I want to preface this blog post by saying that I’ve never been truly destitute. I have also never been truly rich. But I am currently approaching the “middle of the road,” and as someone breaking into the middle class from the lower-middle class (by the way, I think the “middle class” is a misnomer—I’m WAAAAAAAAY closer to $0 than I am to $1,000,000,000), I can confidently say one thing:
Fuck rich people.
And by rich people, I mean people who don’t know the price of common grocery items or people who cosplay as service industry workers. Pro tip, rich people: that shit is not cute and endearing—that shit is out of touch and infuriating.
Let me tell you why…
What it’s like being poor
Full disclosure, I also don’t have a whole hell of a lot of experience being poor as an adult. I’ve definitely spent most of my adult life living within my means, or in just ever so slight excess; I’m no stranger to the #treatyoself life. But when I was a child, I definitely remember my immediate family coming into financial hardship so badly that we had to move cities away and in with family that could keep us sheltered. By that measure, I can tell you that I remember what it means to be poor. Here’s a really short list of what being poor looks like:
Putting in specific, limited volumes of gasoline into your car because you don’t have the budget for gas
Selling or pawning treasured belongings because you can’t make rent this month
Keeping track of the dollar amount in your grocery store cart because you can’t afford to buy too much
Knowing what SNAP is
Keeping diligent track of which lights or appliances are on in your living place because your electric bill can bankrupt you
Having your electricity turned off
Needing a second job
Not going to the doctor or dentist because you can’t realistically afford it
Having to leave a grocery cart at the register because all of your cards were declined
Even shittier, being poor is expensive, because the penalty for not having enough money is often a fee. Being poor is often associated with escapism via substance abuse, because what else is there? There are so many barriers to escaping poverty and general poorness that people seldom do it. If you’ve never had the displeasure of experiencing any of the above bullets, count yourself lucky. But a lot of people reading this will have, and they’ll know how fucking miserable it is.
You only have bootstraps if you can afford boots
There’s a mythical anecdote about people who’ve “pulled themselves up by their bootstraps” and gotten themselves out of poverty and into the more luxurious parts of our society. While these unicorns aren’t completely fictional, they are a statistical anomaly. More commonly, the cycle of poverty is one of relapse and remission, and the longer one stays in poverty, the more likely one is to stay in it (Transitions into & out of Poverty in the United States, Ann Stevens, UC Davis). Ironically, being poor is extremely expensive.
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
—Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play
When you’re poor, you buy obstacles that keep you poor. You buy subpar products, or subpar nutrition, or subpar services. These subpar purchases don’t have the longevity that “premium” products or services have, and consequently, you end up paying more frequently to compensate. When it comes to the relationship of money and problems, less means more.
Money can’t buy you happiness…but it can buy you everything else
When I graduated college in 2017, I was lucky enough to have landed a paid internship, and skilled enough that they kept me on staff after that internship ended. For someone who graduated from art school, this was the golden goose dream. I had previously been working as a morning stocker at a big box retailer, and the pay increase at the time was significant. However, by San Francisco standards, it was still considered a very low-income position. I was fortunate enough to still be living rent-free with my mother at the time, so it was mostly a liquid income as I started to come into emergent adulthood. Over the next few years, jobs, and apartments, I would teeter around that salary, typically staying within $10,000/year of it. It wasn’t until 2021 when I would finally see another significant salary increase of 25%. I kept that salary for around half a year until I jumped agencies for another 33% salary raise. Very quickly, from mid-2021 to early-2022, I was making +60% more than I’d been making for the past 4 years prior.
Let me tell you something: every time I got a raise, the walls felt a little less close—figuratively and literally. In that time, I’d moved out of my mom’s place, into a small apartment with a roommate, into a much bigger apartment with two roommates, and currently, into a reasonably sized apartment with my romantic partner. Net-net, I’ve consistently gained more personal space in wealthier areas with more a more forgiving margin of income. I seldom think about how much groceries are going to cost me anymore. I fill my gas to the brim without thinking about it. I don’t feel guilty making purchases to fuel my hobbies and interests. I am planted firmly in the middle class earning range, according to Bay Area statistics.
But friends, let me tell you this: that +60% salary increase I saw over the last year or so? It really wasn’t that much in the grand scheme of American economics. I find myself extremely comfortable and could probably find myself contented with this salary for the foreseeable future, yet my whole current salary is equal to ~0.0001282% of what Jeff Bezos made in 2020. In relative terms of my salary, that’s about $0.13.
If you could take $0.13 away from me and completely lift someone out of poverty and into the middle class of San Francisco for a year, I would be more than happy to give that to you. Hell, if you wanted to do that for 1,000 people and it only cost me $130, I’d say that I’ve bought shoes more expensive. 10,000, and it costs me $1,300? That’s a shitload of money, but I’d still probably do it because the wellbeing of 10,000 people is well worth 1.3% of my yearly salary. You know what 1.3% of Elon Musk’s revenue from 2019–2020 was? $1,643,200,000.
Let me reiterate: me spending $1,300 is equivalent to Elon Musk spending $1.6 BILLION dollars.
And therein lies why I’m so pissed off with rich people (read: billionaires)…
Only dragons sit on hoards of gold
