this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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They seem to think everything just comes easy, everything is obtainable. I was just reading a thread on reddit about a woman who screams non stop at her son and takes all her frustrations out on him and all of reddit are like "She needs to get therapy, for a long time, maybe years, maybe permanently." Like, what the hell? Who on earth could even afford that? Do they all just have endless money? Even if you live in a country with socialised healthcare you normally have to spend ages on a waiting list for a short course of therapy. Who are all these millionaires who think everyone can just be in therapy permanently? Whenever anyone has a problem the reddit answer is always "Therapy, now!" With no thought at all about whether the person can access or pay for that.

I've noticed this with other things on reddit too. There was once a reddit thread where people were asking why poor people buy takeaway food and how they can't be poor if they buy it. I spoke on there about how I'd been in a situation where I was living in a bedsit, had run out of money, only had a few pounds left. There was no money left on my gas or electric meter. I could either put my last few pounds on the meter, or I could buy food, but then with no gas or electric I wouldn't be able to cook any food. So my only option was to buy some cheap ready cooked food like chips from the fish and chip shop. Some really rude redditors refused to believe this, saying no-one is ever in that situation. They are so dissociated from reality they really don't even believe people can be so poor they have to choose between utilities or food.

I've see other threads where someone posts photos of a medical condition they have, asking what it could be. When told to go to the doctor they say they have no medical insurance, no money to pay, etc and the others are like "Just go, this could be serious." Like OK, just materialise money out of thin air then. It's like they think everyone actually has an emergency fund but just doesn't want to dip into it. It makes me think there's no hope for humanity, when so many people are like this, not even wanting to believe how poor other people are, there will never be enough appetite for change to actually change things.

EDIT: someone on hexbear read this and told me that the people on reddit are well meaning, I'm choosing the worst interpretation of what they say, I seem like someone who would never be happy no matter what they said, and the redditors are right, I budgeted badly in buying chips. If even people in favour of communism think like this then our cause is doomed.

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[–] Collatz_problem@hexbear.net 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

To him, therefore, every luxury of the worker seems to be reprehensible, and everything that goes beyond the most abstract need – be it in the realm of passive enjoyment, or a manifestation of activity – seems to him a luxury. Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of renunciation, of want, of saving and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvelous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made a servile art which embodies this pet idea: it has been presented, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus political economy – despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance – is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theater; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice.

— Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844