Some of the clues seem really inconsequential and yet they tell the whole story. And it started with diet meal plans and now it's fully-prepped meals you pop in a custom countertop thingy and lo, dinner is served!
When you're so incapable of buying and preparing raw ingredients to make a decent meal to your liking, you are an utterly …
Some of the clues seem really inconsequential and yet they tell the whole story. And it started with diet meal plans and now it's fully-prepped meals you pop in a custom countertop thingy and lo, dinner is served!
When you're so incapable of buying and preparing raw ingredients to make a decent meal to your liking, you are an utterly fucked human being. When I married for the first time, at 18, I was as unprepared for adult life as any person anywhere has ever been, and I bought myself a little "meals for two" paperback and began that long, slow, strange journey towards adult life.
When you need everything apportioned out for you, including snacks, because learning common sense and balance is too hard for you...
The best class my now-adult kid ever took, anywhere, was middle-school health where the assignment was to live like a grownup. The teacher gave them a monthly budget figure, and they had to do everything within it. Rent an apt., furnish it, buy groceries, pay utilities commute to a job, etc. etc. That was the biggest eye-opener my kid ever had. We'd go real grocery shopping and my kid was just shocked to realize what it cost to feed even one person for one week, based on my kid's prospective menu plan and the prices on the shelves.
Half the class was, as the British say, skint before the month was out. My kid learned fast to avoid that.
My wife used to hand out assignments like that one, back before she tried academia (and subsequently quit in disgust after butting heads with the gender studies cultists).
But she did it differently:
Write up where and how you want to live, including furnishing your abode, what car(s) and so on. That was the first part and the kids loved it. Second part was to find out how much must you earn each month (remember, in Sweden you pay more tax on your wages than you get to keep, simplified, and 25% VAT on anything you buy, basically).
That was a real eye-opener, realising that buying a 70" plasma screen and decorating the bathroom with olive oil polished, salt water preserved oak cost a pretty penny.
She did one version with the problem class too, even funnier because these kids didn't start bitching: inner city kids from migrant no-go zone. When she had asked the class "what are you doing to do for a living?" one arab kid had piped up "Imma gonna sell dope an get rich!". Kid was only half-joking too.
So she had him tell how he was going to live, then total the cost. Then she asked the going price for a joint, for ½ gram of coke, and for one pop of amphetamine. The kid stood at the whiteboard (hate whiteboards, give me chalk and blackboards back!) and did the sums realising that it was going to be a 50 hour a week job selling dope at all hours.
And then she brought the hammer down: no unemeployment benefits, no insurance and the risk of getting shot because of a friends of yours owes someone else money.
Kids loved the exercise, parents too. Her white middle class colleagues living in owner apartments and houses an hours drive from the zone, not so much.
It's easier starting poor (relatively speaking, I am in no way comparing myself to the likes of kids growing up in favelas or the like!), like I did. When you can compare an underpass to a room with a matress, a bare bulb and a big bag for your stuff to a furnished apartment/hostel to your own lease and subsequently your own house, you know how to roll with the blows. Starting out being spoiled rotten (guess helicopter parenting and curling sounds nicer, don't ask what I think about adults who can't even handle "troublesome" expressions and terms) and then starting to lose, stating to lag behind in the rat race and being overtaken by the Joneses, that must be harder?
PS: My friend recently reminded me that when she got her first apt. lo these 45 years ago, I showed her around the supermarket and explained what was worth paying brand-name price for and what could be bought from the cheap unbranded line--especially since almost all that stuff is mfg. by the same corporations. (You could find the telltale codes on the pkgs. if you knew where to look...) And she was far better educated than I. We'd met in 5th grade but she got 2 master's and I dropped out of college.
Some of the clues seem really inconsequential and yet they tell the whole story. And it started with diet meal plans and now it's fully-prepped meals you pop in a custom countertop thingy and lo, dinner is served!
When you're so incapable of buying and preparing raw ingredients to make a decent meal to your liking, you are an utterly fucked human being. When I married for the first time, at 18, I was as unprepared for adult life as any person anywhere has ever been, and I bought myself a little "meals for two" paperback and began that long, slow, strange journey towards adult life.
When you need everything apportioned out for you, including snacks, because learning common sense and balance is too hard for you...
The best class my now-adult kid ever took, anywhere, was middle-school health where the assignment was to live like a grownup. The teacher gave them a monthly budget figure, and they had to do everything within it. Rent an apt., furnish it, buy groceries, pay utilities commute to a job, etc. etc. That was the biggest eye-opener my kid ever had. We'd go real grocery shopping and my kid was just shocked to realize what it cost to feed even one person for one week, based on my kid's prospective menu plan and the prices on the shelves.
Half the class was, as the British say, skint before the month was out. My kid learned fast to avoid that.
My wife used to hand out assignments like that one, back before she tried academia (and subsequently quit in disgust after butting heads with the gender studies cultists).
But she did it differently:
Write up where and how you want to live, including furnishing your abode, what car(s) and so on. That was the first part and the kids loved it. Second part was to find out how much must you earn each month (remember, in Sweden you pay more tax on your wages than you get to keep, simplified, and 25% VAT on anything you buy, basically).
That was a real eye-opener, realising that buying a 70" plasma screen and decorating the bathroom with olive oil polished, salt water preserved oak cost a pretty penny.
She did one version with the problem class too, even funnier because these kids didn't start bitching: inner city kids from migrant no-go zone. When she had asked the class "what are you doing to do for a living?" one arab kid had piped up "Imma gonna sell dope an get rich!". Kid was only half-joking too.
So she had him tell how he was going to live, then total the cost. Then she asked the going price for a joint, for ½ gram of coke, and for one pop of amphetamine. The kid stood at the whiteboard (hate whiteboards, give me chalk and blackboards back!) and did the sums realising that it was going to be a 50 hour a week job selling dope at all hours.
And then she brought the hammer down: no unemeployment benefits, no insurance and the risk of getting shot because of a friends of yours owes someone else money.
Kids loved the exercise, parents too. Her white middle class colleagues living in owner apartments and houses an hours drive from the zone, not so much.
It's easier starting poor (relatively speaking, I am in no way comparing myself to the likes of kids growing up in favelas or the like!), like I did. When you can compare an underpass to a room with a matress, a bare bulb and a big bag for your stuff to a furnished apartment/hostel to your own lease and subsequently your own house, you know how to roll with the blows. Starting out being spoiled rotten (guess helicopter parenting and curling sounds nicer, don't ask what I think about adults who can't even handle "troublesome" expressions and terms) and then starting to lose, stating to lag behind in the rat race and being overtaken by the Joneses, that must be harder?
PS: My friend recently reminded me that when she got her first apt. lo these 45 years ago, I showed her around the supermarket and explained what was worth paying brand-name price for and what could be bought from the cheap unbranded line--especially since almost all that stuff is mfg. by the same corporations. (You could find the telltale codes on the pkgs. if you knew where to look...) And she was far better educated than I. We'd met in 5th grade but she got 2 master's and I dropped out of college.