i am not the most "successful" person you'll meet but
i made it do what it do. (army officer, veteran, attorney, non-profit work, amateur musician, made it through an abusive childhood without being a total basket case,
still have a sense of humor and i still find ways to enjoy life)


if you wanna call me bitter i'll be that.
i'm just stating the facts.

there are ppl in this world that have been my peers,
and when we swap stories about what it took to get to where we were,
the stories are different.

they had different breaks.

yeah they had to "work hard" just like i did
but they would all acknowledge i had to work HARDER.

so when the conversation is about getting next level, 1% wealth,
i side eye when ppl say "they worked harder."

you cannot earn a billion dollars.
you can acquire a billion dollars.
you can do work that gets you a billion dollars.

but you can't "earn" it.

if you include the benefits, i made more money in the army
than i do now. especially when i was deployed.

i got the money and that's fine, but let's be clear--
i didn't EARN that money. the value i provided to society by deploying to Iraq
did not match how much money i got by going. same goes for the rest of my unit
because we didn't need to be there to begin with.

and truth be told, anybody that was smart enough to get a 3.0 or probably even a 2.5 GPA could have done our jobs.
we were not these special little snowflakes that managed to
get to this "elite" army officer status by hard work and grit alone.

we were ppl that had opportunities that a lot of folks don't
that did average or above average work and wound up as army officers.



One of my closets friends left Big Law to joing the army
after feeling like his work, while well paying, was not valuable.
i never worked in Big Law but I have heard enough about it from him and other ppl
i have met to know that success is not necessarily based on
being the smartest or the most hardworking.

it's also about meeting the right ppl and have the right ppl know you
and some ppl know ppl that you will probably never have the opportunity to meet
because they were born into an entirely different social network than you.



to answer your original question,
do i think ppl w/o privilege need to pack it up and not try?

no.

keep fighting as long as you've got fight left in you.

but don't listen to ppl saying you just have to "work hard."
it's a lie.

If anybody tells me that wealthy, influential ppl
became wealthy and influential because they worked hard,
i give them an extreme side eye, and maybe i'll even tell them to stfu.
because even with the success I'VE had, i can't chalk it up to "hard work"
and nothing else.

i caught a few breaks when i needed them.
i avoided some L's i could have taken.

if a few cards would have played slightly different, i'd be fucking homeless.
anybody that tells me this game ain't rigged
is either protecting their own interest (financially or psychologically)
or has never actually done shit so they base everything they know about the
world on movies and what rich politicians tell then about
how wealthy, influential ppl become wealthy and influential.

you can rise from the bottom to the top
just like you can get rich in Vegas.

but the deck is stacked, the odds are not in your favor,
and i get pissed off because the notion that things are fine the way it is
makes ppl less likely to get angry and start challenging the system
that kicks most of our asses day and night.

bootstraps rhetoric is bullshit.
like, completely.






>"It took
me a while to unpack just how weak-minded the OP was
>here. It is basically telling people without privilege to pack
>it in or be resentful or hope to get lucky, or some
>combination of the three."
>
>
>Surprise me with a response to that