The issue evaporated

Interesting at several levels.  From On Being Rich-ish: Lessons I learned becoming suddenly middle-class by Resident Contrarian.

A theme to which I return very intermittently is how the income and wealth of academics, state employees, and journalists blind them to the hard economic realities of many people and blind them to the unworkability of many proposed policies.  

I have been reading Resident Contrarian for some time.  Though I now discover that I don't know how long due to the fact that there is another blogger Manhattan Contrarian whom I have been reading for years.  I have not established, till this moment, that they are distinct from one another and therefore I cannot speak to that point in time when I started reading Resident Contrarian.

Regardless, Resident Contrarian is speaking to that theme to which I revert periodically: wealth and income enable you to live in a world with different decisions and different decision processes without understanding that you live in a world different from some 60-80% of other people.

Apparently, Resident Contrarian was, until a year or eighteen months ago, not just a family man living hand to mouth but a family man living at the line of 'just barely enough.'  

There once was a guy who was very, very broke. To be clear, he wasn’t the brokest guy you’ve ever heard of. There were poorer people (he knew some, even) but he did spend a long, long time trying to raise a family on not a lot of money; think “a family of four on 35k or less in a major metropolitan area” destitute.

After a lot of lost sleep due to stress and a lot of lost time spent on optimizing resumes nobody ever read, he wrote an article about being poor, meant to let people outside the poor-people-bubble in on what it looked like from the inside. This was the beginning of the shift of the man’s luck; that article went pretty viral and suddenly people were paying attention to his writing.

Shortly after that, he got a pretty good job offer, cried in his car in the parking lot of his terrible cold-call sales job, and then suddenly wasn’t poor anymore.

This is his piece to those still in his former position, describing how that extra income has changed how he makes decisions.  In doing so, he does further illustrate how the decision-making of those with too little income is not necessarily bad or irrational.  They make the best decision they can under the worst constraints possible.  

It is a refreshing piece by someone who has been on both sides of the divide.  On one side of the divide, constrained decisions can end up creating increasingly onerous cascades of negative outcomes.  On the other side, minor emergencies are simply dealt with because they can be dealt with.  

A close friend and I both tell the same identical and unbelievable story:

The other day, something was going wrong with one of my tires, and the other three weren’t that far from failing in the same way. I went to the tire store and bought four new tires for it. They put them on, and I went home. It wasn’t a big deal.

If this story seems boring to you, it’s because you are like most people: something like the $500-1000 spent in this story is an inconvenience. It might even be a major inconvenience that keeps you from doing something else you wanted to do with the money. But you had the money in the bank to pay for the tires, so it wasn’t a catastrophe.

My friend and I both told each other this identical story at different times like it was the weirdest thing that ever happened. I didn’t go to a shady used tire store in south Phoenix. All the tires I bought matched. My credit was not checked. I didn’t have to get a ride to work for days/weeks until I got paid and spent future-rent-money on the problem. The problem just went away.

The other day my kid revealed he had been nursing a middle ear infection for a while. He was only just now telling us because he literally couldn’t sleep over the pain; he would have kept it quiet forever to stay consistent with his tough-kid mindset and to avoid doctors if it were possible to survive without doing so. (My wife informs me, as I write this, that he didn’t even tell us - she just heard him crying in his room. I swear we aren’t bad parents, he just doesn’t like to complain).

But now he was letting us know about it at 3 am. I got out of bed, drove him to urgent care, picked up some drugs and painkillers, and it was handled.

I didn’t have to deal with a single government employee; I didn’t have to wait a month. I didn’t have to find an aquarium supply store that sold pet amoxicillin. I didn’t have to explain to anyone that the smaller of my two children couldn’t go to a thing because we were in a days-to-weeks-long process of getting him treatment for a problem. I just showed up, handed someone a card that indicated I had a high-paying job, and the issue evaporated.  

Worth a read.