me_irl

It's hard to sum up because it's hard to describe. Life in the U.S. on the surface is one of material abundance, congruent with our status as a wealthy nation. But that image is a serious headfuck because of how easily it can all be taken away from an individual: Even a relatively minor illness can plunge you into bankruptcy. You're totally dependent on a car to get just about anywhere. You need it to keep a job, but you could lose it to an expensive mechanical failure at any time. Or, you could get crashed into on the road through no fault of your own, and get plunged into medical debt, lose your car, and your job in an instant. There is no safety net for this. The police aren't there to protect you. In fact, they could come bursting through your door and kill you at any moment, maybe because they read the address on a warrant wrong, or somebody they want used to live there. Or, they could just take your assets by civil forfeiture because they feel like it. Police take more assets from citizens each year than nominal criminals do. Employers steal more yet through wage theft. Nobody will help you when that happens. People live with the threat of homelessness ever looming in the background, and if the system beats you into it, there's little societal help. Quite the opposite, many places in the U.S. are actively working to make homelessness a criminal offense, or even subject to summary execution in some places. Even when welfare programs exist, they're explicitly designed to be humiliating and hard to access.

To use an analogy, lots of people in the world live only a few steps up the prosperity staircase, and Americans are way high above them. However, we're not on a staircase, we can't just back down a few steps to a lower standard of living; it's been cut off. There's a certain minimum wealth standard enforced by law, custom, and environment. We're perched on the edge of a cliff, with the constant threat of being forced over the edge.

Even the people in the U.S. slightly further up don't understand the psychological trauma of this precarious existence, because their backs aren't up against the precipice. That's how the U.S. is such a paradox: It's a shit hole country for so many people, who live with constant fear and anxiety, but so many other Americans can't see it because they're just a little bit higher up in prosperity, so they do have room to step back down a little.

(But even then, the upper classes put in insanely long hours at work and spend large amounts of money to secure a wealthy future for their children, for fear that they might fall out of the upper class. I think that's pretty telling about what it's like to be working class in the U.S. that it frightens them so badly.)