alt Hacker NewsIf you try hard enough you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable. And yet on Saturday at the neighborhood Independence Day party I met a guy who immigrated from Ukraine about 25 years ago with no money, no college education, no family support, and no English language skills. Instead of complaining he just went to work and while not exactly wealthy he's now doing fairly well as an electrical contractor.
Life is usually a struggle. No one should expect any different.
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This is why immigrants are often the most exemplar people of the American Dream today. Most of the people today pushing socialist or communist agendas are not these immigrants, but instead children of very wealthy company owners that only saw a downward trend from their parent's trajectory. It's from that privileged that they found fighting for other people their cause. However it's misguided and they don't even understand this. They're in a small class of very privileged people, and they're pushing an ideology that has taken so many people from the world. And they don't understand that most people just want a meaningful job, not handouts and not free stuff. Meanwhile these people just keep pushing it to college students and the cycle continues. No matter how many times you tell them that it hasn't worked before they always respond with well it hasn't been done "right", and even current attempts in the United States are causing nearly unlimited fraud, they won't listen. The current philosophy of these people is to break the United States so badly that the only trajectory could be up. It's almost like they're seeing their own failures as people and want to replicate it for the country. Stop treating everyone as a victim, stop being a victim and you'll see the world shine.
Steps off soap box.
> you can always find a plausible sounding excuse why failure is inevitable
I think this starts to make an inferred narrative about how failure is inevitable and that its excessive complaining, when there is large amounts of data showing how it is genuinely more difficult.
Just your Ukrainian example, it was cheaper to live 25 years ago, the cost of college has gone up ~180%. Since 2001 incomes have gone up 64% while housing has gone up 136%, healthcare up 180%, food up 100% and transportation up 120%. Thats a different playing field.
The point being made isn't that failure has any inevitability. Most people will be able to make it work enough to live, and those who can't due to choices, trauma, disability, drug use, or excessive bad luck are the homeless people you see begging on freeway offramps and intersections. At the economy level its a numbers game. It will never be impossible to make it big, in the same way that some people with every single advantage will end up on the street without a penny.