Thread by @operaqueenie

An increasingly common slice of American life.
[and thread with some thoughts that i'm working through]
theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2…

The piece talks about not being poor, but being broke, and speaks to how financially unstable many people are today despite having education, skills, privilege, access, etc.

So many of us are working really hard to get/keep/protect/grow money.

There's so much to unpack here. What's top of mind for me, though... is the root of it all.

Often the conversation turns to material things and power, but IMO there's a greater force at play. SURVIVAL.

Arguably, "surviving" is the thing that we are most hard-wired to do, but what it means to survive has changed rapidly over time.

And today, survival is inextricably tied to money.

I'm coming to believe that, in some ways, this is the root of the problem.

We have created markets for virtually every aspect of life. Almost anything can be bought or sold. And that creates a whole slew of other problems.

Most economists and business people like to believe that markets are/can be independent mechanisms. That it's a meritocratic system where the best solutions win and the reward is money.

But this is silly, imho. Because people.

People and their leveraging of resources make markets possible.

People make decisions about market goods and market rules. And people are self-interested (survival) and corruptible. So markets are inherently corruptible, too.

With the way modern societies are built, markets (quite possibly more than governments) influence how we value everything and impact social norms.

Markets decide too much of our lives, impacting our survival.

I can go further down this rabbit hole, but let me bring it back to the original idea...

If you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the two bottom parts are essential for survival.

How much of does the average person have access to without money? THAT'S our problem.

Everything that we need to *LIVE* costs money nowadays.

And at the same time, there are forces at play that are making it more difficult for people get and keep money.

It's exacerbating our previous social problems and creating new ones.

This from the article:

"Downward mobility is a relatively new thing for middle-class white people in this country. It used to be, if you were born into a certain type of family, you went up from there. To be one of the first generations to go backwards is often dizzying."

White Americans are starting to experience what everyone else in this country has been dealing with since the creation of the United States.

It doesn't feel great, does it?

This is currently on a path of continuing and worsening over time.

It's one reason why we need to remake our systems in a way that changes how we value and commoditize things.

Our survival depends on it.