I will also dissent on this. I’ve been homeless. I’ve lived in a rural subsistence community in West Africa where everyone lived on $1 a day. Material items and money do not define freedom.
Your premise is based on a wealthy materialist American mindset. Billions of people, every day, grind just to survive, and yet can still find joy in their lives. A lot of times that’s through basic human connection. Visit any of the poorest places on the planet, and it doesn’t take much to get people to stop and take notice and smile. To experience joy. Joy is free. Freedom is the ability to have your own emotions, thoughts, and feelings.
Before you get all up about someone keeping them down to prevent some Marxist paradise, please keep in mind that rain-fed agriculture is a gamble many people play with their lives every day. A large, large number of humans grind against the weather. Not as slaves to anyone else.
And, rest assured, there are wealthy people who are miserable and wear “golden handcuffs” because they are stuck doing something they don’t love to maintain an above-average standard of living. Fuck - how many of those stupid Housewives shows are there, filled to overflowing with wealthy people showing you in grotesque detail how money and material trap people in pain and emotional suffering, exploited like an emaciated lion in a zoo.
What can YOU do for free to enjoy your freedom? Here’s a fun one, go dumpster diving! You’ll find cool shit! Some of it you can sell - that’s free money, my guy! You can forage for herbs and food, that’s always fun once you know what to look for. Oh, you can make hooch from the stuff you find! You can plant the seeds of rotten tomatoes and start a garden. Go with a friend and you might just enjoy yourself. Or go volunteer at a place that feeds the homeless and talk to the people there and get an idea of how much freedom some of them have exactly because they have changed their mindset. Freedom doesn’t mean acceptance by society. It’s not 1:1 that you are free and loved or free and appreciated, or free and wealthy or free and even fucking smart. But you can taste freedom and realize that only you can bestow it on yourself.
You and you alone own your actions, thoughts and words. What are you doing with them?
I understand that believing these things may have helped you cope psychologically with the stress of being homeless, but that doesn’t make them any less fucking stupid
You haven’t been called stupid for being homeless as a child yet. My previous comment called the rationalizations you used to make yourself feel better about your circumstances as a child stupid. Right now I’m calling you stupid for continuing to cling to them as an adult, and for your poor reading comprehension which is also probably to blame for your lack of enthusiasm for Marx.
The homeless people I’ve talked to with broken limbs and teeth who can’t afford to get treatment didn’t seem happy at all except for the fact that they were getting a slight amount of aid and human connection from the organization I was working with. One of the ones I talked to was on their way to the convenience store to buy alcohol to cope with their injuries.
Driving Uber has been such a sobering exposure to the unfathomable levels of bullshit so many people are dealing with. It’s so, so much. Once you lose your footing for half a second, you’re going to bounce and drag along the bottom indefinitely.
Yeah, it’s not all sunshine and puppy dogs. The point is to get some perspective on one’s own life and to not focus on the “woah, that’s so fucked up” parts of other people’s experiences.
Are you suggesting that no one you met or saw experienced anything positive at all? No one had even a second of joy in their lives?
It’s great that you found a way to be happy in the situation you were in. Personally, I wouldn’t have been. All the time I don’t have to spend worrying about whether I can feed my kids, or give them a roof over their heads, or worrying about them getting sick and me not being able to afford treatment, I use for things that enrich my life. I spend it with friends and family, I read books, every now and then I travel to a place I haven’t been to before.
If you consider wanting to feed your kids and spend time with family materialistic, fine. But some folks need such shallow materialistic things to be happy. I’m one of them.
I will also dissent on this. I’ve been homeless. I’ve lived in a rural subsistence community in West Africa where everyone lived on $1 a day. Material items and money do not define freedom.
Your premise is based on a wealthy materialist American mindset. Billions of people, every day, grind just to survive, and yet can still find joy in their lives. A lot of times that’s through basic human connection. Visit any of the poorest places on the planet, and it doesn’t take much to get people to stop and take notice and smile. To experience joy. Joy is free. Freedom is the ability to have your own emotions, thoughts, and feelings.
Before you get all up about someone keeping them down to prevent some Marxist paradise, please keep in mind that rain-fed agriculture is a gamble many people play with their lives every day. A large, large number of humans grind against the weather. Not as slaves to anyone else.
And, rest assured, there are wealthy people who are miserable and wear “golden handcuffs” because they are stuck doing something they don’t love to maintain an above-average standard of living. Fuck - how many of those stupid Housewives shows are there, filled to overflowing with wealthy people showing you in grotesque detail how money and material trap people in pain and emotional suffering, exploited like an emaciated lion in a zoo.
What can YOU do for free to enjoy your freedom? Here’s a fun one, go dumpster diving! You’ll find cool shit! Some of it you can sell - that’s free money, my guy! You can forage for herbs and food, that’s always fun once you know what to look for. Oh, you can make hooch from the stuff you find! You can plant the seeds of rotten tomatoes and start a garden. Go with a friend and you might just enjoy yourself. Or go volunteer at a place that feeds the homeless and talk to the people there and get an idea of how much freedom some of them have exactly because they have changed their mindset. Freedom doesn’t mean acceptance by society. It’s not 1:1 that you are free and loved or free and appreciated, or free and wealthy or free and even fucking smart. But you can taste freedom and realize that only you can bestow it on yourself.
You and you alone own your actions, thoughts and words. What are you doing with them?
I understand that believing these things may have helped you cope psychologically with the stress of being homeless, but that doesn’t make them any less fucking stupid
Do you need Marxism to be the only answer?
I’ve never been called stupid for being homeless as a child before.
You haven’t been called stupid for being homeless as a child yet. My previous comment called the rationalizations you used to make yourself feel better about your circumstances as a child stupid. Right now I’m calling you stupid for continuing to cling to them as an adult, and for your poor reading comprehension which is also probably to blame for your lack of enthusiasm for Marx.
The homeless people I’ve talked to with broken limbs and teeth who can’t afford to get treatment didn’t seem happy at all except for the fact that they were getting a slight amount of aid and human connection from the organization I was working with. One of the ones I talked to was on their way to the convenience store to buy alcohol to cope with their injuries.
Driving Uber has been such a sobering exposure to the unfathomable levels of bullshit so many people are dealing with. It’s so, so much. Once you lose your footing for half a second, you’re going to bounce and drag along the bottom indefinitely.
Yeah, it’s not all sunshine and puppy dogs. The point is to get some perspective on one’s own life and to not focus on the “woah, that’s so fucked up” parts of other people’s experiences.
Are you suggesting that no one you met or saw experienced anything positive at all? No one had even a second of joy in their lives?
It’s great that you found a way to be happy in the situation you were in. Personally, I wouldn’t have been. All the time I don’t have to spend worrying about whether I can feed my kids, or give them a roof over their heads, or worrying about them getting sick and me not being able to afford treatment, I use for things that enrich my life. I spend it with friends and family, I read books, every now and then I travel to a place I haven’t been to before.
If you consider wanting to feed your kids and spend time with family materialistic, fine. But some folks need such shallow materialistic things to be happy. I’m one of them.
That’s 100% not what anyone considers materialistic.
Obviously, feed your children. Feed yourself. That’s not materialism, that’s surviving. I’m not talking about starving as some moral high ground.
I’m talking about people who stress about not going to brunch or having the latest whatever BS phone. That is materialism.
It sounds like you actually agree with “if people can’t afford to do anything, that’s not freedom”, then.