Really? Do they? That’s very interesting. Tell me, is the over half more like 99%?
I think you knew exactly what idea they were saying. Agency, the ability to control your own life, varies. Clearly and obviously a regular person in the West has more agency than say a regular person in North Korea. It is not an one-off switch. The ever growing wealth inequality is making the population shift more and more to the slave side of things. That doesn’t mean that you are a slave it means your papa was less of a slave compared to you.
This is why being a lolitarian makes you stupid. It bifurcates slavery and freedom. It defines force to be a specific term, that no one else uses, and declares victory in the game it is playing with itself
It’s really disingenuous to compare US-only data to unrelated generalizations of other countries that function under different cultural and economic systems. But I feel like you already know that.
What is actually the definition of “financial freedom”? Having (earned / gained) enough money, so that a person has no need to go to work anymore? If that’s the case, I would expect that number to be much, much lower than 50%.
EDIT: sorry, I just read it in the article. If “financial freedom” just means to work and live more or less without having to worry about financial obligations and what will happen tomorrow, then less than 50% is a rather shocking figure.
Agree. And anyone could quickly go one from side to the other. In need of a expensive surgery? Might lose your financial freedom. Bought an expensive house and lost your job? Goodbye as well.
I’m 45 and I’ve more or less accepted that short of an unexpected and massive windfall, I will never be able to retire, much less experience “financial freedom.”
I’m 43 and literally had this exact conversation today. I work full time for a major financial institution. This shouldn’t be how things work.
Agree yet you work for the enemy.
Because things will certainly change if you keep working without disruption.
If you prefer to ‘bias for action’ there is this: https://youtu.be/TMHCw3RqulY?feature=shared
Lol got em. Yet I live on mostly potatoes and was crippled by a billionaire corporation and haven’t worked or made any income since. Homeless too.
In other news, water is wet
Today a young man on acid realized that all matter is merely energy condensed to a slow vibration, that we are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively, there is no such thing as death, life is only a dream, and we are the imagination of ourselves. Heres Tom with the Weather.
If, like me, you didn’t have the reference: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2r85h2
Thinking about consciousness and stuff is fun. Like what if loneliness is an innate property of a singular unified consciousness and in its searching for another it creates compartmentalized versions of itself until ultimately complex unique lifeforms are formed. What if life is just the complexity of knots tied by consciousness searching for another? What if time is the entropy of those knots becoming untied?
This is why psychology is considered a soft science
I’ve known that from the Tool song Third Eye. Good to know the original sauce. Reference: https://on.soundcloud.com/MLXsj
Bill Hicks, I reckon?
That’s how society is, brother, literally 1% controls the world in their favor and keeps the wealth, impoverishing the 99%.
It’s been 10,000 plus years. Let’s change it, brother.
i agree, but not by passive aggressively shitting on people’s life choices in a social media comment section.
If they choose to stand in an apple line for 12 hours then I have no apologies to offer. But I get it.
I would also venture to say that applies to 90% of us. “Over half” is a fucking laughable fake figure.
I mean, 90% is over half…
Yeah, but it’s marketing jargon to make it seem like less of a deal. When someone says “over half” do you immediately assume they’re taking in the 90% range, or closer to 60%?
Sheeit I’m one step above homelessness living off plasma donations.
I’d go for this except I got a false HIV-positive back in '89 and no matter what I do I can’t get it off my blood donation record. :(
I do ok, but all my debt and bills are telling me I need to get on this gravy train
I’m now in a 2 income household with fewer kids as they grow up, and to us it feels more like we are close always, just no hope of ever actually getting there, if that makes sense. Always almost enough.
Which is better than my previous experience but since it’s happening later in life, still wouldn’t expect to ever stop having to earn money by working. I have never expected to retire though, it would take - as someone else noted - a windfall, luck, not effort. Effort has taken us as far as it can.
49.3% say it refers to meeting financial obligations and having some money left over each month. About 54.2% define it as living debt-free, and 46.2% believe it means never having to worry about money.
I’m going to ignore that pesky 100% thing for the moment. Apparently we can’t even agree on what “Financial Freedom” means. Defining the metric you’re polling seems pretty critical if you want a consistent or useful answer. “Over half” is still burying the lede, though - less than one in ten fall into their personal version of that 150% noted above. Aside from the “American families are financially fucked” though, I’m not sure there’s any hard data to extract from this.
--
“Peter don’t ya call me cause I just can’t go; I owe my soul to the company store.”
Don’t also forget that we’re talking about what people say about their own financial position - which may be different from what their financial position actually is. Self-reporting is never accurate, because people report what they feel or are aware of, which is different from objective facts, to a greater or lesser degree.
Between letting individuals define the terms of the question they’re going to answer, and then self-reporting, this “study” goes beyond useless and into detrimental.
That’s a good point. I make well into the 6-digits and the one reason I don’t believe that anyone under 7-digits will ever be “financially free” is because of the for-profit healthcare system. One bad accident or cancer and I’m fucked for a long time if not the rest of my life as is anyone that can’t just shrug off 5 to 6-digit bills.
Now if I were somewhere that offered universal health care and I was making what I was, I’d consider myself to be financially free. So I guess I fall into the 46.2% category.
Same. I’m financially stable. Meaning I can hit a few bumps and I’ll be fine. But I don’t think it’s possible to be ’ financially free’ when at any time I could suddenly have hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical debt.
I can roughly estimate potential pit falls with my home. And home insurance is reasonably reliable for catastrophic scenarios. Even if they aren’t, bankruptcy is still feasible. The same cannot be said about healthcare. Insurance plans are extremely opaque and while they claim to have terms such as ‘out of pocket maximum’ that should**** in theory limit your losses, there are endless stories about how little that holds up when put to the test.
Proper healthcare coverage would be the single biggest impact on American stability. Nothing else is even close.
You can add disability to this. If I can’t work I pretty sure im buggered even if for some reason we get universal healthcare (I guess being disabled, if you can navigate to the point of getting it, you would have medicaid but what comes in every month would not be adequate to stay where I live or such)
I agree, the definition is a real problem. While still interesting the survey is pretty screwed.
I thought financial freedom was being independently wealthy. Idle rich. Apparently I was wrong, it means working class but with some “bonus” money. Maybe still struggling but struggling less than most working stiffs.
How free can you be if you still have to work full time?
There is a point in income where you have the choice, the choice to move, the choice to switch jobs, the choice to leave your partner, etc.
That is freedom. A lot of Americans are just stuck exactly where they are.
“This is ten percent luck, twenty percent skill, fifteen percent concentrated power of will, five percent pleasure, fifty percent pain, and a hundred percent reason to remember the name.”
Probably the half that make $31k or less.
Looking for a job is insanely depressing when you get to see just how many jobs-white collar, blue collar, fast food, whatever- all pay absolutely disgusting wages one person can’t live of off…
I’d have thought more. With a big gaping chasm in between.
Clearly the answer is work harder and get a 3rd job. Eventually you’ll be a millionaire!
🎶*Day’s never finished, masta got me workin, someday massa set me free!*🎶
Labour will set you free, indeed
Wtf? Of course not. The workforce would be devastated if half of Americans had achieved financial freedom.
Not if the goal was equilibrium/homeostasis rather than unsustainable growth/metastasis on a finite world of finite resources as it is today.
That will never be permitted though. Humanity will destroy itself not out of hatred as once believed, but in the name of cold, insatiable, sociopathic greed.
Yah we won’t stop using resources and fucking the air until we all die off. There’s no other way cause humans, specifically the humans in power with the ability to make change. Won’t. Cause cold hard cash.
Yup. Workers in America desperately need more rights. But so long as there are unpleasant jobs thst have to be done, total financial freedom isn’t really possible. Even under a socialist/communist model.
There is $222 in the wallet in the link preview. Just found that interesting.
