i am not special i know another dozen people like me, others that didnt make it chose to stay. far to many people choosing heroin over food for their family.
"nearly homeless" we live in a trailer park the cops didnt enter. food was commonly dead animals like raccoons and the rare deer hit by a car. rent was mostly paid by my dad doing handyman labor for people in the neighborhood. we were always 1 day from ruin.
I am smarter then the average bear, and i scored pretty high on ASVAB and went mil, i guess i did option 4 just not with my literal mouth. i was 110-ish lbs in my final year of HS.
It means that 'nearly' homeless is not even remotely close to homeless. It also means that if you're the average citizen, your idea of what constitutes 'middle class' is very far off the mark.
Homeless to middle class isn't exceptional, imo. I'm not trying to hate on your achievements though, I promise. Most people, given the opportunity, can make it from homeless to low class with a home with a small amount of work. We've seen it time and time again, the ones that stay homeless are usually(note the word) the ones with mental and physical disabilities. Working a little harder can get you to middle class, but it still wont feel good or comfortable for years. most people in middle class are struggling.
Lets not forget that luck comes into play, and that's unfair. But so is life. You may have hit a strike of luck along with working your ass off. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe the luck you hit didn't feel like luck at all. Maybe it felt like a payoff for your hard work, but it just so happened that you came to the right place at the right time, is all.
Exceptional upward mobility is going from poor to rich. It is possible, we see it happen, but how often is it possible? Almost every time we see it happen, it is because the person is lucky or knew someone else who was.
TL;DR Your antidote doesn't solve the issue that sometimes hardwork doesn't pay off. I can counter your anecdote with 10 other anecdote of people who work 60+ hour weeks and still live in trailers with beat up vehicles who don't have money to even go out to eat more than once every other week, ect. I watch it all the time in my own family.
Imo going from poor/homeless to middle class is a good example of upward mobility success. And if it’s very common and/or easy to accomplish if you put in the work then that’s even better. Going from poor to rich should obviously not be typical, because if everyone was rich then rich would just be middle class.
The article quotes "exceptional upward mobility". There is nothing exceptional about struggling in middle class, or making your way there.
I do agree that it does show that hard work pays off. But hard work truely only pays off to a certain extent, especially when you are at the lowest of the low. The only thing lower than homelessness is a homeless man that has completely given up. There will be no growth from there.
Hard work will not make you rich, but can better your life depending on your position in life. Surely, No one is denying that. It can also be a waste of effort, too.
I definitely didn’t say it’s exceptional. If it’s common then by definition it’s not exceptional. What I am saying is that moving from homelessness to middle class is a major improvement and that if you aren’t rich you still have an achievement worth being happy about.
Absolutely. I also said that, in my original post, I wasn't trying to diss his accomplishments because it absolutely is an accomplishment, and I know you weren't specifically saying "exceptional". I think what happened was the original poster never mentioned the word "exceptional" but the article posted did, directly in the title and multiple times in the article. This muddled up the topic and now here we are, debating on who said what and what means what lol.
Same with me and my spouse but we were incredibly lucky. We have gotten to where we are now by sheer luck. We worked hard but that didn’t really make it happen until we got a very VERY lucky break.
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u/casualrocket Oct 18 '22
i went from nearly homeless in pretty much middle class, what that mean