My paystub and my deed to my house beg otherwise. Hell, I even have an entire social and legal system that will support both of these things if someone doesn’t believe in them.
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People would have a lot more money for health care if they didn’t waste it on houses and cars. And healthcare would cost a lot less if people didn’t use insurance.
It is an easily studied phenomenon that exploiters provoke people’s survival anxieties. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that you need what they offer in order to survive, nor that you will survive if you take it. People need to figure out who the fuck their friends are!
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What is this lifestylist bullshit?
OK. I opt out of the system right now. I still have to pay rent for where I live on Tuesday, If I don’t I lose my shelter. I also lose the ability to grow my own food and the capability of feeding myself easily. It’s winter and my health is not good due to a previous time when I was without food and shelter. I have just fucked myself up good and proper.
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I’m pretty sure most doctors offices and pharmacies will refuse you service if you don’t provide a permanent address.
Same goes for so many other necessities that it’s stupid to go homeless because nearly everybody will stop working with you when they find out you don’t have an address.
Even you admit you’re squatting. In a house. You have an address. Therefore most people will work with you rather than writing you off. They do the writing off part because you come out of left field suggesting everyone would be better off if they reduced their standard of living.
If everyone gets in the sty with the pigs, that doesn’t mean nobody’s worse off since everyone’s covered in mud. It means everyone’s worse off.
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There is no The System, it is not you versus the word. It up to you and your friends and family to make what systems accomplish what you need. Maybe you call that “lifestylism”, but I call it real social activity and community, rather than adopting the systems of complete strangers, while complaining that they aren’t fair.
The vast majority of ‘millenials’ are not “shutting down campuses over safe places”, and would roll their eyes in derision when they encounter such. Equating a handful of entitled camera-hogs to an entire age cohort is bullshit.
I’ve seen a lot of economic naivete and poor decision-making in the early 30s to latest teens age group. However, their financial habits are rarely as stunningly stupid as their elders are. They are not the cohort who put 3% down (with a 3 year ARM) on pseudo-stucco McMansions across the western U.S. They aren’t the shopping mall zombies who funded the “good” economy of the first decade of this century via Helocs.
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The downfall of socialism is that it relies on the altruism of others. You have to work in the system and not Game it to your advantage. The old software systems without security issue. I am not putting my life into the hands of a communal group unless I completely trust them, and also I am completely aligned with their ideas.
Communal Farms might have sounded great to the revolutionaries in Russia, but it meant kicking people off their land and forcing them to live by to someone else’s rules. It’s fine for the people organising it. Sucks for the commoner
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It’d be nice if I could have decent credit as a millenial. I’d love to buy a house I can’t afford on credit, then buy a car I can’t afford on credit, and put it in the garage of that house. Then next I’d “just walk in and ask” the manager for a job, which of course will be handed to me post-haste.
Too bad all the olds squandered their credit and fucked up the whole financial system for my generation.
Not my fault the olds lived beyond their means, and now are unwilling to let me have a job.
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My family live in a city 300 miles away, where I was harrassed into homelessness by transphobic fascists (I mean this literally, they were BNP supporters). Going back there is not an option. As for my friends, we already are doing that otherwise living in Oxford would be impossibly expensive. If I move anywhere else I will be starting again from nothing (including nobody local that I know), otherwise I would have moved to Christiania years ago.
And what I said will happen to me will still happen in a very real way if I don’t pay my “imaginary” rent on this “imaginary” property on Tuesday.
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Why would that be stupid of me? What obligation do I have to such people? Strangers have no business needing me to live a certain way - it sounds clearly to be their problems, not mine. In other topics here that would be clear “victim blaming”.
It’s a temporary concession I agreed to. But so what? How does being in a box make me special?
Not at all. I insist that people should define and live by their own standards of living. There is no universal standard of wealth or lifestyle efficacy - that is precisely The Con which I think people shouldn’t fall for. People kill themselves working to buy an abstract concept of “social mobility” when all they need to do is leave the damn box, and you get complete society, complete mobility - instantly, for free.
And it’s not like it’s a choice between all or nothing. I have made shelters which kept me as alive and comfortable for 0$ as houses which cost hundreds of thousands.
My standard of living includes not killing myself in a depressive episode. Treatment for which costs lots of money. If I work at a job with proper benefits, then I can have most of that treatment paid for, and the cost of drugs I need to take to keep me from killing myself are also reduced. If I don’t participate in the economic system, I’ll likely die. So would millions of other people if they followed suit.
It’s not so simple, or achievable, this idea of just fucking off and not participating that you have. You’re coming from a place of privilege. It must be nice not having to pay for medications that prevent you from killing yourself.
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Who said that it was either? The resolve to do it is simple, but there are no guarantees. Then again, there are no guarantees otherwise either.
How do you figure? When I am supposed to have sympathy for homeless people, it is because they are disadvantaged - yet when I advocate homelessness it becomes a privilege? How the hell does that work? Survivalism only seems like a privilege when you’ve been successful at it. Once you fail to survive, it isn’t your problem anymore. This is not new, it is as old as humanity itself.
That sounds workable, but it is always strategic to consider other options. How do you know that there might not be medications at least as good which you might not need to pay for? Or pay less and not depend upon an institutional framework? There is also the possibility that environmental/lifestyle factors might contribute to your despondent feelings. I am not claiming to know what your situation is, but generally, the more options you have, the better off you might be. Even knowing that you can take or leave money, approval, or even survival itself can take an amazing amount of pressure off of a person.
Having a difficult situation is bad enough without people exploiting you over it. That’s pretty much extortion, and I would kill or die before I would abide extortion.
You see, you think you’re trying to be helpful. But all I’m seeing is someone just saying “trust me, if you abandon everything you’ve tested to reliably work, things will magically work out fine for you. Even if practically everyone who does what I suggest you do ends up unhappy and sick and on the streets or worse, dead. Who needs food, shelter and security anyway? That’s so overrated.”
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Dog Bless You!
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Well… Yes. We all have about seventy five years here. So get drunk and complain about it. 
(or hit some green here in the NW)
Ahh well, I am sure I will be the first up against a wall in the coming revolution, but you just aren’t offering me anything I want.
The ruthless capitalist society hasn’t been particularly harsh on myself or my family.
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How does it work that you sit in your home office, warm and dry with a roof over your head and food in your belly, recommending that other people opt out of the system (which doesn’t exist) and make themselves homeless — and you have the cheek to ask how are you privileged?
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Gen X wasn’t cheap until all that free credit came due.
Now we’re cheap, but at least we have some nice things, if we didn’t buy crap back when we could still borrow for it, without jobs.
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There are concrete costs to provision of goods or services. You can mitigate them by cutting deals, barter, what have you. You can reduce false or inflated charges by breaking monopolies (i.e. dental care, where more and more of us go to border cities in Mexico for major work). These are all valid practices, particularly group negotiation tactics like those pioneered by unions and mutual aid societies in the early 20th century.
However, “organizing” or “dropping out” of the formal economy are not actions that do away with most of the costs of goods and services. Much of the expense of a normal middle class lifestyle buys things that are observably, quantifiably valuable. Buying a residence protects the buyer from arbitrary changes in ownership and ensuing non-renewal of lease. Even a mortgagee cannot be kicked out of his own home as easily and commonly as renters are, and he can borrow against property even with an existing lien.
You cannot entirely negotiate away the value of owning real property in our society as it is presently organized. No small (or even large) subgroup within our society is going to be able to undo the legal framework that undergrids privileges of ownership in anything less than decades. The same is true for health care, transportation, etc. The effort involved in effecting significant structural change is immense.
Given that fact, your airy-fairy unicorn pony talk about how we all should just "Live Differently!"™ is… kind of nasty bullshit.
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Is that what I do? I never go without food, or heat, or electricity? Thanks for the info.[quote=“Nelsie, post:39, topic:69938”]
recommending that other people opt out of the system (which doesn’t exist)
[/quote]
I recommend that people opt into systems. It is others who usually insist to me that they have been bought out by mysterious strangers.
What exactly does “homeless” mean? The term seems to have a lot of baggage with people here.
Apparently. Has somebody bestowed something special upon me? I prefer being homeless, and I think it should not be controversial for me to say so. Maybe you should check yourself for suggesting that nomadism is somehow a less valid way to live. What’s wrong with it? Most people’s criticism of homelessness seems to be 50% social stigma, 50% survival anxiety. If you think living is expensive, it probably is, and is certainly profoundly less so if you avoid having a house. Sorry if that sounds outrageous, but it’s true - take it or leave it.
