this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2025
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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.