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Shit life syndrome

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Re: Shit life syndrome

#11

Post by hkt »

padolsey wrote: post #5

This is quite darkly hilarious tbh. And consistent with my experience of Blackpool. I once went there on couple-week-long driving course when I was a teenager, hoping but eventually failing to get my license. I was put up in someone's house that was run as a sort of unlicensed b&b. The entire place, the curtains, the linen, the pillow,.. all smelled of old nicotine and damp. On my first evening I went out by myself t…

Beautifully put, an answer approaching literature. I have the same feelings about Blackpool.

Coastal towns really are monuments to another time. The houses are beautiful, too - a two bedroom flat in one of the old guesthouses on the sea front with bay windows is a steal in most towns, if you can cope with the town itself.

Scarborough is another one. It was clearly so much more full of life than it is now, but its status as an elder resort is part of its charm. The poverty, so much not.

Re: Shit life syndrome

#13

Post by hkt »

_8j50 wrote: post #7

This is so weird. Is it another way of saying "being poor is expensive"? Or poor people get sick more? If so then this some next level captain obvious stuff. Or do the authors have such a nice societal experience that this seems very peculiar to them? I mean, this is one if the top reasons people want money right? At least they have NHS in the UK, in most of the world and most of human history people either adapt or…

The point is that it is not a single issue, but the result of many complex, interacting and interdependent issues. The stress of insecure work. The consequences of poor diets and little exercise. The cost of housing. The receding access to education. The demands of care work, both paid and unpaid.

These problems taken together are worse than the sum of their parts. In an age where help is targeted, individual, and only given when the outcomes are measurable, shit life syndrome is a reminder that social change has to happen at the level of society, in a holistic way which may be really quite hard to measure. It is a gauntlet thrown down to policymakers who are straitjacketed by SMART objectives and neoliberalism.

Re: Shit life syndrome

#14

Post by paganel »

> Sarah O'Connor's 2018 article for the Financial Times "Left behind: can anyone save the towns the economy forgot?" on shit life syndrome in the English coastal town of Blackpool won the 2018 Orwell Prize for Exposing Britain's Social Evils

Funny that the FT should complain about some of the evil effects of capitalism, too bad they’re only using it for white-washing, as in: “see, we’re the good capitalists! we care!”

Re: Shit life syndrome

#15

Post by lordnacho »

https://www.ft.com/blackpool

Seems like it's not paywalled.

FWIW Blackpool looks like a heck of a lot of seaside places in the UK. Whatever problems are described in this article are problems all the way around the coast.

Visit a seaside town here and it often feels like you're back in the early 90s. There's a certain style that hasn't been updated. Arcades, chip shops, betting shops. Ok the betting shops look modern.

A lot of high streets in nice towns are even starting to look like they're made entirely of charity shops and betting shops, and starbucks/costa.

Re: Shit life syndrome

#17

Post by Karellen »

tetris11 wrote: post #2

I hope there comes a day when the rich and influential look for the next money-making venture in which to invest in, see only a sea of machine-generated uncertainty on the stock market, and decide "actually, the most profitable thing I can do to protect my wealth is to invest it in the public" One day maybe.

Ugh.

I hope there comes a day when using the money hoarded by the rich and influential to invest in the public, does not depend on the rich and influential choosing to do so out of a desire for maximal profits, or even benevolence.

One day maybe.

Re: Shit life syndrome

#18

Post by kevmo »

tetris11 wrote: post #2

I hope there comes a day when the rich and influential look for the next money-making venture in which to invest in, see only a sea of machine-generated uncertainty on the stock market, and decide "actually, the most profitable thing I can do to protect my wealth is to invest it in the public" One day maybe.

Waiting for the rich to lift up the poors? One day never. Source: All of human history.

"Power concedes nothing without a demand." - Frederick Douglas https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1857-fred...

"the perennial revolutionary programme of antiquity, cancel debts and redistribute the land." - Moses Finley

Re: Shit life syndrome

#19

Post by [deleted] »

_8j50 wrote: post #7

This is so weird. Is it another way of saying "being poor is expensive"? Or poor people get sick more? If so then this some next level captain obvious stuff. Or do the authors have such a nice societal experience that this seems very peculiar to them? I mean, this is one if the top reasons people want money right? At least they have NHS in the UK, in most of the world and most of human history people either adapt or…

[deleted]

Re: Shit life syndrome

#20

Post by throaway_12345 »

Hi, speaking from small-town India.

Poverty is extremely harsh on people. And when I was much younger (For example, relevant to the submission, is healthcare. Healthcare in India is theoretically free in government hospitals. But in most places the state of these hospitals is horrific, and getting treatment is very hard due to corruption.

But the bigger issue is opportunity cost. People who live based on daily earnings, cannot afford to go to hospitals abandoning their work as they cannot ensure next day's food. So, unless it happens to be someone young, people don't seek treatment at all. And visiting a proper doctor and buying meds take away ~10 days' income. Really unaffordable for poor people.

So, even people in their forties and fifties decide to wait it out, and easily curable ailments get chronic and beyond cure. Women fare worse than men.

Real victims are old people, and nobody bothers to spend money and weeks of their time to get them to treatment. They wither, and die without treatment. I have seen at least a dozen people die like this.

I think, the cause of SLS is opportunity cost. People often die, and more often suffer for decades from easily curable diseases because they cannot really afford either the time or money to get treatment.

I also know at least a dozen people who have something chronic, but get no treatment at all because they cannot afford it.

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