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Comment by sonnyblarney | Hacker News Reader

I agree for many of us ... but I think 'life is not easy' for the bottom 50%.

Most people sling coffee, serve food, work in factories, panic around in delivery vehicles all day, and with one wrongs step or bad health outcome they could be in doom. Lack of job stability, longer retirement, lack of community ... these things take their tole. Kind of a permanent existential anxiety.

Just 'keeping on doing', facing the daily grind and all the little things, taking care of kids - without falling down (because the cost could be catastrophe) is actually 'facing adversity'.

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This point also confirms my relativity of perception thoughts. Yes, compared to me, the bottom 50% certainly has more adversity. But why stop there? The bottom 50% in America is likely the top 20% somewhere else (I'm making all of this up, of course). Then the bottom 50% of that 20% is likely the top 1% somewhere else. And on and on it goes.

I don't believe that thinking about nameless, faceless people thousands and thousands of miles away is particularly effective at altering daily behavior and mindset here, but it's important to recognize nonetheless.

"I don't believe that thinking about nameless, faceless people thousands and thousands of miles away is particularly effective "

But this is what is implied by the opening statement 'The Average American' etc. etc. , no?

The 'The Average American' does face 'adversity', because most people are barely getting by.

Imagine middle aged parents without spectacular health care coverage, someone gets a cavity and needs a root canal. That's $1000 - and actually beyond the 'average Americans' ability to pay for out of hand. A cavity can be little economic emergency. It means no car trip to Myrtle Beach, or no piano lessons for the kids, or worse, having to put it on the Credit Card, pay terrible rates etc.. And 'cousin Joe' was pulled over for DUI. He'll lose his job if he doesn't make bail, he needs you to co-sign for him. Now you have to make sure he shows up for court. Parents are inching older, have some income but likely need to go into a home, which will be exceedingly expensive. There are umpteen such challenges is 'most people's lives'.

So I agree with the sentiment that normal, employed middle class families wherein there's stability and gainful employment, low crime etc. - yes, it's effete, and not much adversity there.

There is a class of Americans for whom life doesn't have a lot of adversity, fully agree. But it's not 'most'.

> The 'The Average American' does face 'adversity', because most people are barely getting by.

> ...

> It means no car trip to Myrtle Beach

were you trying to make the point that people concoct adversity where it doesn't exist? because i think you're doing good work on that front. keep it up.

Yes - a 'car trip' to a crappy dive like Myrtle Beach and it's shady Motels as one's only, tiny respite from a life of slinging coffee at the Waffle House, in the balance of financial emergencies from something as trivial as some basic dental work - absolutely implies 'adversity'.

In case you're having trouble contextualizing: a family in that situation is an inch from ruin. They will never have anything, and odds are, they'll hit a bump now and again and it will get messy.

Those kinds of families are always coming in and out of financial difficulty.

"It means no car trip to Myrtle Beach, or no piano lessons for the kids, or worse, having to put it on the Credit Card"

That's your example of facing adversity?

Did you read the article? If you're lying awake at night worrying whether you can afford little Timmy's piano lessons you aren't in the same boat as a cave man that's worried about getting eaten by a lion.

There's more. If Timmy does not make the competitive job market he might as well have been eaten by the lion. Which depends on access to right tutoring and right connections more than right skills.

Getting eaten by a lion is less misery. And a lion you can fight with a few guys. Job market? Might as well be hitting a tank with your bare fists.

If anything, it's the lack of control and not the level of adversity that is the problem.

Are you trolling?

Getting eaten by a lion is in no way similar to not getting a 'good' job, in fact I'll go further and say it's not similar to not getting a job at all.

It actually is way worse than being eaten by a lion. Like long torture of varying degrees. There are worse kinds of torture but it is one of the most common, the other being social exclusion, and finally chronic illnesses.

Except this one nobody can really fix. The drawback of invisible poorly understood market processes with many inputs. The only thing you can try to do is make your chances better, be adaptable and adapt.

Even bad illness can often be abated with a few (commonly known as terrible) exceptions.

So if your threshold for 'adversity' is getting 'eaten by Lions' I would imagine you're trolling?

My point was to illustrate a family that might have next to nothing - and who's only aspirational escape from slinging coffee at the Waffle House is a low-budget weekender at a slimly dive like Myrtle Beach, will with one tiny blip of a minor medical issue, have that taken away, and possibly go into debt.

Could you imagine a life of serving at a restaurant, never able to afford even the most basic getaway, going ever deeper into debt for basic things like 'visits to the dentist'? When you tack on just a couple of 'issues', it all comes apart.

Those families have $500 'net worth' and are at any time inches away from ruin, no retirement savings, no way to send their kids to college. If they have a bad day at work, or if their boss doesn't like them they could lose their jobs. If they inure themselves playing softball - it's calamity. Getting one credit card to pay off the other. 'Pay day loans'. Unable to cobble together 'first and last months' rent. Bad credit. A minor offence and unable to make bail. A car that breaks down, no way to get to work, and a boss that doesn't care one bit. Coming down with something as minor as 'late onset Asthma' which is $50/month of meds they cannot afford.

That is the grinding adversity that about 1/2 of America faces with no way out.

I used lions as an example because the article uses the same example.

I've never heard of myrtle beach prior to your comment so that nuance passed me by.

Still if myrtle beach is that bad why go there? And piano lessons are firmly in the realms of the middle class, not 1 pay cheque from disaster poor.

Which circles back to my prior comment, so no I'm not trolling.

Not necessarily disagreeing with you but skid row in LA looks and feels like a third world country.

Skid row isn’t the bottom 50% though. It’s the bottom 0.01%

what's frightening is how many people are very very close to ending up on skid row. in la alone, there are a million people at least who if they missed pay for two months, would be right there.

I think you are on the right track.

I'm not sure the article is. Because the article keeps talking about objective realities.

But human beings experience life subjectively. Making more than your brother in law is a big ego boost. Having the highest degree in your family, even if that is only a BA.

Human beings judge ourselves subjectively.

Technology has broken down borders, increased our self awareness and provided us with education. Which is a good thing, but it also has it's negatives.

One of those negatives is the borders: we are now all part of a global economy. Everyone intertwined with everyone else. I used to be able to go to a town hall that had a lot more sway in how things worked. Now it's a global system that will grind on and grind up anyone who dares get in it's way.

The other point is our self awareness. It's now impossible to live without understanding that... I'm complicit in some child's slavery because I have a phone in my pocket. Likely some of that meat I eat was treated with horrendous cruelty. The pages I need to print and waste because of some bureaucratic rule will cost the lives of thousands of animals in a rain forest where the trees were cut down in a terrible way. My tax dollars will be used to kill and torture people for profit. My car is costing other people their live's from it's pollution, the same as my plane trip. The arguments we used to use to justify this, have been proven false.

Coming to terms with our own terrible behavior would be easier if not for our increase in education.

Since the time of the Gutenberg press, population has gone up 10~, but educated population has gone up something like 1000 or even 10,000 times.

This increase in education has had a huge increase in scientific knowledge. But it also makes any individual much less likely to be outstanding.

So again, our individuality is lessened. But worse, you are average. Mediocre. When there's 100 biologists in the world, you can always find some way to be slightly different. With 3,000,000 biologists in the world, how could you expect to shine?

I think these things add to something that's been brewing for a couple of hundred years: a loss of meaning.

The latest things that we used to feel special: capitalism, communism, our nationality, our race, our religion, have also been falling by the wayside, dying with other idols and invincible messiahs.

We use to think of ourselves as special for a lot of reasons. Science and tech have made it very clear, we aren't special. Just a random primate descendant on a lonely little rock in the middle of a totally uncaring universe.

Now we can't even take console in being the best at something in our own little area.

I think these real negatives are suppressed because they speak poorly of human nature (we are silly creatures) and it leads to irrational negativity in other areas; whether it is worrying over a 'growing crime rate' which doesn't exist, or complaining about vaccines.

Not sure how to handle these issues, I don't really have any suggestions. Just more pointless observations. :p

> So again, our individuality is lessened. But worse, you are average. Mediocre. When there's 100 biologists in the world, you can always find some way to be slightly different. With 3,000,000 biologists in the world, how could you expect to shine?

When there's 100 biologists in the world, you probably aren't one of them. You would just be some mediocre uneducated nobody. How do you expect to shine?

Of course, be it 100 or 3,000,000, at least you'd have the opportunity to shine if your world were the small town you were born in, not the whole planet (or continent).

There's a problem but it is not education that lessens our individuality.

I think most peasants from the 17th century were very religious. They were given a special place by God.

The town halls now don't have that much effect. Complain about education? Worry about federal funding and national wide programs. It's not something that happened over night. It's been happening literally since the technology/science era, which I think of starting with Gutenberg.

BTW, I'm not saying education is a problem. I'm saying it has problems, unexpected consequences with the obvious good side.

>The bottom 50% in America is likely the top 20% somewhere else (I'm making all of this up, of course). Then the bottom 50% of that 20% is likely the top 1% somewhere else. And on and on it goes.

This is if you don't take into account purchasing power parity and the relative expense of things like education, medical care and housing.

Being homeless in San Francisco isn't going to be as fun than being, say, lower middle class in Uruguay even if your nominal income is higher.

Nah, this is very dangerous thinking, that somehow we're so much better than every other country. Truth to be told, aside very limited exceptions, life in the USA is quite bad for a lot of people, and very risky. Most countries have a better safety net than here, either through government or familial ties.

In the developed world, yeah, the U.S. is behind a lot of regions like Taiwan, Canada, Scandinavia, Western Europe, Australia & NZ in terms of the social safety net.

Among the world's population at large, no way. Even homeless Americans are way better off than the average person in Asia, Africa, or South America. In China people regularly work 9-9-6 (9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week); if you lose your job, you have zero social safety net other than your savings and your family; your property can be confiscated if you piss off the wrong party official; and there's a callous disregard for life so that if you get run over by a taxi it's your own problem. In parts of Central America the nominal government has no control, and you can be caught in a random crossfire. My wife served in the Peace Corps in Peru; she stayed with the richest woman in the village, who owned a house with 3.5 walls and a regular stream of reptilian visitors. That woman's occupation? Brewing moonshine in 55 gallon oil drums, to serve as the village's primary beverage and social lubricant.

I've spent a couple of years wandering around SE Asia, and that involves seeing a lot of real poverty close up.

The striking thing about what I noticed is is: Only the lonely people are unhappy. Give the average Cambodian a bucket of chicken feet and a carton of beer and they'll immediately share it with their friends/family and be unbelievably happy.

They have really strong community and family ties, and while that does have downsides (especially for women, whose behaviour is under control almost all the time), it also gives incredible support and comfort.

The contrast between Camobodia and Australia is noticeable: Cambodians are mostly poor and happy, and Australians are mostly rich and angry.

Okay, tweak it to say overcoming meaningful adversity, that satisfies our need for narrative/place/existential order.

Wow, no, this is almost insulting.

Having to raise a family, maintain one's well-being, and being a good community member all while having to live in dour conditions that are never likely to improve, I would argue is actual adversity.

If one is convinced that their lot in life is dour, there is often no specific change or improvement that would change that outlook. Objectively, almost all of us in the Western world have it very good compared with the vast majority of human beings who have lived on this planet. This is true even if we work in menial jobs or have less than glamorous lifestyles.

>> that are never likely to improve

In the United States, your effort towards this goal have an insanely high correlation with actually making it happen. Perhaps the best in any country in the world, in fact.

"the american dream"

Have any data to actually back it up? Such as real number of people who made an effort and failed? And how they failed, and to where? And how well they were initially off?

No one is arguing about the definition of adversity. Of course that's actual adversity. The point that you were ostensibly replying to, though, had to do with meaning and being the heroes of meaningful stories about our lives.

You zeroed in on the single claim that "the average American doesn't face adversity" and ignored the broader context. Yes, that claim is literally false. But your response isn't one that addresses the substance of the comment you replied to.

People regularly risk their lives and risk imprisonment for the chance to be a poor person in a wealthy country. If the daily grind is "adversity", there seem to be millions who want it desperately.

And even those people are often better off than a typical human for most of history.

Absolutely agree. I think everyone understands the relativity of perception when discussing "how hard things are" but that doesn't mean they put it into daily practice. It's very easy to get caught in your bubble.

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