11
Baby boom
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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Alright. I don't really know how to have conversations if we have to couch things in COL gradients. I was specifically responding to this person's sense of astonishment, because it's cruel and harmful for folks to feel the way that commenter felt. And it's - in a mirror kind of way - dehumanizing and damaging for the actually rich (I don't mean you), that they're astonished when they learn the ugly thing, too.
And I mean everything I said, and I said the most important bits right at the top. We go through these versions of life and think they are normal. Your reply to me sounds a lot like you doing exactly that, I dunno what else to say my friend but I wish you well and cheers, sincerely.
By avoiding COL?
And why is COL going to make people feel anything but better as an explanation? You're talking about "ugly things" too. You're stepping around something, I assume inequity, but I don't see how that is supposed to make anyone feel better than a pretty neutral COL. You make more but you spend more in those areas. That doesn't seem ugly to me?
I genuinely don't know what point you're trying to make. Are you saying different costs of living are inherently bad or inequality is bad? The latter makes sense but doesn't make sense with your previous statement. It just feels like you're doing the opposite of comforting the commenter's feelings, it seems you're trying to apply an interpretation with a very negative connotation when a much more reasonable, simpler, fitting one exists. Like do you think the screenshot is the uber wealthy bragging about how much they spend or someone complaining about the cost?
To reply more in the spirit of my original comment, since I spent a lot of words (probably many more than you wanted to read lol) on your COL angle -
(and actually, I realized after I got a little ways into this, I'm just clarifying my thoughts for my own benefit at this point lol, this is basically me just saying things. I'ma post it, it's Lemmy, why not)
The idea about "versions of life we go through, thinking they're normal" -
That's important to me. Going totally unreasonable here - I really believe that most people, regardless of background - if you actually exposed them to the true suffering of the very poor, and the true excess of the very rich, most people would understand that none of this is really acceptable, it only seems that way, it's actually deeply wrong. I think most people, if they could really get even just a weeklong glimpse of life in those shoes (both extremes, and one in the middle), nearly every single one - rich, poor, or in the middle - would clamor for abrupt change. I think we can care, we just don't see.
The opposite of the above, lacking it, is the "...thinking it's normal" I meant.
One enormous, but strange, barrier to all of us recognizing that truth is just the simple fact of the way our lives work - through none of our doing, we wind up ensconced in the environment in which we grew up, roughly, from a socioeconomic standpoint. We live our lives in that "lane", that "version", and we die in the way the people in our "versions" die, too. This applies across $0 - $Inf.
The barrier I'm describing as strange is that way because it's often very invisible, and - rich or poor - sudden realizations about one's lived "version", and the versions of others - those are jarring, damaging, to whomever experiences them.
We should probably do more of it, though. The jarring forced realizations. Like, a lot more. Luigi Mangione, for instance, I think that dude really understood, and the thing is - most people also understood, they thought what he did was dope. I really wish we'd all focus more on what happened there. Do more of it, even.