starfieldcanvas:

lizdexia:

If I never see someone responding to personal finance/budgeting advice with “Poverty is systemic and getting coffee less often/paying less for groceries won’t solve anything,” I am! Gonna! Scream! Yes! Poverty is systemic. We all know this. But one of the fun things about growing up in poverty is that YOU DON’T LEARN HOW TO BUDGET OR SAVE MONEY. Nobody teaches you that shit when you grow up poor! Or, if they do, it’s a slapdash version of how to budget for poor people (so, like, groceries from the 99-cent store, getting the supersize meal because it’ll feed you for two meals) – not middle-class budgeting, obviously – so if/when you DO end up making more money, you have no idea what the fuck to do with it and a lot of unhealthy spending habits attached to/associated with never having steady sources of income before. So yeah, actually, piggy bank saving/simple budgeting instructions and honest personal finance advice (from third parties who won’t profit, not from banks looking to take advantage of people who don’t know what to do with their money) is actually hugely important. Teaching poor people how to budget is important, because it’s an adult skill you just don’t learn if you’re not specifically taught. There’s two different things at play here! Yes, poverty is a system. Income inequality is a system. But it’s not saying “poor people shouldn’t have nice things” to suggest that budgeting and personal finance are things that everyone should have the opportunity to learn about, and I’m tired of seeing that strawman pop up everywhere. I grew up in a goddamn trailer park and have no idea how personal finance works. I’ve only recently decided that 2017 is the year that I get my financial situation in order and it’s amazing how much I don’t know about finance, just because I never had the opportunity to learn the differences between different retirement accounts and how to save money. Please stop suggesting that basic household income math is oppressive. It’s not. It’s a skill that those of us who grew up in poverty or close to it have to be lucky to learn.

the more posts i see like this, the more hyper-aware i become of how tumblr functions as a giant dialectic machine. this post dismisses the “i am oppressing poor people when i say they need to learn how to budget” line as a strawman at least once. but for a long time that was pretty much the only context in which i heard budgeting advice aimed at the poor: the whole fox news style “why do poor people own refrigerators” and “eating healthy is actually very cheap, if you can afford to invest several hundred dollars in food and cooking implements all at once!” and so on.

then there was The Dialectic of “poor people deserve nice things”/”a refrigerator or cell phone or car is not a nice thing if you need it to live” plus “being poor is expensive” and “here is a chart showing that people are poor because of health care and housing cost increases not petty budgeting problems.” and that was all great! and true and based on real data!

but as this post rightfully points out, that response ossified into a kneejerk hostility toward any and all budgeting advice for the poor, which is terrifically unhelpful.

you know what it sounds like? tumblr’s mental health discourse.

start with mainstream concepts of mental health treatment: “exercise! meditate! have you tried kale smoothies! just stop stressing out so much!” all that nonsense. neurodivergent tumblr mocks those tropes to the skies, and in the process they find solidarity, erase shame, and create a better culture of mutual support and acceptance, which is an important first step toward real recovery.

but then the mocking of any and all recovery advice became too ingrained in tumblr culture, to the point that setting any mental health goals at all becameindistinguishable from imposing ablist, unrealistic standards. an ADHD user who posted “isn’t it nice to just sit down and focus” about her new medication got dogpiled by people who thought they were defending the marginalized.

thus again there is a Dialectic, this time in the form of “why is tumblr so anti-recovery,” and “sometimes self-care is doing HARD things,” and “you CAN actually take productive charge of your thoughts using cognitive behavioral tactics,” and so on. which is great! but if you don’t keep your eye on why tumblr developed its anti-recovery attitude in the first place, you’ll end up recreating the conditions under which that attitude developed because you’ll start to sound just like the kale smoothie people.

anyway. I think OP got it more or less on the money with this particular response, but my dash definitely shows a lot of insensitivity to the great ongoing back-and-forth that is tumblr.

my takeaway? keep in mind that whatever you’re responding to is shaped by whatever it is responding to. if someone’s point seems exaggerated or overstated or unnecessary, that might just mean you simply weren’t around for the original battle and all you’re seeing are the echoes of the victors.