Journal of Other Forum Analysis (Volume II, Issue 2)

[Potato]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/why-do-many-rich-and-privileged-people-appropriate-struggle.1271889/

No Nepenthe posts, curious

She literally couldn’t resist.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/why-do-many-rich-and-privileged-people-appropriate-struggle.1271889/page-2#post-143960553

Part of it is sheer myopia. Most people are only ever immersed alongside people and opportunities relevant to their own class and thus do not actually have significant amounts of direct experience with those several tiers lower than them to reasonably gain perspective. So the things they struggle with are struggles inasmuch as they present friction between their current lifestyle and whatever theoretical state of "success" they have in their mind is. Your friend being "broke" despite being in a condo paid for by his family could be technically true in that he has poor spending habits or high bills or whatever, and this is a "struggle," but he doesn't know any better to understand that this issue doesn't actually put him in a position of precarity because he doesn't know what "precarity" even means without anything to actually compare it to.

The other part is Westerners' general inability to recognize and analyze contradictions. We live in a sea of competing and contradictory myths, motivators, and moral outlooks that persist for the sake of maintaining the state of imperialism and class unconsciousness, and a lot of people either don't question any of them or lack the skills and emotional maturity to do so with a reasonable analytical framework. Like, people want to be seen as having "earned" their lot in life due to the capitalistic myth of meritocracy and the moral value of a "work ethic"- that humans who work hard are fundamentally better human beings than those that don't (which, lol) without ever acknowledging that the very country they live in in only exists on the back of rampant imperialism and theft that traps billions of human beings in a state of destitution they will likely never experience, that people who work much harder than they ever have, even those who escaped Western impoverishment, will never achieve even that level of a pittance of an income.

For those who are well-off or rich, this contradiction is even more blatant. You not only outpace most of the world, but you outpace most of the people around you who in turn outpace most of the world. This is inherently isolating and painful to deal with when your moral fabric is shaped by a society that insists on the meritocracy myth. If you really didn't earn your lot in life, how can you then justify being well-off or rich? Why do you deserve to live better than most of the people on planet? Well, you have to find something to justify it, right? You can't just admit you were one of the lucky ones; even if it required some level of "sacrifice" like going to school, or networking, or dropping all of the distracting consumption like video games to focus on the hustle...is that truly enough? I mean, how do you begin to even quantify being "deserving" of anything material within a system fundamentally built on exploitation? How do you balance these meager acts of working hard against all of the other factors that had to have gone your way, such that you weren't born in a lot in life where you had to do fucking sweatshop work?

You can't, if you're honest with yourself. Hence, the appropriation of struggle.

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

I did not read one word of this drivel

Was totally expecting a pic of nep's house in that spoiler.

You fucking failed me Lonewulfeus