| ▲ | usui 6 hours ago |
| It needs to be because the US has leaned further into individualism relative to other countries. If society's golden metric of success means being able to acquire all of these luxuries or services purely through monetary means as transactional individuals, don't be too surprised when the expenses rack up. |
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| ▲ | thewillowcat 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Just because the wider society encourages it, your family doesn't have to lean into individualism, and many don't. We got by when I was a kid with a lot of help from friends and family, when I am absolutely sure we didn't have a living wage under this definition. |
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| ▲ | zozbot234 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Did you fairly compensate your friends and family members for that "help"? Systematic reliance on wholly unpaid labor is not exactly something to be proud of. | | |
| ▲ | nomel 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I help my kids, but I don't expect them to help me. I want them to save their money to help their kids, otherwise I'm just taking from my grandkids. Same when I help my siblings. If they pay me back, now I'm taking away from my nieces and nephews. Within friends/family, I think it's completely reasonably if the money flows "downhill". This is the fundamental concept of the vast majority of taxes, including those that feed the poor/unemployed: that money is gone, somewhere between little and no personal return, but that usually makes sense, increasingly so with income. | |
| ▲ | brendoelfrendo 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Um, sometimes people help each other because they want to, or because they understand that those less fortunate than them need it, or because they understand that they may need help someday and so it doesn't make sense to make a big deal of "compensation" now. It's called community, and I think it is something to be proud of. |
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| ▲ | legitster 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I think it also reflects a lense of US academia. It kind of assumes a sanitized, formal, self-sufficient life, detached from others - and then assumes anything other than that is an aberration. It's kind of like the physics joke about assuming a spherical cow in a vacuum. |
