Category Archives: Poverty

September 27, 2017

This Is How We Live Now: Part 1

By wise sloth

Financially, 2016 was the worst year of my life financially. It hurt so bad I had to write three blogs to vent some of the emotional trauma. The disasters I experienced aren’t unusual, but that’s what makes this story poignant. My life is so normal, it’s a metaphor for every American who lives near the poverty line, who, no matter how long and hard they work, are perpetually having their life savings drained back to zero by predatory business practices.

The story of why 2016 sucked for me begins in 2008, with me being a hypocrite. Newly married and separated from the Air Force, I moved from Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii to Austin, TX, where my wife and I bought a duplex for $250k.

I didn’t want to pay a realtor. So I researched how to buy a house without one and immediately learned why realtors exist. There are so many laws around buying and selling houses it’s impossible to do it without having an associate’s degree worth of knowledge. After a few days of mind-numbing reading, I laid my head on my keyboard and muttered, “Why does this have to be harder than buying a car?”

Very complicated infographic of the process of buying a home. It's too long to describe, which implies you need to hire a real estate agent to buy a home.

The next day my wife and I met a realtor who came highly recommended from a distant relative. Our agent looked like a model and talked like an auctioneer. She picked us up in a brand new BMW equipped with space-age technology. After our first conversation, I felt like I was hiring a scout to take me on a treasure hunting expedition.

Over the next week, she showed us two trashy properties below our price range, two giant, expensive houses, and one solid option just above what we wanted to spend. So we picked that one, which in retrospect, I don’t think was an accident.

The only type of houses we looked at were duplexes, because we thought the tenant’s rent would cover our payments, and it would have if the cost of a mortgage equaled the listing price of the property, but after taxes, interest, and fees, the final price of a 30 year mortgage is double whatever the property is worth. So, after we picked the house, we learned we’d need to take out a $500k loan for a $250k property. Plus, most of the first fifteen years of payments would go to whittling down the interest, not buying equity in the house. Why do lenders have to structure loans that way? Because fuck you. That’s why.

Normally, home buyers have to put down a 20% down payment to qualify for a loan, and we didn’t have $50k. However, the Department of Veteran Affairs offers a special service to veterans. In exchange for $5k, it will vouch to pay the 20% down payment if the vet fails to pay their mortgage and the house gets foreclosed on. At that point, the VA will give the lender the 20% down payment, which in my case was $50k. So if my house got foreclosed on, I’d have to pay the VA, $50k.

This is a great deal, in the sense that it removes one of the glass ceilings stopping renters from becoming homeowners, but it’s a scammy solution to a problem created by the government. Think of it this way. The government enforces laws which make buying a home impossible to do without hiring legal representation to walk you through all the laws that inflate the cost of a property so high you can’t afford it. The government’s solution to the problem it created, is for homeowners to buy the lender an insurance policy to cover their losses if/when the veteran can’t afford to pay twice the advertised listing price of a property plus another $5k.

"You served your country with honor... now let the VA loan program honor your service."

My real estate agent and the lender she referred us to explained all this to me and acted like it was completely normal… because it is. So I signed the paperwork and went on with my life, which consisted mostly of spending 10+ hours per week sitting in Austin’s notorious traffic and working 40+ hours per week at a computer helpdesk job getting yelled at for problems other people created.

I told myself it would all be worth it when I finally beat the game and could live life on my own terms. Seven years later my wife and I divorced and sold the house. Luckily, the divorce was “no contest.” So we didn’t have to spend $5k each for lawyers. Since we filed the paperwork ourselves, it only cost a few hundred dollars in government fees and having to stand in front of a judge who didn’t know us to beg him to let us get on with our lives.

We had already moved away from Austin halfway through our marriage and rented out both duplex units through a property manager who sent us “repair” bills for $300-$1000 almost monthly. We finally terminated our contract after he charged us $90 to replace a smoke detector battery and another $90 to look in the chimney and tell us there weren’t any birds in it. Wanting to avoid confrontation, my wife told them we were moving to Samoa and had to sell the house.

The next property management company we hired never sent us any absurd charges in the two years we used them. Since they rarely did anything to the house, effectively, we paid them $240 per month to deposit our rent checks.

Our contract also stipulated that if we sold the house, they would act as our real estate agent and take a higher-than-normal percentage of the sale. I didn’t care at the time because I wasn’t planning on getting divorced and selling the house.

When we decided to sell in 2013, Austin was experiencing a housing bubble, which means houses are overpriced. So sellers make can make a lot of money, but buyers get screwed paying inflated prices that could drop by the time they get divorced and have to sell their house.

There was so much demand for duplexes, our property manager/realtor was able to sell the house in two days for $60k more than the original listing price, which sounds great, except we’d spent at least that much on the mortgage, upgrades, fraudulent repairs and property management dues.

In the end, my wife and I received $15k each, and my realtor took $30k for doing less than ten hours of work. Just to be clear, I didn’t make $15k profit. I got a $15k return on a $60k investment. In the grand scheme of things, I lost $45k.

After signing all the paperwork, the realtor handed me my check and said, “See? It wasn’t that painful, was it?”

I wanted to tell him, “The only painful part was when you pocketed $30k I spent seven years working my ass off for in exchange for ten hours of your labor. But that’s okay because it’s normal, right? Enjoy your normal life, sending your kids to college and buying them sports cars. I’ll enjoy my normal routine of not having a retirement.”

Cartoon of a giant, fat rich man in a business suit sitting at a table eating a huge pile of money. Next to him is a tiny, skinny poor person sitting in front of an empty plate

Pictured above: My real estate agent and me at the closing table

At least I had $15k to start my new life with when I moved to Houston, TX to live with my identical twin brother. I didn’t make it out of my marriage with a vehicle but was able to pay cash for a used truck, which I bought from a small car dealership, owned and operated by a sweet, old Southern country farmer type who prided himself in his old-fashioned honesty. He won my trust and sold me a 1997 truck with 50k miles on it for $7k. It had been owned by an old lady who only drove it to church on Sundays. So even though the truck was almost twenty years old, it was practically new.

Now that I had a vehicle to drive to work, I turned my attention to job hunting. Most of my adult life, I’d worked in IT, but halfway through my marriage, after my wife and I left Austin, I couldn’t find work in the IT sector. So I worked a series of odd jobs until my IT experience became obsolete and unusable. I’ve never complained about or regretted letting that door close because I absolutely hated IT work. What good is making money if you spend your entire life doing things that make you miserable to earn it? That’s wasting the present, not investing in the future.

Theoretically, that’s true, but in America’s economy, chasing your dream is shooting yourself in the foot. Without a college degree, training certificate or relevant experience, my job options were staggeringly limited. I didn’t sit around crying about this. I drove straight to a staffing agency I knew could hook me up with “an exciting job opportunity.”

For the next few summer months, I spent 9 hours per day in a warehouse digging through vats of marble-sized ceramic balls, picking out any that were tarnished, broken or disfigured. The only break I got was an hour for lunch, and my bosses monitored me closely via the security cameras. At first, I was happy because I felt lucky to be getting paid slightly higher than minimum wage, but it didn’t take long to realize my assessment of life was wrong. In reality, my life was actually quite shit.

I had 9 hours per day to think. So I used the opportunity to weigh my options and decide how to save my life. About the time I got laid off, I convinced my twin to move to Colorado with me, where he could work, and I could attend a year-long trade school for free using the M.G.I.Bill, which would also pay me a $1,200 per month living stipend.

He agreed immediately because Houston sucks. So we settled our affairs in the local area, loaded everything we owned into our two trucks and drove to the cheapest hotel in Denver. The first night we celebrated our new beginning with overpriced legal weed and a box of Franzia. It seemed appropriate since the hotel was so low class, the Denver Police Department had a permanently reserved parking spot directly in front of the lobby.

Before leaving Texas we’d searched for apartments in Denver and made a list of places that have vacancies within our price range. There were enough options that I wasn’t worried about finding a place. My only fear was settling on the second or third best option because it’s closer to my school. After spending thousands of hours in Austin traffic, not commuting had become a priority of mine.

My brother and I spent the next week touring Denver’s ghetto-est apartments and getting turned away by every slum lord. Come to find out, Denver has a local law, which says in order to qualify to rent a property, you must either have three months of paychecks from a local business or a co-signer who makes three times the amount of rent, neither of which we had.

The apartment managers were unswayable. No matter how much we begged, nobody would bend the rules for us. At our last apartment viewing, I put $7k cash on the table and offered to pay an entire six-month lease up front. The apartment manager scowled at me like I was a hillbilly offering to pay with a bag of dead possums. He looked me in straight in the eye and said with dead seriousness, “That’s not good enough.”

Since when is having enough money to buy something, not good enough to buy it? When did the American Dream turn into The Twilight Zone? My money was good. The problem is Colorado lawmakers want to prevent poor people from immigrating to their state. So they invented a disingenuous rule that all the local apartment owners agreed to go along with. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was written by wealthy apartment moguls who made campaign contributions to the politicians, who signed it into law.

Unable to legally rent an apartment, we looked on Craigslist for people offering to rent out spare rooms in their private homes, which is actually illegal under Colorado’s anti-boardinghouse laws. Luckily, this rule isn’t enforced, because Denver police have better things to do thank kick poor people out of their houses. And by “better things,” I mean, “legally robbing motorists to meet their ticket quotas.”

My brother and I spent the next two weeks viewing rooms and begging people to let us pay $900 per month to live in the cupboard under their stairs. It wouldn’t have taken so long, but most landlords required a $50 non-refundable, non-binding fee just to fill out an application, in addition to paying another $30-$50 to run a criminal background and credit history check on you, which requires you to give out your social security number, date of birth and bank account number.

We refused to apply for any of those rooms, which drastically limited our choices, but it was worth not risking paying $50 to have our identities stolen. After a long, discouraging search, we finally moved into a large, trashy two-story house containing five other tenants.

Our landlady was a semi-obese, bedridden hoarder whose husband had recently died of cirrhosis of the liver, and she was dying of cancer. Since she couldn’t work, the only way she could afford rent and groceries by sub-leasing her extra rooms. Her situation wouldn’t have been so dire, except she lived with two of her children, who were both in their early twenties, didn’t pay any bills and refused to get jobs.

All three were drug addicts who took whatever narcotics they could get their hands on. The son would steal his mother’s morphine, forcing her to send the daughter to buy more off the black market when the pain of dying became unbearable. When the mother confronted him about it, he bitched her out in front of the whole house for playing the cancer card too much. She died four months after we moved out.

One of her tenants was a 20-something-year-old black, gentle giant who moved to Denver to escape the apocalyptic ghetto in Chicago where he grew up. The other housemate was a white 20-something-year-old Texan who moved to Colorado for the weed. He’d been in Denver for several years and had moved into our “boarding house” after getting kicked out of his last apartment for overdosing on a psychedelic designer drug and diving out the second-story window naked and then fighting three police officers in the parking lot until they tazed him unconscious.

Gif of a man jumping out of a window

My brother and I shared a room and a bed for three months until we talked our landlady into letting us convert the basement into bedrooms. She only charged us $800 per month for two rooms, which is made it the cheapest price we’d ever find Denver.

We had some good times in that house, but most of them were bad. We moved out the day the landlord’s son blasted his stereo at 7am for the hundredth time and then threatened to “fuck me up” with a golf club if I tried to turn his music down. At that point, my brother returned to Texas, and I rented a camping spot outside of town and lived there until I found another room on Craigslist.

I finished out the school year living in an elderly couple’s house, paying $700 per month. At first, I lived in a tiny room on the ground floor but was able to move downstairs into the much larger basement after the landlady found her other tenant’s crack pipe in the drier. They’d already been planning on asking him to leave anyway because he was literally insane and thought government agents were following him at all times. Other than being a moocher, he never bothered me, but I was glad to see him go because after he learned I’d worked for the NSA during my military service, he assumed I was a government agent sent to spy on him.

After graduating from school, I decided to move back to Houston as well to be with a girl I’d met after my divorce and stayed in touch with. I moved in with her at the beginning of 2016, flat broke again.

The whole trip had been an asteroid shower of unexpected expenses. I expected Colorado to be Candy Land, but it turned out to be more like Chutes and Ladders. Every time you think you’re getting somewhere, you slide back down to where you started.

The problem isn’t that Colorado is worse than the rest of America, it’s a metaphor for the rest of the country. One of my friends from the military recently moved to San Antonio and was unable to rent an apartment for the same reasons I couldn’t. In the end, he bought a house using the same VA home loan program I did, because it was easier for him to qualify to buy a house than to rent one. My friend and I didn’t do anything wrong to deserve the moving nightmare we experienced. This is just how everyone lives now.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

My Goals
My Life Stories (in chronological order)
The Life of the Poor

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , , | posted in My life stories, Poverty

September 27, 2017

This Is How We Live Now: Part 2

By wise sloth

I moved to Houston at the beginning of 2016 feeling optimistic about life, because I had a loving girlfriend and a new professional credential that would allow me to earn more than minimum wage. Little did I know, my year was going to be destroyed by ordinary people under ordinary circumstances. If you live near the poverty line, the same routine catastrophes are going to devastate your life over and over again until society makes some serious changes.

I won’t say what I do for a living, but I will say it it’s intellectually and physically demanding. I eat healthily, drink lots of water, take supplements and stretch daily, but my body always hurts somewhere. I endure it though because I make $25 per hour, which is almost five times the minimum wage in Texas. Unfortunately, I can’t work full time, because I would live in constant pain until I suffered a career-ending injury. But I make enough money to survive and can spend a decent amount of time pursuing my passion of writing, which shouldn’t be too much to ask in life.

My employer makes about $1700 off the work I do every two weeks. Of that, I get to keep about $600, which covers my rent, utilities, and cell phone. So I spend two weeks out of every month breaking my body just to survive until the next month. If I don’t have any fun, I can save about $500 per month, and since I spend most of my free time writing, that’s easy to do.

Rather, it should be, except every single month of 2016 I kept getting hit with major unexpected bills. The contract my girlfriend signed with her landlord before I moved in required us to pay half the cost of repairs to his dilapidated house. I had to replace my glasses, shoes, vacuum, and lawn mower. Now that I had a girlfriend, gifts became a mandatory expense at each major holiday. Every time I managed to save more than a thousand dollars, some disaster of the month would knock me back to the start.

"Do not pass 'Go' and do not collect $200"

My biggest recurring bill was truck repairs. I’d already spent $700 repairing my sort-of-new truck in Colorado. Even though the engine didn’t have many miles, it had spent almost 20 years baking in hot Texas summers. The tires and half the engine had deteriorated to the point of failure. After spending $1200 on repairs in the first half of 2016, the engine overheated and warped a head gasket.

Having been ripped off by enough mechanics to distrust them, I researched internet reviews until I found a place that presented itself as a good Christian business and had positive reviews.

I was able to have my truck towed there for “free,” because I get my auto insurance through USAA and pay an extra $2 per month for roadside assistance. $2 sounds like a good deal, until you realize, over the years I’ve been using them, I’ve given USAA $10k and never got anything in return other than a piece of paper that says I’m not breaking the law.

The staff at the mechanic shop were wonderfully friendly and made me feel like family at first. After the mechanic diagnosed the warped head gasket, the supervisor told me it would cost $2k to fix. Then he tried upselling me on replacing every other part under the hood. It would have cost $5k to fix everything he wanted, but the truck wasn’t even worth that much. In the end, I agreed to spend an extra $1.5k on replacements, and I told him the only reason I couldn’t spend more was because I was flat broke and had to get a credit card through USAA to be able to cover the whole bill. So I could only get the most important parts fixed. He told me I should replace the radiator, but if I only had $1.5k to spend, I should fix other things first. In retrospect, he should have had more foresight.

As soon as I drove off the lot, the radiator broke. So I drove back and told the nice supervisor what happened. He reminded me that he had recommended I replace the radiator. I reminded him I couldn’t afford to, and since I came in with a warped head gasket, he probably should have prioritized fixing the radiator. More importantly, if they’d diagnosed my problem correctly, they would have found out the radiator was busted before I drove it off the lot. So it would be harsh to make me pay the $500 they automatically charge any time they have to pull an engine out of a vehicle, which would need to be done to replace the radiator.

The supervisor told me there was no way to know the radiator would blow after driving it 1000 feet, and the fault is mine because, “I should have had more foresight to replace that radiator.”

After the fourth time he told me I should have had more foresight, I wanted to tell him, “You’re right. I didn’t have enough foresight to see you extorting me into six months of debt. If I’d known you were going to do that, I’d have broken my body working harder to prepare for the Christian ass raping you just gave me.”

He didn’t offer me any kind of loyalty discount. He just charged me $700 and acted surprised when I wasn’t smiling and laughing with him like family anymore.

What your mechanic pretends to be... a friendly, smiling guy saying, "Yes, sir. Not a problem!" ... but once back in the shop... a maliciously grinning devil saying, "We got another victim, boys! Hahahaahah!"

I paid for everything on a USAA credit card because a friend said it would lower my auto insurance, which I had noticed was higher than it used to be. When I checked my account, I discovered I’d never canceled the renter’s insurance on my old house, and had paid $2k over the past two years insuring a property I didn’t own. Normally, that would be a bad thing, but USAA was gracious enough to refund me the money. In another lifetime I could have put that towards my retirement or used it to enjoy life, but it all went straight to back to USAA to pay down my credit card.

USAA didn’t have to refund me all that money. Most American businesses wouldn’t, but it didn’t surprise me when they did. In 2015 USAA distributed $1.6 billion of profits back to their customers. Every year I get a check from them for about $50 with a note that basically says, “We have too much money. Here’s some back.” In addition, their customer representatives are the nicest in the world. I’ve literally told people, “If you’re ever having a bad day, call USAA. I always feel better after doing any kind of business with them.”

I stopped feeling that way after a few months of putting all my disposable income towards my debt. Each month, my friends at USAA charged me about $50 in interest, which means I paid $50 per month to not have $4000. If I had less money, they’d charge me even more.

The leaders of USAA and every other lending institution are millionaires who don’t need any more money. They could all stop working today and still live like gods for the rest of their lives. They know 50% of Americans live at the poverty line, all of whom need credit cards and loans to cover the cost of living in a country where every business charges as much as possible and forces those with the least money to pay the highest prices.

The Feudalism Pyramid... THEN: Monarchs/landed gentry/clergy/royal ministers/merchants/vassals/everyone else... NOW: Central bankers, big bankers, corporate elite, elected officials, top bureaucrats, top professionals, everyone else

Economics is complicated, but it’s easy to calculate why half the country lives in poverty. Businesses charge their customers as much as possible and pay their employees as little as possible. That’s a simple recipe for bankruptcy. Charging people more money, the poorer they are, is a recipe for debt slavery. The problem isn’t that poor people are being targeted. It’s that everyone is being overcharged, and the only way to stay ahead of the game is for you to overcharge or underpay someone else. So everyone has to become part of the problem. The main reason we don’t stop is because we don’t even notice we’re doing it. Economic cannibalism is the only way of life we’ve ever experienced. So we assume it’s the way.

USAA and my mechanic may provide customers with vital services, but their business model is ultimately based on gouging desperate people. Jesus wouldn’t do that to veterans. Only someone who needs to seriously rethink their life would do that. Since everyone is guilty of the same sin, we all need to do some soul-searching.

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

My Goals
My Life Stories (in chronological order)
The Life of the Poor

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in My life stories, Poverty

September 27, 2017

This Is How We Live Now: Part 3

By wise sloth

Note: The events of this story are real, but the names have been changed.

This is the third installment of a three-part series, in which I illustrate why half of all Americans live near the poverty line by using my life as a case study.

Case in point, medical bills are the most common cause of bankruptcy in America. In 2016 I became part of that statistic, and having gone through the process, I shudder to think how normal it is. Nobody should have to go through what I did, because getting health care in America is as frustrating and overpriced as buying real estate.

I started learning this four months ago. One morning, as I was brushing my teeth, I looked in the mirror and noticed a white pustule on my gums. At first, I thought I had cancer. After suffering an existential crisis, I collected myself and recalled that I’d had two root canals done on one of my bottom, front teeth by a military dentist eight years ago. The most reasonable explanation was the root canal had failed, and the tooth got infected.

Since I no longer had access to the military’s socialized medical system, I’d have to pay a civilian dentist. Knowing they charge an arm and a leg, I looked up cheap insurance on the internet and spent several evenings slogging through mind-bogglingly complicated insurance websites. Unable to make sense of all the terms and restrictions, I decided to take another approach.

I searched for a dentist office with good reviews in my area and found out which insurance they accepted. Then I paid $125 for the insurance and waited for it to activate… hoping the pustule didn’t become life-threatening in the meantime. In case you’re wondering, the reason there’s a waiting period for insurance to activate, is so you can’t wait until an emergency happens to sign up.

When I finally got my insurance card, I took it to the dentist’s office, which we’ll call Negan Family Dentistry. The secretary at the front desk told me they accept my insurance company, but not my plan. FML.

Afraid to leave the pustule untreated any longer, I paid $50 for a checkup, which lasted about 15 minutes.

A dental technician led me down a long hallway lined with booths like a hair salon. Walking down the assembly line I started to worry I’d be treated less like a family member and more like a fast food order. My suspicions were confirmed when the technician X-rayed the one tooth with the pustule under it. Then a dentist came in and told me it needed to be replaced and left.I don’t even know what the dentist looked like because he or she stood over my shoulder wearing a mask for the entire forty-five seconds they spoke before dashing back to the salt mines.

After the dental apparition vanished, the tech sent me to the front desk, where the secretary gave me a bill for $250 and the phone number for Negan Family Periodontics, two towns away. Everything happened so fast it made my head spin.

In a daze, I asked what the bill was for, and she said, “It’s for a temporary tooth we put in after the real one is taken out.” I asked why I was paying her when she was sending me somewhere else. She said, “We put that part in.”

I told her I’d think about it and threw the bill away. A few hours later I called Negan Family Periodontics and told them I needed a tooth replaced before I died of blood poisoning. The secretary told me their next available appointment was two weeks away, but she promised to call me if they had any cancellations. She never called.

After fourteen days of worrying I was about to die, I drove to the place “my” dentist referred me to. The secretary who greeted me was an older woman with white skin but Hispanic facial features. She spoke warmly until I told her I didn’t have insurance. Then she snapped into full aggression mode, basically accusing me of not intending to pay my bill. I gave her my credit card and driver’s license, which she copied angrily and pushed back at me.

Afterwards, a nicer lady handed me a bill for $3.5k. By the time I saw my periodontist, Dr. Simon, my head was spinning again. Dr. Simon’s cheerful personality put me a little at ease. He laughed and joked like he didn’t have a care in the world. I wanted to like him, and I tried to act happy but couldn’t stop thinking about how I just paid him six more months of all my disposable income for what would amount to less than half a day’s work on his part.

Photo of Simon and an unnamed character from the TV series, "The Walking Dead." Simon is smiling maniacally, and the other guys is looking solemn and quiet with his eyes cast doen

Pictured from left to right: Dr. Simon’s eternally happy smile, and my life circumstances being the opposite of his, thanks to him

I offered to barter my professional services in exchange for reducing my fees, which is legal, but he responded with a long speech about how he always follows the rules to a fault. As the overpriced laughing gas kicked in, I wanted to say, “It’s too bad there isn’t a rule about not extorting your customers out of their future life savings every time they have a minor medical emergency.”

An hour later, he’d pulled out my decayed tooth, cut it in half, screwed in a metal foundation for a fake tooth, and glued the top of the old one back in place so I wouldn’t look like a jack-O’-lantern for the next few months while my jaw bone healed around the prosthetic.

The next time I walked into Negan Family Periodontics, was for a cleaning I didn’t ask for and wasn’t necessary for the tooth replacement. As soon as I sat down in the waiting room, The Dragon at the front desk told me I needed to pay another $1k to the dentist from Negan Family Dentistry, who would be putting my fake tooth in. Stunned, I asked why I was paying someone else more money to finish the job I thought I was paying them to do. In response, she ripped some papers out of a folder and waved them in my face, telling me I already signed something agreeing to everything, and I better pay up now, with a tone of voice that clearly said she didn’t believe I would.

I reminded her she already had my credit card number. So anytime she needed another $1k from me, she could just keep charging my card, and I’d just keep being bankrupt. Snidely, she replied, “Great.”

When I asked Dr. Simon about the charges, he explained he would only mount a screw in my jaw, and the original dentist who referred him, would take a mold of the mounting plate, send it to a lab to make a fake tooth from, and then screw it in. I asked why he couldn’t do it, and he lectured me about how he specializes in his field, and other dentists specialize in theirs. So it’s best that someone else screws the prosthetic tooth in. The process sounded illogical to me, but he assured me it was normal. So I let the issue go.

On my way out of the building, The Dragon gave me an appointment date a few weeks later to remove the half-tooth and install a screw into the plate. She also said she would schedule an appointment with Negan Family Dentistry for the same day so Dr. Negan could take a mold of the screw to make the final fake tooth from. However, after calling three times and getting a busy signal, she said she’d try again later and relay my appointment time to me. I never heard back from her.

Two weeks later, the secretary at Negan Family Dentistry called and informed me they double booked my appointment and needed to change it, which turned out to be convenient, not only because I didn’t know what my appointment date was, but because The Dragon scheduled my appointment at Negan Family Periodontics one hour before the appointment at Negan Family Dentistry, two towns away, which would have been impossible to reach in time. So I rescheduled the second appointment for the next morning.

The reason the appointments were supposed to be for the same day is because after Dr. Negan made a mold of the screw, he normally would have installed the temporary tooth I never paid $250 for. However, I didn’t pay for it because I couldn’t afford to waste money on a cosmetic enhancement I’d wear for two weeks. My only option was to leave the screw exposed while the third-party dental lab Dr. Negan subcontracts his work to, made my fake tooth and shipped it back to Negan Family Dentistry.

So, the morning after Dr. Simon installed the screw, I showed up at Negan Family Dentistry looking like a James Bond villain. After checking in, I sat down and happily thumbed through an uninteresting magazine. After months of racking up debt, driving all over the Houston area and being treated like an asshole for being poor, the ordeal was almost over. My life was finally looking up.

Then the kind, attractive, secretary politely called me to her desk and asked for another $916. I explained I’d already paid that bill through Negan Family Periodontics. Confused, she said they don’t do that. At my urging, she called The Dragon, who told her they didn’t do that. I thought I already paid this bill, but I knew it would be pointless to argue with The Dragon, and I was already mad enough to say things to her I’d regret.

I don’t know where the miscommunication came from. Maybe The Dragon and Dr. Simon did a terrible job of explaining my fees. Maybe I didn’t understand what they were saying because my head was spinning from getting hit with a baseball bat named, “Debt.” Maybe I’m just stupid, but there is one thing I’m absolutely sure of. Nobody ever said anything about me having to pay another $916 for the appointment in question.

If I had known I’d have to pay more after the initial $3.5k, I might not have agreed to it. If Negan Family Dentistry had given me an itemized breakdown of every step and fee involved in their tooth-replacement process the first day I walked in their office, I probably wouldn’t have ever called Negan Family Periodontics. Now I have to wonder if they consciously chose not to be transparent so they could surprise me with outrageous bills after I’d already committed.

Their surprise worked. I didn’t see the debt bat coming until it hit me between the eyes, sending me into that familiar punch-drunk feeling again. Clumsily, I used my cell phone to check my account balances to see if I even had $916. I didn’t, but I was able to cover the bill by maxing out my credit card and draining all my checking and savings accounts, including money I’d set aside to renew my vehicle registration.

By the time the technician sat me in the exam chair, my net worth equaled $23 in cash and $6k in debt. Financially, it was the lowest point in my life. My body’s fight or flight response flooded my veins with adrenaline causing me to shake as the technician put the bib around my neck. She may as well have injected me with 10 milligrams of fear and charged me $100 for it.

I had a few minutes to close my eyes and try to breathe the nausea away before Dr. Negan casually sauntered in.

Photo of Negan from the TV series, "The Walking Dead," Negan is walking in a dimly lit forest carrying a baseball bad wrapped in barbed wire

Pictured above: a metaphor for my dentist

Without looking in my direction, he asked the wall in a rote, disinterested tone of voice, how my Thanksgiving had been. I said, “Pretty good,” which was a lie. The truth is, I had broken up with my girlfriend that week and moved into a cheap trailer next to a railroad track with my brother, who spent Thanksgiving with his ex-girlfriend while I sat alone at our new “home” writing and wearing earplugs to block the sound of the train horns. Part of me was happy for the solitude, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that the only reason I had to live in a shitty trailer by a railroad track was because my dental bills had erased all my other options in life.

I’d completely run out of fakeness when Dr. Negan asked how I was doing. Exasperated, I replied, “Not good, since you bankrupted me.”

Without missing a beat, he launched into a bitter, condescending tirade, saying, “Oh!? So, you don’t think dentists deserve to get paid? You don’t think ten years of school is worth any compensation? We rack up a lot of debt in medical school, and it’s not cheap to run a dentist office, but hey, if you think our prices are unfair, you can just go to Mexico.”

Photo of Negan and Rick from the TV series, "The Walking Dead." Negan is smiling maliciously at Rick, as Rick stares into space hopeless and afraid

Dr. Negan gives me a pep talk

He actually said that. I couldn’t believe it. After taking everything from me, he was bitching me out for not saying thank you.

Ironically, he was right about one thing. I had a friend who’d recently returned from a medical tourism resort in Mexico where he spent $4k to fix everything wrong with all his teeth. Plus, he got a two-week vacation at an all-inclusive resort. He wasn’t treated by the dirty, filthy Mexican dentists Dr. Negan was so prejudiced against. He saw American doctors who had moved to Mexico so they could help people without having to charge an arm and a leg and a dream to replace one tooth.

My life would be profoundly better on multiple levels if I had the foresight to go to Mexico. For the same price, I could have even flown to a medical resort in Thailand, where the doctors and staff would have treated me like a god instead of a cockroach.

My appointment with Dr. Negan lasted 30 minutes, most of which he spent bitching me out. The rest of the time he made a mold of my tooth space using the same process Dr. Simon used when he took his mold, which makes me wonder if both of these guys were referring me back and forth to each other to rack up referral charges.

If my final appointment took the same amount of time, I would be paying both my dentists an average of $1k per hour. I’ll have to work 40 hours to pay off one of theirs. If I made minimum wage, then one easy hour of their life would be worth 140 grueling hours of mine. That’s a narcissistic, psychopathic assessment of the value of life, based on a lie.

No human being is so much better than another, that an hour of their life is worth 40-140 times anyone else’s. Plus, if they’re charging $1k per hour and work 8 hours per day, that’s $40k per week. Even if half the money goes to expenses, it doesn’t cost $20k per week to run a dentist office. Even if Dr. Negan only pocketed $200 per hour, that doesn’t make it any less painful for me to pay $1k per hour.

In the end, the truest measure of Dr. Negan and Dr. Simon’s morality is the size of their retirement accounts. They might have taken on a lot of debt in school, but they’re not going to lower their prices after paying it off. They’re going to charge as much as they can get away with for as long as their career lasts. In the end, they’re going to retire in mansions surrounded by space-age luxury that would make a medieval king jealous, and the only reason they’ll get to do that is because their vaults will be full of peasant’s gold.

I’ll spend the rest of my life living in a trailer next to a train track, wearing earplugs in bed and getting stomach ulcers from lying awake, worrying about how long I can put off getting extorted by family-friendly medical professionals.

The last thing the Dr. Negan said to me before he ejected me from the dental assembly line was, “Hey, man. Everything’s going to be fine. Everything is going to work out.” If he truly believes that, then living in a gated community must have disconnected him from reality. In the America where I live, I’ll never be free. Perpetual debt will always force me to work for a boss who underpays me, just to pay off the businesses who overcharge me and add on extra fees for not having any money.

Picture of Rick from the TV series "The Walking Dead" looking hopeless as the post-apocalyptic mob boss, Negan, enters his survivor's compound to steal Rick's resources

Pictured left to right: Dr. Negan deciding what he’ll do with my life savings, and the look on my face as I watch him horde my hopes and dreams

If medical school, rent, and medical equipment are so extortionately priced that dentists are struggling to keep their practices open, there must be better solutions than passing on the extortion to customers. If medical professionals truly cared about their clients, which Dr. Negan assured me he did, then they would be doing something to fix the problem.

As it stands, they’re just shrugging their shoulders and saying, “If I can pass this problem onto the customer, then it’s not my problem. Fuck em…” just like I metaphorically said to the single mother who rented my duplex unit in Austin.

The simplest solution is, stop fucking your customers in the ass with a friendly smile, but if you can’t afford to do that, then try to imagine how angry and dejected bankruptcy must make all your customers feel. Then take that anger and shout it in the face of the people who are overcharging you. Unionize and boycott those people. Write blogs and give speeches about how you have to double the cost of your products to pay rent or a mortgage that’s twice as expensive as the property is worth.

The least you could do is not be silent, but if you’re smart enough to earn a Ph.D., then you should be able to think of at least one solution to high operating costs other than raping your customers and bitching them out when they say, “Ouch. You’re killing me,” instead of, “Thank you, sir. May I have another?”

If you’ve read this far, you may be thinking, “Hey, Travis. Wake up. The common denominator in all your problems is you. If you were better at adulting, and less angry about life, then you wouldn’t have dug yourself into a pit of debt and made enemies with people who just wanted to help you.”

If you’re underwhelmed with my plight enough to leave a comment telling me what an irresponsible, whiner I am, then you need to take to the streets and shout the exact same speech in the face of the other 6 billion people in the world who live below the poverty line. Maybe I am whiny, but if everybody stopped complaining about normalized extortion, the only thing it would change is how much longer the majority of humanity stays in poverty.

If you believe I can’t blame anyone except myself for my bankruptcy because I didn’t have insurance, then you’ve either never used insurance, or you’ve accepted insanity as normal.

The reason I needed insurance in the first place is the exact same reason why medical tourism resorts exist: because the cost of medical care in America is inflated beyond reason by insurance companies.

If you’ll recall, I did buy the insurance Negan Family Dentistry advertised they accepted. If they’d been more transparent, I would have known the right policy to buy. If they didn’t pick and choose which policies they accepted, I could have just used any insurance.

It wouldn’t have mattered much if I did because all policies are designed to be as useless and difficult to use as possible. The company I work for offers medical insurance for $124 per month, but it has a $6k deductible, which wouldn’t have covered the cost anyway.

If I had paid $124 for medical insurance every month since I separated from the military in 2007, I would have paid $13k by 2016. Even if insurance would have covered the entire cost of my tooth replacement, I still would have saved $8k in the long run by not having insurance since 2007.

Doctors don’t even like insurance even though it pays so well because they have to hire an otherwise unnecessary employee just to file all the paperwork. Since doctors don’t want the extra cost to impact their salary, they pass the cost onto the customers by raising prices accordingly, which I’m sure they feel terrible about.

To make matters worse, doctors have to wait months for insurance claims to be processed and pay out. As much of a nightmare as insurance companies are to work with, doctors should know better than anyone, bitching customers out for not having insurance is blaming the victim.

The problem is that the insurance companies have rigged the system to require everyone to buy extortion protection in the first place, and doctors have chosen to go along with it. I wouldn’t have lost the game if it wasn’t rigged.

I can’t afford anything, because everyone gives me the “fuck you” price instead of “the friend discount,” and you don’t have more nice things because you get treated the same way. So if you’re mad at me for getting extorted, then be mad at yourself too, and be mad that someone convinced you to accept this sadistic system as normal.

My story ends with me going back to Negan Family Dentistry to get my fake tooth put in. Before leaving the house I checked my bank account to see how much money wasn’t in it, just in case I got surprised me with another bill. There was no need to check how much wiggle room was left on my credit card because it was already maxed out. Luckily, the secretary surprised me by informing me they wouldn’t be hitting me in the head with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire again.

The whole appointment took about fifteen minutes, and most of that was done by a tech who makes as little as supply and demand will allow Dr. Negan to get away with underpaying her. The tech put some kind of clip on the screw sticking out of my gums. Then Dr. Negan came in and snapped the crown on. The procedure didn’t even require any cementing or heating, which proves everything Dr. Simon told me about me needing to see Dr. Negan for the final procedure because he was a specialist, was a complete lie. I could have done the final step myself.

At the end of the appointment, I gave Dr. Negan a slip of paper with the address to this blog on it. I told him I didn’t use his real name. I just needed to tell my customer service story, and that it wasn’t glowing, but he could use it to fix the holes in his process.

He didn’t understand what a blog is. So I had to explain it to him. His eyes told me he still didn’t understand. So I wasn’t surprised when he pressed me to just tell him what the essay said.

I told him, the biggest issue, and the reason I was so upset the last time we met, was because his prices were deceptive, and I wasn’t given the total cost at the beginning. When I said that, his eyes bulged out, and he shouted at me, “YOU’RE A LIAR!”

Experience has taught me that trying to give someone advice who doesn’t want to admit when they’re wrong, will only result in them attacking you until they’ve said something ugly enough to convince them-self you’re the problem. So I just turned on my heel and walked out the door. Dr. Negan chased me down in the lobby and tried to bitch me out some more. I’d already said everything I had to say in the blog, and I didn’t want him to ruin my day any more than he already had. So I continued walking, right out the front door.

As I exited the building, he shouted, “Have a Merry Christmas!” His attempt to take the high road didn’t impress me after calling me a liar for trying to point out the flaws in his customer service. It just reinforced my perception that he’s a delusional ass hole.

I don’t even believe in Christmas, and he obviously doesn’t believe in Christian values.

The worst part of the story is that, even though I’ll never go back to Negan Family Dentistry or Negan Family Periodontics, I won’t get a better price anywhere else in America. I’ll just keep getting my head bashed in and my savings looted, just like you… unless something drastic changes.

Before the world can change, people like Dr. Negan and Dr. Simon need to change the way they justify their predatory business practices to themselves.

If you enjoyed this story, you’ll also like these:

My Goals
My Life Stories (in chronological order)
The Life of the Poor

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October 30, 2009

The economy is stacked against you: part 2

By wise sloth

Outline of a man drawn on a table that looks like he's being crushed by a deck of cards sitting on top of him

I bought a house almost a year ago. The only reason I was able to get the loan for the house is because I’m a veteran, and the VA will vouch for veterans’ down payments on houses. Otherwise I wouldn’t have even been able to afford the down payment. Nobody tells you this until the last step of the home buying process, but if you take out a 30 year mortgage, between interest and taxes you house will end up costing twice as much as its worth. Knowing this I bought a duplex so my renter could pay half my mortgage. This is a hollow victory though, because my renter isn’t paying half the cost of my house. My renter is paying the fake fees forced upon me….well, most of the fake fees anyway.

I read an article written by an ex-car salesman a long time ago who said that when you see, “As Low As…” written on the window of a car for sale it really means, “As Much As…” It’s common knowledge that when you drive a brand new car off the lot it looses several thousand dollars in value. Why is that? Because you got ripped off by the dealer, and people are only dumb enough to get ripped off by dealers and not by ordinary people.

How much money do you think it actually costs to make a phone call? Like one cent. How much more do you think it actually costs to make a collect call? The same price. How much do you get charged though? As much as possible.

How much does a college professor get paid per year? How much does the average student get charged to attend college per year? How many students does the average college professor teach per year? Where is all that extra money going?

Inflation could be easily kept at 0%. However, if that were to happen everyone would just keep their money in the bank and save it for a rainy day. While that will help the regular Joe, it doesn’t help stimulate the economy. So the government intentionally tries to keep inflation at about 3% so that you’ll be punished for saving your money and will invest it. Most economists agree this is a good thing for the economy.

Inflation supposedly goes up 3% per year. When I was 10 years old a soda out of a vending machine cost 50 cents. Now it’s not uncommon to see a soda that costs $1.50. I’ve even seen sodas at theme parks that cost $2.50. $1.50 is 200 times the cost of a soda 18 years ago. $2.50 is 400 times the cost of a soda 18 years ago. At 3% inflation a year (compounded) soda should cost about $1.36 today. This is also assuming that in the past 18 years the soda companies haven’t started using cheaper ingredients to lower the cost of production and haven’t moved their factories to third world countries to get cheaper labor. If either of those two things were to happen you’d expect to see the price go down for the consumer. Actually, they are using cheaper ingredients and cheaper labor, but the price hasn’t gone down. In fact, it’s gone up.

The pharmaceutical business is possibly the worst of all mark up profiteers.

I could give these kinds of examples and do these calculations all day, but you don’t need me to. You know that the price you pay for everything is extremely marked up. Plus, prices are getting more marked up every day while the quality is getting lower. Plus, all of our luxury goods are being made in sweat shops and we don’t give a fuck. Fuck brown children. That should be the new American slogan. But whatever. They’re not important. Let’s get back to talking about us.

There was a magical time in ancient history past when the cost of a thing actually represented its value. Today it’s taken for granted that anything you buy is going to cost at least 100% its cost of production. Some things, like I’m guessing “Smarties” sugar candies for example, cost thousands of times more to buy than they cost to produce. With car, house, life, etc. insurance we pay for nothing 99 times out of 100. And car insurance is mandatory. The government came to us and said, “I declare that you must pay $50-$200 per month on nothing…just in case. Just in case we ever save any fucking money for ourselves.

Here’s the bottom line. Every year the consumer is getting charged more and more than the things you buy are worth. You’re also getting paid less and less every year in order to maximize corporate profit. If corporations can get cheaper labor oversees they’ll just shit can your job all together. The fact that public school teachers almost never get raises that meet or beat inflation just goes to show our nation’s fucked up priorities.

The bottom line is that you’ll never get ahead because it’s too expensive. This is great for business, because that means you’ll have to take out more loans and pay more interest. It’s too expensive to live because that’s the way the people you cheered into public office designed the system. Only one or two politicians are even talking about curbing corporate extortion, and it’s only going to get worse.

That’s the main reason your life sucks, because the economy is stacked against you.

If you liked this post, you may like these: 

Leave a comment | posted in Poverty

October 30, 2009

The economy is stacked against you: Part 1

By wise sloth

Outline of a man drawn on a table that looks like he's being crushed by a deck of cards sitting on top of him

I just wanted to vent some frustration I’ve been feeling lately that everyone without a trust fund can relate to. By saying this I’m not looking for advice. I know the solutions to the problem. It’s just that those solutions are long and hard. So this is really just a commentary on how the system in the supposedly greatest nation in the world sucks.

Man, it just seems like the cards are stacked against us from birth, and succeeding in the land of opportunity is fucking hard. I mean, really hard. Yeah, I know you’re supposed to buck up, not be a pussy, rise to the challenge, and overcome the obstacles in life, but it seems like there are a lot of superfluous obstacles standing between the common person and the success we’ve been promised as our birthright.

For example, we have free public education. Awesome. This hasn’t always been the case, and the quality of life for the common person increased exponentially after this change occurred. However, it’s a well documented fact that the poorer you are the poorer an area you’re going to live in. The poorer the area you live in the worse your education will be. Thus, the less of a chance you’ll have to succeed. The richer you are the better school district you’ll be in. Thus, on top of all the other benefits you were born with, you’ll also get this free source of empowerment.

College is too damned expensive. I sold my soul to the military to pay for college even though I graduated 11th in my class and had a few scholarships. It still wasn’t enough. You can get loans to go to college, but why should you have to do that? College should be free. As long as it’s not it’ll serve as an obstacle to success for the poor and a vehicle to success for the rich. As it stands though, poor people either don’t go to college or finance it through loans that they’ll be paying back for a very long time. Thus, even when they enter the work force they’re starting their lives in debt.

When you enter the work force without a college degree you can only climb the corporate ladder so far based on your merit. You’ll quickly reach a point though where you can’t go any higher without a degree. The really fucked up thing is, and you’ll see this if you work any length of time, that people with degrees don’t have to prove their merit nearly as much as people without degrees. So you end up getting unqualified morons in high paying management positions who can’t be fired because their unqualified moronic boss believes that since they have a degree they must have earned it and the position they hold. All the while the non degree holders are busting their asses twice as hard for half as much with little hope for advancement unless they go in debt while taking night classes after coming home from an exhausting, thankless job.

Something you probably won’t be taught in school unless you take economy classes in a college you can’t afford is that you have to buy a house. Paying rent your entire life is a huge waste of money that will terminally cripple your financial security. And unfortunately, you probably can’t afford a house. You certainly can’t pay cash. So you have to get a loan. You can’t get a loan for that much money unless you make enough money, which you probably don’t, and/or your credit is very good. Your credit won’t be very good though unless you have a long history of paying off debt on time. Well, if you’ve been in debt all these years, then you don’t have any money. But supposing you can get a mortgage you have to pay 20% down, which you probably can’t do. So you have to pay mortgage insurance, which is through the roof and people who were born rich don’t have to pay. You also have to buy insurance, pay an inspector to inspect your house, agree to an interest rate that is based on no other calculation than how much the banks can gouge you for, and on top of all that, if you only pay the minimum balance of your mortgage each month the final cost of your house including interest will be twice as much as the actual cost of the house. The poor get twice as poor out of this arrangement and the rich bankers get twice as rich.

Suppose you want to get around this problem by building your own house. Not so fast, there are so many bureaucratic (even the word is spelled all fucked up) red tape around that you won’t be able to do it without paying someone a lot of money who knows the ropes. Plus you’ll have to pay surveyors, draftsmen, building permits, construction crews who will each mark up the price, etc. And you’ll have to buy a house in the middle of nowhere because you can’t afford good land close to the jobs. And the reason office buildings won’t be built near your house is because of zoning restrictions that prevent office building from being built in residential neighborhoods. So you have to spend a lot of gas (and money) driving to work. And the only reason gas prices are so high is because the ability to lobby and finance politicians through campaign contributions has created a streamlined method for big business to bribe and control our politicians…in a country that claims to have the greatest government in the world to the point that we’ve been overthrowing governments for decades to implement our form of government there.

Supposing you can overcome all this, you still have to save for retirement. Your best vehicle for this is to use a tax sheltered retirement account like a Roth IRA or certain 401K plans. For rich people they can shove their spare cash in these vehicles and laugh all the way to the bank. Poor people have to sacrifice luxuries and sometimes necessities to put money in these plans. But they’re also putting their money towards fees that they get nothing in return for. Sure, it costs money to run these things, but the fees translate into ludicrous profits for the institutions and a disheartening setback for the individual. Plus, if you want to withdraw any of that money out early you’ll be fined a ludicrous amount unless you use it for very specific emergencies. Well, it’s you’re fucking money! Why are you getting penalized for taking it out? To discourage you from withdrawing it for your own good? How much good does getting raped in the wallet do you?

Your entire life you’ll still have to deal with other setbacks like registering/insuring your car. It’s you’re fucking car. Why do you have to remind the government once a year? Why do you have to renew your driver’s license? It’s not to make sure you can still drive, because you don’t take a driving test each time. You need a phone too. And the telecommunications companies will tell you they love you and will help you more than the next company, but then they pull this shit. I moved to an area with no Sprint service. Sprint refused to cancel my contract without charging me $200. Yeah, I signed a contract, but only because you have to have a phone these days. And the phone companies know this. So they’re going to use it as leverage on you. My wife even went to Sprint to get her free upgraded phone after using the company for several years. There was an $18 administrative fee to get the new phone. That doesn’t sound like a free phone to me. It sounds like an $18 phone. And we’re so used to this Orwellian double speak shit from every business we deal with that we don’t bat an eye at it anymore. That’s just life. Life is one long process of getting ripped off by the people who say they care about you, and we just take it in the ass because we have no other option save building an illegal house in the mountains and living off stream water and beaver meat. Moreover, when we bitch about it we tell each other we’re pussies and to suck it up. That doesn’t sound like being manly to me. That sounds like being a fucking idiot. But again, there ain’t shit we can do about…except boycott…which may or may not accomplish anything. Some of us could strike, but the greatest government in the world has made it illegal for a lot of people to strike. Nah, if you’re not rich you’re just fucked. All you have to look forward to is a life of hard work only to be rewarded by an underfunded retirement…

Drawing of a man in a business suit carrying a large bag labeled "CHEAP LABOR." He is saying, "I call it opportunity, not exploitation."

Unless you start your own business, but there’s so much bureaucratic red tape you have to navigate in order start a business that you’ll have to hire a CPA to set up your business for you. You could run it illegally under the table, but then you’ll go to jail and go more into debt. But coincidentally, you probably don’t have the money to pay the startup costs of a business anyway.

If you liked this post, you may like these: 

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October 28, 2009

An American Beauty-esque Rant About Life In America

By wise sloth

You ever feel like Kevin Spacey’s character in “American Beauty?”

 

 

You have an indoor job that doesn’t require a lot hard physical labor. So theoretically you have an easy job, but you come home from work every day tired. You’d think you would have lots of energy because there’s so little sensory stimulation in suburbia, but your job is stressful and pointless. You have no job satisfaction. The only places you ever go are to work, a gas station, home, a grocery store, and occasionally a restaurant or mall. Wash, rinse, repeat over and over again. Your life is a skipping CD. It has become so routine that you can do it without thinking, and sometimes you do. Months fly by and you don’t even realize it because you’ve been asleep at the wheel the whole time.

Then one day you take a vacation to someplace you’ve always dreamed of, and your vacation probably goes something like this: You spend the whole vacation running from attraction to attraction in a wild frenzy trying to fit everything into your short trip, which makes you more exhausted than when your vacation started so that you’re relieved when you get home. When you get home you realize you spent way more money than you budgeted, because you got overcharged for everything, and now you’re going to stress out over making your money back. Despite all the problems with your vacation it still got you thinking about how jealous you are of the people who live in the picturesque place you visited, and now you’re depressed because you had a taste of a better life (that you know someone else is living), and now you have a frame of reference with which to measure how dismal your bland, stressful, circular life is.

So you get back to your bland, stressful, circular routine and the memory of your vacation quickly rides the conveyor belt of time to the back of your mind. You don’t realize it, but if you had have enough money or vacation time left you’d take another vacation as a roundabout way to buy happiness, but since you can’t do that you’re forced to endure the unfulfilling lifestyle you’re trapped in. So you try to find little ways to bring some happiness in your life (or at least ways to feel alive): buying a new hat, masturbating, watching a movie, going bowling, getting drunk, eating at a new restaurant, etc.

So basically you have a tiny life, and it starts to feel claustrophobic. That compounded with your stress and lack of respite you start feeling depressed and develop panic attacks. You start to suspect that there’s something wrong with you, and all the self-help books you read agree you’re an ungrateful emotional cripple for not being maniacally happy every moment of every day. Since the self-help books didn’t solve your problems (and actually made you feel more guilty) you suspect there is something wrong with you biologically. So you go to see a therapist who puts you on antidepressants, which make your stifling lifestyle more bearable by forcing you to be happy chemically.

The problem isn’t that you don’t understand the self-help secret of life, and the problem isn’t biological for most people. The problem is that our economy is designed to force you into a repetitive, stressful, lackluster lifestyle that is too expensive for most people to escape. Nobody intentionally designed it like that. It’s just the way it happened. If beer or antidepressants help you get through it then you may as well try them, because you’re probably going to be stuck in the cycle for a long time. Here are some other helpful hints for coping with modern life: Go insane. Get a hobby. Convince your boss to let you wear pajamas to work. Exercise. Work in the porn industry. Quit your job and move to a third world country.

 

If you enjoyed this post, you’ll also like these:

 

Predatory Capitalism Creates Poverty
Socialism and Communism
The Life of the Rich
The Life of the Poor
Oppression in the Workplace
Success and Retirement
The Housing Market
Healthcare in America
The Stock Market
Banks
Taxes
Cryptocurrency
Fixing the Economy
My Tweets About Economics

 

Leave a comment   |  tags: , , , , , , | posted in Poverty