My life is pretty good. I enjoy myself and my days more often than I don’t, have plenty of hobbies and love learning about the world.

However - you are wrong.

You cannot just “quit a job”. If you are fortunate enough to not have your entire life tied to your employment via a visa sponsorship, that still means a job search in an ever-shrinking job market where increasingly peasants don’t matter as employees not even as consumers as demand and thus supply - shifts towards the ultra rich.

Un(der)mployment is in reality - sky high and most people can’t afford necessities as is, nevermind savings, and if they can, it sure as shit doesn’t make sense to spend a rainy day fund on months of job searching for no reason other than you don’t like your current role in the ever-more-remote hope that you’ll find something better

It’s not impossible of course, but it ain’t an easy decision to make by any means.

Similarly moving out of the slums is not possible for most due to a housing market that prices out residents and carers towards buy-to-let investors (landleeches) and private equity portfolio builders - there are now more private equity companies in the US than there are McDonald’s, it doesn’t take being an Einstein to see what kind of dark future we’re headed for.

I understand your frustration though and I feel similarly sometimes when people seemingly refuse to make choices that I do - e.g. quitting corpo social media, quitting algorithmic feeds, quitting using corpo products, consooming less corpo junk media, etc. etc.

Like it’s almost existential to me in terms of crisis how anyone could fall for misinformation about a topic you even remotely think about ever when you have the world’s information at your fingertips democratised for you right there, easily indexable and searchable for free, all you need is intellectual honesty and you can learn something at least in the ballpark of accurate truth about literally anything in under an hour at most, yet people don’t.

It’s very easy to say then, “I am super smart, others are not, that’s why I do the right things”, but I’m not satisfied with that explanation, it’s too self-serving and I just don’t buy that I’m anything like that.

There is another explanation - more or less, people are the same, they vary in priorities, but largely are some degree of rational, if chaotic actors that navigate the same systems you do from different starting positions.

Even when the actions seem absurd to you - there are reasons people do the things they do, the gambler and the porch parcel thief aren’t a different species of being from you, they navigate the same systems you do, but from different positions.

Assume they are the same as you, put yourself in their shoes, and think about what could make you do what they do, and it starts to add up, you can simulate the path of another by navigating through the systems of our society from their perspective and starting point.

This sort of systematic analysis is not easy, but it can get at things we can actually affect, the system is necessary, but not natural. The world was built this way, and just the same it can be built differently.

So, perhaps instead of virtue signaling yourself and your own assumed superiority by pointing out how you made good choices and other people make bad choices like some sort of Christian who divides everyone into those who go to Heaven and those who go to Hell - you can ask, you can research, and think hard, because there are definitely reasons one can’t follow your suggested actions, even if they are also not an excuse to sit still and do nothing, either.