Reply to People who are born on third yet act like they worked "so hard" for something

Forum Index » Money and Finances

Reply to "People who are born on third yet act like they worked "so hard" for something"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You can be born privileged and also work hard. The two are not mutually exclusive [/quote]

Of course. You can also be born NOT privileged, work even harder, and wind up with a lot less.

That's why it's obnoxious for people to emphasize their hard work as the reason for their success and glide right over an inheritance or a job they got through nepotism or even the gift of graduating from school debt free due to parent contributions or being able to live at home. [b]Hard work alone is not enough for most people.[/b][/quote]

Yes, it is. Unless your definition of "enough" is narcissistic materialism. [/quote]

Your experience is too narrow. You are thinking of some middle class person from a stable-but-not-rich family who, through hard work can become UMC. Okay, yes, that can happen.

And there are people from poor and working class backgrounds who can make it up the ladder as well. But they are exceptions. Most people born poor or working class will die poor or working class, and they may were very hard in the interim. But working hard if you don't have a college degree is usually not going to get you a substantially better life.

Plus all the people born into abuse and neglect, who have to overcome the impact of that in order to function at a high enough level to actually achieve the kind of security and comfort we are talking about here. Sure, some do but most do not. I say this as someone who DID make it out of an abusive family with substance abuse issues and mental illness, but has many family members who didn't. It's not so straightforward. One of the things I had to do in order to make it where I am was essentially turn my back on my family -- I moved far away and keep a lot of emotional and physical distance because I know getting drawn back into that world would make it all but impossible for me to give my own children the kind of life I never had.

So no, hard work alone is not enough. You need luck, and help. If you were born into wealth and privilege and can't even recognize your good fortune or want to try and convince people that your position in life is solely the result of your hard work, go ahead, but I know the truth and so does every other person who was born into worse circumstances. [/quote]

Our policies only support the poor and UMC/UC. There is no real structural support for LMC/MC. This is one of the reasons why it is so difficult to make jumps in income brackets even with substantial interventions. For example, say that you are working poor. You get the Earned Income Credit, you can get subsidized/free healthcare, reduced/free lunches, etc. You accumulate funds and a savings account. Pull yourself by the bootstraps if it were. Most people are one emergency away from losing it all. They are one more kid away from not being able to pay their rent or a parent having to go part-time because of daycare costs. They are one car accident or disability from losing their house. There is no support for LMC.

[u]You only get support if you get back down to being poor again. There is no support for keeping you from getting poor again. And if you manage to claw yourself back up again, you meet the same issues/constrictions.[/u] And while people here love to talk about college cost donut holes, there are real donut holes in LMC lives. And being able to navigate that is 99% luck.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics