"When the cost of [a car] repair was increased to $3,000, the cognitive performance of those at the upper end of the income distribution was unaffected by the increase. But those at the lower end suffered a 40% decline! The authors interpreted this to mean that scarcity impaired people’s ability to think clearly. The threat—even an imagined threat—of a large bill made it difficult for poor people to focus on the cognitive tasks at hand."That's me. I was recently fired for having severe narcolepsy. (Irony: The medication that might help with this condition for the first time in my life arrives tomorrow, a few days before our health insurance runs out.) It's been surreal to be excluded from most life aspirations due to being unable to participate in the 9 to 5 that society expects. Part of why it's hard is that no one can relate to this at all. When you throw your back out and are unable to work, people understand. When you arrive at 1pm because you have no memory of waking up and turning off all three of the alarms you'd set, no one cares why. You're damaged goods.
A basic income would at least assist with searching for my next job. My wife and I are now in a situation where we either start receiving income within three months max, or completely run out of money.
I know intellectually what needs to be done: Port a webapp from an older framework to a next-gen framework, then write a detailed post about how it was done and what the benefits were. That would be enough social standing to at least get some freelancing gigs.
Trouble is, I'm completely frozen. It's not quite fear -- closer to profound loss of hope. When a medical condition excludes you from society, it's easy to let it get the better of you, or feel bitter. Those are precisely the opposite feelings that will result in income.
In that light, it's not strange that a $3,000 bill would reduce someone's performance by 40%. Even if it's not a disaster, you end up wishing that you could take your wife on that honeymoon you've talked about for four years. When it took 6 months to save up $3,000 dispite a decently high salary, you know that your future will never be free from the "money problem," and that it will permeate every aspect of your life.
So what do you do? Try to be intelligent, of course. Try to see your situation as amusing. Amusement, yes; anger, no. It's easier to deconstruct a problem when it feels like a puzzle rather than a prison.
Easy to say that. What do I do? Pull up React docs while trying not to cry.
None of my ambitions matter anymore. Life is a years-long process of trying to recover from a tailspin. I'm 28; blink a few times and I'll be 50.
A basic income might help. When the company fired me without notice, they mentioned that our health and dental insurance will expire at the end of the month. This translates into a few things: (a) an extra $350/mo of bills, which accelerates our impending bankruptcy; (b) choose to remove my wisdom teeth and get a root canal right now, this week, which will knock me out for at least two weeks when I have to perform, and will cost at least 15% of our reserves anyway, so I'm not going to do that. Maybe it will result in messed up teeth for life, but that's an abstract problem that Future Me will deal with later.
On the other hand, maybe a basic income would hurt. I don't want handouts. I want to participate in life and to add value to my pursuits, just like you. It's easy to imagine feeling like maybe this basic income should be my lot in life. At least if I know we'll hit a brick wall in 3 months and that my wife won't be able to graduate, I can sort of force myself to try to use React / etc, and to otherwise hustle.
But I miss being 13, when life was an endless intellectual playground, and that "forcing yourself to have fun learning a programming framework" was an absurd contradiction.
Why post this? I don't know. It's not a sob story, and it's not really a warning. It seems like no one else will learn a thing from any of this. But at least it won't seem so mysterious that a $3,000 bill can subvert you.