What you’re saying is that the only way for you to get ahead is by exporting your own lack of class mobility to another nation. This is akin to shipping trash to other shores so we don’t have to deal with the repercussions of landfills in wealthier nations.
If that’s considered a sane way to get ahead, home is not economically well.
I understand and agree with your overall point, but the fact that this an option underpins a certain amount of privilege.
I have personal experience with refugees from Central America and Mexico. I can assure you, many are fleeing violence.
Again, dismissing or diminishing someone's accomplishments because you accuse them of being privileged without knowing the first thing about them violates all of the following:
- Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.
- Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
- Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead.
So, go ahead and flag this too, because you know as well as I do that the rules have nothing to do with what they say, and everything to do with who is applying them.
My point is that the OPs “model” is a strategy for a limited population and not very generalizable. Within those caveats, I have no issue with their suggestion.
You choose here to focus on the fact that some people have more angles available to them than others. You call them privilege and believe them to be unjust. If you do that too much, you'll defeat yourself and destroy your own agency.
Maybe you're right, maybe they are unjust, I do have opinions on that sort of thing, I also think the best places to indulge those opinions are at the ballot box and at my desk writing checks to nonprofits. I mean I do screw this up and focus my time/energy/attention on them at inappropriate times. But I know it is a screw-up when I do it. No one is serving the greater good by wasting time.
He laid his heart and mind out for our benefit, and you rewarded it by attempting to bully him. Don't tell me I'm being uncivil.
You're right that I'm not adding to his discourse. I'm just trying to hush the people who are attempting to bully him.
What you do with the cards in hand is what matters. Other paths lead to insanity.
If you are outside of US, your chances of liquidity event decrease even further.
I think people always divide into two camps here, its either hard work or luck but the truth is somewhere in between.
As a normal non-privileged person, I can't afford placing all-in bets. But I can go to a different table with different stakes and different strategy.
In our culture there is an immense preoccupation with the unfairness of this but the reality is that if you don't come from wealth and privilege, you need a different playbook. Dwelling on the inequity neuters you. If you want to win you need to figure out what the playbook is and then do the right things.
I found a playbook that worked by reading all the self help and business books I could (preferably from the public library because that was free and I was poor). My playbook ended up being: move to a country with a lower cost of living, and get good enough at freelancing online that I essentially had a safety net and a long-term runway for other pursuits.
I then tried a few different business models, each failed a bit less than the last until I hit a winner which bankrolls about a dozen people on my payroll.
A rich guy wouldn't have had to go through all that but I don't care. It's totally irrelevant to the requirements for success in my reality. Which were build my own baseline from scratch and then fail until I succeeded.
People born into easier paths than mine have sneered at many many elements of what I did over the years (living in a "shithole" country, working with a "shitty" tech stack, taking "shitty" Elance gigs that didn't pay enough, etc. etc.). Other people who were able to tolerate remaining victims of the system tuned out my story and focused on other things, like bitching about politics. I'm worth more than most of the people in both categories now and I feel like this is just the beginning. I haven't had children yet but if I do they will have far fewer disadvantages than I did.
There are different and easier playbooks than the one I used. If I was starting again I would probably go into a more conventionally profitable vocation and save for 15 years, studying business and coding on the side, and then start a business.
But either way the point is your playbook if you start poor needs to be different. It's not as easy as the one the rich guys have but that fact is a distraction. You should be too busy figuring out your plan to care.