No Break. Broke. Broken.
Still vaguely sick and tired but I have to go back to cooking regularly because my expense has been alarming (actually sick all December and I ordered soup the whole season). Met a friend this afternoon and after some exchange of news about the people around us we kinda remarked that everyone seemed to be sick these days. Families, coworkers, they're all coughing and sneezing and just generally unwell. It's kind of sad how nonchalant we are about this sort of thing now. There's an implicit understanding that we can't just possibly pause life and isolate for every small symptom. What a wretched merry-go-round.
Financial anxiety has plagued me for as far as I can remember, but with my workplace situation and health it really rears its ugly head. Look around, and almost everyone is short on funds somehow? It's very tiring to see people asking for money everywhere on the net, but at the same time I know that many people are really struggling. I have a ko-fi account too, but it took so much pain for me to get one and to this day I'm not sure how I'm gonna use it for. There's a fantasy of getting money just by being myself and making things I want to make, but I live around enough creatives to know it's mostly a measure of how hard you're willing to go in the exercise of customer service and public communication. I have several friends living off Patreon and the likes. They work long hours still, the customer service side of the art is practically a full-time job.
It's not new, but I think the general despondency is the worst in the last two decades.
Recently, I was lucky enough to be approached by well-meaning friends and family asking me what I might want as a celebration of a personal milestone. It's a nice gesture by nice people, but I couldn't bring myself to quite say, "I'd rather take the cash, if I may," because I'm in no need of possessions, I'm in need of relieve from mundane bills. Suppose I could say "cover my electricity/groceries/..." instead, so they still feel like they give something instead of cold hard cash. It feels like insinuating that I'm having trouble managing my basic household finances and give them reasons to worry. It's not very reflective of the truth because I will be alright as is, but any kind of help will make things so much lighter. If that makes sense? It means I can take better projects, it means I get an extra layer of safety net. It means I get extra months of runway if I somehow get laid off. Again.
(I did bring myself to tell them that).
How scary is it that we went from one main breadwinner in a nuclear household to two-must-contribute and even then it's often not enough in only a generation? Not in the sense of attaining comfort even, just to sustain a living. My parents were living paycheck to paycheck, but they managed to send us to good schools and bought a house. Yes, they had no savings by the time we went to college. Yes, the house was crumbling as we lived in it. Yes, it was a very seedy neighborhood, but it was their own nonetheless. Their children are scrambling to even afford a place for one let alone a landed house for four even with their decently paying jobs (compared to the country's minimum wages).
If you want to be comfortable, well, you will have to carve out time and energy for side hustles (plural, because one's a child's play!). Heck, why aren't you monetizing every last of your hobbies yet? Failure to do so came to be a signifier or laziness, that you're somehow worthless as a person. Sometimes people aren't being entitled, they're just being rugpulled their entire lives. When they eventually kiss the ground face first, we're taught to look down and laugh at them.
People do try!
People are still working hard, maybe even harder than ever before!
We also get increasingly responsible for things the corporate used to provide for as part of our employment. Petty cash? Sure, fill this five-pages form and wait 3 months to get reimbursed. They sold us the myth of self-sufficiency, disbanded our villages, and now trying to sell them back again at 1000% markups (now dressed in fancy modern jargons!). There's enough money in the world, they're just being burned at record speed.
The soup's been simmering for a while. Time to turn the heat down and let everything soak.
Tomorrow's meeting will start with us apologizing for a cough here and a sneeze there, but the show will go on.