it’s true in experience. I’m a single guy. I date around. Most women I meet think gardening makes me queer. It is not considered a desirable hobby for a man. And many men who don’t garden, also think it’s queer/feminine.

People who do garden, don’t see it that way, of course. But every garden group I’ve ever met up with was 70% women, and most of the men were not ‘manly’. I myself am not a manly guy.

yes. everything is gendered for gender warriors.

i’m cishet and i have a garden and most women i date think it means I’m secretly gay. the cat doesn’t help.

gardening is considered feminine, or for old people. not for younger men who are supposed to be virile and dominant. they should be hunting.

the easiest way to make big money in any area… is have family/connections in that area.

most very successful people I’ve ever met… were simply riding the coattails of their family/parents. no matter what it is. if you want to be an engineer and your dad is already an engineer you have a huge leg up in engineering.

but nobody wants acknowledge this, esp in USA because we have this stupid myth of meritocracy. where you magially can do whatever you want and be really good at it. truth is very few people have that privileged. Most follow in the footsteps of their families.

because just like generational wealth, generational jobs skills/knowledge… compounds. your dad’s 30 years of experience in engineering if you want to be an engineer, is basically gives you a huge experience boost.

Everyone should have access to a free college education, but not everyone benefits from it and it certainly does not guarantee intelligence.

why do you think that would do anything?

i litereally taught those subjects for 3-4 years. Trust me. for most students its just another stupid class they don’t want to take, they won’t learn anything. maybe 10% of those enrolled will actually learn anything.

I mean, how many people do you know as adults that remember how to do do an integral even those they took Calculus?

No. it doesn’t.

stupidity is a choice people make, regardless of how well educated they are or not. many people actively choose to be stupid because it is easier than the effort of having to be smart. many smart people turn off their brains for everything outside of the workplace.

i used to teach college. half the students absolutely refused to learn or make an effort. they were not dumb, they were just lazy.

a lot of people it takes years to find a job. esp if they are picky. my brother has been unemployed for 3 years but only because he’s a snob and refuses to work for a non-elite company.

what happened to all the money your parents had from those houses?

I make 150K and to buy an affordable home that isn’t a teardown, say under 600K, you need a two hour commute from the downtown area. Anything inside an hour of the downtown is more like 800K+ and being bought up by people with family money or 300-400K yearly incomes. someone making 45K in my city needs to live multiple people to a bedroom to afford rent.

But it’s all about where you live and the incomes. Where I live 150K income puts you only in the top 20% of households. And I don’t have family money backing me like most of my peers in the housing market. Most of my friends got 100-200K gifts from family to buy their homes.

Weird. I had the opposite experience.

Used to have gfs. They constantly nagged me to don’t work out, to not get a better job, to drink, to smoke, and party. oh and don’t have friends they don’t like and don’t do anything that doesn’t involve them. i was always trying to get us to get better jobs, take classes, try new things, try new places, etc. They would have NONE of it. Having goals and wanting to do stuff in life made me some sort of huge asshole to them.

I’ve been single 6 years and my salary has gone up 250%. in the decade I was dating women… it went up like 10%. and i am fitter, stronger, have lots of cool hobbies and i volunteer a lot. I also have pets and own a home. Only thing I don’t have in life that I want is a wife/child.

And when I try to date… i just meet women who think all that shit is gross. I already went on three dates this month and got told by each woman that I was ‘too put together and active and serious about life’. they just want someone to get drunk with on the weekends. I don’t. I can’t seem to find any women to date who actually want to be an active participant in their own life.

mostly because they feel they are a superior species to those who have less money than them.

and a lot of that is deeply rooted in racism, sexism, and classism. they are all intertwined to the anxiety people have about financial and social status and the life scramble to ‘move up the ladder’ for you and your group, and keep other groups from doing so, or even actively push them down.

a person who can afford a 80K car isn’t a better person than someone who can only afford at 8K car, but according to the default beliefs of most of the upper classes, they are. They literally believe money and consumption directly proportional to your social worth as a human being. So if you don’t earn/spend enough, you are ‘less than’ those who do more of it.

Is every wealthy person like this? No. But the majority are. The attitude is also present among lower classes, where the working-class feel better than the poor, and the middle-class better than the working-class. And lots of people are debt-spending to seem they are a class above their actual income because they don’t want to be seen negatively due to a lack of money by those who have more than them.

It’s very hard to see any of this, if you only spend your life in/among one social class. A lot of people, their entire lives, never change classes. It’s much easier to see if if you have changed classes or living in community where there is clear class stratification. I’m a working-class person who has been around the entire spectrum of wealth for different periods of my life. I’m familiar with how people from different classes think about other classes and the assumptions they make and how ingrained those assumptions are.

And a lot of people are complete ignorant/incapable of really talking about this type of stuff because the emotional intensity of this ‘money = good’ ‘no money = bad’ stuff people have ingrained in their psyches. For example, I was raised that the worst thing you could ever possibly be is unemployed/living off government assistance. Like my father was so proud he didn’t even take unemployment when he had no job for 2 years, and made us suffer unnecessarily. it was stupid, but belief makes people do stupid things.

But typically, very crudely put the stereotype is that the poor hate the rich for being rich and looking down on them and hoarding resources for themselves. And the rich hate the poor for being lazy, unwilling to ‘improve’ themselves’ and see them as subhuman animals who squander the resources given to them.

Anything is possible.

The question you have to ask yourself is the probability of it worth making a concerted effort to achieve it?

but also the people pmming you on reddit or lemmy are not seeking to be your friend. they are scammers/bots.

You can afford a home on a single income if your income is 3-4x of the value of the home, roughly.

Where I live lots of people can afford homes, but they are just super angry they can’t afford the homes that they want. They don’t want a 2bed condo for 400-500K. They want single family home with 4bedrooms that’s about 3-4x the size of the condo, even if they don’t have kids, and are outraged such homes aren’t affordable for a single person.

But also, lots of people, don’t save intentionally and still complain they can’t afford stuff, even thought they could if they did save. These are the types who argue with you that 300/mo on gyms is a necessity… but they never go to the gym.