solowingpixy
the resident car guy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
2d ago
The race-based charts just line up in the traditional poverty order. I dunno if there was ever any possibility of it being otherwise.
Yeah, Hale County Alabama having a working-age disability rate of 25% (It looks like that's dropped to 20% since that article was written.) sounds scandalous until you consider that it's mostly a dying rural area, the sort of place that doesn't even have a Walmart to be a greeter at. Especially in the crappy job market of the early 2010s, a fifty-something country bumpkin with no education and occupational experience limited to blue collar work that they're aged or injured out of is pretty close to unemployable anywhere within a reasonable commute of the area. Tuscaloosa is 30-60 minutes north depending on which side of the county you're in, and that's pretty much it. Good luck competing with a bunch of underemployed college graduates!
It's also worth noting that the gig economy was very much in its infancy at the time of this article's publication in 2013. Commuting 30-60 minutes to Tuscaloosa (The only city within an hour of Hale County, which itself is so rural that it doesn't have a Walmart or pizza delivery.) to drive for Uber or Doordash is a superior alternative to SSDI, but Uber didn't operate in Tuscaloosa until 2016 and Doordash didn't get into gear until a few years after that.
Relating to your point about wages, the labor market being much tighter than it was in 2013 means that managers hiring for the sort of light retail job suited for a lamed blue collar worker have much less room to be picky.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4d ago
IMO it's the confluence of several things:
For one, the pre-2010s Democratic Party were far more beholden to private sector organized labor and high school educated voters in general, and that group tends to be skeptical of immigration be it for cultural or economic reasons. For all his Millennial fans, Obama won in '08 because high school educated white Midwesterners (He won Indiana!) liked him. Since then, thanks to Millennials being the most educated generation in history, the college educated (who tend to be pro-immigration) are far more powerful in intra-Democratic party politics than was the case in the 90s and 2000s. The pro-immigration lobby has also arguably changed from mostly being a pro-business project (hence Bernie's quip about open borders being a Koch brothers policy, which is literally true if one reads the 1980 Libertarian Party platform) to being a project spearheaded by educated immigrants and second-generation children of immigrants themselves.
Relatedly, the fusionists (a bunch of highly educated/cosmopolitan northeasterners along with the pro-business lobby) lost control of the GOP to the populists (Trump has personality, yes, but his platform is largely cribbed from Pat Buchanan minus the hoe scaring social conservatism, nominating ACB aside.) representing the high school educated. The GOP aren't so much the party of big business at this point (Nationally, anyway; this is less the case at the state level.) as small/medium business owners, whose interests concerning immigration are more mixed (Some use illegal labor, yes, but others are irritated with having to compete with illegal labor. See also: free trade.).
IMO an underrated cause for polarization on both sides is internet media making the issue more visible and mobilization easier. It's true, yes, that post-2000 immigration has spread far beyond the traditional locales of border states and major coastal cities, but there's also the media factor. On one hand, we're seeing things from the right like truckers using social media to lobby for English proficiency requirements and crackdowns on non-domiciled CDLs on the back of several high profile fatal accidents involving immigrant truck drivers (I have no idea if anyone's actually quantified whether or not foreign drivers who can't speak/read English crash more.). On the other, enforcement of immigration laws has never been overly pleasant, but it's never been easier to capture the anguish of the unfortunate migrant being deported, akin to viral incidents of police brutality in general.
Finally, there's the obvious answer that immigration has become more contentious for the simple reason that the foreign born population is at or near historic highs. The last time we were where we are now in that regard we got the first red scare and the height of the second Klan.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4d ago
Eh, George Wallace didn't get prosecuted, and defying immigration enforcement has infinitely more elite buy-in than resisting civil rights, enough to smooth over any degree to which Newsom is less shrewd at playing the game (The stand at the schoolhouse door was more carefully scripted LARP than real resistance.). Performative (save for the not so performative 1860s) displays in the name of states' rights have been a feature of Democratic Party politicking for more or less the entire history of the party.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
6d ago
Work that should and could be done in weeks takes months
Coming from a history of working for small businesses to my first "real" salaried job at a large company I'm presently going crazy dealing with this. I'm current in "training" three weeks into the job and I've done next to nothing (My signature accomplishment so far has been performing a BIOS update on a coworker's laptop which just happened to fix his docking problem, sparing him a potentially weeks-long computer outage.). IT is either snowed over with work, incompetent, or just not a priority because their onboarding program doesn't exist and response time on tickets is glacial and requires escalating up the chain to get even basic shit done.
I was issued a company laptop without being told the username and password to log into it (had to call IT for that). The instructions for setting up the company phone didn't totally work and I had to figure it out myself (I'm a talented or at least "willing to Google it and try" or "capable of installing and using an easy Linux distro" user at best. I'm a car guy, not a computer guy.). It took me three weeks, multiple tickets, and multiple conversations with bosses to get the login to the dispatch software I'm supposed to use. I still don't have a login to the company intranet (Allegedly HR never created the account on their end.) and my email account is getting the wrong terminal's mail.
Call me crazy, but this is stuff that should've been done on day one, or week one at most. I should've been issued my devices with a piece of paper that had the relevant login credentials included and accounts already set up. My previous employer was a bunch of clowns that had their company phones shut off for a week due to non-payment and even they were capable of this. I'm assured that this is perfectly normal for the company, it's frustrating but par for the course, I'm not expected to actually contribute for a few months, and so on but I can't shake the fear that I'm totally wasting time in which I should be learning how to do my job and thus am going to wind up being thrown into the fire with little other than knowing the right people to call for help (because I've really spent most of my time hobnobbing and doing my best to present myself as eager to learn and do in lieu of actually doing anything) while I learn things on my own the hard way, under fire with expectations once the honeymoon period wears off.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
6d ago
If you consider health insurance companies to be outsourced tax collectors and insurance premiums to be a payroll tax in all but name that's mostly imposed on the middle and upper-middle class, I wonder how different the tax burdens really are.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9d ago
My maybe hot take is that addicts are optimists. However intolerable they find their lives and/or motivated by warped incentives they are, they choose to kill themselves one day at a time instead of permanently, always telling themselves that they're going to quit.
Speaking as an on-off alcoholic who has generally trended from "pathetic, shut-in drunk who blacks out every night" in my early 20s to "incorrigible barfly" in my late 20s, to "weekend warrior who hits a happy hour or two a week out of boredom" I guess that my tolerance for feeling like shit during the day has declined and my desire to be present instead of hungover during the day has increased as I've gotten older. I'll probably never have great impulse control as far as drinking is concerned, but I have or at least try to have better things to do with my free time. My father has been an 18 pack of coors light a night guy as long as I can recall and I have no clue how he does it in his late 50s. I'm not tough enough and/or don't hate myself enough to do that.
I'm far from a sage or any kind of example to follow but if asked for advice I just tell people that they have to find something better to live for, something better to be for. Maybe professionals can help there, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect a layman, friend, or spouse to be able to find that thing for you.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9d ago
You are no one's outgroup and everyone's far-group. You might as well be living in a different country. I used to think that I'd just learned some social skills and had the right attitude of "I can't lose friends over politics, because my views are too weird and I will have no friends."
Not OP, but one of my favorite party tricks is to critique Ronald Reagan from the right by taking the left's criticism of him as accurate (Tell a Boomer that Reagan was a continuation of Carter with a more optimistic demeanor and remind the social conservatives that he legalized abortion and no-fault divorce as Governor of California along with screwing the pro-lifers by nominating O'Connor to the SCOTUS. Heads will explode.). Really though, while my beliefs best map at whatever JD Vance is stabbing at (I'm not sure he even knows at this point.), I'm not overly ideologically certain compared to my youth spent as a firm member of the Ron Paul camp. I can be polite, though, and as long as their arguments are well-reasoned instead of being cable-news tier crap I'm willing to listen to and respect anyone.
As for my parents, they divorced long ago but they're both shrieking harpies when it comes to politics. Mother has been a Hillary Clinton Democrat of the worst sort as long as I can recall while Dad went from caring little about politics to being a Catturd following Trumper who worships Elon Musk. I just don't talk politics with either of them.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9d ago
As someone with a mother who most likely suffers from BPD (Mercifully, she's been pensioned off on VA disability and has embraced the "disabled veteran" identity in middle age, so she's mostly not my problem now.), I think you more or less nailed it. It's hard to describe, but if mom loved you, you were invincible. If she hated you, you were an enemy combatant to be destroyed. If someone else you loved was the object of her ire your only recourse was to stay out of the way.
It's an amusing instead of awful story (There were plenty of those.), but to give an example when I was seven years old right after my parents had divorced my father took me mud riding in his SUV. As a little boy into all things motorized of course I had fun mud riding with dad, but when I came home and expressed that I'd had fun mother took it to mean that I loved dad more than her, and so she kicked me out of her house, threw every belonging of mine out of onto the front yard, called my dad, and told him that he could have me. Of course, it couldn't be that easy. After dad showed up and dutifully packed all my stuff into his car mom changed her mind and there was a fight. Mom won, I stayed with her, and I'll never watching my clothes sway in his his back window as he fishtailed making the turn away from her house. My parents' post divorce "co-parenting" wound up being a 15 year War of the Roses.
I'm not sure it's entirely possible to come out of that experience without a mis calibrated emotional Richter scale. I find myself drawn to emotional intensity and struggle with finding women who don't have that to be...boring (The trick is to find someone who has an intense affect, but is otherwise relatively sane.). I have a sufficiently developed fear response that the actually violent borderline types (Mom was one, but they're a minority relative to the unfixable dysfunctional black holes.) will make me run quickly, but those who are skilled at eliciting care/pity have been a sore spot in my life. I'd be lying if I said with certainty that I wouldn't ruin my life for the right combination of hot/smart/crazy. Being on the right side of it is that good.
borderlines will hurt and manipulate you as a part of hurting and manipulating themselves, and feel everything.
Yeah...that's accurate, and yes it's tragic. My last encounter was very brief (about six weeks), a roommate gone wrong. Her life's story was something akin to Jenny from Forrest Gump, sexually abused by father turned sex worker in her teens/twenties turned to drugs/alcohol to being hopelessly burned out by her mid-30s, interested only in drinking herself to death. There's "self-diagnosed on Tumblr", "diagnosed by a mental health professional but working on it", and "would never dare face a mental health professional but gives me all the heebie-jeebies", and she was firmly in the third category. I had the sense to nuke things quickly and got out of it unscathed, but I still think about her sometimes and hope that she found someone whose variety of codependency can deal with her, because she deserves better than what she's gotten/given herself from life. I just couldn't do it without being dragged down into her Hell, and as intoxicating as her affection was it wasn't worth it (could've been hot enough if she took better care of herself, wasn't smart enough to be interesting).
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9d ago
On the other hand, I can also imagine him a sage of stoicism, someone who has so thoroughly embraced minimalism and detachment that he has transcended the weight of social expectations entirely.
I worked with a guy like that at a locally owned version of doordash in a college town, one of many characters we employed (Our long-term staff from ownership down were ground zero of the male loneliness/failure to launch epidemic, referred to as "the lost boys" by one of the more clever among us or "the expendables" by the owner.). I don't know his specific story, but he's in his early 40s, single, lives with roommates, etc. such that he has insanely low overhead. He doesn't really drink/go to bars, doesn't do drugs other than weed I guess, and is into Marvel and videogames and that's it. If his car craps out there's always another relative with a cheap Toyota, but otherwise he's self-sufficient. Nice guy and perfectly competent, but infuriatingly lazy, truly dedicated to working as little as possible with the bare minimum of hassle necessary to meet his expenses. We jokingly refer to him as something of a monk, in contrast to the suckers who grind and spend insane amounts of money on bar tabs for the illusion that they might gat laid, or at least have a pretty bartender remember their name.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9d ago
Maybe it's the contrarian in me (I was a Paultard in high school/undergrad, so being at political odds with pretty much everyone is nothing new even if I'm more into Nixon than libertarianism these days and less ideologically committed in general.), but I'd take "no MAGA" as a challenge. Then again, I've always found blue tribe dilettantes to be charming, especially if they're smart and argumentative.
On a totally (not) unrelated note, I remain baffled as to why the bar I used to work at (which aspires to cater to grad students/professor types) hasn't followed my suggestion to do anything they can to market to the university law school. FFS law students might be the last group of young people that actually drink!
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9d ago
The New Job
We’re going on week three now, so while things remain inconclusive my impressions remain positive on the whole, so I’ll give it a go.
Starting with the good, the pay/benefits are quite decent, and life-changing compared to where I was at the service tech job. Working at the terminal I’ve been training at strikes me as unpleasant but doable with time. The terminal I’m going to be working at/have spent some time at is much easier to deal with, such that I dare speculate that this job won’t be that bad: occasionally annoying, tedious, and/or boring, yes, but not that bad. My boss is the sort who likes to leave early. This isn’t so much a good thing as indicative of the workload, but I’ve watched more Fox News in the last two weeks than in the last two years.
Neutral, dispatching in this context is a totally different exercise than dispatching a food delivery company. The theme is sort of the same, but it’s a different skillset, one that rewards long-term planning and resource management than sheer speed and/or clever route choices. Trucking is paperwork/regulation heavy and not all tanker trailers are the same. There will be a learning curve before I can do my job reflexively, but with time and practice I believe it to be an achievable task. The software they use makes the software I used to use look brilliant in comparison, but it can be learned.
Annoying/bad, onboarding has been a grind/exercise in helplessness. I’m assured that this is perfectly normal and that nobody expects me to contribute for another month or few, but we’re two weeks in and I still can’t log into the company intranet; allegedly this is an HR issue and IT has washed its hands of it (But I can’t put in a ticket with HR because that’s linked to the company intranet account that I don’t have/have access to.). I had to call IT just to get the login credentials to my company laptop/email address. My work-issued laptop does not have the dispatch software I’m expected to use installed on it (I don’t know, but I kind of expected to get an onboarding packet with all the usernames and passwords on a piece of paper and the laptop to come with a standardized image pre-installed with all the programs I’d need. I may be able to install the dispatch software from the vendor’s website if I have login credentials for that program but so far I don’t know if those exist or if that is possible.). I don’t even have a desk at my home terminal. I’ve spent the last two weeks watching people do stuff, but otherwise aside from assigned training videos have literally done nothing. I’m going a bit stir-crazy and, again, while I’m assured that things happening slowly is the expectation I can’t help but fear that I’m wasting time during which I need to actually be learning how to do my job and am going to wind up thrown into the fire and failing. My goal for the entire week was to get the dispatch software installed and acquire a working account for it and it’s looking like that’s going to be a failure given that I got no response to the ticket I sent yesterday and the guy who was supposed to be training me (but was in fact far too busy) also got no response to the ticket he sent. I’ve been told by other dispatchers at the big terminal that they’ve spent months waiting to get all the permissions they need and still don’t have them. Even higher ranking people don’t seem to have a useful answer as to how to get what I need done other than suggesting that I directly email somebody in the IT department that they know personally instead of submitting a ticket.
More importantly, what do I do with my life?
This is the first time I haven’t worked two jobs in three years, and while University to Go was an easy gig I put in more hours there than I’m going to here (It really does seem be to be in the 40-45hours a week range, roughly 8-4 M-F, whereas I worked 6-7 days a week at the old gig/gigs.), so I find myself with a bunch of free time that I’m not used to having. I’m currently working on catching up on personal maintenance backlogs (clean the car, clean the house, set up my plan to get out of debt), but that’s going to run out soon and then what? I’ve never been one of those enviable souls who enjoyed watching TV all that much, nor am I really into videogames. There’s only so much time Reddit, Youtube, and X can waste. I used to be an incorrigible barfly (This was easy when I didn’t have to be at work for University to Go until 11AM.), and admittedly have yet to case out all my town’s happy hours to see if one exists where people my age instead of 20+ years older than me actually go, but the signs haven’t been overly encouraging on that front (The place I used to work at is a nursing home/sausagefest during happy hour.) and 8-4 isn’t exactly compatible with late night drinking on work nights (and, frankly, mid-30s me isn’t as interested in closing down bars as I used to be; aggravating this, many/most of my friends have moved on from the college town I live in). I’m being a bit blithe or cynical here, but am I going to have to join a dating app just to find someone to hang out with?
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
9d ago
But these days it feels like the budget can only explode, and if anyone tried doing something crazy, like balancing it, the whole system would collapse.
If we wanted to reduce healthcare spending's share of the economy back to where it was in 2000 under Bill Clinton (Most of the increase occurred under George W. Bush. Obamacare just froze it in place.), we'd have to cut it by 25%. This would cause a drop in GDP roughly equivalent to the 2008 recession.
Health spending is especially troublesome because it blows up government budgets and private spending largely draws from the same middle to upper-middle class taxpayers (If we wanted to be elegant, take the SALT caucus as avatars of this.) whose taxes would need to increase to balance the budget.
Even otherwise decent red state GOP governments have done nothing to address health spending in their locales.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
10d ago
I have recommended that. The middle sister went and allegedly got the same initial reaction from her therapist that I got from mine (something along the lines of "How are you still alive?"). The little sister is more private and thus I have no idea.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
19d ago
Republican Party Animal (an actual banned book, have to pirate it on libgen) is fairly entertaining. I found the bit about how the CA GOP types he was hanging out with (before being outed as David Cole) were legitimately surprised by Romney/Ryan losing and having a post-election meltdown to be interesting given that I considered that election to besuch a foregone conclusion that I barely paid attention to it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
23d ago
No.
The closest person I can come up with who died of Covid was a coworker's (middle aged, obese) mother who I'd never met. Otherwise, I knew people who got it, and one who was hospitalized with it (twice, but he was on a "hospitalized every six months" schedule as it was before), but no one dead or seriously injured. As far as I know I never caught it (I took the initial two course vaccine but that's it, didn't make efforts to avoid it, lived with the guy who was twice hospitalized, etc.), and if Covid was indistinguishable from a bad hangover/routine flu-like illness that goes away after a day for a ~30 year old alcoholic (The bars being shut down really was annoying.) with a past history of smoking, that's on it.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
Hey, there's nothing wrong with that. In my experience it takes a reasonable amount of education to be able to pick the right therapist, but you strike me as having a good grasp of the subject.
In my experience, therapy generally isn't a miracle worker (It actually kind of was in terms of acute anxiety symptoms I was experiencing.), but it can equip you with the tools to tolerate things going badly (It really does help to be able to say "This sucks, but I know that my emotional regulation is unusually poor at present. I am not insane and will get through this.) and, more broadly, to be your own therapist. I'd give the therapist that I saw for ~3 months an 8/10. The stuff he understood, he really understood, more than I was prepared to accept at the time (I felt like he was exaggerating the severity of my situation for the sake of being validating. In hindsight, I don't think he was.). The stuff I felt like he didn't, things could get pretty cringe.
If anything, I think the point of therapy is to speed run acquiring these tools and mantras instead of muddling through life never learning them or learning them the hard way and wasting irreplaceable time in the process. I am far from perfect or "fixed" (and at some point in the future may have to take advantage of the fact that my town's selection of therapists is vastly better than it was the last go around), and have generally erred toward learning things the hard way, but I am vastly better off than I was 10 years ago.
Best of luck!
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
Adding to this, reds don't even have a better offer to the write-offs within white America than "At least we don't blame you for minorities' problems.". The present Trump administration is flailing at a solution for high school educated male wages being stagnant at best for the last 50 years (This fucks over black men harder, BTW, given their lower level of college education.) and probably isn't going to find one.
For better or worse, IMO Trump's rise was fueled by a creeping sense within white America that the "writeoff" portion was being expanded from "high school dropouts" (who barely exist) to "high school educated". Nobody cares about this guy, but people get mad when their nice but unexceptional kid with an IT degree struggles to find well-compensated employment.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
Sometimes you are being selfish, and you have to realize that it's okay to have (or not have) wants and desires of your own. In pettier situations it does ring a bit hollow, but in my experience if you can't learn to say "No" to something that isn't really a big deal (and to be clear, you don't have to say "No" every time; doing favors can make for rewarding experiences), you'll get get stomped on when the big things do come up. You don't have to be specific, just "sorry man, I'm tired, have other stuff going on, or whatever it is". People aren't going to hate you for that just like I don't hate my friends/relatives for not answering the phone when I call them in the middle of a long drive because I'm bored and trying to kill time. Ask yourself, "Would I be really bent out of shape if someone said "No" to me concerning this?"
I had to kick out two roommates in the last year. One was a big contributor to that 30 grand I mentioned and the other one was an awful, sad story, the prompt of "I have the right to defend myself" as an argument (I'll admit that phrasing comes across as overly dramatic, but you'll see why.). Some spineless regular at the bar I worked at met her on a dating site, hooked up with her, and couldn't handle the crazy (I'm not one who goes around diagnosing every woman I don't like as suffering from BPD, but she's one of two or three I've met in my adult life who was a dead ringer for that malady.). She was homeless/living in extended stays, I had a spare room and could use some extra cash (she was employed), and she seemed nice enough, so I said "Why not?" and took her in. Note to self, Friday night at the bar is not the place to go shopping for roommates.
It was toxic. She's not a bad person and I wish her something better, but she was troubled in a way that I'm not qualified to fix. She was 36 and drank like I did at 22, blacked out every night and trauma dumping on anyone in earshot. Honestly, observing her behavior made me feel deeply embarrassed for myself and how I was at that time and understanding of why the 8th Step exists. During blackouts it wasn't just the mundane stuff about being sexually abused by her father and not believed by her family or being fucked over by every friend in her life, but hearing the most disturbing admission of animal cruelty/neglect that I've heard, being called while working at the bar and told that she'd been on the phone with the suicide hotline, her goading her boyfriend into dumping her because she liked me more (her words), having to reject multiple sexual advances, and her blowing up on me for neglecting her in favor of speaking with an old friend that I hadn't seen in years. All this happened within two weeks. It was a disaster waiting to happen and she had to go. I felt like a massive asshole as I endured tantrums, "Why do you hate me?/What did I do to you/I'm sorry!!!?", and so on with stone silence (precisely how I dealt with/deal with my mother's tantrums), knowing full well what I was exiling her to (where she was before). I did it though, because my only choice was to do the hard thing or get dragged down further into her Hell than I already was. I still think about her sometimes.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
I guess the difference between my sisters and I is that they still demand some variety of justice, some "thing" that's going to make up for their suffering and make life happy ever after, or at least punish our mother, as if being pensioned off the by the VA in her mid 50s and facing the rest of her life alone isn't sad enough. For the middle sister it's always the next man, so she winds up in horrible relationship after horrible relationship (Refusing to address her severe obesity doesn't help here; it's an ugly thing to say, but she could get a higher caliber of man than the trash that she dates if she weren't pushing 400lbs. Ozempic exists! She makes good money so there's no reason that she couldn't afford it or at least one of the bootleg versions.). For the little sister it's the next degree, with a PhD being the holy grail, so she has two master's degrees, 250K in student loan debt, and a job that barely affords her living in an east-coast city with roommates.
Dealing with the manipulation is hard because I struggle to set boundaries or say "No.", but that, reflexive risk-aversion, and trying to buy feeling worthy/like a not bad person through overcommitment are things that have gotten me in more trouble in non-familial relationships than anything else. I spent my 20s being the "functional" one in my friend group and a few friendships in particular (One at least had the excuse of being a woman that I was love with.) wound up costing me around $30K between unpaid rent, a damaged car that I had to sell at a loss, and then god knows how much in unpaid mechanical labor. I'm good at avoiding the violent psycho variety of crazy but realizing that I'm not obligated to drown myself in service of someone who elicits my pity or that I like was a harder and more expensive lesson to learn. There's no amount of doing for others that's going to award you a "you're a good person and I love you" card. You'll just wind up broke and tired, and unless you address that compulsion you won't believe people when they tell you all those nice things anyway.
The way I put it now is that I have the right and obligation to defend myself and saying "No" is sometimes a necessary exercise in that.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
They are comparing themselves to their parents' lives that they experienced. Millennials by definition aren't old enough to remember the malaise era, and the stereotypical ones with millennial parents who had them later in life don't remember their parents being broke 20-somethings. It's also worth remembering that the later part of the boomer cohort missed Vietnam/the draft, and your older boomer cohort's kids are more likely to belong to the tail end of Gen X. I see this a lot with my youngest (half) sister, an early Zoomer. Her material and class aspirations blow mine out of the water because she remembers being a kid during her father's peak earning years whereas I remember the time before that of perpetual financial crises and spent that period of time waiting for the other shoe to drop (It did.). My father has been successful and rebounded from the '08 recession fairly quickly, but I remember him being broke in his 20s.
It's easy to be tempted into envy, as my father has been more financially successful than I am, but the fact is that comparing is silly because we're very different people with different priorities. If I envy anything it's his lack of neuroticism and easy self-confidence, but there isn't a political solution to that (It turns out that I'm very much like my maternal grandfather, and I've had a vastly easier life than he did.). He's always been extremely career-oriented, willing to sacrifice personal/family life, has relocated every five years, etc. I work hard and do a good job, but I've always despised job hunting, didn't want to move, and stay in the same job so long as it's good enough. If anything, the worst thing that happened to me career-wise was lucking into a gig as an overpaid delivery driver in my mid 20s and staying with that company a few years too long. Objectively, if this new job (that I networked into from my time working a side gig at a bar) turns out the way I hope it will, I will have had my big career break a whole year later than my father did. Such horror! Really though, relative to what I've put into life I've been pretty lucky as an adult.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
Lower success level, but same. The mid-late 2010s were genuinely easier. Rent was still cheap where I live and I was making stupid money for what I was doing ($50K a year mostly driving for a locally-owned food delivery company and my rent was a shade under $500/month). Post-covid inflation blew all that up and while I just got my big career change break spending a year making less than I did straight out of college driving for Papa John's really sucked compared to the non-stop party that was my late 20s.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
I find it interesting how siblings who by and large grew up in the same house can have radically differing opinions of their relatives (and with that, which relative they clearly take after; my half sister is very much like the women on her father's side of the family in spite of having spent very little time with them growing up, while I'm so much like my maternal grandfather that my father believed my mother when she told him that I'm not his kid. Funny enough, my stepmother disagrees and loves to point out the dumb little habits and traits that we share.).
My mom (a former Marine, FWIW; my parents met in the Corps) was something of a cartoon villain of a parent, most likely suffers from Borderline Personality Disorder and the shrink I saw was adamant that she suffers from ASPD as well. My favorite story to tell about her is when she burned our house down for the insurance money two weeks before Christmas and then doctor-shopped shrinks and had me diagnosed with OCD and put on Zoloft at the ripe old age of nine because I was sad about having lost everything (There are details that make this story funny.). There are stories I've learned not to tell. Millennials love to complain about their families/childhoods but it's a party foul to throw real trauma out there. Failure as a sibling and murdered pets are a mood-killer.
The confusing part about it is that her parents were flawed but relatively decent people whose kids (my mother and aunt in particular) turned out to be Hillbilly Elegy-tier fuckups (My aunt was very much like JD Vance's mom.), and having mentioned the book one of the problems I have with it is that it comes from the perspective of the youngest sibling in which he claims a position of unconditional victimhood. I'm the eldest son, so it's not that easy, and one of the hardest things about adulthood is realizing that I have no more power today to save my sisters from their godawful decisions than I did as a boy in the face of our mother's wrath.
At the same time, while I still consider my maternal grandparents to have been good people (My theory is that the crazy skipped a generation. Apparently my great grandmother was infamous for being an ill-tempered banshee.), I differ with my sisters in that I consider my mother's complaints about her parents to have been more or less accurate. Her father wasn't around much because they were poor and he was always at work (Cat's in the Cradle was a hit in the 70s because it resonated with a bunch of guilty Silent Gen consciences. Gen X was prone to helicopter parenting in compensation for having felt neglected as kids.) and her mother was depressed and withdrawn (Two of her six children didn't survive to adulthood and died within 18 months of each other. No shit she was depressed.). I grew up watching the toxic push-pull of dependence and resentment between Mom and Mamaw. Mamaw meant well in her way, but was utterly smothering, controlling, treated my mother as an incompetent child, and had the gall to say that she raised me and is the reason I turned out alright, not mom. Mamaw was an astute enough critic, but utterly lacking in self-reflection such that she and her daughter were stuck in a perpetual fight where they were both right about each other but never willing to look in the mirror.
My little sister was chosen to speak in the commencement when she graduated from undergrad and gave a deeply moving speech about our grandfather, her hero (and mine). He really was a good man, kind and generous to a fault, and we were his little sidekicks as children. When the house burned down he took his shoes off and handed them to me, because he would be damned before he saw his grandkid go barefooted. We're so alike that I might as well be his walking clone. Thus, I say the following not out of iconoclasm, but self-reflection. He was a servant, but spineless. He was conflict-averse to a fault and didn't like exercising authority as the patriarch or dealing with drama and so rarely did, leaving his children feeling neglected and unprotected from their mother's maladies. Alzheimer's is an awful, but at times illuminating disease. I was fortunate in that I was able to catch him on a good day, tell him that he was the best grandfather I could've asked for (at which he perked up and asked, "Really?"), and promise to take care of Mom and the sisters for him. The sad truth is that he spent his life feeling like he'd never done good enough. When Mamaw died he woke up every morning thinking that she'd left him. I pray that being able to be the grandfather that he was gave him some peace for having been unable to be the father he wanted to be.
My mom? She'll never be much of a "mom", but she really did try to be better and to her credit is not a bad mom in the same way that her mom was bad to her. My little sister lives on the other side of the country and is still terrified of her in her mid-20s to the point that seeing someone who looks too much like her makes her freak out (Dear little sis, you have a Master's in psychology. Please see a fucking therapist for yourself because you don't have to live like that. Mom was the sort of awful that forced little sister's decorated Force Recon Marine combat veteran father into abject servility, but she isn't Agent Smith and is frankly far past her prime at this point. Sadly, for all his military chops her father is kind of a deadbeat and whatever differences I have with my father, I genuinely pity her for having a father best described as "useless".), but Mom is still a person. Inhumane at times, yes, but still human. I don't have the right to speak for my sisters, but speaking for myself if I have to be the only kid who talks to her, so be it. I'm not going to drown myself on her behalf (Mercifully, she's embraced "disabled veteran" as her latest identity, so she's mostly the VA's problem now.), but I do what I can. I won't cosign a loan for her because I know better than that, but I'll front her a down payment if I've got it. I'm the favorite kid, so she's usually good for paying it back. Having been the favorite and something of the sibling relations equivalent of a war criminal is what I have to deal with. Everyone has their cross to bear, I guess, and that one's mine. I deal with her so my sisters don't have to.
solowingpixy
the resident car guy
1mo ago
That's because dispatching (at least for the food delivery company) is like playing an RTS that isn't fun. On that note I do find it amusing and maybe a little bit disturbing that there are food delivery simulation games.
I suppose the better way to put it is that Walmart is the only hypermarket chain that is efficient enough to survive in mediocre redneck towns (A "fucked up redneck town" is one that doesn't have a Walmart.), so they wind up associated with them.
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