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I'm truly glad I was able to help you have a nicer day. We all need to look out for each other and prop our friends (current or future) up in this system rigged against us.
I'm with you in that most of the population are comparatively poor. The problem is that the oligarchs know exactly how to keep us down, by playing our minor differences off against each other. We need a whole lot of love and understanding to counter that power.
I mean, I'm so goddamn fortunate compared to like 95% of the earth's population. I grew up fairly poor to working-class parents who had to really struggle to provide for us and keep a roof over our heads. But poor in Canada is a whole world's difference from poor (or even doing okay) in most other places, and I include the USA in that latter category.
I'm now nearing 40 and for the first time in my life I don't have to outright directly stress about money. My wife and I are lower-middle-class, and along with the rest of my family were able to buy the business we all worked for. It's still a struggle - now I have to worry about keeping the business afloat for everyone who depends on it, and we had to make a lot of sacrifices to make this happen. (It's still up in the air whether my mom, the president of our company, will be able to retire in time to enjoy it.) That said, part of the reason we could make this happen was because we had my wife's family to fall back on and have "temporarily" been living rent-free in their basement for 9 years now. This is something else that so many other people lack. I can't remember the technical term for it, but having a family or other social network to lift you up is so crucial to keeping people out of poverty or otherwise helping them better their lives.
This is getting stupidity long-winded, but the point I'm getting at is that for the first time in my life I have the potential to become very wealthy over the next few decades. However, myself and my family are in full agreement that we don't want that. As our business becomes less of a struggle we certainly want to pay ourselves a little better (with our skills and experience we could make far more anywhere else than we can currently afford to pay ourselves), but we want to raise the wages of our staff right along with our own - never making much more than the average person we employ. To us, that's the real mark of business success - creating a thriving organization that lifts up everyone involved.
We've all seen what egregious wealth can do to a person and want no part in it. If our business does well enough to potentially make us rich, I want us to be taxed punitively- to properly incentivize us to reinvest our profits into creating more jobs and paying them increasingly well. To get rich would be the death of who we are as people.
With this all being said, all of us who want to make the world better in spite of the egregious power of the rich need to stick together. Leftism is so prone to infighting over minute technical details when we ultimately all want the same core things. I'm certainly critical of certain strains of leftism, but at the end of the day I have way more in common with ya'll than I do with the rich. (In fairness, my family technically owns some of the means of production, but the tiny sliver we own is worth less than a typical house in our low cost-of-living area and we don't own houses because of it. As such, I think the worst we could be accused of is being petite bourgeoisie.)
The rich, on the other hand, possess a remarkable class consciousness. A white warehouse worker has far more in common with a black supermarket worker than a Saudi Sheik has with an American or Russian oligarch, but you'd never know it. They've gotten so good at playing us against each other while cooperating to keep us all down. It's a tale as old as time.
I really liked you long winded post.. genuinely.
And I wrote out a really long reply but.. I deleted it. Because it was probably too much trauma to throw at someone I don’t know :) and I really enjoyed what you wrote to me, but I know that I’m “much”, sometimes “a bit much”, sometimes “too much”.. either way I don’t want to lead on that because it never works out for me so.
I really enjoy you friend and I want you to know I read everything you wrote I just don’t have the gonads to actually engage with this the way I want to.
Instead, here’s something that helped me be who I am today (jokingly, old humor you may recognize)
I definitely recognize that video! I'm sure I saw it on Ebaums World or something way back before YouTube.
As to your comment itself - don't worry about being "too much" with me, especially after that info dump I fired at you. Many of us at my work struggle with mental illness and joke about how blatantly we trauma-dump on each other all the time. Sooooo, I'm used to it, and regularly perpetrate it myself. I've also been through two full-on mental breakdowns myself so not a lot can shock me.
It's late and I need some sleep but if you ever need a friendly ear to vent to, add me on Mastodon ( @[email protected] ) or straight up shoot me an email ( [email protected] ). I skimmed some of your comment history and you seem like a good egg and we have a lot of common ground for a friendship.
I appreciate you friend. It’s been a solid while since I drank (which is better for everyone, I’m a fucking mess!) and so I’m kinda very aware of myself. I’m trying to be a better person and I fail every time. So if I limit my exposure surface area I can’t be so abrasive right…? Or something? (Frankly idk what’s wrong with me, but I’m clearly unlikeable so I try to limit my.. exposure surface area I guess? Hence deleting my post. But telling you about it because i want to social..
I hope you have a wonderful night, and sleep wonderfully. I always like to encourage my friends to have soecific thoughts, so if you read this before you go to bed, I hope you fall asleep thinking about a random mountaintop stream leading into a lakebed. I hope you see trees around you, filled with fireflies. You see the lake lapping at your feet with the wind, and bioluminescent glow around your toes.
Have a great night friend and wonderful dreams :)
You as well, my dude! And for the record, you seem very likable to me. Please do feel more than welcome to reach out if you ever need a friendly ear. I often feel powerless in the world, but one thing I am capable of is acting as a sounding board for someone who needs to vent. As I said in another comment earlier today, I'm pretty pessimistic about the state of the world, so these days I focus on just helping people where I can.
Aww that’s super nice of you :) even my friends struggle to…. Not dislike me :) I struggle with it myself but you made it a bit easier today, being very open to things.
It won’t be tonight but I do hope to run into you again. I… can’t reach out to you, it just isn’t a thing I can do at this point (always goes horribly) but if you do want to keep touch, please do feel free to dm me, or whatever that looks like on Lemmy/fediverse..?
Honestly it has not happened, and irl people who give me their contact info tend to do so with zero expectation of follow-up (I have learned through failed attempts to follow up), so idk how to do it or what it looks like.. but I would like to keep contact if you’d be into it.
But if not o hope you have a great night all the same :) no pressure or whatever :) but do think of that mountain stream, maybe throw in glowing trees if you feel adventuresome! I have a whole dream town and it’s so fun to have a place to explore. Give yourself a glowing woods while you can ;)
Well, I've favorited you here on Lemmy and will make sure to keep in touch. I wasn't sure there was a DM feature, but looking in my app it appears there is, so I'll do that in the coming days to check in.
No glowing trees in my dreams, but a good sleep nonetheless so thanks for that!
Zomg I totally missed this message, I’m sorry, so I guess this is ME checking in on YOU a couple days later ;)
Sorry to hear the glowing didn’t work but thrilled to hear you had a good sleep anyway. That’s hard to come by sometimes :)
No worries! I just shot you a DM being that this thread is already so long. It's the first I've sent on this platform, so let me know if you don't end up receiving it.