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Further, there are 7.53 billion people on earth. If you conclude (generously) that, living in New York City, you have the freedom to associate and deeply rely on anyone in the tri-state area, you have access to about 20 million.

That's 0.2% of the total addressable people, and living in NYC puts you near one of the largest population centers in the world. It would take large amounts of capital for you to switch to another fraction of a percentage of the total population, and in doing so you'd be abandoning much of that original 0.2%.

You are far more constrained by your circumstances, by our social organization, and by physics than it might appear because of how easy it is to talk casually with others. Some of this we can overcome with changes to our society and development of technology, but some we probably can't. Your freedom to change your conditions falls off in power really quickly. Or, put another way, addressing the full set of choices gets expensive very quickly.

EDIT: I liked doing this math and, having lived in Tokyo as well as NYC, you could increase that 0.2% to about 0.5% by moving to the center of Shibuya; about 40m people live in and around the administrative unit. It's the densest area of its kind on the planet. That said, measuring Tokyo is a bit of a fraught problem because there are multiple ways to outline the city itself.

What's your point?

That your one true love may be in nigeria, but you'll never meet them because you're in NY?

I don't really understand why people make these kinds of posts as if it's some sort of wisdom. Everyone else innately understands that you can only interact with the people available for interactions to you, and that tends to be limited by locale. In fact, everyone understands it so well that most don't feel it needs to be said.

But it doesn't change the point that you still can choose to move to nigeria if you want to interact with more nigerians, and that you can refuse to interact with that 1 asshole down the street even if you haven't met every person who ever existed during your lifetime.

The top-most comment said

> I value that choice and the freedom to change.

and my point was that not only is this freedom curtailed by capital and circumstance, deploying capital to modify circumstance requires a shitload of it. Far beyond what is implied when people bandy about the slogan of "i'm free to associate with whomever i want." In reality, you're not! You're constrained six ways from sunday and the size of the constrained set is a fraction of a fraction of the total set of choices.

I guess you can argue that this is totally intuitive to everyone and so my comment is obtuse but judging by the way people talk and behave it doesn't seem that way to me.

> and my point was that not only is this freedom curtailed by capital and circumstance, deploying capital to modify circumstance requires a shitload of it. Far beyond what is implied when people bandy about the slogan of "i'm free to associate with whomever i want."

I'm just going to quote myself.

_But it doesn't change the point that you still can choose to move to nigeria_

This is like the people who argue that you shouldn't put in a solution that only makes the problem 20% better, that we should wait until it's a 100% solution.

You should probably just curl up in your basement and wait to die since you apparently can't interact with everyone in the world.

You’re doing the thing I talked about exactly! Our ability to chat with people in other parts of the world like we’re doing now is not at all what the original comment was talking about when they talked about reliance on others. Facebook and slack are not a substitute for community or family. That community needs to be strong because the fact that a small subset of all people have the ability to move to Nigeria isn’t at all evidence that we’ve got the freedom to just keep roaming about life until we find a group of people who just happen to provide everything we need.

In other words the fact that you CAN deploy capital and time to go to Nigeria hardly means we live in a world where you can shift the context of your life at will. Most people don’t even have a fraction of what it would require to do this.

What you're trying to argue is that poor people can't move to other countries, and that's just not reality.

That's a little bit much don't you think? Please do be kind, that is another human you are responding to.

I don't think it's too much at all, the persons argument boils down to "because you can't meet everyone, you don't really have free will to change who you interact with", and if they REALLY believe that, the world is hopeless and they may as well just stop trying.

The world has hope, but we are really constrained.

The correct advice is "make the best of what you have and are" and not pie in the sky "you can do anything".

And yes, it's because you cannot meet everyone or even afford to try every educational path to learn who they are and their language. Or sometimes even move out of country, and even when you do, the are costs.

Ultimately you have to run a cost benefit calculation and many benefits are big gambles in reality.

right, but this leads back to what I said before. Why not just lay down and die? It's like the ultimate form of analysis paralysis. What if there are better people to hang out with? What if I'm not meeting those better people because I'm wasting time enjoying the friends I met in college?

At some point you need to either accept it or change it, both of which you can do. My issue with the previous posts is the claim that you must necessarily become victim to this form of analysis paralysis because you can never truly choose to hang out with ANYONE. That 5 year old in the congo who died of malaria will always be a stranger to you.

It's just such a bad point.

This is very well said. We need to support every single person as much as possible because each choice is extremely costly and precious.

> If I'm unhappy with the scummy behaviour of a credit rating agency, my only recourse is to... Opt out of credit entirely

Well you have more options than that. You can freeze your credit reports, put holds on your information, and push your political representatives to engage with the issue. No, you can't single-handedly fix the problem, but it is a correctable problem.

> If I'm unhappy with the scummy behaviour of my bank, I could switch to a competitor, which has the exact same policies

You can also switch to a credit union which probably has very different policies, or use one of the very many online centric banks which have since popped up and are very customer focused.

> I could move to a different city, and the players in this game will change, but the rules, and the outcomes, will remain the same.

At least anecdotally, moving from the DC area to Texas changed my life significantly for the better. It moved my friend group for people who were stuck to people who were pushing to accomplish things. It opened up a job market for me personally from a few firms to almost infinite choices. It reduced the cost of buying a house and made it so I could have that as an option.

> by powers and circumstances you have absolutely no control over - and by your current personal level of wealth and status

You have a lot of control over your money. You can choose to spend it or not spend it, and you can choose how you spend it. You can give up your free time and make more of it, and you can use that free time to make more of it faster.

On your point about not being able to tell an unreasonable boss to back off without having money - that's simply not true. I've left a job while basically broke because I felt continuing to work with my employer was unethical. I picked up a lot of odd and un-fun jobs to make it work and it wasn't easy, but I had the choice and I exercised it.

Having a choice doesn't mean the choice is easy. It doesn't mean you get to keep your nice car or convenient apartment. Often times choices have consequences and that's OK - that doesn't mean it's not a choice.

Many people in the U.S. get by with limited banking and credit, so consumer businesses are used to dealing with them. Try letting go of the importance of some of the things you are worried about and it might not be as bad as you think. All those businesses that want your SSN will usually accept a deposit instead (yes, even the "big evil" companies that demand it, they will often relent quickly and accept a deposit instead). Get a prepaid phone (again, no SSN).

Theoretically, yes, there are lots of problems with banks and credit agencies. But in practice, they don't often interfere with your life if you use them sparingly.

However, when they do interfere they're a real pain in the rear.

(Second hand: including invalid vindication, account lockouts, wage garnishment.)