Alrighty so I know this is the most boring topic to most people, but I really believe that to engage in effective activism and start to deconstruct the ideology around hyper-consumption you gotta learn a bit about finance. Yeah I know it’s a field dominated by the worst boys you’ll ever meet, in their lil Sperrys, but hear me out.
Someone’s profiting off of your lack of financial education.
Finances, taxes, and all that was never taught in my school, and I hear that’s a common story. In fact, most of the advice I was given financially was the exact opposite of how people actually get rich. Hustle harder, grind grind, grind. Consume consume consume. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Blah blah blaaaaahh.
That’s some BS, anyone with any real wealth built it through investments, not work. There’s this saying – “make your money make money” – that’s pretty much the opposite of hustling for money. The goal of the 1% is really to sit back and do as little as possible while the money they invest appreciates.
And money doesn’t just magically appreciate, that return on investment is often either skimmed off of someone else’s labor or propped up by the government who literally considers ‘stocks’ and ‘the economy’ to be about the same, nevermind that the working class’s economic stability has little to do with stocks. (And not to be a conspiracy theorist, but the most common misinformation I hear the working class get told about economics? Is exactly the sort of misinfo that allows the owning class to extract maximum profit off us. It feels like the lack of financial education us Americans get is, whether through deliberate means or negligence, greatly benefiting corporations at great cost to us)
So I’m gonna try and debunk some of the biggest myths I hear around economics…
Myth – Hustle and you’ll get rich!
Yep, this infuriating one. If you’re working for someone else, any more hustling you do isn’t getting you rich, it’s getting THEM rich. Funny how we’re taught hard work is a virtue though.
The only time that hustling pays off at all is if you own your own business. (And I’m not talking about selling on Amazon or driving Uber here – those are designed to extract profit for Amazon and Uber and the only reason they say you’re ‘your own boss’ is to get around the laws around giving employees rights. You ain’t your own boss with gig work, you ain’t even an employee with rights.)
And even if you fully start your own business? The #1 advice I get from CEOs and founders I’ve talked to is that to lead, you need to learn to delegate. Even for skills you have yourself. Someone else does the work (for a wage lower than the value of their work) and you profit. That isn’t a spicy take in entrepreneurship, that is the entire underlying business model of a corporation.
And even having someone else do the work? Try to have them do the minimum viable amount of work, the more time they spend on it, the less profit is left over after paying them.
Myth – [Consumer Good] is an investment!
This one’s a personal pet peeve, I feel like working class people are often told that a nice car is an investment, a nice set of furniture is an investment, a nice set of clothes is an investment.
Bull. Shit. Only one thing is a reasonable investment, and it is a thing that increases (appreciates) in value at a rate higher than inflation. Anything else is a depreciating asset. The fucking opposite.
What if that purchase is used for your business to make you more money? Nope, still a depreciating asset. This one can at least be considered a business expense, which lets a business owner write it off taxes. But the ONLY thing that is an investment is something that is reasonably expected to provide a return on interest that is higher than inflation.
So why are we told that depreciating assets like cars, designer clothes, etc are investments? Well, technically it is someone’s investment. Not yours though, you’re the pay pig there. When we put money down for these consumer goods – say, getting the newest car on loan or putting a purse on credit – The interest you pay on your loan ends up in the pockets of whoever gave you that loan.
The only things I would buy as investments are: Stocks, Bonds, Real Estate, Commodities, etc. And just to show you how crazy the amount you can make investing is? Here’s a 50 year projection for what happens (assuming average ROI) if you buy $25 a month in S&P 500. Over that time, you put in $15,000 and make $418,109. So in that graph? The tiny blue bars are the money you spent and the big orange section is the money you make with interest. (I hate to say this but the ‘stop buying coffee to get rich’ dipshits were almost right – they just forgot to add ‘start buying stocks with that extra $25’)
And remember, that money you make only gets made if you pick investments which actually appreciate! So no fuckin designer goods or cars or whatever.
Myth – Invest in (This one thing!)
Invest in a exciting company! In Bitcoin! In whatever the hot new thing is. No, that’s probably a pump and dump. if someone tells you to invest in any one singular thing, you’re probably getting conned. The con is – someone buys up stock or assets, artificially drives the price up by convincing others to buy it to get rich quick, and sells their own holdings. Then whoever bought in is left with some worthless shit.
If you’re gonna invest, invest broadly. (It’s called diversifying assets) For stocks – I’d recommend mutual funds with hundreds of different company stocks in there. Maybe one mutual fund with American companies, one with non American companies. So when America does its usual bullshit, you won’t be screwed.
(I could go on about picking funds – it’s a balance between high risk high reward, and low risk low reward. I personally like lower risks) The S&P 500 is one of the lowest risk funds IMO, they’ve got a average ROI of 10% compared to the average inflation rate of 3%
Myth – Consumerism / Money is Apolitical!
This one’s a big one – the belief that your consumerism isn’t deeply linked to national or global politics. Well, to oversimplify a rather complex and purposely obtuse chain of events, when you buy something from an American corporation, they make a profit, turn around and lobby politicians with that money, and often have far more influence than your singular vote has. So the saying “vote with your dollar” IMO isn’t about consumerism – it’s about looking up who specifically heads the companies you shop at, and which politicians they’re paying off for what reasons. (Of course, this is a LOT of research, so an easier way to ‘opt out’ is to shop at local small businesses rather than Amazon / Walmart / Etc)
I’d say consumerism and strategic finance is the most politically active thing we can do, perhaps even more than voting.
Also, and this is a big enough topic to make a whole post about, but through buying stocks, a person becomes a owner of a small fraction of a company (Literally, having a stock in the company). And companies are legally answerable to stock holders. So in the same way the 1% uses stock ownership to wield power over corporations for their benefit? So can activist investors, groups who buy stock together to force changes at those corporations. (Side note but Exxon is currently suing activist investors who are trying to get the shareholder meeting to include climate proposals – and if there’s one way to know that you’re successfully putting pressure on the powerful? It’s when the lawyers come out.)
Enough theory, what can we do?
Here’s my short list of ideas, I could go on and on about effective financial activism tho.
Don’t buy shit on credit / loans if you can help it. You’re being scalped for someone else’s profit.
Don’t rent anything if you can help it, you’re REALLY being scalped for someone else’s profit. Even more than if you took out a loan to eventually own it in full.
Sometimes you’ll have to do one or the other (i.e. housing.) It’s better to take out a loan where you’ll pay a percentage in interest for someone else and build some equity for yourself than pay rent where you’ll pay 100% to build someone else’s equity
Don’t let folks convince you there’s shame in looking poor. The US has a culture of making working class folks poor and indebted by making us scared of looking poor.
Don’t buy luxury, luxury shit is wealth cosplay sold to the working class to extract money from us. (seriously the richest folks I know dress like ass)
Do invest if you have any extra cash, tho that’s not always possible.
Do look at the expenses you have with a budgeting software, break it down by category, and try reducing the biggest first. Get creative with self sufficiency, even for things we’re trained to rely on corporations for, see if you can get the same goods yourself. (Collect & purify rainwater, grow food, barter with your neighbors)
Do donate to mutual aid groups if you can. Food not bombs is one of my favorites!
All this shit and more (I could go onnn about any of it) keeps your money out of the hands of folks who’ll use it to lobby politicians to fuck you over, and in your own hands where you can use it to help people in your community. (This whole idea of counter-growth. IMO we don’t need revolution – we need to start building networks of support and power that work counter to the ones which don’t serve us)
Image description: An undecorated block of text in a serif font. The text reads:
“I did things in my 30s that were ignored by the world, that could have been quickly labeled a failure. Here’s a classic example; in 1974 I did a movie called Phantom of the Paradise. Phantom of the Paradise, which was a huge flop in this country. There were only two cities in the world where it had any real success: Winnipeg, in Canada, and Paris, France. So, okay, let’s write it off as a failure. Maybe you could do that. But all of the sudden, I’m in Mexico, and a 16-year-old boy comes up to me at a concert with an album – a Phantom of the Paradise soundtrack- and asks me to sign it. I sign it. Evidently I was nice to him and we had a nice little conversation. I don’t remember the moment, I remember signing the album (I don’t know if I think I remember or if I actually remember). But this little 14 or 16, whatever old this guy was … Well I know who the guy is now because I’m writing a musical based on Pan’s Labyrinth; it’s Guillermo del Toro. The work that I’ve done with Daft Punk it’s totally re.lated to them seeing Phantom of the Paradise 20 times and deciding they’re going to reach out to this 70-year-old songwriter to get involved in an album called Random Access Memories. So, what is the lesson in that? The lesson for me is being very careful about what you label a failure in your life. Be careful about throwing something in the round file as garbage because you may find that it’s the headwaters of a relationship that you can’t even imagine it’s corning in your future.”
— Paul Williams
I love this: the idea the failures you mourn are secretly building your wonderful future.
I don’t think outer wilds could happen again. It was a one-in-a-million union of talented mystery and character writers, auteurs with an impeccable eye for landscape and character design, nerds shit obsessed with astrophysics, people with a beautiful philosophy about the universe, and of course, Andrew prahlow
We should think ourselves extremely lucky this happened. I don’t think I’ll get another in my lifetime
Comfort movie this comfort character that, what are you doing to make yourself profoundly uncomfortable, what are you watching that’s so disgusting you can’t take your eyes off it, what scares you so much it makes you intensely aware of what you take for granted, if you don’t have stuff like this in your regimen then you are operating on a serious nutritional deficit and also your opinions on media are worthless.
But seriously folks! I get why people would build their whole personal culture around comfort-seeking in this cold dark world of ours, but…well, I guess you have as much a right to do it as I have to make fun of it.
There’s one thing about the fandom output that I’ve been trying to articulate, and I’m probably just overthinking it, but it’s about how characters, if not the specific idea of the OC, has taken over as the main impetus for making anything. Like, to the exclusion of wanting to tell a story or explore a style or experiment with allegory or like, anything else people normally do with narrative media. That is definitely tied in to the fact that a lot of fan content appears to have pornographic motivations–that it’s all kind of romance novel adjacent, whether or not it is sexually explicit it’s all about pleasurable interpersonal situations the writer and/or reader wishes they were in. But I was really struck when I started to see a shift in the meaning of the term OC; like it seems that it used to be about inserting your own original character into the existing world of Doctor Who or whatever, which makes sense. But now I feel like people are using it to just mean…a character, that they created, just for them to draw or be in their own stories. And like in the rest of the world that’s just called a character. You know, Dostoevsky had no need to be like “Check out my OC’s the brothers Karamazov, I came up with a whole story for them!”, because what he was doing is just called writing, you know, narrative fiction with people in it. When I see somebody posting a character they made up that’s pretty clearly for their own creative purposes and calling it “my new OC,” I always get this urge to say, like, you don’t have to say it that way. You know. In China they just call it “food”.
“I’m almost 50, and here is the best thing I have learned so far: every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.” @louisethebaker on Twitter
saying “i wouldn’t be a good parent” is a morally neutral statement and i’m sick of whenever i say it people replying “noo no you’d be a GREAT mother i know you would!!!” like… no! being a good parent requires a certain set of skills and traits and i know that i don’t have them and that’s a good thing!!! i think people should figure out if they would be good parents BEFORE having kids and maybe we’d have less shitty parents in the world! fuck!
It was mentioned in Una McCormack’s “The Crimson Shadow” that Cardassians grew fond of coffee and I think it is totally true. Also so-called ikri buns were mentioned.
But the catalyst for me to draw this picture, however, was a scene that my mom saw in the street: an ambulance stopped near ice-cream stand and two EMTs went there to buy ice cream. We agreed that this certainly had Bashir & Parmak vibes and I got so inspired that literally next day drew THIS. The Cardassian version of ice-cream stand, but with buns and coffee, ambulance skimmer and two very serious doctors while on duty.
And I wonder what else do they sell in such stands… Any ideas on Cardassian street-food? 🙂
ALT
