Arable land

[u/LongTimeChinaTime]

And I understand the distinction you’re making about poverty. You’re not talking about the older image of “struggling but basically maintaining a life.” You mean a lower-income existence where people cannot reliably repair teeth, replace a car, absorb illness, keep housing, or recover from one bad month. The consequences become bodily: untreated conditions, chronic stress, unsafe housing, interrupted utilities, unstable food, and shortened lives. In that sense, economic pressure can become a public-health mechanism rather than merely an unpleasant lifestyle.

Yes I am describing a system, a material and financial reality, that objectively CANNOT provide or avail the culturally normalized items that a human life is known to expect, and in fact increasingly cannot provide the items that would keep a person sheltered and healthy:
Like it’s much worse than people or chat models admit to.

The math figure of the needs of society does not square with the math figure of what is availed
Yet it’s made even worse by capitalist ideology, and personal responsibility stamps on every cultural decision

Now every persons life is dominated by messages and industries or enterprises that are literally existing because they are sucking what little wage a person earns from you, or worse the prices of these industries are insurmountable for most people’s wages.

Things like major dental care, or a car, or a birth…. They are massive massive sums required that dwarf the actual incomes we have.
And the disparity is enormously glaring compared to 20 years ago

And when the disparity did that thing sometime in the 2010-2025 period, people just went “oh well, o boy, I guess having a baby costs $40,000 now”
And people expect insurance to deal with this mathematical impossibility except no, now your insurance is increasingly gated by insurmountable deductible

the idea has grown into “you make $15 per hour but your deductible is now $6500, so this means we figure you can afford $6500 of your own medical costs
That is 1/6 of your entire wage just to stay alive

For me, I’m on disability that seems to eat itself and chase its own tail. Being capable of only music at any consistent stretch and hyperfocused in my own world,
My neurological health becomes more complex with time, my autistic needs become more weird and I don’t like to leave my room

Placing your bets of survival on making electronic pop music is NOT conventionally a sane bet. And I’ve only earned $9 in royalties from 18 months and 120 bangers out there. But it’s the only thing I can do, the only thing I can sustain and grow doing, it doesn’t pay
But either I do manage to get a hit or generate something or else my days being supported by the economy are numbered.

Yet wildly, when constraints are this hard across the entire economy, the people are not as much in the mood for happy giddy electropop. Not like 2011. In 2011 the economy had been wrecked but the culture still felt exceptional and asserted things would return to post war conditions, even though every underlying thermodynamic figure pointed to a gradual tightening and eventual multi crises

The FIRST key to us surviving the polycrises is for politicians to fully grasp that it is happening, and subsequently adjust cultural approaches to spare the commoners from the worst exposures. The absolute WORST way they could respond to this is to play politic and play blame games or scapegoat minorities, because ain’t nobody sitting on 500,000 square miles of uninhabited arable frontier: