Poverty especially sucks when you're all alone like it seems this person was. Where I grew up, most of the people were poor, but we had rich lives for the most part. Lots of family dinners and outings. The people with more would let you take the leftovers home. You can't really train this and we all definitely need a social safety net, but I do think our closed off society prevents us from helping each other too.
Exactly - I’m from upper middle class and while this meant I was lucky enough to go back home when unemployed, all my peers were just career oriented and it’s very lonely to be ‘a loser’ - I recently moved in w some old coworkers/friends in a diff city who are from a diff socioeconomic background. At first they just let me stay in the apt, now I make more than them (though not a lot). We share like family and look after eachother. Sometimes I wish I made more, like the other day when we were all posting our salaries, or when I browse ‘Who’s Hiring’ - but other ppl are more important than anything (unless you’re like a genius or something), you can lose work, money, etc. The internet can make you feel more isolated, being isolated can make you crazy - you need people, mostly to talk to, but also to depend on and to help in turn.
This crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed here. It also breaks this guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
Reread the comment you replied to and it’s parent, then decide if shitting all over the comment was still appropriate. Op’s very first sentence admitted how relatively privileged he/she was.
Please don't take HN threads further off topic. If you see an egregious comment, flag it, as requested in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. You're also welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. Venting about it here doesn't help; we don't see most of the posts. All it does is lower the signal/noise ratio of a thread even further.
The reason I know about this subthread is that another user flagged the GP comment. Had you added a flag of your own it would have killed it as well.
Yup, to some degree if you have the money you can buy yourself a safety net. If you neither have money nor the social safety net, the thing left is what government may provide.
I grew up with a divorced mother that could provide only a small social safety net through family and an unstable financial situation. Although my financial situation is very stable since I've graduated - with small gaps - I'm extremely careful about my spendings and earnings, and instabilities worry me a lot.
We all have to do our part to extend safety nets to those in our spheres of influence. I have done very well in life, mostly through what I attribute to luck and being at the right place at the right time. In return, I treat checking in and providing a helping hand (temporary housing, an extra line on my cellphone plan, or in some cases plain old cash) to extended family, friends, and others I encounter as a second job.
Societal fabric isn’t going to be solved through anything other than effort on the part of individuals.
> We all have to do our part to extend safety nets to those in our spheres of influence
...or we can collect taxes and provide goods and services to those that need it the most, even when they are not lucky enough to be in the "sphere of influence" of somebody that is (a) well-off and (b) willing to share their wealth with them.
I agree entirely. But besides run for office (soon) and maxing out my FEC contribution limits (which I already do) to candidates who support policies that align with what you mentioned, this is the only alternative I can suggest. Tactical short term suffering reduction, strategic long term suffering reduction.
Through both ideas and actions, you scale a compassionate society. A better tomorrow will hopefully arrive, but do what you can today with what you have.
> Societal fabric isn’t going to be solved through anything other than effort on the part of individuals.
Right, but this seems pretty defeatist, or even like it 's advocating against government support.
As a left-leaning person in the UK, I would look to the government before looking for financial support from friends and family, because I see that as one of the functions of government, whereas it may put more strain on my friends and family if they needed to give me significant financial support.
It seems like lot's of people have the moral position that the government should only be looked to for support as a last resort, and i would like to challenge that viewpoint. Kind of how it's much better to catch an illness early, it's much better to intervene early with difficult financial situations to prevent them snowballing into something much worse. And people shouldn't be made to feel bad for accepting that support.
Joining a church requires money as most Christian churches expect or in some cases mandate a tithe. Furthermore, why should you be forced to join a religious organization that may have beliefs you don't agree with to get basic survival assistance? While my particular church doesn't require any particular beliefs or even that you're a member to receive basic necessities from our pantry, most churches I've been to are judgemental and terrible places full of people who go there just to prove they are better than everyone else. You don't even have to look far to see it, most churches discriminate against people of different sexual orientations, different religions, different choices regarding birth control, what you can eat, etc. I'm pretty much against churches being seen as a "charity". The Red Cross is a charity, churches are mostly am untaxed business.
Because church membership is voluntary there are no mandatory tithing. The closest you can come to mandatory tithing is if you are in the LDS church and want to go to one of the big white Temples. But even then you self-attest that you are tithing fully. Because there are many different types of churches with different peoples are beliefs you can pick one you like. When the dot com crash happened and I lost my job word got out and someone gave us $500 for Christmas. My children had a blow-out Christmas that year. We could have leaned on the church more but due to my self-pride we endured hardship instead. There is a benefit to hardship my children, now grown, do not take anything for granted they are entirely self-sufficient.
Sure there is. There is a huge swath of society whose precepts revolve around "fuck you, I got mine." What are politics but bargains between those two positions?
I think the recent decades turned us away from ~natural gathering/solidarity mindset. Consumerism drugs you thinking the best thing is to satisfy envy with things, and without a context of cultural sharing habits, many people end up alone struggling thinking people are selfish because today's mainstream is selfish and so it's hard to connect.
Social connections require work, they also are slow and unreliable.
Before the information age, to get to know something, talking was the main way.
But now with books, panels, displays, packaging, signs, internet, GPS, etc., we have access to a huge quantity of information without having to talk to each others.
And we choose to do so because on average it's faster, more accurate, and avoid to deal with annoying people. After all, human relations also include a part of risk.
I lived 2 years in Africa, and there, you don't have that much information immediately available. You are back to talking, creating a social network and playing the game. People are way more friendly there, there is greater solidarity. But things are also way slower, unreliable, and you are a lot more at the mercy of popularity games even in the most simple activities.
This century we have been mutating our lives in deep ways, very fast. And it's not all bad. But we will need some time to reconcile the efficiency of our new life styles with the social needs we have at the primitive level. A few decades is way too short for that to have happened already, especially since we are not done with technical progress.
I think you're pushing it too far, even my parent's generation is confused how culture changed from a lot of social interactions to barely nothing. They had radio/phone/tv (a lot lot less of course) but the social quality was still present.
Radio and tv are worthless for information on demand. The phone is still talking to other people.
I can now travel into a city I’ve never been to, find directions to and make reservations at a popular restaurant, follow it up with directions to a nice scenic spot, and finally find a last minute nice hotel to stay in all without ever interacting with another person.
> But now with books, panels, displays, packaging, signs, internet, GPS, etc., we have access to a huge quantity of information without having to talk to each others.
Very true. And not only information but 'stuff' as well: we buy (and now order) all sort of specialised tools that we will only need once, because they are now cheap and widely and quickly available, instead of borrowing them or asking a neighbour to come over with one.
But yeah, information availability is the main change: instead of asking a neighbour/friend where to get something, how to do something, how to choose something and so on, we browse the web alone for those pieces of information.
All this quickly brings more individualism since we become pseudo-self-reliant, do not need interactions any more, and since those 'forced', interested interactions are absent, the other interactions are lost too.
I don't see much of a difference. There still is a popularity game and it's played with corporations, not people. Though I agree that it's not necessarily a bad thing in comparison.
Yes, but your popularity doesn't affect your experience of buying bread or your ability to reach a destination. In Mali you may get more expensive and shittier products for being disliked. You may have a hard time finding a good guide to accompany you somewhere.
You life literally depends on what others think about you.
It still true for us, but an order of magnitude less after high school.
That's not the same thing. China has some kind of scoring system, but it's much more totalitarian and popularity based than the credit score you were referring to in the US and other Western countries which is fairly straightforward. It's not helpful to conflate the two.
From anthropological research people in subsistence farming societies do not tend to accumulate. If there is surplus (which is mainly crops) it is put towards accumulating social capital (fiesta, wedding, social gathering, gifts to neighbors and family). The safety network is not accumulated capital but social relations (social capital).
In urban societies relations become more money based and suddenly people tend to accumulate wealth and there is never enough.
If you just google for Social Capital Theory you will find enough of articles that you might find interesting or not.
Personally I have been inspired by 2nd hand source - I had been reading historical book on Afganistan (very good book but I can't find it at the moment). At the same time I had been living in provincial Sumatra and experiencing myself something similar (It is something that makes living in Indonesia a joy despite other shortcomings).
On the flip side, I much more fear poverty with a family than without. I didn’t need much to make it as a single person, but now I have responsibilities.
We typically refer to the rest as an extended family, but I guess you could call my concern as one for having an immediate family. Of course, different cultures have different ideas about all of this (I’m specifically biased by growing up in an American nuclear family unit far away from extended family connections with no help during financial difficulties).
No, they were referring to the difference between having to support yourself versus the responsibility towards having to support your family. This could be their grandmother. It could be their children. It could be their pack of dogs. It doesn't matter, the point is singular vs multiple responsibilities of basic necessities.
Not only is she alone (as in 'single' - not to equate 'single' with 'alone' or 'lonely'...), she adopted three special needs children, too (I got this from following the link to her blog and then the 'about' section). From reading between the lines, it also seems she moved from the British countryside to a big Canadian city, likely leaving behind most of her social support network.
Of course it's easy for me to 'judge' (I mean, I'm not really - to each their own) from my position as a software developer with a working spouse and a traditional family in a Western European country, but still - when you're already not in a very stable position, why take huge risks like adopting three special needs children?
Raising children is the primary function of society. Someone going beyond their means in order to raise more, harder to raise children should be celebrated. That we would see any fault is damning evidence that our society is malfunctioning.
Growing up in a poor immigrant family was a weird version of this. Most of us were poor and certainly provided emotional support in this regard. However from what I could see as a child there wasn’t a lot of material support. Maybe something with not wanting to trouble others.
Those people you're talking about, your friends, neighbors, and family used to be what we were referring to when we talked about the social safety net. Now we mean govt programs. I'm not saying it's a causation, but somehow we gained the govt safety net and lost the old social one. I think we're all really missing out on something great and I don't know if we can ever get it back.
I'd even argue that "relative" poverty at least (i.e. once one escapes actual, severe deprivation, which is mostly a factor in underdeveloped countries but not entirely unknown in the West, either) is all about the "being alone" factor. The best "anti-poverty" policy, once material abundance is achieved (and a UBI can help with that) is to promote social inclusion and to strenghten institutions that provide social capital.
Conservatives understand this very well, BTW; strong social capital is key to the conservative worldview, whereas a "liberal" is often more inclined to see the world in terms of material relations of production and an inherently-unstable balance of power, and even the very notion of social atomization might be entirely foreign to them.
A lot of conservatives see the value in private arrangements (ie social capital) over public programs certainly, but I think their pro big business policies and suburbanization, inequality etc drive social atomization at least as much as the lefts policies do. Its a complicated problem and as long as we remain deeply commited to economic growth and individualism its hard for me to see how we can solve it.
While I have many thoughts about organized religion, one way that I see it benefits people is that it does give people a sense of community.
And when you think you have an invisible being in the sky that will take care of all of your needs, a government provided social safety net isn’t that important to some people.
