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Comment by azernik | Hacker News Reader

"We're all in this together" is more of an aspirational phrase, meant to motivate the better-off to contribute. When it doesn't work, the people who aren't better off will of course be reminded every time they hear it that the system is failing them.

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It's one more of those meaningless demonstrations of support that social media has generalized.

Communicating that "we're all in this together" is as effective as a giving "like" to the Facebook page of a person dying from cancer raising money for their treatment.

The person who hits that "like" surely feels better about themselves and sees social media as a facilitator of this effortless moral redemption.

PS: The individuals building these systems are aware of this.

Have to say the "We're all in this together" rings hollow for me, even irks me - especially when it's some wealthy celebrity saying it. That said, I feel blessed that (so far) I still have my paycheck working remotely and my wife has her's as a teacher. We decided to keep paying for a number of services (local small gym, house cleaner, gardener) we aren't using - I guess partly motivated by a sense of "we're all in this together" and "it's the right thing to do", etc. But there is a still a lot of risk that I could eventually lose my job depending where all this ends up and with two kids heading to college, a mortgage, retirement coming sooner than later - It's not stress free by any means.

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