When I was 4 and my sister was like 8, my mom sat us on the kitchen floor in the dark wrapped in a blanket in front of the 1950s gas oven’s flame with the oven door open. It was well below freezing outside, in the middle of winter. There was no money, so my mom had stopped paying rent and the power bill. Our power was shut off, and the toilet froze over solid in our dilapidated 1880 victorian house we rented in Oregon. I remember the slumlord coming over one night pounding on the door, yelling about the rent money, my mom just crying saying she didn’t have it.
My young parents in their early 20s left Southern California in search of a simpler, more sustainable life in Oregon. With a hand-me-down used old buick and $1200 cash in my mom’s purse as all we had, we set sail to the new frontier. The first day arriving in Oregon, my mom had forgotten the purse inside a convenience store, and when we returned later frantically to retrieve it, it was gone. We had nothing.
Having no other option, we contacted my dad’s distant relatives in the far out Oregon coastal range wilderness, and got permission to come stay on part of their acreage out by a stream. No plumbing, no power, no house. My dad built essentially a framed plywood box on a deck for the 4 of us to live in, no insulation, no solar power. We drank the boiled water from the stream.
My mom had simple wants from the beginning: to be a stay-at-home mom in a loving family and just raise kids and do home things, supporting a good quality working man. Supporting each other, seeking community. In her teen years when she got together with my dad, she didn’t know there are really guys out there that will have 2 kids and then just disappear, bail out on life to drop out of society and go abuse drugs and alcohol never to be contacted again. That’s exactly what my dad did, and my mom never had a restful day since then of getting to be a loving homemaker in a stable and secure home.
Before abandoning ship, my dad got some terrible construction laborer job, the only work to be found in the 80s recession, and commuted from the wilderness to the valley every day for hardly any pay that year. He was able to help us get the shitty old house rental in the local small town. When he disappeared by surprise so did the rent and electric money that we barely scraped by on each month. Luckily the gas was still on and we could sit in front of the oven’s flame.
My childhood memories are interlaced with endless hundreds of hours of visits with my mom to all the various soulless social services offices. food stamps. welfare. section 8. child support. It was clear very early on that there were things in this world that were for other families, for other kids whose families had money, but not for me.
My new school clothes came from salvation army. My jeans wore until they were 4 sizes too small and the knees ripped out to shreds. I didn’t really get new toys. In middle school I wanted to join the track team because I was outrunning most of the PE class, but we couldn’t afford the 80$ registration fee for the uniform plus all the equipment like cleats we would have to buy, so I never ran track.
When i was 17 Element skateboards reached out to me after viewing my sponsor-me VHS tape to come meet and skate in San Francisco to maybe get hooked up with a flow team deal. I excitedly begged my mom to go, but we didn’t have money to travel or stay in a motel so I never went. Things that other people are able to do are not for me, I internalized that. These are just a couple examples i lived through out of hundreds that reinforced that conclusion.
I watched firsthand from a very young age what the term “welfare trap” looks like in practice. The state will help with only what “they” think is enough for basic survival, a condition the lawmakers have never experienced. Assistance amounts are likely based on a 20-to-30-year outdated mental model of the real cost of living. As a welfare recipient, if you attempt to do anything to meaningfully help your own situation, you will be swiftly punished. You will be punished by never seeing your kids as you slave to find a job and work as a single parent, perhaps punished to never be eligible for welfare again if you conduct under the table work on the side while collecting welfare. You might even get a lawsuit against you from the state and be required to pay back all that was ever given.
On welfare programs, they don’t want you to feel like your basic needs will be supported. They want you in fear of the ruling powers, they do not want you to have agency. Welfare programs are not designed to actually help anyone stand on their own feet.
I got my own apartment at 17 with my best friend from high school. the only place i could get a job was doing political phone surveys in a cubicle farm for 7.50$ an hour. You were required to only speak verbatim on the script and not interject your own words or explanations, the most mindless work possible. My roommate and best friend worked a grueling landscaping job in the cold rain and mud, driving around the owner’s barely running beat up 70s carbeurated pickup truck that smelled like gas, for like 10 or 15$ an hour.
As teenagers new to adult life, we tried to live simply, and yet even in the 00’s economy of those times, all it took was one setback– a skateboarding injury and giant hospital bill when of course we could not afford health insurance, a layoff from your job as it gets outsourced to Indian call centers… and then we couldn’t make ends meet. We would inevitably each go through setbacks like this every couple months.
With no family support to go to university, I tried to navigate working and putting myself into community college 10 miles out of town, spending a couple hours commuting on a day on a stinky packed public bus to get there. Focusing was hard sometimes when I was exhausted from work and going hungry at school trying to figure out how to eat lunch for 7 days on 40$ for the week, with no vegan options at the remote campus in the woods.
One winter when my roommate and I both were navigating our latest setbacks, we couldn’t make ends meet and we literally went hungry. There just was no money for food. We would go to the catholic food box donation center and they gave me a box, but I was vegan and the box was full of garbage Spam and Frank and Beans type stuff that I ended up just settting out on the curb. I would rather go hungry than develop health problems from filling up on ultraprocessed hydrogenated oil government peanut butter.
I remember in the dark back of our cupboard during that time finding Bisquick box with about a handful of stale flour at the bottom, our last food. I mixed it with tap water and baked it like a messy little cookie in the middle of the sheet and we devoured it together appreciatively directly off the baking sheet in an instant.
When we were out skateboarding in the middle of the night one night downtown behind the post office, it happened to be during the annual postal canned food drive and we discovered a giant mail cart just sitting out on the loading dock, overflowing with nonperishable food. We ran home to get backpacks and filled them with as much food as we could. Pulling off this heist when we didn’t know where the next meal was coming from was euphoric.
Being an 18 year old child who never had guidance about how all this works (life, college, professionalism…) I got some bad grades my first year at community college by failing to keep up with the homework load, and the federal government sent me a letter stating that due to my grades I would never be eligible for financial aid ever again. I said ‘fine, fuck it.’ I Pursued skateboarding and got a sponsor, had a steady girlfriend to live with, and worked my way up to the best pay I could get, $19 an hour doing tech support in a cubicle farm. Maybe I didn’t need college after all? Maybe I could carve out a simple living with plenty of time for relationships and doing things I loved like skateboarding and music, and just have a simple working life. I spent a couple years out of school and in the full-time workforce, just trying to earn a simple life.
When the owner of the house in Portland that I rented with like 6 other young roommates decided to sell the house, I didn’t have the savings cushion to afford the move out expenses to another dirt cheap roommate house situation. I existentially reflected on the state of things and accepted that if I was to ever have a chance at making it with a basic life in this world, I was going to have to make it through college and get a career.
I moved into my parents unfinished garage attic above the lawnmower fumes that was below freezing in winter, got into the University of Oregon, and immediately picked up 3 jobs to work simultaneously while taking full time computer science credits. From 8 in the morning I’d work coding for the University’s in-house web development org, attend classes til 4 or 5, then either work my job as support desk in the science computer lab until closing at like 10 or 11pm, and on weekends and in-between days, go do restaurant delivery driving for 5 or 6 hours, getting home at midnight.
The price of books and tuition had gone up about 400% in the preceding 10 years, and with the 3 jobs I could just about buy the 400-500$ textbooks each term, feed myself most of the time, and afford rent in my little house with 2 roommates.
Predictably in retrospect, this lead to developing severe anxiety disorder, showing up in the ER several times certain I was going to die when the stress was so immense that I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t relax for days and weeks on end. Of course there was nothing they could do for me but write me up some huge bills for being uninsured. I should have known.
The anxiety destroyed my relationship with my girlfriend, I went through a blurry couple years as an anxious shell of a person. I did not have guidance and was not equipped for what I was navigating. I knew it was going to be hard but I didn’t know it was possible for anything to be this hard, until I was already in it too deep.
As I was doing my delivery driving job and walking around campus, I would see happy young people all around me— at frathouse parties that never ended, showing up to class hungover in pajamas as their parents paid for everything, getting involved in extracurricular sports or clubs with all their extra time. I saw what the college experience was intended to be, but as I of course already knew, “not for me.”
I somehow got to the end of college and got my first full-time web agency job as a developer. It was hard, but for the first time I could rent my own tiny place from some hippies in the “scary” side of downtown without my girlfriend needing to pay. I still wasn’t affording to buy a car or any new clothes, but it felt amazing to reach the level of stability where I knew the rent was getting paid and that I could afford dinner every night. Those times did not last for even one year out of college though when I ran directly into the 2008 financial collapse which hit tech hard, and was laid off like thousands of others. Between my student loan payments which were already due and being the sole provider for the house, I had been living check-to-check, so I had to put in notice to move out of my house the same day I got laid off because it was going to be all but impossible to find the next job in time before running out of money. The job market became bleak.
I had to leave my hometown and head to the biggest city in my state, Portland, to sleep on couches and in my makeshift “bedroom” in the foyer of a friend’s old house rental with 5 other young adults, while trying to launch a new software dev career that I had always been promised would lead to prosperity for the last 10 years.
Having no work experience or negotiation skills I was extremely lowballed on wages, but since I was raised by the boomer mindset that: ‘you do anything your employer wants. everything should be yes sir. this is the only way you climb the ladder and succeed by proving that loyalty and reliability through hard work. you should be grateful for any offer, and if it’s too low just work harder for a raise!’, I accepted what offers I could get.
I built up my career slowly, upgrading from one agency to the next, but with my persistent lowballed pay, student loans that I paid steadily for 10 years, the rising cost of living and 30% year over year rent and home price increases, I was out of money by every payday, I was never able to save a dollar.
All throughout life to this day, I only ever wanted an extremely simple life. A tiny home to own. I mean literally, a tiny home. I have lived in cars and toolsheds, I do not need a lot. I just want some land to cultivate and grow my food, and a space to be safe and secure and play music. That was always the goal, when I began college, and remains the goal to this day.
When I started my career after college, I thought ‘finally the struggles are behind me. I did what everyone wanted of me: I went to school, got a job, it was going to be ok from here.’ In reality that was the beginning of my struggles, and nothing ever really got any easier.
7 years into the career I was so disillusioned with it I was ready to check out of life. I bought beat up rebuilt 1993 hilux truck for $1500, a canopy shell for $300 and moved into the truck bed. I went to California for warmer weather to make truck living possible. I signed my own independent clients for work. I felt that “the system” as you are designed to enter it through the front door had proved that it wouldn’t work for me, so I would just simply cut all expenses including rent in order to save up for my first house, and I would have to do this my own way.
Like so many others, I learned the realities of van life. In the modern world, you effectively are not saving any money by doing vanlife unless you park in one spot and never start your car again and never leave. Once I lived the trucklife for a while, I tabulated the savings and found that after the gym membership for showers, increased food and gas costs, I was saving a total of like 30$ a month as compared to roommate living.
Before giving up on vanlife as a path towards financial independence, I tried renting an office room in a professional office building, and living illegally splitting my time between the office and a storage unit. I worked my ass off coding all day for clients from the office, never spent money, and on my best year of my independent consultancy I made about $60k. Less than I made in the private workforce, and I was working even harder for it. After self-employment taxes, it was more like sub-$45k which puts you into McDonalds Shift manager range, which is not really enough to live on comfortably in any American city.
At that time, my Grandma then began a 12-year long slow, heartbreaking, agonizing slide into Alzheimer’s. My grandpa couldn’t bear to lock her up in an abusive overpriced care home, and as things got more severe he was paying for nearly around the clock in-home care, depleting his lifetime savings from 35 years as a college professor with a pension at a rate of $80k per year. To go from a child laboring to grow potatoes in the yard in Gresham Oregon to help his family eat during the depression, to becoming a college economics professor, my grandfather was a brilliant man and amazing person who did ok financially, only thanks to a lifetime of investing.
While I never counted on nor expected free handouts from anyone my whole life, it did sit in the back of my mind for decades that when it was time for grandpa to go, I would stand to inherit a sizable amount of the family life savings, enough for a down payment on my first home one day. It would have played out that way, except it was our family’s fault for encountering Alzheimer’s.
The lifetime savings was essentially spent on grandma’s care til the very end, and it was all we could do to help get him set up himself in a retirement home for his last years immediately after grandma left, which cost the same monthly amount as his pension. Had he not lived an entire lifetime of hard work, financial prudence and responsibility, I have no idea what we would have done for my grandfather. For others in my family with no hope of a tech job, things were even more bleak. We couldn’t really fully take care of ourselves, so I dont know how we could have taken care of my grandpa.
With mounting anger and frustration, each year for the last 20 years I have tried to hustle and grindmaxx harder than the year before, all in service of the United States Dollar. What does it take to achieve a simple life of security? The garden and the tiny house? I used to think maybe I just hadn’t worked hard enough for it, but now in the late stages of my career I’m not so sure.
This extractive system is designed for your failure. You absolutely do not matter in this society beyond the extractive financial gains you can provide to make a corporation more wealthy. In this system the more money and power you gain the easier it becomes to gain more. The less money you have and the larger your generational poverty hole, the harder it is to get one step ahead.
I moved back into my car for a third tour of duty in 2019 at age 36 when both of my primary clients had their work for me dry up after being steady for years. Though I was much happier working for myself for those 7 years of independent consultancy, I was dragged back into the private work force out of pure survival necessity. Without self-employment tax it could have just about been sustainable, but with self-employment tax factored in it was clearly untenable.
125 degree storage unit that I illegaly partially lived out of (along with a coworking office).tapped electricity from the light socket to shave (2019)
teaching myself elastic cloud computing from the 24 Hour Fitness parking lot where I got my showers, to try to improve my job chances
Having failed to get anywhere close to being in a position to come up with the down payment on a home in my homelands of the West Coast through 2 decades of grinding, I accepted I was priced out and I left everyone and everything I’ve ever known and loved on the west coast in search of an affordable house ANYWHERE.
By the end of 2022 after several more years of frontier tech work, I went from living in my car in Oakland California to owning 3 houses in central upstate New York, whose combined mortgages are less than a studio apartment’s rent in the Bay Area.
I bought the real estate not because I had found my dream property and finally reached the simple life through hard work, I bought the real estate because I had accepted the fact that to have any chance of getting ahead under this system, you are required to gamble and play the rich man’s games.
Under this system, you lose by default. If you put 100 dollars in your bank and don’t touch it for many years, that same 100 dollars is almost worthless at the time you pull it out. Organic ketchup is now $9 for a small bottle. The rents and home prices have continued to go up by 12%, 20%, even 30%, consistently every year. All while the late-stage of this system has produced more billionaires than ever in history.
I treat USD as if it’s on fire and will turn into worthless ash blown out of my hands in the wind. I try to hold as little of it as possible, because to hold USD and not play the financial casino games is to lose by default, which I know from repeated experience. I buy nothing, and put all incoming cash into tech stocks, crypto, real estate, ANYTHING that the rich people game to gain independence. Going through the front door in society did not work, so now I’m doing whatever this is that I’m doing now.
There is no happy ending here. Just for fun, I keep a document on google drive listing out every house address I’ve ever lived at: 57 addresses. I’m a 43 year old man who owns 3 houses, and I have not achieved even housing security, what to speak of financial independence.
One home is for my mother to live in, who is still surviving on a patchwork of social programs plus disability social security insurance after a 20 year battle in the courts to prove disability. The total amount of housing assistance for her comes out to like 1500$ per month less than the market rent rate for the house that I would otherwise collect, and I’m not allowed to live at the same house to help her with anything because then my income would be considered household income and she would be removed from all social programs.
We have looked into ways she could make even the smallest amount of side income, an etsy art store, anything, but you are not allowed to work to make any money on the disability program, as they will say it’s proof that you can work and aren’t disabled. They do not want the disadvantaged to be helped nor to help themsevles.
The second house I rent on airbnb for extra income, while staying in an off-grid trailer on my land.
When I bought my first house, all i could afford was a 105 year old city house in the rust belt for 1/6th the price of the equivalent house on the west coast. It needed tons of work, and these days I go there whatever evenings and weekends I can after my full work week to clock in my second job finishing the house renovations so I can rent it out hopefully this year. Meanwhile it’s property taxes go up 30% a year lately.
I moved across the country for this opportunity, so I don’t have friends here. I don’t do anything for fun. I just try to strategize harder and work harder at cracking this puzzle of figuring out how one can afford a simple life.
At the dawn of the intelligence age, we are at a fork in the road. To the left is applying human ingenuity and creativity, and rising to the moment to collectively reimagine the order of society. To re-imagine a new way.
On the right, we choose to forfeit our autonomy and agency and freedom, and we willingly hand over the keys to the new system to the winners of the old system as if we are disinterested in the future and prefer that there should be more suffering to go around, more power in the hands of the few over the many.
We are at a point where we either bow down before the old system and try to maximally increase everyone’s suffering under that system in an effort to keep holding onto the system til the last possible moment while knowing it’s not compatible with the AI age, or we become bold enough to open our minds to new systems and new ways of organizing things. It will require imagination and creativity.
We created and upheld a system where billionaires can exist while people go hungry and die. We created a system where so-called social safety net programs functionally operate as traps removing peoples agency and keeping them prisoner to poverty indefinitely.
The new way should elevate the baseline floor level of human suffering that we decide below which we cannot tolerate. We should rebuild this new system brick by brick, a new vision starting from first principles.
While we disagree on so much as a species across genders, parties, religions and country lines around the whole planet, there is actually pretty remarkable convergence on what it is humans want and need in order to thrive and be happy:
food
water
shelter
sunlight
safety
security
love
fun
purpose
Let’s decide what the baseline quantity is for each of the above metrics that no human should go without. Let’s run the numbers, create the models, and set up a new means of distribution that starts not from a place of artificial scarcity, but starts from a place of abundance and compassion for life.
My people have suffered immensely at the hands of this system, and I have yet to escape the lifetime shadow of generational poverty despite my efforts. It’s not enough anymore just to be a white hetero college-educated male, you need to also be from a stable household where no one has any disabilities or medical issues or mental health issues, where both of your parents slaved their entire adult lives to position you with a savings for college, and you need to be well-connected within a supportive community like a church or extended family business. If not, or if you’re a minority, gay, disabled, etc… well you’re fucked. By design.
This system has long overstayed it’s welcome, and it is not worthy of an honorable sendoff ceremony. We should burn all of the dollars and tokens of the old system into the buildout of the information age, and usher in a new beginning based on abundance.
There is enough room for everyone to have shelter. There is enough food and water for everyone to eat, without needing to increase shareholder value.