausted friends who struggle every month to pay rent and bills and still have money left over for literally anything that makes life worth living-- how are they supposed to feel? how is my mom, who got a job that paid "$20 an hour" that then turned out to actually pay less than minimum wage (by making her drive her own car to clients and use a ton of gas they refused to reimburse) supposed to feel when she hears this? what are we supposed to get out of it? relief? hope? a feeling of gratitude, that we're so lucky, that we're living so much easier lives than we could be? literally what the fuck do you expect to hear back when you tell people who are angry and scared and always tired that the median person is doing fine?

i don't think anyone should have to be grateful that they aren't living the worst possible version of their life. i think we all deserve to have higher standards than that. i think a standard of "most people still live indoors" is pathetic. i think we are so warped by the absurd cruelty of the united states and capitalism in general that even people who genuinely want things to be better often don't know what that would look like.

it is not selfish to want more than this. it is not unrealistic. it is not childish. if we want to talk about what's objectively true-- it is objectively true that we all could be living better than we are, if wealth were fairly distributed and everything didn't just exist to fuel the stock market. it is objectively true that we have enough houses and food and clothes and electricity for everyone. it is objectively true that the problem is the wealthy and powerful.

let yourself want more than this.

Comments

[wispfox]

Of course, the idea of things being better ignores the fact that the data _saying_ it's better isn't making clear that it's only better in specific segments (front-line workers as far as I can tell), and not most of them.

That said, the rest of what you say is on point. The cost of everything is absurd, people like avoiding paying benefits by claiming they are contractors (all gigs) or not giving them full-time work, and yeah too many people have to work multiple jobs to barely scrape by.

[amphobet]

But line go up mean economy more better!