anyway, harry potter Concept where down the road the boy who lived thing becomes less relevant and most people know him from the pictures of when he was a teenager, so by the time he’s middle aged all of harry’s interactions play out exactly like that tony hawk tweet
i hate so much when rich people claim they could live on minimum wage
you can’t. you absolutely fucking can’t.
it’s not just about how literally impossible it can be or how the rich are so accustomed to luxury they wouldn’t be able to stomach being poor – it’s about the fact that any experience rich people have had with poverty was temporary.
“to prove that $8/hr is humane i lived on minimum wage for a month – and it was fine. you just have to spend wisely and be frugal.”
i promise any rich person who’s done (if they even have) something like that was ACHING by the end of that month. that week. they were edging out the end of that month thinking “after this i can go back to my cozy $100k a year, i just have to get this month over with”
it’s livable, right? this guy proved it. one month and he’s sure – it’s totally doable! he ate gross food and kept his lights off and his AC off and scrounged up change for gas for a month and it wasn’t THAT bad!
but man…. imagine if that was your whole life.
i’m sure they felt a little stressed after realizing how tight the budget was at the end of that month… imagine that but for years. years and years with no end in sight. you never have the relief of going back to your $100k salary and flat screen TV. it’s years upon years of pent up stress and anxiety
what if your car breaks down? what if you miss your bus? what if you have an unexpected charge on your card and overdraft? what if the kids want pizza? what if you call out sick from work? what if you can’t afford christmas presents?
and on top of the stress, you’re poor and you don’t have much free time because you take all the hours you can get to make ends meet. instead of cooking you have to eat shitty banquet and michelinas meals because delivery and takeout are too expensive. and the more tired you get, the more exhausted, the more shitty food you consume just to try to keep going.
and you probably don’t have good healthcare!
you’re stressed, you’re eating poorly, your body hurts from all the work and you’re too poor to pay for medical help, things like car repair fall by the wayside in order to provide, you’re sad, you start drinking to cope, etc
this is the cycle poor people are fucking trapped in. this is why the minimum wage is a fucking failure to all impoverished people in america.
this is the toll “just being frugal” takes on poor people after living for decades like that. adddiction, mental illness, lawbreaking – these things are associated with low class and poor people because it’s what happens to us and what we resort to when the system fails us.
They should try a year rather than a month
they should just shut up about something they don’t understand.
the worst thing for me about being poor was knowing i had no backup plan. i had no spare resources, no emergency exit. this was it. if things get worse? too bad. if you break your leg? you lose your job, you’ll be dodging vicious debt collectors for god knows how long because you can’t afford the emergency room, and if they prescribe painkillers you don’t even bother taking the scrip to the pharmacy because the elderly aspirin you have in your bathroom is what you’ll be taking. and if you get a bone infection? you’re gonna die. you’re going to lie there all night, awake because your leg hurts, replaying your boss’s “well we can’t hold your job for you, we need to cover that shift, just reapply when you’re better” speech in your head, and knowing that if this bone doesn’t heal smoothly there’s absolutely NOTHING you can do about it.
people who grew up rich can’t possibly comprehend this on a temporary trip to poverty unless you actually take away everything they have, including their support system, and genuinely convince them that they can NOT have any help they can’t afford on what’s in their pocket right now, no matter what, not even if they’re dying. they have to know in their gut that if they’re dying they’re just gonna die, because they can’t buy help.
i’m ‘rich’ now – since when is “i’m not terrified about paying my bills” rich, btw? that should be the baseline, jfc – but i remember how it was. so yeah, i could live on minimum wage for a month, but i know enough to say, dear god, please don’t make me. please don’t send me back there. i was so lucky to escape.
Ugh, this is such a mood. Ive worked my short (1 & ½ year) career doing full time jobs and online college. I get on average, 8.00 per hour. Then i got seriously sick because apparently my gut likes to give me ulcers starting at my esophagus and going all the way through my digestive tract. I had to quit my job, move back in with my parents, and live off of my tiny nest egg, about $600 bucks. Id just gotten enough to pay my aunt off the $500 i owed her too.
I had to make that stretch almost 6 months. I couldnt pay my car payment, or insurance. I barely had enough for groceries and my phone bill.
I spent alot of time in the hospital, and even the emergency room once because of a ruptured cyst. For the past 4 or 5 months, I’ve been able to work again, so ive been saving to pay off my many, many bills. Ive tried to pay them off immediately, 100 bucks here for some labs, 50 bucks there for a consultantation or some crap like that. 17 bucks for a perscription ill be on for the rest of my life.
Considering its been about 5 months since I’ve been healthy again, i figured i was nearing the end of my medical bills. Today I opened one for 1,200 some odd dollars. I can pay it, but its gonna leave about 100 bucks in my bank account again, and i just switched to a new job. I knew they werent gonna give me full time for at least a few months, but they told me I’d get around 10-30 hours a week. For the past 3 weeks, i havent gotten any. I dont want to switch, because where i am I’m on the top of the waiting list for a really amazing full time position, especially considering my age. But I cant make it another two months on $100 bucks. Ive already asked for so much help from my parents to get through this year, and I feel so helpless asking for more help from them. Theyre struggling too, trying to get through this year with all of their own bills. But I dont have much other choice, i dont have credit built up yet to put more than a hundred bucks on a credit card. Being poor, or even middle class SUCKS and those people have NO FLIPPIN’ CLUE what theyre talking about when they say its not hard to live on minimum wage.
lmao no joke my favorite part of les mis is in “javert at the barricade” when that bouncy music starts playing and gavroche comes for javert’s entire life in front of everyone
jane austen was so lit because she wrote about men the way men typically write about women i.e. her stories just centered around women and men were only there for the sake of women, and her books could have been all bitter and sad about the state of women in that century, but instead they’re sweet honest observational stories of friendship, family and love *sighs* what a lady i am sorry i ever doubted you cos I was bored in high school
no seriously her books do not pass the REVERSE bechdel test and it’s perfect
Jane Austen never wrote a single scene without a woman present.
dorian hid that painting but I bet y'all if he’d just hung it in his living room and been like “oh yeah I get someone to come in and paint it to be slightly more gruesome every night” and everybody woulda been like “I believe you you dramatic bitch”
dorian, completely serious over a glass of wine, hand trembling: this painting is the literal decay of my soul. this painting is all my sinful anguish and moral depravity
literally anyone who knew him longer than 5 minutes:
