Clearly since you and I met at a fantastically expensive private educational institution located in the world capital of finance and culture, we’re not impoverished or oppressed in any morally meaningful way. My use of “class-trator” in the title is tongue in cheek. This post is all about navel-gazing and not about what’s wrong with the world. Indeed, we’ve always been loaded to the gills with what the sociologists call cultural capital, which is really what’s important. Chances. Choices. Potential.
I think you read my use of the term “oppression” and got it inverted: I’m not suggesting I was ever cash-strapped because of oppression. I’m saying that being broke is oppressive in and of itself. It colors ever aspect of your life, and even if you wound up there because of the choices you made — and not because the universe dealt you a shit hand — it’s still no fun.
Further, solidarity in the face of this is something that people bond over, just as people with excess income bond around mortgage payments and the like. I’m used to the former, and I find the latter to be distasteful, probably because of lingering prejudice. All this is bound up in one’s identity and relationships.
Which is why the idea of being “poor by choice” is more complex than you make it out to be, I think. Life is all about choices, for sure: I could have gone back and lived with my mom instead of trying to maintain an existence in NYC, or maybe I could have gone to a different school and studied more financially-viable things in the first place, but that would really mean I’d be a different person than I am.
To put it another way, I don’t feel it’s as though drawing a healthy paycheck was an option I passed up or deferred until now — like there was some job I could always have gotten or something. In real terms without making the choices I’d made, including being broke a lot, I wouldn’t have made the connections and had the experiences that got me to be where I am. Not having any money was part and parcel with trying really hard to be the best that I could be.
And, to be sure, I do expect a hell of a lot from myself. :)
what did one NYU grad say to the other?
Clearly since you and I met at a fantastically expensive private educational institution located in the world capital of finance and culture, we’re not impoverished or oppressed in any morally meaningful way. My use of “class-trator” in the title is tongue in cheek. This post is all about navel-gazing and not about what’s wrong with the world. Indeed, we’ve always been loaded to the gills with what the sociologists call cultural capital, which is really what’s important. Chances. Choices. Potential.
I think you read my use of the term “oppression” and got it inverted: I’m not suggesting I was ever cash-strapped because of oppression. I’m saying that being broke is oppressive in and of itself. It colors ever aspect of your life, and even if you wound up there because of the choices you made — and not because the universe dealt you a shit hand — it’s still no fun.
Further, solidarity in the face of this is something that people bond over, just as people with excess income bond around mortgage payments and the like. I’m used to the former, and I find the latter to be distasteful, probably because of lingering prejudice. All this is bound up in one’s identity and relationships.
Which is why the idea of being “poor by choice” is more complex than you make it out to be, I think. Life is all about choices, for sure: I could have gone back and lived with my mom instead of trying to maintain an existence in NYC, or maybe I could have gone to a different school and studied more financially-viable things in the first place, but that would really mean I’d be a different person than I am.
To put it another way, I don’t feel it’s as though drawing a healthy paycheck was an option I passed up or deferred until now — like there was some job I could always have gotten or something. In real terms without making the choices I’d made, including being broke a lot, I wouldn’t have made the connections and had the experiences that got me to be where I am. Not having any money was part and parcel with trying really hard to be the best that I could be.
And, to be sure, I do expect a hell of a lot from myself. :)