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Buying groceries for rich people, I realized upward mobility is largely a myth

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Re: Buying groceries for rich people, I realized upward mobility is largely a myth

#31

Post by Alex3917 »

cperciva wrote: post #17
Alex3917 wrote: post #10

I find it amusing that one of Instacart's competitors, TaskRabbit, is currently blanketing the NYC subway system with ads that say "We do chores. You live life." The implication being, at least the way I read it, that they consider their workforce to be perhaps slightly less than human.

I'm struggling to understand how you can possibly jump from "we do chores; you live life" to "our workers are subhuman". Are you saying that only subhumans do chores?

If the people you hire to do your chores are doing something other than "living life", to me that implies they aren't really human. (Since living life is sort of part of the whole human thing.)

Re: Buying groceries for rich people, I realized upward mobility is largely a myth

#32

Post by NhanH »

nostrademons wrote: post #28
skylan_q wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twenty three paragraphs but no message. The message is "tax the rich".

No, it's not. The message is "This is my experience." I think much of the HN community is accustomed to a style of discourse that deals in big ideas with immediate applications: "This is where tech is going." "How I hacked the YC interview process and got in." "Here's what's wrong with the Javascript dependency mess." Much of the world doesn't think this way, though. For much of the world, their goal is to be heard ,…

> When articles speaking from this angle come out, people react with "What's the point?" And the point is precisely that people react with "What's the point?", and they shouldn't.

Oliver Sacks's late writing is of the latter type you describe, and various eulogies type of writing occasionally popped up on HN as well. So I don't think it's just the type of the writing that isn't well received here.

Re: Buying groceries for rich people, I realized upward mobility is largely a myth

#33

Post by _rpd »

x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #25
NhanH wrote: post #14

The topic itself is worth discussing. However I'm not actually sure why this specific article was the one being picked for a second chance. It's one long life story (stories?), and there is nothing in it supporting either the title or subtitle. Yes, her upbringing was bad, but I wanted to know what happened personally to her after graduating that she's where she is now. Or even better: what exactly could have helped…

I'm also curious what 2 degrees she has that prevent her from getting a job in her field.

According to her linkedin ...

Master of Fine Arts (MFA), Creative Writing, from California Institute of the Arts

B.A., English from Temple University

Re: Buying groceries for rich people, I realized upward mobility is largely a myth

#34

Post by skylan_q »

x5n1 wrote: post #19
skylan_q wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twenty three paragraphs but no message. The message is "tax the rich".

Which is the wrong message, but that's what happens in constant class warfare society. They screw us we screw them, and on and on it goes.

Many messages could be inferred but the title gave more than enough subtext to give the author's/publisher's intent.

What I gathered from this is that the author is making bad career choices and people in her family are prone to making bad choices.

She can't handle a woman laughing at her, so she decides to be a writer like her father. Seems like not growing up and having poor decision-making skills is what's stopping her upward mobility.

Buzzfeed is full of examples of this idea: I should be able to do what I want for a living because I want to do it, and it should make me upwardly mobile.

Re: Buying groceries for rich people, I realized upward mobility is largely a myth

#35

Post by gearoidoc »

home_boi wrote: post #30
x3n0ph3n3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also curious what 2 degrees she has that prevent her from getting a job in her field.

I did a quick "site:linkedin.com" google search. Bachelors in English and Masters in writing from not the best colleges.

"from not the best colleges"

You do realise that it's a considerable achievement for someone from a working class background to go to third level at all, right?

Re: Buying groceries for rich people, I realized upward mobility is largely a myth

#36

Post by [deleted] »

mindcrime wrote: post #8
eitally wrote: post #2

I think this article is important and useful, but the title she chose is misleading. The content has absolutely nothing to do with higher education, or either correlative or causative connection to her employment with Instacart. Social mobility is an interesting research area, and it's important to be aware that most people who claim bootstrapping out of poverty is easy are the folks who've never been in poverty or w…

and it's important to be aware that most people who claim bootstrapping out of poverty is easy are the folks who've never been in poverty or worked menial jobs I don't know about easy , but I know from personal experience that it's possible , at least in some cases. I did it. And I saw other people do it. And while it's not politically correct to say this, I firmly believe that a significant factor in whether (some)…

[deleted]

Re: Buying groceries for rich people, I realized upward mobility is largely a myth

#37

Post by AnimalMuppet »

nostrademons wrote: post #28
skylan_q wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twenty three paragraphs but no message. The message is "tax the rich".

No, it's not. The message is "This is my experience." I think much of the HN community is accustomed to a style of discourse that deals in big ideas with immediate applications: "This is where tech is going." "How I hacked the YC interview process and got in." "Here's what's wrong with the Javascript dependency mess." Much of the world doesn't think this way, though. For much of the world, their goal is to be heard ,…

Many of us write to communicate facts. When we read, we expect the writer to be doing that, too. We get frustrated if they take far too long to deliver on too little payload of facts.

But sometimes other people write to communicate feelings, not facts. Sometimes I see this in my marriage. My wife says something, and my reaction is, "So?" But she wanted me to share in the experience, not just to know something. If I listen just for facts, I miss what she's trying to tell me.

Now, for those of us who are fact-oriented, it gets annoying to have people talking to us the "wrong" way (i.e., not our style) all the time. But we need to be able to learn to handle the other style, at least at the level of a somewhat-fluent foreign language. (I say so, who does not do very well at this...)

Re: Buying groceries for rich people, I realized upward mobility is largely a myth

#38

Post by pjlegato »

The headline ("Two College Degrees Later, I Was Still Picking Kale For Rich People") is a statement of disappointed entitlement, of outrage over a belief that some implicit social contract has not been fulfilled.

The reality is that just having "a degree" in a generic sense is no longer the magical ticket to a middle class lifestyle that it was in 1960. It's become too common and is no longer much of a differentiator in most job markets.

A related issue is that many, many people have degrees in non-marketable subjects. Whatever one may think of the intrinsic value of studying history, philosophy, English literature, anthropology, art history, etc. there simply is not much demand in our society for specialists in these fields -- and so you wind up picking kale for rich people, with a pile of student loan debt to pay.

We utterly fail to communicate that fact to young students entering college. We do the opposite: follow your dream, follow your passion for anthropology or whatever and it will all somehow work out in the end. Turns out that's not actually true. Telling students that it is true is what leads to indignation and this sense of entitlement. Society just doesn't need more than a tiny number of anthropologists. Whether one thinks that society ought to need more of them is irrelevant.

It's disingenous to keep encouraging kids to get degrees in non-marketable subjects, to keep pretending that economic reality should not be a factor in what you choose to study.

Re: Buying groceries for rich people, I realized upward mobility is largely a myth

#39

Post by AnimalMuppet »

NhanH wrote: post #14

The topic itself is worth discussing. However I'm not actually sure why this specific article was the one being picked for a second chance. It's one long life story (stories?), and there is nothing in it supporting either the title or subtitle. Yes, her upbringing was bad, but I wanted to know what happened personally to her after graduating that she's where she is now. Or even better: what exactly could have helped…

> I don't consider her writing to be good.

Her writing would be fine for long-form fiction. She gives details, images, feelings. It doesn't work as well in an article like this. But if she writes novels, she could turn out to be good. (Or she could not be. Or she could be good and still not make any money. Novels aren't a guaranteed path to riches, even if you're good.)

Re: Buying groceries for rich people, I realized upward mobility is largely a myth

#40

Post by nostrademons »

NhanH wrote: post #32
nostrademons wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. The message is "This is my experience." I think much of the HN community is accustomed to a style of discourse that deals in big ideas with immediate applications: "This is where tech is going." "How I hacked the YC interview process and got in." "Here's what's wrong with the Javascript dependency mess." Much of the world doesn't think this way, though. For much of the world, their goal is to be heard ,…

> When articles speaking from this angle come out, people react with "What's the point?" And the point is precisely that people react with "What's the point?", and they shouldn't. Oliver Sacks's late writing is of the latter type you describe, and various eulogies type of writing occasionally popped up on HN as well. So I don't think it's just the type of the writing that isn't well received here.

Some'll get it already. The HN community isn't one monolithic hivemind, it's a bunch of people who each have their own perspectives. But I'm trying to connect with the people who don't, who still think in terms of the big picture, and so my comment needs to be phrased in the same terms that it complains about. It's hard to make a perspective shift, because you are trying to see things that, by definition, you did not see before.

I remember wrestling with this when a friend of mine posted her personal experience, as a woman and as a psychologist and as someone who has been discriminated against, a year or so ago, and she said "You're a hero for making the effort. I mean that."

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