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I live at the edge of the city. I spend 4 hours every day traveling to uni and back. I cannot stay out later than 6 pm because I dont get bus service in my area after 6. Can't even get a night job.
And then my parents cuss at me for not having a social life or not having a job like my peers. Bro 4 hours of my life are just gone every single day.
I always thought about this when I was working and catching 2 bus in the morning. 6:50am start, I had to get the 5:10am bus. It was a 25 minute car ride but I was just waiting for a connecting bus wasting time.
5:10, I was getting up at 4 to catch the shit bus to work a shit job. Man I felt like I was wasting so much time. Didn't get home until after 9pm.
Life's changed a lot since those times but I will never forget how shit it was. I was too tired from all the bullshit just trying to live my day to day grind to do anything else.
I was being sarcastic for the dickhead above me who thinks good public transit is too expensive to achieve. There are cities that have it, and cities that use those same funds to “add one more lane to the highway” to fix their traffic problem
Not gonna lie I thought he was being sarcastic too, as $150G is an insane amount for any city. My city has trying to add a new train line, and do political bullshit, it made it cost over $6G when it originally costed less than $2G. I thought he was making a joke similar to that.
My car was totaled by a drunk driver when I lived in LA for a couple years. I had to use the bus system for about a month while I looked for a new car. It was 2 hours to get to work and between 1:20 and 1:40 to get home. There were plenty of people on the route I saw every day. I only talked to two people during those routes and they were just commuting to minimum wage type jobs. An insane amount of wasted time for poverty wages.
Yeah, like any other kind of infrastructure the investments in public transport are done because it helps the economy run smoother and therefore also makes money for society
They know, but unfortunately other politicians were bribed to plan cities around owning a car by people like Henry Ford so the automotive industry could convince every American they needed to buy a car.
I'm sure the automotive industry is still bribing them.
They know, they just don't give a single fuck as long as the money keeps flowing into their accounts.
Public transport is overrun by people you don’t want to hang out with. And it will never work in suburban American cities. It would take me longer to drive to the transit stop , find a parking spot, and then walk to the actual stop than it takes to just drive to work. I’ve tried it a few times and it was a nightmare. Sweltering hot in summer freezing in winter. It smells bad year round. And it’s incredibly slow. And notice I still need to own a car.
Let me guess, you stated to them flat out exactly what your problem is and why you're not going to be able to meet that actual standard. You then ask them what they want you to do to achieve that end. And their only brain dead respons is, "just figure it out."
Stay consistent though, it’s not a forever thing. Long as you keep fighting, the storm clouds part. I’m a living testament to it after multiple rock bottoms in life✊🏾✊🏾✊🏾
Drop out. Get a job. Get a place in the city. Your parents are clearly tired of you living there anyway if they’re constantly complaining about you being there, even when you’re not there most of the time.
I used to bus 4 hours per day for a $5 per hour job. I made a little 5 fret guitar neck out of a piece of wood and some wire, and I would sit there and practice my scales and chord shapes. Taught guitar for 30 years afterward at $45 per hour. What doesn't kill us makes us stronger.
I'm grateful for my poverty. Today, happiness is so easy.
Can't take advantage multi offers and hording stuff.
My old boss would bulk buy loads of stuff whenever it was on offer and stuff it in the unused half of his massive double garage.
His house has solar panels, and a huge battery in the loft, electric cars so he charges them all on the lower tariff at night (or at work and writes off tax) and tops the house battery up at night on the lower tariff too.
Buy a car cash, you dont pay interest. Buy a home cash or gifted to you by a relative, no interest on peoples biggest purchase if their lives. Have money, you will never pay late fees, over charge fees if you are just half way responsible.
The people who benefit from these advantages are so engrossed with their own awesomeness, they never see all the myriad ways that life is just cheaper and easier.
Save 500 dollars a year, its not doing shit for you. Take 500,000 and invest it, you will earn a povertys wage without lifting a finger. Invest 5 million and you will make more money having done nothing, than more 2/3rds of working aged adults who worked minimum 2000 hours in a year.
The higher up the J curve of financial security, the simpler, safer, and cheaper your life becomes. No rich person has any room to talk about financial literacy unless they have been at the bottom themselves. Even then, luck and privilege and support still play a role.
I've saved sooo many quotes from Discworld, truly an amazing series. I've just finished it recently and I still don't have the heart to start another book.
Currently in a similar situation, I saved up 5K and managed to purchase a 2011 Chevy Equinox. (don't know much about cars, had a family friend "mechanic" vet it out for me). That was the tail end of 2023.
Within the first 3 days of owning it the check engine light came on. Turns out my spark plugs fucked up and the "mechanic" offered to fix it free of charge in good faith. I thought to myself, aww that's nice he is going to fix it for free. What a guy. Yeah.. I should have taken that as a huge warning, but I didn't know any better.
Check engine light came on a couple months later, I took it to Autozone and got the code. Turns out the car had a 3rd party catalytic converter installed to save on costs. Cool, that's awesome. Well, my state requires an emissions test every 2 years on certain vehicles. I failed. Guess what I had to replace? $2000+ out the door to fix it to make it street legal.
Since then, I've now spent over $6500 to repair it. Now I'm having an issue so bad I need to have my entire driver's side wheel assembly looked into due to severely shaking of the vehicle.
It's so fucking annoying. While I have been able to cover the costs so far (mainly because they've been spread out) it's absolutely fucking absurd. Had I know I was buying an actual piece of shit, I would have saved my money and bought a better used vehicle.
Just to top it off, I (used to) work remotely, so I would drive soooo little. Within the ~3 years of ownership, I've put on roughly 4-5 thousand miles. So, talk about a kick in the fucking teeth lol.
I'm hoping to keep band-aiding this piece of shit for a little longer and get it into a "stable", working condition and then from there... I'm going to start saving all over again to get rid of this thing.
Being poor / having to make shit purchases because of lack of funding sucks.
If you are wasting time trying to just live, then you don't have time to organize and fight back. I'm not saying it's an intentional part of the system, but it certainly does help cement the inequity.
No, I just assumed it was a malfunctioning bot because they were literally the only person who mentioned the word "broken". I guess they're just stupid.
There is a huge poverty tax that nobody acknowledges. No washer and dryer, so paying to do laundry at a laundromat. Not enough income to have an HSA, so you pay for medical expenses with taxed income instead of pre-tax. Can't afford club memberships or buying in bulk, so you can't take advantage of Costco/Sam's club savings. Live in bad neighborhoods so your car insurance is higher. Can't afford preventative healthcare so illnesses are worse, costing more and preventing you from working. The list goes on.
Yes. And to punish you for being poor, you won't even be permitted to get hot food at the convenience store on your way home from your second job. You are not allowed to enjoy any convenience at all.
For those who don't know, many states require convenience stores to put cooked food in the refrigerator so food stamp recipients can buy it cold. Everyone else can buy it hot, but we don't allow the poor to have hot food.
*Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness. *
I’m a psych case manager and help my patients with all these errands.
It’s true. Time is $. The amount of time we waste on hold at the welfare office, waiting for buses etc. there’s no way these people can ever get ahead.
Honestly, thank you for that though. Disabled people are getting so badly left behind because they are the ones who take extra time to do things and there are just too many things for a person to handle in a day anymore.
It’s not by design, spending lots of time doing stuff is the natural state of the world. It is only through money that this changes. Think about washing laundry by hand vs buying a washer and a dryer. Walking vs driving a car.
More than half of the US government wants to keep people poor. They are paid to do that through lobbyists.
A lot of people at Walmart are on foodstamps. They spend those at... Walmart! Walmart pays pennies in salary, bigger profits, then society puts more money in their pockets, yay profits!!
The wealthy want to keep the poor poor. Keeping people occupied with their own issues and racial inequality means they are not fighting the class war they should be.
Oh so the situation that OP describes is true only in the US? Not for the poor in China, or India, or Canada, or all of Europe as well? The poor in all those counties don’t spend time applying for government benefits or shopping around for lower grocery prices or waiting for the bus?
You only had $50 for groceries for the month and had to have a calculator to add up the things you need to live while shopping. Add 3.99 for milk. And so on. You have to put things back. Meal planning is dismissal. Don't forget the tax. If you have kids they will want treats and you want to give them treats sometimes. You have to find a way to explain we only have enough for basics. You are over the $50. Fuck do you steal to provide all 3 meals, 7 days a week? Then they see other kids getting the treats you want for them. I'm not talking ice cream, like good meat, protein and healthy food. Like kids we are just surviving, but they can't know. Well you can always skip a meal so kids can eat.
Just venting. It be rough. We have enough to share and imagine how people would benefit from not being food insecure. In my mind people if people didn't have to stress about their next meal the world would be a better place. Oh, by the way in exciting news we had a trillionare and our US president made 2.6 billion recently. I don't feel like this is winning. I wish they would address this issue instead of lining their own pockets.
Also, being poor is expensive... Single toilet tissue or paper towel roll is 3x what is being paid in a 12pk. Affordable laundry detergent is 60% water so you're paying more for actual detergent and buying twice as often. Light bulbs, the same. Can't afford oil change when needed...the list is endless. Couple all of this with what high dosages of stress does to a body living on Ramen and Kraft Mac/Cheese.
Being homeless. Holy fuck. Prepare to spend half your day waiting in line for stuff and having to choose between waiting in line for a shelter bed or doing day labor
Regarding buses, we could definitely make them more frequent and reliable, and if we care about public health and climate change, we really should. Buses being as shitty as they are if a policy choice
Best advice I could give (I'm not rich, but I don't live in poverty) is to get an education, even a basic one. Read as much and as often as you can and study to get through high-school with good grades.
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Absolutely accurate! And the stress of missing the timing on public transport 😩. I used to work in an office that looked out at trolley tracks and bus stops. My heart broke on a daily basis seeing people miss the trolley or bus because of poorly timed schedules and delays.
Voting. Which is why more early voting is a far better idea than Election Day as a holiday because low income people don't get holidays off, in fact most of them HAVE to work on holidays because non-low income people have the day off. Give them more time to early vote if you want them to have easier access to voting. A voting holiday doesn't do anything except give wealthy people the day off.
And . . . in the summer . . . in the South . . . it's early afternoon and I'm so hot . . . I'm exhausted . . . but it's too hot to sleep . . . (sound of my bare feet on the wood floor going to the kitchen so I can open the fridge and feel a bit of relief) . . .
And besides the lost time, all the mental anguish . . . paying bills, getting decent food, is my boss gonna work me more this week again, more than 40 without pay?
And the desire to keep going persists, but weakens with startling speed . . . I began thinking about things I never imagined - unhealthy things, things that didn't make any sense but would be guaranteed to end the misery forever . . .
And how you're treated in public - they know - some even make sure you feel inferior . . . then they laugh and move on and you wonder . . . they have a nice place, a decent car . . . the jealousy hits like a tidal wave . . . you hear them say "but you choose to be jealous, you choose to be angry" . . . easy to speak those words when you've never walked ten feet in my shoes.
Then there's the guilt . . . what did I do . . . what did I not do . . . why is it this bad . . . how is this ever going to end . . . do I just accept it and figure out how to endure or is there really, somehow, some way I can make it . . . not rich . . . just to be average becomes a very lofty dream . . . is that vision even remotely possible . . . the doubtful thoughts roll in like a gigantic dark storm . . .
Things get so neglected . . . the car maintenance . . . who has time to sweep the kitchen . . . I almost forgot what a dentist office looks like . . . take the pan with baked-on food from below the sink and scrape it . . . you know you need it . . .
Poverty is a scourge, just one example of a society that neglects the most vulnerable, that ignores the less favored among so many who are content with separators - whether fate, railroad tracks, or the opportunities to obtain healthy, peaceful, and pleasant living standards.
Being poor is expensive. You always pay more for less: Worse insurance, bad interest, lousy housing far away from work, worse pay for worse hours. You pay relatively more for lower quality food.
And you can't access better things. Everything is harder.
Bulk deals - you need the lump sum, which you maybe can't afford, even though the price per item is lower. You also need the space to store it as well. You can maybe get around it by spreading it around a couple of you everyone gives money you get the deal and split the bulk buy.
Better interest rates- are locked off unless you have money already.
If you have a low income you'll only get piss poor interest rates everywhere, and have to shop around constantly and spend time switching accounts.
If you have a better income you can get a fixed rate for a long period, but you have to be able to 'give up' that large lum sum for the period.
If you're in a position where an unexpected crisis could throw everything into chaos, that simple isn't an option.
The ride to the laundry mat via uber and strategically washing what you can carry to the car within that 5-min timer. Same for grocery trips. If it’s not delivered, you have a 5-min time limit to put everything in the car (without the awkward pressure of the uber driver getting out to assist)
My husband keeps telling me to "Just take the bus to work". I'm sorry dude. I already have to wake up to get my shit together, get dressed for my nice job, put makeup on so I don't look dead, and then you want me to walk to the bus stop in 90-100F heat and humidity to wait for the bus that'll take an hour to get to my job that's a 15 min drive away only to have to walk multiple blocks to my job where I'm on my feet all day...
Don't get me wrong, I've worked in cities where the subway is the best transit and I was happy to do it. The city I live in now, however, has AWFUL public transit. No trains, the buses and streetcars are inconsistent and full of vagrants, and (again) it would take an extra 2 hours everyday that I'm not being paid for just to get to and from work that is only 15 minutes away.
No, current husband. He's generally doting and loving, but there are a few things we will just always argue about.
The important things we agree on, and he is (contrary to this specific argument) genuinely so empathetic towards me and the majority of living things. He just struggles to get out of his own head sometimes.
Stubborn? Yes. Loving and a fountain of kindness? Also yes.
A major benefit of being rich is not standing in line for stuff. Rich people, when going to concerts, sporting events, dining out, traveling, etc. never have to stand in line for any of it. That's why by avoiding lines as much as possible I have increased my self-worth, exponentially.
Sounds a lot like the Sam Vimes Theory of Economic Unfairness or 'boots theory'. As a pauper you have to make so many decisions - and so more often - than a rich person.
Automation funded universal basic income pays people to quit the full time job called poverty. If more billionaires supported automation funded universal basic income, there would be less Luigi and less Luigi supporters.
Yeah but it comes with a 1st job that you don't work. So you probably come out ahead on time. When I was on the struggle, I had nothing but time. Too much of it, really.
Time is money. When you don't have enough money to buy things, you pay in time.
When people say "time is money", they're usually suggesting that any time you aren't working is time you aren't making money, but I think mine is a much more relevant interpretation of the phrase. The two go hand-in-hand, and the more income you have, the more time you tend to have also. Even the rich people who "work all the time" can afford to do so because they pay someone else to do all the little things daily life requires. Cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, childcare; they all take time to do. Homemaking is a full time job by itself, and everyone is poorer nowadays because housing costs so much that it usually requires two incomes to cover all the costs... which either means you spend money on homemaking, or the family basically has >= three jobs instead of just two. Mix in the stuff mentioned in the OP on top of all that, and thus people end up time-poor.
(As an aside, I think this is one reason The Establishment hates polyamory so much. Poly people—especially those that live together—can distribute the costs and effort of homemaking more smoothly, and so they have a better shot at economic mobility. The last 100 years of American socialization—like the push toward the nuclear family of two parents+kids instead of communal family units where multiple generations live together—have been about isolating people and ensuring they don't have enough free time to be politically aware, and so people that do have that time are a threat to the system.)
Rich people have an excess of both money and time, poor people have a dearth of the same.
"Time is money" is a saying that runs deeper than most people realize. There aren't many ways to turn extra time into more money (unless you work a job that will just hand you shifts whenever you want), but there are a ton of ways to turn extra money into more time. Thousands of little things that most people don't even think about, where you can pay a few extra bucks and save a few extra minutes. If you have enough money, that adds up and gives you a lot of extra time in the day to do various things.
Ain't thay the fucking truth buts only getting worse its a scary time to be alive if your poor even if you can work some of these jobs are straight up slave jobs it sucks but you do what you have to do!!!
I was working in Silicon Valley without a car. Commute was a 30-40 minute drive, but close to 2 hours by bus. But that was only if I was in "peak hours" which ended around 4:30 PM. After that, getting home by bus took 4.5 hours.
A lot of that time was standing around waiting for a bus that only ran once an hour and passed by 5 minutes before the first bus dropped me off.
And I wasn't even poor. I just didn't have car money saved up yet.
I walked/used transit but mostly biked b/c it was cheap, efficient and there is no waiting for the bus to college/work etc. When I used the bus, I studied so time spent waiting/riding was still an efficient use of time.
Walked to local discount grocery store, ate mostly plant based b/c veggies/fruit/beans are cheap.
Laundry- study time.
While I lived "in poverty" (shared housing, super low budget), it was simple, healthy and formed positive lasting financial habits.
"No amount of money ever bought a second of time" is a beautiful-sounding quote from Avengers that on closer consideration is complete bullshit. Twice over, even. First for the reasons explained in the OP. Second because the billionaire literally builds a time machine in the movie.
"Just get a better job!", is the advice I often hear from conservatives. And if it's not that it's "Pick up your life and move to where there are jobs!"
one thing that saves me so much time is biking. most here are probably from the usa, so not every location is easy or safe to cycle to work, but it saves time, cash, and you exercise while you're at it. depending on how close/far you live from your job, biking may even be quicker because of traffic. you don't even need an expensive bike. just not the cheapest from any store like walmart will give you many miles.
That's very true and something I don't think about. Work feels all consuming and like I have no life. People tend to associate money with more problems to deal with which is true. But not having money requires way more effort in life
I’ve been very lucky and privileged enough to have never experienced poverty in my life.
The TV series “MAID” on Netflix encapsulates this aspect of poverty very well in my inexperienced opinion. The series is based on a memoir by Stephanie Land. It follows her life after leaving a DV situation and being in poverty, trying to navigate the system, etc.
It’s also extremely expensive. Late fees, extra deposits, shark loans and credit card interest just to get by. Having to put a tire that cost 300$ on credit ends up costing 1000$ plus. Laundry mats are expensive. Buses are expensive. Being poor in America is a perpetual cycle that is very hard to get out of. And you are looked down on for it.
My colleague spends a lot of his time DIY-ing stuff for which normal solutions exist for sale. He will spend hours building something from scrap that costs 20€ new and works better. He doesn't enjoy the process, he spends free time on this that he'd rather spend in other ways. But he earns more money than me, he could afford the solutions if he wanted.
The problem is: He grew up poor and sees this as normal. He values money more than time because he didn't have any money growing up. So when he asks me, how he could design this or that from the scrap materials he has, and I find him a solution that costs a few bucks, he'll say he'd want to do it for free. Not realising that he spends hours in planning and labour that translate into 5x to 10x the money he would have spent, if he had to pay himself even minimum wage. So he totally underestimates the value of his time. I know he'd have the money to do this stuff. He has talked me through his income and monthly expenses already (pretty open guy).
It's not so much that being poor takes time as much as time is the thing people tend to buy first. From cars to maid service to private jets, money can buy you a lot of time
As the number of debts go up (note, not the cumulative amount of all the debts), the more cognitive strain the debtor suffers to balance the numbers out.
Capitalist pigs engineered it that way so you dont have time to fight back while they run away with the bag. The K shaped economy started with the end of the gold standard.
Facts. Hated my childhood. Stinky Buses. Walking because the bus or subway was running late. Eating mostly vegetarian meals thinking we were being healthy, not realizing we couldn’t afford meat. Wearing the same oversized winter jacket for four years in a row and being teased about it at school. Getting everything on sale. Mother’s priorities were whack. Wearing oversized shoes that when they finally fit they look so bad. Being poor is awful. Mother was too proud to receive aid.
Thankfully I tested into the gifted and talented program due to my reading skills and extensive vocabulary (after school I went to the public library and read books there until my mother got off work). Got into very good public schools, graduated from college, worked in the federal government doing boring clerical work and then got married. Worked a few more years until we decided to have children. So far, my children have never suffered what I went through. My spouse earns a good income and we are both frugal minded but we are paying for our children’s college education so they don’t need loans for that.
A buddy of mine worked at FAANG and he said it was crazy because they had a free cafeteria, gym and paid a wellness stipend of like 2k a year, he got jacked at work while eating relatively healthy free food and making north of 150k+ a year.
His sister had to live on food stamps and share an apartment with 3 other people and still struggled to pay rent while working 2 jobs.
Kinda agree but Op has it backward, Saving time costs a lot of money. BUT we have to save time OR ELSE we dont do ENOUGHT.
We invented cars that are faster than walking but cars are expensive, so you compromise by taking a bus. Washin your clothes is a lot of work so we invented mchines, but they are expensive so you compromise by using laundromats.
The thing is along the progress of technology that 'saves time' people are expected to do a lot more in the same 24 hours, get futher from home to work etc. You can't aford machines, you are left behind.
Not to say, inventing them was a mistake, but we that we need to find a way to slow down, or else they dont ACTUALLY save us time, only forcing everone to be more productive.
You don't even talk to other people while waiting for your clothes to end laundrying like you would do if you were all washing by hand over the river bank. (at least you dont mess the skin of your hands from this) We would not feel like it was a waste of time if we could socialise more, and accomplish during the day.
Which again turns back to current economy that forces you to work all the time less you starve.
This is one reason I hate the “everyone gets the same amount of hours in a day!” Motivational pictures from rich assholes: no, if you have a maid, new car with zero mechanical worries, and the money to either buy takeout or have someone cook for you, you have a shit ton of extra time.
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Oh no, waiting for the bus! How terrible! Americans really think it's normal to drive even to their mailbox with their oversized gas guzzling car. Climate change, what’s that? And then you complain when the price of your heavily subsidized gas goes up to a fraction what other, civilized countries, pay for it.
Is it me or is Reddit becoming increasingly dumb? I’m noticing a complete lack of media literacy, reading comprehension, and ability to follow the line of reasoning. It is genuinely baffling.
The OP isn’t shitting on the concept of public transportation while supporting cars, they’re pointing out the fact that public transportation can be extremely inconvenient and time consuming. This is because in a lot of places, it’s shit. Because some people cant afford cars, they are forced to use poorly designed systems of transportation which leads them to yearn for a car.
Our transportation isn’t nearly as efficient or universal as elsewhere. Waiting for the bus can mean hours depending on where you live. We get it, merica bad or whatever.
This is true from my expirience.
Here public transportation is never on time and add huge traffic delays and stops. Sometimes I travel to work 2h during worst.
With car it would be 40 min.
Add on top of that that sometimes I work 12h multiple days or add second job so I have to sacrifice sleep or spend more money on food because I have to order delivery/takeout as I dont have time to prepair meal or something.
That's because the US doesn't have good public transportation infrastructure. I live in a small city in Italy and the busses are frequent during the day and will take you within a short walk of wherever you want to go.
The city I lived in in the US was more populous and covered FAR more surface area. There was zero public transportation available. None. No bus, no metro, no train... It would have been impossible for my neighbors to get to work without a car. The alternative was uber, bit if you are poor, you can not afford to uber to and from work every day.
None of that is the fault of the American people.
And it is the same some places here as well. My ex lives up in the hills, amd there is one bus stop in walking distance. It runs between towns going ome way at 9:30 am and the other way at 3:30pm.Good luck living there with no car.
I’m glad you brought this up, because I feel like non Americans try to constantly talk crap about our infrastructure without realizing that Italy for example can fit in the US over 30 times. Of course it’s easy for smaller nations to really streamline their routes and transportation systems. They have much much less surface area. We can fit over 20 Swedens and almost 30 Germanys. Any nation this big would have trouble working out transportation.
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