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You do not want to be rich (a thread).
You do not want to be rich. You want to be able to tell your boss to fuck off without losing your livelihood. You want to have time for your passions. You want to sleep in and spend time with your loved ones. You want the ability to participate in society, to have a voice.
We live in a society that denies us our basic freedoms, and then tells us we must earn enough money to prove we deserve them. Want reliable transportation? Better get a GOOD job. Want more than 1 week of vacation/year? Better enter into a lifetime of debt to prove you deserve it.
Capitalism says "Ya of course you can be free! All you gotta do is give up 50% of your day to a job that pays you a squalid wage, make smart investments w/ $$ u dont have, never make any mistakes, take on a massive amount of debt, and THEN, maybe in 50 years you can retire"
Capitalism CANNOT EXIST without a population to exploit. chattel slaves, sweatshop workers, immigrants, fast food workers, etc. Without someone whose labor and rights are STOLEN, there is no "wealth created" to send up the ladder. The poor are fodder for the capitalist machine.
You don't want to be rich, you just don't want to be exploited. You want to ENJOY your life. You don't want to work a soulless job you hate making money for someone else and barely scraping by yourself, while having no time for your own interests.
Capitalism says "We have to starve people to make this work. Better work hard so it's not you!" That is not a system of justice. That is a system that values the comfort of the elite over the wellbeing of the people. That system has no place in modern society.
And the worst, MOST INSIDIOUS part, is that difficult/important work =/= success.
How do you get rich? Not by being a social worker or saving lives or inventing a vaccine or doing a gross job no one wants to do.
How do you get rich? Not by being a social worker or saving lives or inventing a vaccine or doing a gross job no one wants to do.
If 'working hard' really made you rich, then why aren't the people in education, human services, sanitation, arts, ecology, the richest people? Aren't those jobs the hardest and most important?
OH RIGHT. It's because in order to become wealthy, you must create (exploit) wealth out of others. That's why lawyers, CEOs, investors, banks, record labels, are the rich ones. The system doesn't reward you for working hard, it rewards you for perpetuating the system.
I have bad news for you -you will never be rich. You are closer to poverty now than you ever will be to being a billionaire. But that's okay, because money doesn't buy happiness. Freedom buys happiness. We live in a society that forces us to use money to 'buy' our liberation.
It. Doesn't. Have. To Be. That. Way. A better world is possible. A system that works for the people that live under it, and not for the perpetual enrichment of the state/elite. The cycle can be broken but only by us, and only if we are brave enough to demand it.
