It's possible to get ahead on minimum wage in some states. It requires working full-time, not having dependents or expensive habits, and preferably splitting costs of housing and car ownership.

If you buy into the narrative, perpetuated by the rich, that luxuries are necessities, you will go broke trying to keep up. If instead you aim for direct production of what gives life its substance, you'll be better off.

Baseline living rates are below the equivalent of 20 hours a week in many places. Anything beyond that is your decision of what to do with the slack that life in the imperial core affords you. We are in fact not fucked, as long as we can make wise decisions amd act collectively in accordance with our values and analysis.

I am "downwardly-mobile"; it took me at least 2 years to accept that I wasn't going to have a prestigious professional career, and instead I'd be hanging out close to the bottom, doing manual and menial labor, and most of the environment I grew up in would less or not at all affordable. I had to say goodbye to that life. Yet for 3 of the past 5 years, I have sent more to my savings account than I sent to my landlord, and amidst this, I have traveled on many adventures and reveled in all kinds of communal luxury, and that feels way better than "upper middle class" ever did.

I don't want a white picket fence in the suburbs with 3 cars in a 4-person family that accumulates material possessions. I want a shared house in a commune with 0.2 vehicles per person and where people live an ecologically net-zero lifestyle and still do cool stuff.