Comradeship // Freechat

I feel like a deadbeat (which I probably am tbh).

I looked into the etymology of the word because it's important sometimes to question the language that capitalism thinks is normal. Here's what I found:

"worthless sponging idler," 1863, American English slang, perhaps originally Civil War slang, from dead (adj.) + beat. Earlier dead beat was used colloquially as an adjectival expression, "completely beaten, so exhausted as to be incapable of further exertion" (1821), and perhaps the base notion is of "worn out, good for nothing." It is noted in a British source from 1861 as a term for "a pensioner." The English, characteristically, turned up their noses at the American use.

In England "dead beat" means worn out, used up. ... But here, "dead beat" is used, as a substantive, to mean a scoundrel, a shiftless, swindling vagabond. We hear it said that such a man is a beat or a dead beat. The phrase thus used is not even good slang. It is neither humorous nor descriptive. There is not in it even a perversion of the sense of the words of which it is composed. Its origin

It also was used of a kind of regulating mechanism in pendulum clocks.

So you might actually be a deadbeat in the British meaning of worn out, but especially at your age, that isn't a permanent state of being.

The US meaning would be more appropriately applied to the billionaires living on yachts, who take lots at the cost of others' health and wellbeing, and don't even try to give in return.

OTOH, a person who is ill in some way, who because of this is struggling to meet standards that are considered basic, can only be considered worthless if we are stripping them of their humanity and saying that you only have worth if you can meet certain standards of labor. Which is a horrible way to view a person. Now let's look at sponging:

The slang sense of "deprive someone of (something) by sponging" is by 1630s; the intransitive sense of "live in a parasitic manner, live at the expense of others" is attested from 1670s (to live upon the sponge "live parasitically" is by 1690s); sponger (n.) in reference to "one who persistently lives parasitically on others" also is from 1670s. Originally the victim was the sponge (1620s), because that person was being "squeezed." Sponge (n.) in a general sense of "object from which something of value may be extracted" is by 1600s. Sponge (n.) in reference to the sponger is by 1838 and reverses the older sense.

Once again, it is the capitalist class who lives parasitically, not a depressed person. Wanting you to matter too insofar as you get the care you need to survive is not the same as treating people like a resource to extract from.

It is literally impossible to reach adulthood without receiving a lot of care and help from others, so nobody is getting out of that, no matter how bootstraps they want to consider themself to be; which means we all share an experience of getting help from each other to one degree or another. Hyper individualism paints a picture that once you ding adulthood, you abandon all of that and become a bootstraps tugger now, but pulling oneself up by their bootstraps originated as a saying that meant something impossible to do.

And now idler: This one is pretty straightforward, "one who spends his time in inaction." This means little on its own. There are plenty of valid reasons to be inactive, such as when resting or when healing from an injury. Capitalism often equates effort put in as value produced, but it's very easy to do busywork and go nowhere fast in a lot of contexts. Being idle is not intrinsically much of anything other than being idle. We cannot be in motion all of the time and we will burn out and break down if we try.

This may seem excessively pedantic, but the point is to interrogate the language that can be used to hurt us, that is easy to reflexively believe in. I myself sometimes have moments I think of myself as a "loser", but these days there's a part of me in the back who is like, "Isn't winner and loser (in the sense of identity in life) a capitalist framing?" The billionaires are incredible winners in a capitalist metric of value and we despise them for good reason.