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Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

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Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#201
post #8

Poverty harms children. It's possible it harms young adults as well. The sooner we dismiss the notion that we need the poverty to motivate us to work and adopt some form of basic income, the better. It might be cheaper too than current system when you consider all the harm that poverty does to economy and workers.

Giving money to poor you only create more of those. People should be given a chance, not money.

Poor people need both money and opportunity. If you can't feed yourself, you can't pursue opportunities.

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and the system we live under selects away from that. A majority are struggling today. Unnecessary.

I think you'll find it's not just "today". The majority have always struggled.

Regardless, the current and growing level of struggle is unnecessary.

Examples elsewhere in the world are not hard to find.

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Giving money to poor you only create more of those. People should be given a chance, not money.

Giving money to poor is giving them a chance. A lot of problems with being able to find and keep a job ultimately stems from lack of money for things like housing, clothing, transportation, healthcare and decent meals.

Exactly. I have been without before, and it consumes too much of your higher brain function. Lots of problems evaporate even with a small amount of cash or cash flow. Conversely it is hard to then use money as an efficient lever after running on fumes for years. This is often why you see changes in leadership as an org grows, the person who bootstraps a company has a much different skillset then the person who grows it into a large powerful org. The latter should know where to spend much larger sums of money to achieve goals rather than penny pinching and sinking more precious resources like time or focus.

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Instead people wrongly think fast food is cheaper than home cooked food. Fast food is cheaper than home cooked food when you factor in time & mental effort. Cooking at home requires skills that many people do not have.

Sorry, this is beyond my understanding. Morning porridge: pour water into oats. Microwave for 2 minutes. Dinner: pour water into rice. Boil for 10 minutes. Add a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store. My 7yo does it. Do you seriously think there's a non-disabled adult incapable of pouring water in a bowl?

People who are homeless or inadequately housed can have no access to the ability to do this. They may not have a microwave or means to boil water.

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#205

The lack of money gives people with lower income a problem that the brain cannot solve. Not everyone can 'just get a job' that easily. I've experienced periods in my life where I kept thinking in circles to find a way to get some money for our basic needs. The only solution was to simply keep trying and waiting for some luck or fate. Of course that fucks your brain! I knew a professor in Berlin who was living in the…

"schlechte Zeiten für die Heiligen"

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#206

who doesn't go through unsteady income in young adulthood? if anything it teaches you how to prioritize with few resources.

I didn't. I was a military wife in young adulthood. We had a steady income with good benefits.

Unsteady income for me came in my forties when I began doing freelance work post-divorce to accommodate a health issue.

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People don't want to face cold hard truths. IQ is not perfect by any means, but one of the best predictors of overall success in life. Yet when it's overlapped with socioeconomic standing, it suddenly becomes a racist measurement.

What causes low IQ though? Just going to take a guess here and say that >People don't want to face cold hard truths. Yeah, no shit. People are too busy trying to survive instead of trying to figure out life's "truths".

>What causes low IQ though? Just going to take a guess here and say that

I think your statement is unlikely to be true. It will, of course, depend on your specific definitions, but from twin studies we've found that intelligence seems to be heritable.[0] It's even a fairly strong effect:

>The heritability of intelligence increases from about 20% in infancy to perhaps 80% in later adulthood.[0]

Other studies have found a similar effect.[1][2] Due to us observing this kind of a heritability effect (one that grows stronger as we age), I think it's unlikely that random events, such as trauma and hardships, are the main cause for lower levels of cognitive development. They certainly play a role in it, because they absolutely do affect cognitive development negatively, but I wouldn't bet money on this being the main reason.

Note that even though [2] favors the maternal womb environment over genetics as a factor in intelligence, it's still a factor that the individual in question had no control over.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270739/

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24791031

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9242404

>Yeah, no shit. People are too busy trying to survive instead of trying to figure out life's "truths".

I think in this case the parent was referring to people who discuss and solve these kinds of problems, rather than the people actually going through them.

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#208
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, but if basic income becomes reality, it won't happen because people will want to help the poor, but because the amount of work required to produce food will become so small that people by their mere existence will generate more value, similar to the way people can get email accounts with gigabytes of storage for free.

I think that when most people think of basic income, they don't think of the type of society you mentioned. That's something we hopefully will get to in the future, but we're still quite far from it. If we get basic income, then it's probably going to be much sooner than that, which is going to have widespread implications on society. Many of which we don't know. I even think that most people would have no problem wi…

Population growth is a good thing, it will force us to build cities on mars, irrigate sahara, build floating cities on the ocean. And will help to make "produce once, use infinitely" things: art, software, science cheaper. It wouldn't be a side effect of basic income but the main purpose.

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#209
post #16

I went through a few years of unstable income in my early twenties (circa 2000), it wasn't altogether bad, just very very sporadic. When I think back on those years I had all kinds of bad behaviours that were not rational. For example, not paying bills because something more urgent might come up. Not looking at balances because it was easier to not know. I would go from feeling rich one month because a freelance clie…

> it wasn't altogether bad, just very very sporadic. When I think back on those years I had all kinds of bad behaviours that were not rational. For example, not paying bills because something more urgent might come up. Not looking at balances because it was easier to not know.

I never had unstable income (maybe wishing I had more), but I definitely had some degree of these specific bad behaviors.

I feel (financial) maturity is a big part of this; As a parent now, I'm being intentional on how my kids earn allowance and think about spending.

Re: Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

#210
Oh how I can relate. It's been about a year now since I closed my failed startup, and still no webdev job after many interviews. After a year of countless applications, interviews and networking with no result (insanely repetitive and people can sense the desperation) things start to spiral. I get this sense from friends and family that they begin to think something's wrong with me and distance themselves - not to mention being unable to afford to do much.

There is something about spending too much time on the same problem that may drive a person insane. I think it might create deep valleys over certain neural pathways that are shared with other important functions. For example after a year of grinding on the same problem of "get job" my mind has become hyper sensitive to patterns and hidden meanings like never before. I'll see a leaf blowing in the wind and my mind will sometimes slip into interpreting it as some symbolic message from the universe to help me find a job. In a way I can sort of understand these homeless guys that walk the streets talking to themselves - they might just be further along, so deep in this pattern recognition psychosis from trying to survive that their brains are telling them the whole world is talking to them directly.

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