All Hollowed Out: The lonely poverty of America’s white working class

It doesn't have to be church that brings people together, and there are other communities that have church like qualities such as car clubs, user groups, etc.

What we do lack is a church-alternative meetup for the masses that forge a community together. The closest we probably have is reddit. Just before the technological age, communities were brought together for survival, but now that we really don't even need each other for survival e.g. more efficient to hunt/build together, it seems that communities are decaying away.

I've found it interesting that in the immigrant communities, religion is a pretext for bringing a single ethnicity together for people to form relationships and business partnerships. It does seem that religion has a certain staying power only if to purely provide community under the guise of spreading a "good" morals.

Not everyone is out for intellectual progression or even a better wage. I can tell you this first hand from living in country towns, where there aren't many high skilled jobs, but plenty of happy people who just like that lifestyle.

There can only be so many electricians in a 2000 person town once the bolt turning factory shuts down, for example. So for them it would mean skilling up in an area they may not be happy about, because it is what is available, or moving town to somewhere with similar work to what they had before.

I agree with what you are saying though, at that point it is up to institutions to support and retrain them if they are to continue being useful to society as a unit, but they may very well lose a lifestyle they were quite content with.

I was forced to work extra hours for no extra pay because I was salaried. I was under a lot of stress and assigned other people's projects until I was overwhelmed with them. I worked in St. Louis MO and my wife didn't want me to relocate and be in a different state so my job search was limited and nobody was hiring.

From the stress I developed a mental illness in 2001 and became disabled on short term disability. When I returned from short term disability I was fired for having a panic attack at work. They lost my doctor's notes that excused me and used them against me.

I tried another job in 2002 they used me to get their project to the next level, migrating from Excel to SQL Server for their database and optimizing the code. After the project was done, I was fired.

I ended up on disability in 2003, I went back to college to earn a bachelors but I was never medically cleared to go back to work.

I am 47 now, and I feel like my career is over. I had offers to work in the west coast but I could not relocate because of my wife not wanting me to leave out of state. I'm sure the working environment is different in SV and west coast companies.

But if other white men of a middle age had the stress that I had when working, I can see them developing a mental illness or turning to drug use. I never turned to drug use, but I had problems sleeping and waking up due to the stress.

I had friends who didn't go to college but learned programming by experience, they were expert programmers but lost their jobs because they didn't have college degrees and ended up working in retail jobs to make ends meet like Sam's Club.

I've known people with college degrees that didn't know what they were doing and I mentored them at work to get them started in programming. It is possible to earn a degree and still have problems doing the job they are hired for. For example programming classes teach how to write short programs that are very small, but writing larger more complex programs and how to debug them is not taught. That takes experience in the real world.

But as it turns out, almost all of those peasants were capable of learning to read, doing algebra, engaging in abstract reasoning, labor coordination, and operating some fairly complex machinery. Many of them were even capable of becoming software engineers. We know this, because pretty much all of us came from them, and if we can do it, they could've done it, given the proper environment. Someone advancing your argument 1000, 100, or even 50 years ago would've wrong, what makes your argument different?

Of course we shouldn't expect equal outcomes from all people, but to suggest that we've now reached such a level of access and fairness in society that everyone still at the bottom can't possibly be elevated any further seems... unintelligent.