I have been conned. And so have you. As Americans, we’ve all been conned. It’s like an Oprah episode, only instead of getting a copy of a book you’re never going to read or a car or some shit, you just get ripped off forever.

What am I talking about? If you’ve read anything else I’ve written, you know where this is going. A lot of the problems of our country, many which seem totally unrelated, all boil down to the fact that capitalism implies winners and losers, and the winners have Jedi mind tricked y’all into thinking you can catch up with their centuries of money if you deserve it and/or work hard enough.

You probably can’t, and that’s not just my opinion as a slutty black magic practicing communist and enemy of the moral order or whatever.

You almost definitely can’t.

Let me run a scenario by you.

Two babies are born. Both white. Both male. Both have little tufts of tawny hair and big blue eyes. They are plump, healthy, and fairly chill babies. They have those cute little baby toes. You know the ones I’m talking about. That’s the good shit.

One is born in an affluent suburb near New York City to some old money motherfuckers. One is born to a poor family in rural Pennsylvania that burns their own trash, because no municipal trash services are available. The only WalMart is two towns over. There is no grocery store.

Old Money Baby’s dad is an alcoholic and a fuck up by all accounts, but he’s also an heir, so it doesn’t matter that he is unable to provide for his family or himself, or do any of the things that anyone of a lower class would hate themselves for being unable to do. Despite earning nothing for himself, he has several houses, a number of cars, and dresses impeccably.

Because he’s drinking scotch and IPAs instead of PBR, it’s classy. Because he’s rich, his cruel neglect of his son in favor of being constantly fucked up is fine. He’s just distant and showing him tough love. He’s not mentally ill. He’s not an addict. He doesn’t have to address anything. He doesn’t have anger problems. He’s fine.

Old Money Baby goes to a good school, but grows up traumatized and deeply angry because his father is an emotionally distant drunk that spent half of his childhood shooting lions in Africa and the other half screaming at him. His mother has been at brunch with some other housewives for ten years straight.

He gets into drugs in high school, and gets caught, but it doesn’t matter because his dad is friends with the judge. He goes to Columbia for no real reason, other than that he can and most of his family has, and spends most of his time there drunk, and despite never really putting effort into his education, he’s been passed through so many high quality educational institutions that some of it sticks.

Old Money Baby graduates college too fucked up and miserable and drunk to hold down any job, but it doesn’t really matter. His family money carries him through. At the age of 40 he hasn’t held a job down for more than a few months ever, but lives comfortably. It’s fine. He’s not mentally ill either. He’s also not an alcoholic. The cycle is not continuing. It’s all fine.

Ok, so let’s talk about what happens to Baby Pennsyltucky, after growing up with a deadbeat alcoholic father, and a mother who doesn’t have time for him.

Baby Pennsyltucky goes to an unfunded rural school where there isn’t a textbook that isn’t from before 1975. He lives in a crumbling house with parents who work three jobs between them, but can afford nothing. There is no computer in his house. There’s only electricity about half the time.

His parents can’t afford a lot of the most basic shit, like even laundry detergent. Many poor families have only two kinds of soap in their house; bar soap for washing your ass, and the cheapest industrial tub of dish soap, which is used for literally everything else. Baby Pennsyltucky’s clothing is washed with dish soap. His parents can’t afford to buy him deodorant. He smells like shit all throughout school, and because of that the other kids fucking torture him.

He’s tortured by other kids at school, and at home by his family members, because it turns out no one really reacts well to the constant pressure of existing on the edge of complete desolation.

His dad is either at work or home drunk and unconscious. He sees his mother every few days, and it’s clear that she regrets having him, because how could she not? None of them really know each other.

It’s no fucking secret that there is an opioid crisis in this country, and whether you believe it’s a terrible accident or yet another attempt by the lizard people to cull the herd, we all know it’s happening. There’s whole streets you walk down in my city and can find needles sprinkled everywhere, like the world’s most fucked up confetti. It’s so fucked up that librarians are learning how to handle overdoses.

Baby Pennsyltucky learns no skills and absorbs nothing from his underfunded school where he is isolated and tortured, because the school isn’t really there to teach anyone anything; just to tick off some boxes so the powers that be can pretend they tried.

Baby Pennsyltucky ends up overdosing on heroin at age 16. He almost dies. There’s no money and no safety net. There’s no one to smooth things over. His parents kick him out and he hops between friends couches for awhile until their generosity dries up. Somewhere in there he drops out of high school, but it doesn’t really matter to him. When he gets mixed up in drugs there’s no one to back him up,and there’s no one to bail him out; there’s no nothing. He goes to jail, where he is further traumatized, but this is never addressed.

No one cares. He’s another degenerate, alcoholic, addict, scumbag that just can’t do anything right and doesn’t deserve anything, right?

Like many prisoners, he goes in and out of jail for years. He’s more or less homeless in between, because employers won’t hire ex-convicts to do upstanding over the table work in many cases, regardless of what their charges actually are. And when he does get hired he’s too deeply scarred and angry and mentally unstable to hold a job for long. But because there’s no old money backing up Baby Pennsyltucky, that makes him an irredeemable piece of shit in the eyes of our society. He’s someone who doesn’t deserve the very basics of a minimally non-miserable existence.

Baby Pennsyltucky and Old Money Baby are both white male American citizens born in the same country. They actually don’t even live far from each other. Let’s say that Baby Pennsyltucky lives in the Shippensburg, Pennsylvania area, which has a median income of about $31K, and Old Money Baby lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey, which has a median income of over $150K.

Both of these assholes only live about 200 miles from each other. According to Google Maps, you could drive from one of their hometowns to the other in about 3.5 hours. This is less time than it takes somebody to watch the extended edition of the Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

In the time it takes you to watch Viggo Mortensen as Aragorn go from a dirt and sweat caked sex god who looks like he would somehow smell worse before fucking you raw than after (!!!!!!!!), to some old guy in a dumb crown who probably bathes and would fuck you ok (…..), you could experience the vast chasm that exists between rich and poor America. In an afternoon basically.

Of course, there are vast intersections which influence just how far you can get in America, but right now I’m hitting it straight from the economic angle. While occasionally somebody Mad Max Fury Roads the shit out of a barrier, that does not negate an entire network of oppressive systems torturing millions of people.

When we have such vast disparities on multiple levels, including this one, why are we all pretending that everyone has the same opportunities for success? For most Americans, you only matter and deserve anything if you can prove it by having a lot of money. We believe this deeply about ourselves and others. So deeply that we are probably about to kill millions of our own citizens and not bat an eye.

It is for this reason that the Republicans might just manage to jack health care from over 20 million people. As Americans, a cornerstone of our culture is that you are only worth as much as you have. Your humanity is tied entirely into how much you are worth to your boss and how much you earn. Money lends you grace and buys your humanity, even if you didn’t do fuckshit to earn it. We don’t believe that life is innately important, even though we want to think we do. This disregard underpins what it means to be an American. To insinuate that people might need one another and have moments of “weakness” is offensive.

Do not buy into the fallacy that you are self made if you have anything, even if it’s not a lot. Don’t let them play you. Rich people who have done nothing to inherit their money, or maybe even did rad and respectable shit, but want to pretend they didn’t have a lot of help, have invented this self made bullshit. People who come from money will do wild leaps in logic to pretend they are self made. This can be seen everywhere from Ivanka Trump’s latest book to that song by Drake.

Almost nobody who got anywhere really started at the bottom.

Drake comes from a family of successful musicians and grew up rich in Toronto, eh.

We are all products of our environments; both good and bad. We are our parents, we are our class, we are our race, our sex, our gender, our connections, our family. A lot of this has nothing to do with us. While we all have agency, it’s a lot easier to exercise that agency when you aren’t a starving child, and the President your parents voted for out of blind desperation and anger wants to take the one guaranteed meal you get a day from you.

We need to take the value off work and off money in this terrible system and put it back on people. Having cities full of empty rotting houses while homeless people die in the streets, because having anyone under a certain tax bracket living in them would make the money sad, is insane. Having two towns a few hours apart in the same country, be oceans apart economically, is crazy, and also probably a big part of the reason Trump won and the final season of America is so wild.

In Detroit, where capitalism has already notoriously failed, citizens are devising their own kind of economy, which responds to the needs of the people rather than prioritizing numbers and idolizing the fiction of hard work in exchange for things.

Why the fuck do our lives revolve around money and jobs, instead of ourselves?

Why aren’t we taking care of each other?

What are we doing?

 

 

Support Isadora’s writing on our site by subscribing to our newsletter on this link, Subscribe here!

---

Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glamthane/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GlamThane

 

Maybe I’m kinda late on this and no one cares anymore, but honestly, I can’t let it go.

It haunts me.

Every generation has its symbols and stereotypes and generalized flaws and accomplishments, but the idea of a fruit on a piece of bread being symbolic of the apparent wastefulness and lascivious overindulgence of my generation—  is insane to me.

Remember when representations of affluence were like, having a car? Or wearing fucking gold?

Oldheads are mad we don’t buy cars. They’re mad we don’t buy houses. They’re mad we don’t buy diamonds, and they are mad many of us have realized we have been priced out of having families of our own, and so are not doing it.

We can’t. Even if we desperately wanted to.

And instead of listening to us when we say it is impossible to meet your standards of success on the wages you pay, hot and fresh out the debt mill you created, some motherfucker wants to make it very clear that it’s not a chaotically systematic clusterfuck designed to bleed dry anyone that’s not on Trump’s constant golf holiday.

It’s our love of avocado toast, according to Australian property mogul and millionaire Tim Gurner.

Well, I’m here to make it very clear that given the choice, I would choose a single fucking slice of avocado toast over owning an entire house. I’m not interested in meeting a single standard set up by a generation of sociopaths, who have destroyed the world around them without compunction.

Whether we are talking some fancy shit with fennel, radish, and lemon or just some avocado mashed onto a piece of toast with a fork with salt and pepper, I think that avocado toast is great, and owning a house is dumb, based on what they do for you.

So, what exactly does avocado toast do for you that a house does not?

On a basic level, avocados are actually incredible for you. They offer over a dozen vitamins and minerals, which are good for everything from your eyes, to your blood pressure, to your skin, to cell repair. How well we live and how fast we die is tied to how well our cells repair themselves. Basically what I’m saying is that if you eat enough avocados you will live forever.

Yeah, science!

On a more bullshitty “I have a liberal arts degree level,” avocado toast is really being used in this context to generalize a fascinating shift in what counts as indulgence and valued action in our culture, how it functions, and what it means. Tim Gurner is picking up on the fact that we don’t give a shit about what he values and what he is.

So, what the fuck am I talking about?

As I said before, indulgence and success and taking care of yourself used to mean very different things. In the old days you got a house, you got kids, you married ASAP, you ate steak every night, you hired poor people to do your exercise for you, and you worked a pointless job to acquire objects that would mostly just rot in your basement.

You would be expected to do things like put time, energy, and money into maintaining a lawn, which is functionally useless, while driving your gas guzzler to the supermarket to pick up overpriced borderline nutritionless produce picked by terribly paid immigrants.

All of these things are performative. We know now that eating steak every night will kill you, and staying with someone you hate forever, sucks (and now that we are no longer held economic prisoners to one another, we don’t have to!).  Also, never moving will kill you, and relationships and meaningful work and human connection will do more for you than having 15 cars and a breakfront full of fine china no one is allowed to ever use will.

We indulge in experience, each other, and ourselves, often through eating healthier, physical activity, and doing things to benefit our communities. We often make shit money working terrible hours for nonprofits because helping others is worthwhile to us. We are doing our best to care for ourselves and each other in big and small ways as older people hold the world hostage out of spite, seemingly unaware that they actually exist on the same shitty planet they are plunging headlong into oblivion to spite us.

So to summarize, avocados: the complete key to immortality. We like ‘em ok. We are living in the age of avocado culture. It’s like the age of aquarius but it doesn’t have that song at the end of “The 40 Year Old Virgin.”

So, what does a house do for you then?

Home ownership is one of the main parts of the American dream, which is pretty much dead, and may not have ever been a thing in the first place. I, personally, cannot afford one, and am not sure if I ever will be able to. Even if I magically won the lottery tomorrow, I’m not entirely sure I would immediately sink that money into a home for a few reasons.

For one thing, spending money to not only buy, but constantly maintain a structure against entropy and termites seems like an uphill battle that is ultimately pointless. When I die, will it matter that I renovated my kitchen every 7 years? Will living in a room painted blue rather than one painted red dramatically improve my life? Will putting all of that focus into maintaining an external and ultimately slowly degrading structure rather than myself and the people around me yield all that I hope it will?

I’ve seen people desperately pour money they didn’t have into their nice homes while their elementary school aged children sat on the floors of their big individual bedrooms slicing themselves hip to ankle; death their first real flirtation.

BUT HEY, THE NEW FOUNTAIN OUT FRONT WILL MAKE THE NEIGHBORS JEALOUS.

People pour countless thousands into their homes. The decks, the paint jobs, the driveways, the useless lawns, the cleaning – all of it. Something breaks every 14 seconds and it’s on the owner to pay for its replacement. That’s on top of your mortgage, insurance, and property taxes. Even in 30 years, after you pay the damn thing off, your stuck with property taxes forever whether you like it or not.

Homeownership keeps you stuck, preoccupied, and constantly in debt. People are who are in debt are less likely to fight back. What are you unaware of if you spend all your time fucking weeding and working overtime to just take up space somewhere?

Unless you are a young person with an endless supply of money at your disposal (let’s be real, all those people are too busy taking Molly in Ibiza in their indie brand swimsuits to read this), owning a home is probably not only out of your reach, but maybe not the best call even if you can swing it. Homes can limit your opportunities. Get offered a great job somewhere across the country? Fall in love with someone who lives far away? Good luck selling your house in this market, buddy. If you don’t like where you rent for any reason, you can leave at any time.

I want flexibility and I want freedom. I want limitless opportunities for self-cultivation. I want to take care of myself and those around me. I come first. A house does not.

While conservatives have kinda ruined “Fight Club” for me by constantly misquoting Tyler Durden— calling us all a bunch of snowflakes for wanting to have the same standards of living the rest of the first world has, they really wouldn’t like almost anything else the character had to say; like that whole thing about how “The things you own end up owning you.”

So, to summarize:

Avocado toast: Tasty

Homeownership: Sold to you as tasty, but actually eats you.

Bye.

 

Support Isadora’s writing on our site by subscribing to our newsletter on this link, Subscribe here!

---

Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/glamthane/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/GlamThane

I’m the kind of millennial that would be in a conservative joke about millennials. That’s if they could stop misquoting Tyler Durden by calling us all snowflakes long enough to make actual jokes. I’m 25, bisexual, genderfluid, live in a crumbling house with two other queer people and a cat, and make my living writing shit on the internet for money. I don’t make a lot doing this, have zero job security, zero benefits, and can lose jobs as fast I get them. I depend on a revolving door of start ups, mysterious funding from weird companies, contacts who need help or want to throw an opportunity my way, and the work just being there.

Sometimes it’s just not. Sometimes I’m an arbitrary restructure away from getting the axe. My lifestyle would probably be enough to give a responsible person that gives a shit about anything, four coronaries a week.

You might be wondering why anyone would elect to do this.

[Read more…]

Ok, so before we get into this, some disclaimers:

• I’m getting into this because I really want to believe that we, as the young, hip, full of shit, touchy feely generation, can make a genuine and concerted effort to do better. For ourselves and for others. A big part of doing better starts with being real about what you need to fix. I’m going to be very real with you.
• I am not going to be present in most, or most likely any of your actual life situations. If a guy is coming at you with a fucking knife, or you feel impending violence on deck, that’s not the time to get witty. That’s when you fucking run. And if you’re white, probably when you call the police.
• This is 100% anecdotal. It’s shit that’s happened to me. It’s a tactic I’m trying out. There’s no scientific study. There hasn’t been a peer review. I’m just spitballing here. Take this with a grain of salt. It’s not fucking gospel. I’d rather you toss it out than try it in the wrong situation and end up dead.

If you think I’m being overdramatic, here’s a handy list of over a dozen women who died because they didn’t make themselves available for some total lunatic’s sexual and romantic whims.

[Read more…]

 

If there’s anyone who understands complete pessimism and the strange seduction of reactionarily giving the fuck up, it’s me. I understand that in the face of all of the terrifying possible futures for America, it’s really easy to collapse inward and totally withdraw. Our political climate is tumultuous and unsure, and shit is fucking terrifying.

I’m not looking to undermine the realness of this threat, or to shame anyone who has to disengage for their own mental or emotional well being. I don’t know you personally, and if you’re realizing what you need to do to stay afloat and are doing it, good for you, my dog.

However, working on your mixtape while Rome burns is a shitty option, regardless of how on fire it is. In fact, because of the way our political system operates, you (YES, YOU) actually have a lot of power to effect change. Even more than you realize. And it doesn’t actually take you chaining yourself to a tree, throwing blood on people in fur coats, or marching anywhere; other than to a polling place for a few hours occasionally.

[Read more…]

 

Jobs is hard, man.

While I can’t speak for you personally, something along the lines of this exact scenario has occurred to me and so many of the other working people I know, that it can’t just be a one off weird thing.

You see a job description. It’s entry level. They want two or more years of experience and a list of degrees and skills that reads like a James Joyce novel. The description is also full of avocado culture conscious capitalism bullshit about how you will “grow with them” and “spiritually evolve” by making less than a dime off every dollar you rake in for them. It’s kind of terrifying. You figure there’s no way in hell you’ll get it, but you figure, “what’s another resume and cover letter thrown into the void?”

You hear back from them. At the interview they tell you a weird version of what they are looking for, so convoluted that you aren’t even sure what they hypothetically want you to do. You just know that it sounds very businessy. They say a lot of official sounding words, but none of it really means anything. You thought you knew what they did going into the interview, but now you’re kind of unsure. It’s like an absurd play— one that you went tens of thousands of dollars in debt for a sliver of a shot at being cast in.

“…millennials are particularly infamous for being unsatisfied at work, and tired of this shit, when no one has ever liked it”

[Read more…]

So, let’s get a few things thing out of the way before we start this up. I’m bisexual. I’m Ashkenazi Jewish. I was born with a vagina. I come from a pretty financially unstable background, and I’m mentally ill as fuck. While I look white enough that a cop isn’t gonna shoot me in the face in broad daylight and claim that I deserve it because I have an attitude problem, white Christians have been doing their best to oppress and exterminate people like me for thousands of years.

While the risk I face is not as dire as the millions of people Trump wants to deport, or the middle eastern children Trump and his friends will bomb to supposedly protect, but are not willing to allow into our country, which is largely descended of immigrants and refugees, I cannot help but look the fuck around and notice that shit is so fucked up right now. I also can’t help but notice that the people who only wish their ancestors had done a better job of killing my predecessors, so I would never have been born and couldn’t mouth off, are in power.

Fear is in my DNA. Being able to properly assess threats and sheer luck are the only things that separates me and my family members from the millions of our dead kin. My great grandmother escaped the pogroms in Russia on a fucking boat with a baby and (probably) a potato strapped to her. I’m only alive because she went “fuck this” and came to America. In her honor, I have looked around, said “fuck this,” and am now working on hopefully leaving America.

[Read more…]

 

If you truly believe that all young people hate older people as viciously as they seem to hate us, I guess the popularity of Bernie Sanders with young people would be confusing to you.

If you are really that set on ignoring everything Bernie Sanders has ever said and stood for, and the complaints of the majority of Americans, because you deeply believe that people of different age groups are destined to fight each other like some kind of Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon bullshit, I honestly don’t even know what to tell you.

I’ve encountered this mindset a lot. Older people who have done shitty things to me have tried to dismiss my anger by telling me that “I’m just too sensitive” or “I just hate old people.” When I was a college student, a middle aged woman I was at dinner with bragged about her wealth and famous connections for hours, and then tried to nickel and dime me into paying for her dinner and wine. I don’t think I was old enough to even legally drink at the time.

Obviously, I hated her. And I’m not subtle. If I hate a bitch, the bitch knows about it. You know what this woman said to me?

“You don’t like me because I’m old. I can tell.”

Let’s get this shit out of the way. Most normal people do not inherently dislike or like somebody because of their age. You know what most people like? Feeling validated. You know what most people don’t fucking like? Feeling ripped off.

“When we say “What the fuck, America?” most older people straight up ignore us or tell us to shut up.

Bernie Sanders has been asking “What the fuck, America?” and actively trying to fix it for decades.”