lizardtitties:

earthboundricochet:

earthboundricochet:

bpd-anon:

theunitofcaring:

An important piece of how well-off you are, which measuring income isn’t really going to catch, is how much shock absorption your community has built in. 

Some people don’t have an in-person community, of course, and so the shock-absorption available to them is just whatever is in their own savings account and how much credit they have access to and maybe the knowledge that in the worst case they could move across the country and sleep on a friends’ couch for a few weeks but not longer because the friends’ landlord is strict about subtenants.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, upper-class communities have tons of shock absorption – if your home burns down, you probably have a friend who has a vacation home or an in-laws suite or a guest room where you can stay, if you lose your job it was the kind of job for which you get unemployment and you know someone who can get you an interview for another one, if you have a medical crisis you have lots of friends who can bring food and help out, and they all work jobs that let them take off on short notice in the middle of the day.

I’ve been helping a friend recover from surgery this week, and I’ve been thinking about this a ton. I could work from home for three days to be with her; her girlfriend had a spare bed where she could sleep for two because she was supposed to be near the surgery center and her house was an hour away; her girlfriend’s boyfriend could come over to help when girlfriend had to go to work; when her doctor’s appointment was changed to a time when I couldn’t drive her, another friend could take three hours off to do it. That’s a community with shock absorption.

It’s a class thing, but it’s not just a class thing. Doing this sort of thing is one of the things religions do. When I describe what I value about my community, my religious friends tend to go “oh, so, like what my church does”. A poor community where a dozen people from church will bring meals and support after surgery or after a loss or during cancer treatment has vastly more shock absorption than a same-income community where people have no way to coordinate that (and I think the decline of religion has been particularly costly in poor communities for exactly this reason).

And lots of money can’t fully substitute for a community, because lots of disasters (like medical emergencies) are of the kind that make it hard to advocate for yourself and independently arrange all the things you’re going to need.

I don’t know how you increase shock absorption. Lowering the cost of housing does part of it; a spare bedroom is a particularly critical kind of shock absorption that protects lots of people from homelessness. More leisure time increases shock absorption, and cutting the expected work week has been at least partially successful some places. My impression is that Social Security dramatically increased shock absorption, by giving elderly people (who often end up needing community support to remain independent or survive) more financial resources; it’s much easier for poor families to take someone in if they will get regular money towards housing and expenses. UBI would do it too, of course. 

It’s not just personal savings accounts for people without in-person communities. If something terrible happened to me, my friends could send me money through PayPal or checks in the mail and vice versa.

This is a concept that I have not seen discussed before but is very real. I’ve never been rich (closest would be when my family was sort of higher-middle-class than now because both of my parents worked full-time), and for example I’ve been able to live two years in Germany without a lot of savings and without going homeless because I have connections. 

My aunt could host me for half a year, then I moved in with my (at the time) boyfriend and his family for a couple months, then his grandmother could host me in exchange for household chores, then thanks to a connection with a friend who knew a friend I had work and housing in a commune for a year, then when I lost that I could be hosted for a few more months in another communal living situation due to connections I had built in the local leftist community (which is somehow simultaneously incredibly disorganized and incredibly organized) and with some short and long-distance economic help from friends (on top of my income from a local part-time job, but that I had not found through connections) and eventually when I had no more options I could move back in with my family here in Italy (not an ideal situation, but eh, I’m not homeless).

If I had not had connections I firstly would never have been able to move there, and secondly I would have been homeless for months. It was not always an ideal living situation, and for some time I was in extreme poverty, but also I was not sleeping on a bench in the German winter which is a significantly important thing. I also was able to access things like food, clothes, transport, limited medical assistance, and legal assistance, mostly thanks to connections. 

This also means that people that struggle with social skills can be severely disadvantaged. 

Networking for example is often very important if you seek a job, but also if you want to move up in your current employement. It’s how sometimes people who are less competent at a job will advance more compared to more competent people who are less good at the social game. 

It’s an axis of privilege that is not really talked about much in SJ, at most I’ve seen it framed under ableism, probably because it’s a lot harder to quantify and harder to reduce into a black&white privileged VS disprivileged dynamic.

I had to put out a call in Facebook to find someone who could pick me up after a dentist appointment and I only had one person who I was close enough with to have pick me up after an abortion. When I became homeless I had to find a stranger on the Internet to have a sofa to sleep on. And in financial hard times, it’s been Internet begging, payday loans or less-than-legal work to stay afloat.

This is one of the things my boyfriend doesn’t really get. Iceland is small and close knit; as a general rule, unless you’re a total asswipe, you’re going to have people you can rely on for this kinda shit. The boyf has never had to worry overmuch about losing a job or getting injured. This is also why he has a fuckton of savings and I had upwards of £3500 in debt when we first got together. He’s been able to live with his parents or in a house they owned, and not had to worry about paying bills in periods of unemployment, whereas I was mostly the only person looking after me for a good 10 years. He’s always had the knowledge that he’s safe and nothing can go THAT wrong. Whereas I’ve been playing debt dominos and not really having much in the way of financial or emotional support.

I mean just as an example, if he got flu, he could take the week off work, either his mum could cook for him or he’d live off takeout for he week, and he could get comfort. When I got flu, I’d be dragging myself through work on two bottles of Robitussin, having to cook, panicking because I’ve spent more money than I’d like on cough medicine, and dealing with the huge guilt and panic that comes with missing a day of work, and doing all that without anyone to check in on me. He doesn’t understand why I try to “tough it out” rather than buy medicine when I’m sick.

That sounds pretty rough.

I was born into closer to the other kind of cultural safety net and support network, and didn’t necessarily appreciate it until after I moved across the Atlantic and it just wasn’t there anymore. Getting extra socially isolated thanks to disability really hasn’t helped either. It came as more of a shock than it maybe should have, realizing just how easily I could end up on the streets without that support available.

My parents ended up in pretty bad financial shape while I was growing up, partly thanks to medical problems and debt from that. But, we were insulated from some of the worst, with family willing and able to make sure we stayed fed and kept utilities on, cover some other urgent expenses, etc. Worst case, other places to stay with the repeated threat of losing the house thanks to medical debt. Plus the smaller mutual support, like somebody glad to look after kids or get you to the doctor/bring food when you’re sick. I didn’t have to worry about ending up homeless after I crashed out of college and had to go on SSI. And so forth.

Obviously not everyone has that kind of support network available, at all. And nobody should have to rely that heavily on a less formal safety net, which may or may not even exist for them. Not to mention the potential for abuse when there aren’t other good options for getting basic needs met. Hard to see a lot of great solutions for all of that, but something like UBI could certainly help with some of it.