Sure, the math doesn't add up. An avocado toast and a coffee every morning won't add up to a real estate deposit. But that's not the point; the point is that people who are barely making ends meet having avocado toast at a coffee shop have the wrong mindset. I'd argue they are barely making ends meet because they're having avocado toast at a coffee shop, and multiple other expenses they can't responsibly afford. I've worked with young people barely making any money out of school, who still religiously went to the pub with their mates for the proverbial pint, and never skipped on Costa del Sol holidays.
I grew up in a lower-to-middle middle class household. Eating out was something we did on special occasions (some birthdays, high school graduation, etc). Travel and holidays were limited to the one holiday a year, to a beach 45 min away from where we lived. It does seem like young people these days have an incredibly distorted sense of what they "deserve" or what they can afford or what's "normal".
Now after decades in tech, a couple of stints at FAANG, I'm pretty comfortable financially. There's a lot of things I can afford in the strictest sense of the word (a 300k Lambo, a boat, whatever), but I know better than to spend money on things I don't really need just because I have enough money to buy them.
Love avocado toast but are on minimum wage? Go to the store, buy bread and avocado, make your own goddamn toast, and organise a picnic with your friends in the nearest park.
If the cost of housing increases faster each year than your annual salary, it doesn't matter a damn what fraction of your salary you manage to hoard in a year, you still aren't buying a house. But that salary can handle vacations and coffee just fine.
This is different from coffee and toast. Going to the pub with the mates can be a social obligation, whereas coffee on your own is not.
If you are asking your collegues to skip hanging out and vacation with their friends, you may be asking them to stop having those friends. Sure, maybe they are the wrong friends. Just noting this is a much bigger ask than not having coffee and toast by yourself.
Step 1. Assume they're spending $20k a year on Starbucks.
Step 2. Tell them not to do that.
Step 3. Pat yourself on the back and award yourself the nobel peace prize for solving poverty.
There's a reason it's unpopular. It's too obvious to be useful and it's almost always used as a strawman counter-arguement to any actual solutions regarding any real economic problem.
You're not telling it to somebody holding an avacodo toast in their hand complaining about how poor they are. You're telling it to people who can't even afford that. It's extremely condescending and arrogant of you.
I agree with you that people's spending habits don't make sense. I see young people complaining about having to live with their parents when near their 30s who still think a two week vacation with a nice rental and eating out ever night is a basic human right. I'm constantly horrified how many people simply cannot cook their own food. The wouldn't know how to make a good rice and beans dish if they had to.
But the part you're missing is that our current system cannot survive without this spending. That FAANG job that paid you so well, where do you think all that cash came from? My friends making money for insta are basically making that money selling avocado toast.
If people started living like their great depression era relatives they wouldn't be able to afford houses because our entire economic system would break down.
Perhaps in the past the destitute poor could find some free escape valves to this end, but modern urban society limits access to the social interactions and natural resources that made them possible.
It is a fallacy to suppose that living a monastic life would save enough money to get out of this extreme situation. Even discounting the mental imbalance it would cause, if your income is so limited, the meager savings of suppressing these small luxuries would not radically change your financial situation.
More importantly, there are tons of people who do live fiscally responsible and still can't afford basic necessities (let alone avocado toast).
People have drastically different interpretations of what it means, and end up arguing over that instead.
Nobody disputes you can save $X/day by not purchasing avocado toast and coffee. Everything else is people shadowboxing with themselves.
Are there a lot of people (or even any) doing that? Are there a lot of people who don't have bread to eat refraining from having their cake?
I, being fairly young, think that fulltime jobs paying a living wage ought to be normal. Many don't - https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/2020/home.htm
Some people are going to overspend and be careless with their money, but that's not the core problem in the US. The core problem is unfairly low wages for many workers.
People who know how to save money on the big stuff and spend money in the places where it gives a high return in joy are the ones doing it right. "It's your duty to be miserable because you're poor" is the most backwards attitude imaginable.
So what?
Some people think they control everything about their lives -- they do think that if they put in the time, effort, and energy, they can achieve anything. When they don't, they blame themselves endlessly. Sometimes, learning that it was something beyond your control (ie social forces were stacked against your particular endeavor) can be liberating and break the person out of personal blame an hopelessness and let them start again.
On the other end of the spectrum is feeling like an endless victim. Sometimes, it's easy to blame everything and lament how everything is stacked against you. This provides psychological solace but can prevent you from moving forward because you're convinced you won't be able to. In these cases, some of the stories of 'self-made' optimism can help get you out of a spot of hopelessness into action.
In this situation, though, what's medicine to one is poison to the other. I can think of times in my life where each view was helpful and warranted, even if they're hard to reconcile with each other.
In this case, the 'truth' isn't really knowable because we can't objectively observe a system we're a part of. So, until we know, I guess it's whatever view gets you where you need to go.
"It was said of Reb Simcha Bunem, a 18th century Hasidic rebbe, that he carried two slips of paper, one in each pocket. One was inscribed with the saying from the Talmud: Bishvili nivra ha-olam, “for my sake the world was created.” On the other he wrote a phrase from our father Avraham in the Torah: V’anokhi afar v’efer,” “I am but dust and ashes.” He would take out and read each slip of paper as necessary for the moment."
Ask "did I try my best", opposed to "did I get what I want"
I find deckbuilding games to be decent examples of this. At relatively close skill levels a bad draw can be the difference between winning and losing. It still takes a certain level of introspection to figure that out. Almost all elementary-school aged kids will conflate success with skill, even in games that are pure chance.
I've seen a lot people personally who get stuck in a loop of trying and failing. Each time they'll say to themselves 'I did my best' but a result based framework would have told them 'what you did didn't work and you need to try something _different_ next time'.
I will admit just this once that maybe I too readily tell myself that I did my best. Sometimes. Often? Please have this message self destruct in one hour.
Denying freedom altogether is logically the simplest way out, and is often done on behalf of other people, but I don't think anybody chooses this way for themselves, not at a deep level. Psychologically, we need agency, and it's cruel to deny it to others. So we keep trying out new ways of framing it.
Almost anything is "within your power". The right sequence of muscle movements, performed by your body, could bring an end to most world conflict, cure near every disease we have, spoof any cryptographic protocol, reinvent basically every creative pursuit…
However, as a regular human, with a brain not quite the size of a planet? Your actions are constrained by your knowledge, reasoning speed, reasoning ability (honed by past experience), mental state, emotional state, alertness, distractedness, loneliness, blood sugar level, blood protein level, percentage water…
You can do more than what you can do at this moment. But you can't do more than you can do at this moment. But you can probably get yourself in a position where, next moment, you can do more than you could do this moment.
> bring an end to most world conflict, cure near every disease we have, spoof any cryptographic protocol, reinvent basically every creative pursuit
The main reason I'm not doing these things is because I'm not rich and I have to work a full time job to simply not be homeless.
> In this situation, though, what's medicine to one is poison to the other. I can think of times in my life where each view was helpful and warranted, even if they're hard to reconcile with each other.
Moral philosopher John Rawls's uses the concepts of original position and veil of ignorance for a thought experiment that is the only fair basis for making decisions about moral principles and how society should be structured. You can think of it as "What we'd all decide for the world if each of us did not know ahead of time which circumstance we'd be born into".
https://open.library.okstate.edu/introphilosophy/chapter/joh...
> The Veil is meant to ensure that people’s concern for their personal benefit could translate into a set of arrangements that were fair for everyone, assuming that they had to stick to those choices once the Veil of Ignorance ‘lifts’, and they are given full information again.
> One set of facts hidden from you behind the Veil are what we might call ‘demographic’ facts. You do not know your gender, race, wealth, or facts about your personal strengths and weaknesses, such as their intelligence or physical prowess. Rawls thought these facts are morally arbitrary: individuals do not earn or deserve these features, but simply have them by luck. As such, they do not deserve any benefits or harms that come from them. By removing knowledge of the natural inequalities that give people unfair advantages, it becomes irrational to choose principles that discriminate against any particular group.
So here's something that's true: you can only move forward from where you are and with what you have. So while it's surely easier to lose weight if you can hire a coach and a nutritionist - if you can't do those things you nevertheless have to find a way!
So if you are "poor and fat" as in this scenario, the idea that you need a gym membership and perfect running streets is a trap. You don't have those things and therefore you are going to be fat forever.
The reality is that plenty of poor people lost weight when they decided to. They found a way - whether by walking around the block or taking the bus to a highschool running track or whatever. It's not easy but it was the only way to do it.
So how to avoid this mental trap? Rather than obsessing on the fact that it's easier for someone else, obsess about the fact that someone in your situation and even worse can do it and has done it. And then start.
The real purpose of the media is to expose and raise the awareness about systemic issues affecting large portions of the population. Then society should attempt to address those issues through the political institutions, with the participation of both the affected and the unaffected group.
I've found every time that I wanted to lose weight I needed to get my eating in order. That gave me more energy to work out, which of course helped even more.
But it starts with eating less.
Whenever I focused on just working out, I found I would just eat more and still have a caloric surplus. It never worked as a way to lose weight as I wasn't addressing the root of the problem, overeating.
There's probably some term for this phenomenon in formal logic or argument, and if there isn't, there probably should be, but...
It seems to me often with these kinds of things you can always say "if you want X enough, you can find a way," and that's logically true, but in practice the effort involved or the threading of the needle is exactly the problem. People have lives, and maybe taking the bus isn't feasible because you're working two jobs, have kids, and literally don't have the time without jeopardizing those things. It's some kind of logical trap, where you can provide all these examples of things to do, in some imaginary context where nothing else in life matters, or where success comes by making exactly the correct sequence of N steps of complicated decisions that is extremely implausible once uncertainty and normal levels of human error are taken into account.
The authors also basically provided an example of the neighborhood not being walkable and then you offer walking around the neighborhood as a solution. I bring this up not to be antagonistic or hostile to you, but I think this is part of what they're talking about: someone has X obstacles, and then in the course of getting advice, those obstacles are ignored in part or in whole. Even if it's unintended, it creates a loss of credibility on the part of the person giving advice (whether or not that credibility loss is warranted or not): "if you're ignoring my problem X, do you really understand my situation? And if not, can I trust that what you're saying will work out?" Then they might even ignore good advice, which then makes the problem worse.
I agree that you can still lose weight if by no other means than not eating as much, and I'm deeply skeptical of someone's inability to lose weight in the absence of some kind of internal physiological limitation. But as someone who's sympathetic to where you're coming from, I kind of read your comment and felt like you were just kind of illustrating the author's points. At what point at a population level do we start recognizing that these systemic factors are in fact causing problems for individuals, and that individuals cannot just bootstrap their way out of it completely? In the same way that you can come up with a complicated series of excuses for a person, you can also do the opposite, whatever that is termed -- you can come up with a complicated series of explanations of how they are culpable by not doing exactly the right series of things that would never be even discussed about a whole other subgroup of society.
I guess it seems to me that dismissing "obsessing on the fact that it's easier for someone else," and asking them instead to obsess about their own situation, is basically the thing the authors are talking about.
AKA: "why don't you just have 10x more willpower?"
Having done online dating for years, this rings so true. Some people online talk about the success stories but rarely do they acknowledge the absolute slog that can happen for a huge portion of people and that there is no guarantee even with persistence and a good attitude that you'll ever find someone who neither ghosts or treats you like garbage, and has a true connection with you.
I recall a Louis CK joke:
> 'There’s someone for everyone.' Nope. Not at all true, and stop saying it cause it’s mean to people who never find anybody. There are millions of people out there who we’ve all unanimously decided that they are lightspeed ugly and nobody kisses them on the lips even. Nobody touches their genitals their entire life. They just wash 'em, and then they die. That’s all that happens. 'Aww,' and if you’re feeling bad for them, you can go find one and fuck one tomorrow, you can just solve the problem right there with all that kindness in your heart. 'Aww.' Well, go fuck one. 'Nah.' I didn’t think so."
Out of all my friends, only one tried setting me up with someone on a blind date. Goodness, I can't even describe to you the kind of disgust I felt from her face when I walked through the restaurant door for our first and only date. Even though I knew from the first minute that the date was doomed, I did my best to make non-awkward.
Such is life, we can't choose what we inherit.
I’ve seen the opposite of this: Online spaces are full of consensus stories about how dating is hard, dating is terrible, dating is miserable, and that it’s nearly impossible to find anyone.
Many of my (completely average looking) friends have found success in online dating, but they’re not broadcasting it to the world. They also avoid talking about it with people who are struggling with online dating because those people don’t want to hear about other people doing well.
Among my friends who are struggling with online dating into their 30s, this entrenched cynicism is turning into self-defeating mindsets. As an outside observer it’s frustrating to watch them self-sabotage by insisting that the problems with their dating are 100% society’s fault and 0% due to things they could possibly change. This ranges from not spending enough the tiniest effort on personal appearance to declining second dates or follow up conversations unless everything goes exactly as they imagined it. They retreat to online spaces like Reddit where they can get endless confirmation for their biases that other people and society are to blame, and that there was nothing they could do differently. I’m surprised to read the suggestion that “nobody” is talking about the difficulties in dating when it’s quite literally front page topics on sites like Reddit all of the time.
Are they really _average_?
I have a friend who has the full puzzle and can’t seem to put it together. Used to be fat, poor, lived with his parents. In five years he’s completely turned his life around - he’s young, in shape, has a career, and is moving out into his own place. Still can’t get a date. Starting to both rapidly lose his hair to male pattern baldness and his sanity to the numerous rejections he receives.
This isn’t some comment on society or my friend, I’m pointing out how nobody (especially him) seems to know what he needs to be happy. If even specific advice doesn’t work how could generic advice ever help?
Godspeed friend, hope things get better for you.
I found the book 'Models' by Mark Manson to be a big help. Sometimes, the right advice really does make a difference.
Unfortunately, living in a country where meeting any kind of people at all is extremely hard to start with, I barely get a chance to ever even flirt or ask a woman on a date.
At least your friend is getting rejections. That means he somehow managed to figure out how to routinely get in contact with women.
This problem did plague me in school though, it's all I strove for (getting laid).
Step 1) be attractive as they say. Online dating is brutal too, depressing stuff.
I'm just glad there's an outlet for me (porn). Then I can go about my life still.
// Such is life, we can't choose what we inherit
I agree that there's no guarantees but something conspicuously missing from this story is anything you've done to better the odds.
Do you go to the gym or work out at home? Have you found a barber who cuts your hair well? Have you had a fashionable friend help you with your wardrobe? Have you spent any time practicing small talk or put any emphasis on becoming more charming?
None of these things guarantee success either but it's weird to not hear about any work you had put in to make this happen (not saying you haven't done it just you didn't mention it)
This quantification into a single number is also promoted by the corporate propaganda machine, since it gives companies more leeway to bullshit being green.
While it's not a coordinated conspiracy, something severely suboptimal is happening. Many identify this but simply don't have a better term to voice their frustration, so we're left with "conspiracy".
Obviously there's not a clear distinction between the two, i.e. food deserts / car-only locations forcing people to make certain choices, but it seems like for most things outside of energy production meaningful improvement requires a meaningful change in downstream consumer experience/behavior.
Whose fault is it that all those bottles are in the ocean - people who bought them and threw them out, or the people who made them in the first place? PepsiCo definitely wants you to think a certain way.
1 https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-perspec...
More like “there is a sense that people are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this global warming thing… since it would be very disruptive to our operations to have regulatory bodies come in (by way of pressure from their constituents), let’s show that we care about the environment too with this PR campaign. It won’t actually be any meaningful steps toward helping the situation, but it effectively takes the pressure off of us.”
No doubt they took a page out of gun manufacturing, sugar manufacturing and tobacco playbooks.
My generation (millennial) tends to frustrate me, in that while a lot of people are correct in that the system is setup to lead them to failure, there are so many escape hatches to actually succeed.
I mean think about it, yeah, things are a lot more expensive now than my parents generation, but we also have these advantages:
- We all walk around with super computers in our pockets
- We have instant access to pretty much all of humanity's collective knowledge, practically for free
- Most people have pretty easy access to credit (which is admittedly a double edged sword)
My unscientific observation is that the people that complain the most about "the system" are actually some of the most privileged people, which makes them sound sort of spoiled and ridiculous.
I don't know, on one hand if you came from poverty in a crime stricken neighborhood you have my sympathy and understanding. On the other hand, if you came from a middle class background, you went to college and majored in something utterly useless (I won't mention the degrees... but you know them), racked up a huge debt, and now you're upset that nobody has a great job for you... I have slightly less sympathy. I realize that's a bit of a strawman, but it also just seems to be something I see a lot. If there's a big mistake my generation has made, it's having everyone go to college for degrees they'll never really use. And for some reason the trades have this huge stigma, even though you can make a perfectly good living as an electrician or a plumber.
I heard this quote by John Maynard Keynes writing in 1919 about life before the First World War that reminded me of anyone claiming how lucky the current generation is to have smartphones provide modern marvels like Amazon next day delivery-
> The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep;
We might have supercomputers in our pockets, but people just use them to do a budget version of things everyone has been doing for 100 years because they can't afford the real thing anymore.
Firstly, no, not "everyone", a tiny fraction of "everyone". And secondly, because at that time London was the capital of the global superpower whose empire encircled the whole planet. If millennials are comparing themselves to the richest people who lived in the capital of the richest empire of all time, then they're going to be disappointed.
No argument there. I think it was well meaning, no parent wants to think their kid isn't college material, but... yeah not every kid is college material.
> and even then doing a useless degree is probably the rational choice since grad schemes have all replaced the equivalent schemes for high school leavers that existed 20+ years ago with no practical difference other than arbitrarily requiring a degree
To me, this is an open question. I know various college dropouts that actually have really good careers. I think their first jobs were harder to get, but once you have a resume I don't think most employers care that much about college (I say as a college grad, so I don't know first hand). Plus, there's just also the matter that if you are going to go into debt for college, maybe get a useful degree? Even if you don't go into certain fields, I think some degrees look better than others. For instance, I know some coders that have a degree in architecture (like, buildings). Even though they aren't designing buildings, it's a somewhat impressive degree. On the other hand, I feel bad for people that got a degree in something like art history or gender studies or political science but didn't go into academia or grad school. I probably shouldn't pick on those, but, oof, those don't seem like a promising path unless you want to be a professor or go into law school or something.
We have access to an overwhelming amount of knowledge, but the problem is that this by itself is not enough to use it. All that knowledge is in a format that is difficult to assimilate and largely lacks the social aspect needed to transfer it effectively.
Humans assimilate knowledge by participating in social groups, most of us acquire it largely by imitation; only some complex academic subjects benefit from isolated personal study, and even then you need a mentor to guide you through it.
The wealthy remain wealthy because they maintain exclusivist institutions, devoted entirely to transmitting such limited social knowledge to their families. It is practically a requirement in order to improve your social standing; people with access to unlimited knowledge but without having the tribe to guide them in its assimilation cannot harness it in a way that is more effective than the people they are competing against.
Right now one of my hobbies is robotics/electronics/makerish stuff, and most of what I've learned has come from youtube/reference documentation/blog posts (I bought a few textbooks as well, although most of them are collecting dust). There's a bit of a social aspect in that I'll ask friends with actual EE degrees for advice sometimes, but even then I mostly get "ah I haven't used that in forever, I don't remember". Most of my learning is by setting a goal, and then more or less learning the skills along the way. I don't know if it's efficient or not, but it's not costing me anything other than time.
The other thing I've been teaching myself is art techniques, and you probably guessed it, I've learned those things in the same way and through practice developing my own style. Again, no institution needed.
Don't get me wrong, I think institutions and the social aspect of them can be tremendously useful, but if you want to learn a skill and you're interested there's practically nothing stopping you, you don't need them, it's just a bonus.
This is the question I asked myself as well. In my own life I've settled on Stoicism as a philosophy of life (though I am far from the ideal sage). I don't think it needs prefixed with "pessimistic" though. I think that, by itself, it's already the middle ground between the two positions. It says that you should only focus on the things that are under your control, but to do so while working for the greater good as well. Fight the dragons, but also fight your own inner battles.
Collectively, that's great. I'd argue that western civilization has never been kindler, gentler, inclusive and diverse than it is at this moment in history. So we've made great strides.
However all of this does very little for the average individual unhappy in their unique situational challenges.
If you're unhappy with the hand you're dealt, and keep shifting the blame to society, you will probably remain unhappy for a long time.
If, on the other hand, you decide to change things in or about yourself, you will find that you have significantly more agency over the situation.
A wise person once told me that whenever you have stress in your life it's because your expectations don't match reality.
I learned that sometimes what had to change was I had to "learn to accept reality", as reality was something that couldn't be changed. As Bruce Lee said, the reed that bends in a storm survives it and grows, while bamboo, being rigid, will snap and break.
There's no panacea to the problem of being happy and content in our short lives. But there are things you can do to improve your odds of enjoying it more while you're here.
In the meantime, we should continue to fix systemic problems, injustices, etc.
This was a breakthrough for me as well. Accepting reality as it does not mean you have to like it, but it gives a foundation for moving forward.
I would quibble that it is important to separate reality as it is today, The future it Can Be, and the future it Can't Be.
If you cant accept reality as it is and that some futures are impossible, you will miss the best future that CAN have.
You need to accept the cards you are dealt and then play them to the very best of your ability.
It's not that the message is wrong, it's that there's no empathy so it just comes across as incredibly tone-deaf (which it of course is).
I can't agree with this at all.
If expect to have to work 60 hours next week and then I do, should I reflect on why that's stressful?
Or if I'm expecting to lose my house because I don't have a job or money... Where's the stress coming from? I'd probably be less stressed if I were under the illusion that I'd be able to keep my house without money!
Stress is not just expectations.
It's not clear to why working 60 hours is stressful to you. Is it because the 60 hours is too long, or the quality of the job? If long hours is the problem, then your expectation is that you shouldn't be working 60 hours, but reality clearly says that you are, and so your stressed. If it's the quality of the job, then you're expecting the job to be something other than it is. You're purposely showing up to a place that you know will make you unhappy.
In this case, the agency you have gives you a few options to consider
- talk to management about possibly reducing hours or responsibilities
- if that doesn't work, leave and find another job with better work/life balance. You may have to accept a pay cut to get this. If your expectation is that you'll make $1M a year being a McDonalds worker, well that's another expectation not aligned with reality.
- or alternatively "accept" that is what your job is at this part of life (maybe you have crushing debts you need to pay, and so you accept doing something hard for a while to pay them off)
> Or if I'm expecting to lose my house because I don't have a job or money... Where's the stress coming from?
The stress is coming from you expecting not to be homeless, while reality is telling you that you will be. A terrible situation for sure (how did you get here?).
If you don't have friends or family that can help you get back on your feet, then your options are very limited (you can't change reality and make someone house you for free). So accepting the temporary homelessness will reduce the stress you feel. Many people choose to be homeless, so it is possible. There are homeless shelters and other programs designed to help you get back on your feet. Accept that this is part of your life moving forward and make plans to get back on your feet.
This is a hard example, but same logic applies. If you're going to be homeless then you're going to be homeless. I understand why that one is hard to accept. Not saying it's easy. But you can either be homeless and stressed because you don't want to be, or you can be homeless and find a way to make it work (live light) while you get back on your feet. I lived on my buddies couch for a month. I know a woman who was homeless as a young single mother, now works in IT. It is possible to overcome these things and put yourself back on your own two feet.
I lost my son at 16. That was very hard to accept. I'd have done anything to turn back time, but that's impossible. Some of the worst parts of life are learning to accept things outside of your control, grieving, and moving on with life. Life is for the living.
A lot of the discussion here seems to be focused on individual agency and how much people are responsible for their circumstances or not, but for me many of the underlying issues are really about lack of understanding on the advice-givers.
Sometimes someone is capable of changing their circumstances, but just doesn't know how to go about it. They just never were taught how, or whatever, and when they turn to others for help, they get bad advice. The people they turn to might really care about the person and want to help, but just aren't good mentors.
The avocado toast example is important as a flawed position not necessarily because of broader issues about individual versus societal responsibility, but because it illustrates how completely ignorant people can be about their fellow humans' circumstances. This has a whole host of consequences that are extremely powerful, including not providing advice that would actually help, to not recognizing that good people sometimes just make mistakes, that good or bad mentoring actually does matter, and so forth and so on.
So maybe someone is entirely capable of improving their financial situation. But is telling them it's because they're eating avocado toast too much really going to help them? No, because the worldview that avocado toast is causing financial ruin is just as flawed as the worldview that everyone is a completely helpless victim. Cruel optimism isn't just cruel optimism, it's ignorant optimism, and proves the point by its very nature that the system is broken in some way: a person who believes avocado toast is the source of financial distress themselves probably is not sound in their financial reasoning, and if they are not in financial distress, it's probably not because of their sound financial reasoning, but rather, other factors.
If you cannot correctly identify the systemic impediments to someone improving their situation, and offer realistic advice to them in those circumstances, you're part of the problem, or at least, you're not recognizing the problem. Avocado toast is kind of a perfect example of opportunity costs applied to moral reasoning or something: it's not that it blames the victim, it's that the advice is actively harmful if for no other reason that decent advice is not being given, and then becomes an example of the very thing it's trying to argue against.
I'd say it's similar to telling someone who is cleaning, "you missed a spot". Technically helpful, but annoying, but misses the larger point. But, at the end of the day, it's advice that you can take or leave. Why get so offended?
In the example of the avocado toast guy, why did he say anything at all? The subtext of "all you have to do to save money is stop spending money on frivolous things" is that it is a defense of the status quo: "You shouldn't complain about our unfair economic system, your suffering is your own fault". But why make that statement? Because the speaker is broadcasting to the world that he thinks he's better than the avocado eating proles.
The choice to say anything at all is an even bigger choice than what to say.
A personal example I can think of has to do with how I managed my spending in the past: I would make sure not to overdraw from my checking account. Not because I am incapable of budgeting but because I didn't know any methods of budgeting. If I were to hear someone lament about their lack of making ends meet despite good income I would first try to get an understanding about how they budget since I know that was the actual mechanism that helped me make the decision not to buy the proverbial avocado toast.
Of course, finances could still be difficult due to cost increases not being matched by income increases; that is a genuinely unfortunate situation which I'm not sure how to fix. In this case, I would offer condolences over advice ("shit, that sucks, I'm sorry" not "just get a better job, lol") because I don't know what I would do in that situation.
Long term, consider making fewer personal offerings to the dragons and plan to relocate to an area with lower dragon density.
TFA just points out that the opposite tack (It's all society's fault so I'm screwed no matter what I do), is also not helpful. Also (IMO; not sure if author of TFA would agree with me) the "lazy pessimism" is at least partly a push-back against "cruel optimism." If the optimism were paired with more empathy, then lazy pessimism wouldn't be the obvious alternative.
Name of the woman who actually invented the concept you discuss is relegated to "someone" and a footnote.
Did you also read my previous post (https://tegowerk.eu/posts/the-deep/), where I heap praise upon praise on Alma Katsu, a woman? What about this earlier one, where I express just how much a particular woman means to me and to my life (https://tegowerk.eu/posts/serendipity/)? Or did you just make up your mind about me based on a footnote?
I'm willing to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian
I found interesting this paper which cites Berlant's concept of cruel optimism: "Disinformation as the weaponization of cruel optimism: A critical intervention in misinformation studies".
It discusses the state of disinformation studies with example such why academic interventions have failed to "correct" e.g. people who believe in QAnon.
Open access link below: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S175545862...
This is correct. It is hard to do all the time. But it's a better way to live. Happiness / unhappiness is a choice (depression other mental illnessesses and additions are conditions to be treated, out of scope, it is not "unhappiness").
Think of it this way.
You can be poor, have kids to feed, homeless, whatever. And unhappy.
Or, can be poor, have kids to feed, homeless, whatever. And happy.
You can wallow in self-pity, blame yourself (or others, society) for your situation, be cynical and pessimistic. Or, be happy, see the positives, be optimistic, try and improve your situation.
Many social problems are not caused by you or by "society" at large.
You live in a "car-centric hellscape"? Shops only sell unhealthy food? The board of directors of some companies took these decisions.
When I was learning electricity and struggling a little, the instructor told me part of the problem was I didn't yet know the right questions to ask. This blew and opened my mind at the same time! I've used that statement on myself and others ever since. But I also except some won't ever be able to understand these questions.
This is an interesting start but feels too narrow as a definition of the term.
Cruel optimism, in general, seems like it should mean "cruelty by means of optimism". As in, you don't trouble yourself with how something (which you are morally responsible for) isn't going well and some person(s) will be negatively affected, and you justify that with the assumption that everything will turn out fine in the end, or the problem is much milder or easier to solve than it really is.
Neglecting responsibility for a problem justified by downplaying the problem, imagining the problem away.
A sufficiently intense optimism might say "I don't care that giving up social media gives you withdrawel pains, you're doing it!". A sadistic attitude towards myself (or whoever's masochistic enough to ask my advice) might help cut through the kind of pity that would prevent pushing a painful but healthy change.
Honestly, it made me squirm. Sounds like a conservative on the freshman debate team trying to sound "compassionate." Like, those Mexicans aren't lazy. They just need to realize that their attitude needs adjusting (said the guy who knows not one person from Mexico.)
This is more clever than deep and certainly less thoughtful than it might seem. Read some James Baldwin. Please.
Rebelling against personal responsibility has a deterministic fatal fate that no narrative will protect you from.
What will you do?
For anyone struggling with the problems he uses for examples, I think the example exhortations ("Just start running!" "Just be yourself!") illustrate that you should be skeptical about advice from someone who has never solved the problem in question, or solved it accidentally with resources you don't have. It's possible you can learn from their advice, but there's a good chance it won't apply to you in a simple way.
Tellingly, in the first part of the article, it was easy for me to gloss over the parts that touch on problems I don't have. Where I got upset was when it talked about the problems I do have. I think a great deal of the disconnect comes from people with privilege being unable to imagine how people can survive without it. Their prescription is for everybody to live like they have privilege, which is the only thing they can imagine, and accept the suffering that results. Some people can eat whatever they naturally gravitate towards and be healthy... so you should eat anything you want, and if you end up with diabetes, that's the proper outcome for you. Some people can afford $22 avocado toast every day, so you should eat that toast, and if you run out of money for rent, that's fine, that's what happens to people like you. Some people can be blithe and careless about their mental health and be happy, so you should be careless too.
No matter what empathetic language you dress it up in, I think it's a pretty brutal message, that the way the most privileged people are able to live is the only way worth living. You should study like you're a Harvard legacy, manage your money like a trust fund baby, and take care of your body like you're the twenty-year-old offspring of a model and a professional athlete with centenarians on both sides of the family, because that's the only way worth living.
Seen from that perspective, telling people not to bother with individual solutions to their problems is an even more flamboyant display of privilege than someone saying "just be frugal!" or "fix your mental health issues with exercise!" Offering someone a solution, however inadequate, at least acknowledges that their lives require effort and compromise, and that a life of effort and compromise is worth living. It's shitty and inadequate, but it's better than being told that you simply must eat that $22 avocado toast because life without $22 avocado toast would be too ghastly.
I get the 30,000 foot political perspective. Collective and individual solutions are different and therefore competing, and politics doesn't allow for complexity or nuance, so public desire for collective solutions can only come at the expense of belief in individual solutions. I see that logic. However, because people are currently facing these problems alone, they are resorting to individual solutions, and many people are benefiting from individual solutions in ways that matter to them, even if it looks meager and meaningless from a more privileged perspective. It comes off as awfully snobbish and disconnected when you deny the value of the benefits (however small) that people realize from their efforts to manage their health, their finances, etc. And you don't have to do that to promote collective solutions. At least let's hope not, because if so, that's a really tough messaging problem to solve.