I didn't agree with everything, but I did with a lot; in particular this: > As Julie says when someone repeats that Amazon was started in a garage: Ain't no garages in the trailer park. Not sure who Julie is, but I think she's spot on.
Yet I can see that I was , in fact, born into privilege.
Not a privilege of money, but a privilege of priority, skills, and acceptance of risk.
My parents prioritized one single thing above all others. Land. They bought land. Remote land, useless land, land wherever it was cheap.
They could have fixed the car, but instead bought an acre of land. We would go 100 miles from the nearest town to eke out a parcel of land in some Godforsaken place I haven’t been to since.
Because of that, and the skills I learned because I had to do everything myself, I have never had to pay rent. Because I knew how to live without luxury, I built a cabin when I was 16 on my parent’s land with salvaged lumber and fixtures and wire and things I got from demolishing houses. I raised three children in various iterations of that eventually 600 square foot house.
By that time I was successful in infotech, so we bought and rebuilt (ourselves) a 63 foot steel schooner and finished raising our children at many ports in the world, so that they would grow up with the same privilege of mind, but with broader horizons.
But I never forgot land. Land, not a house, land . Land is the key. Just a couple hundred square meters is fine.
You can still do exactly what I did today. You can buy land cheaply in many places in the world, including the USA. I just bought a half acre in Montana for $1200, with road access. (I sometimes buy cheap land sight unseen halfway across the world when drunk and bored at 3am, the results are kinda hit and miss, but it makes for a good excuse to travel to see what happens) On eBay there are many deals owner financed with nominal or zero down, with payments from 50 to a few hundred dollars a month.
You can still tear down old structures for people and get building supplies. You can get furniture and appliances curbside or on Craigslist, etc. I don’t need to, but I sometimes still do.
Every opportunity I took advantage of is still practical today. You can still buy land on fast food wages, you just won’t be able to live near a big city while you do it. That also was impossible in my youth. The sacrifices were substantial, the discomfort at times severe.
Nothing has changed except the expectations that people have about life and what they can or cannot do.
I was born into privilege for sure, but it was a privilege of a culture of independence and a deep understanding of the value of owning outright a place to stand.
Except those born into poverty in a truly hopeless place in the world, we suffer mostly from our attitudes and lack of knowledge, and belief in our ability to do reasonable things that other people don’t believe we can do, because they are not willing to.