Thoughts on Christmas on New Year's Eve · 4:18am Jan 1st, 2016
Deleted. Sorry. It was clear from the comments that my post made my circumstances sound harsher than they were.
The original post began with me noticing that I enjoyed Christmas more now that I have my own money and the people I give presents to have enough stuff. Christmas used to always have two big bundles of anxiety, one about whether I would get the stuff I wanted (because Christmas and my birthday were my only chances to get new stuff), and another about getting presents for others: how I'd get money, whether the stuff I got for other people would be what they wanted, whether it would cost the right amount, what the right amount was, whether they'd know how much it cost, and whether they might buy me something that cost more or less than that. Now, I don't care. I have money, they have money or parents who have money, and it's just fun.
The main idea was that, contrary to what you see on Christmas specials, beyond some point having less things and less money will make kids more materialistic and more money-oriented.
My own mother held what I think is the correct philosophy - that if you deprived children of something, they would perceive it as super special, while if you presented it as if it was a normal thing, they would hold no special desire towards it, and thus perceive it as being as valuable as it truly is.
We always had candy in the house, all the time. And so, why would you gorge on it? Candy wasn't special. It was tasty, sure, but it was something you ate in moderation, like anything else.
Halloween was cool because we got a nice variety of candy, but also because we got to hang out with our friends and dress up in silly costumes. I don't miss trick-or-treating at all, but I do vaguely miss dressing up in costumes.
I think my fondest Christmas memory now is buying a poor friend a laptop, and helping them pay for their college tuition, because I could and they couldn't.
yeah, no, I kinda feel this
because I'm poor as fuck and I want everything
My great grandpa grew up during the Depression. My grandma, as a consequence of being raised by a Spartan, was big on creature comforts. Lots of food (healthy and junk), lots of presents, all that sort of thing. But, to this day she has a terrible time letting anything go. As such, her house runneth over with stuff, and I now have a fear of being a packrat.
It's funny how history cascades through the generations.
That journey where you reflect, find what you were missing, connect it to how it affected your development socially, emotionally, ect., through the years and molded your personality for better or for worse – you're not alone in it BH
But damn, your folks sound almost sadistic in their methods.
Good post.
When our values tell us to go against our values and the values of others, we are going to be unhappy. Best to embrace ourselves and work together, like that smile song where Pinkie Pie pulls herself out of the darkness...yes, that was about economics...!
Totally true, too.
Now that I'm in a secure position in life, things can be so much more enjoyable, because there is no sweating the little things. Yes, some of the stuff I had to struggle for makes me appreciate things better now - but what does even more is the good values I picked up from family, peers, education, my own studies - a hodgepodge that has somehow, miraculously, worked out.
The world is a fantastic place and if I have kids, the goal will be to help them learn that balance. Yes, I'm not going to buy them a new computer every year, because it's totally unnecessary to upgrade that often. But hell, if they want to go overboard in that regard, I'll do my best to help them find the best job possible to earn the money for it, because if they value it that much, sure, let them get it in the easiest way possible.
Learning things have value is a good lesson.
So is realizing that your own time is valuable and you should dedicate it to what you find worth pursuing.
You see this a lot in people who manage to get rich after growing up poor. There are actual properly done studies on it, too. They're less likely to be charitable, more stingy/withdrawn/selfish, and treat those without money more poorly, as though they've "risen above".
My used to have money, before moving away from LA and up north to an island where there was little to no work in what my parents had been previously doing. As a result, my parents aren't too materialistic, and they raised me and my brother aren't too materialistic, but me and my brother definitely value possessions and money more than our parents along with having a great deal more respect for the whole "time is money" mantra.
I like to think I'm at least self-conscious of it. But if I had money to spare, I would mainly spend it on utility purchases (a good dishwasher, laundry machine, stove, computer, desk, etc). The frugality of my parents growing up was at least somewhat passed on, but I really, really want money to purchase useful, non-frivolous things to improve my quality of life. Good-quality computer accessories, good-but-affordable clothes, a chair that doesn't murder my back...
And if I had a decent income and didn't want for many things like that, I would freely spend it on having fun with friends or giving gifts.
3655600 3655416 In fairness to my parents, they're both Christian. They believe that people who don't accept Jesus as their savior will burn in Hell for eternity. Given that belief, spending money on anything they didn't need, or even taking time off from work and so having less money to give to missionaries, is a horrific selfishness.
There's an interesting book called The Salvation of Zachary Baumkletterer about a Christian who acts as if he believed the things he says he believes. Eventually, he starves to death, because in a world in which so many people are starving and suffering, he can't justify spending even the bare minimum on food and money to keep himself alive.
Also, after I was away for a few years, they became very generous towards all of their kids, and have remained so, though now we don't need it.
... I'm curious, Bad Horse, how old are you? If that's not intrusive?
Because for the first half of this post I thought "wow, BH must be older than I thought he was; this reads like it was written by someone who grew up in the sixties." Then in the second half you toss around figures like "the three grand my parents saved me for college lasted about a month" and I went "no, wait, what? My father went to college in the early eighties at one of the top medical schools for his specialty in the country and three grand would have covered tuition, room, and board for a year. Bad Horse had to have gone to college much later than that."
Then I looked up when Asteroids came out. 1979. Two years before I was born. Which means you're probably only ten to twelve years older than me and went to college probably around 1990 or so.
And that's batshit. It makes the rest of your story so much more terrible. Being paid fifty cents an hour for a paper route? Maybe in 1955, but in the eighties? Your distributor was committing some hardcore labor law violations. A quarter a week for allowance in 1979/1980? That's the sort of allowance given out by people who don't understand the concept of "inflation" and probably spent their entire lives tipping a flat two dollars at any meal they eat out because they read that that was appropriate in an etiquette column in 1950 and think that if someone can't get a whole weeks worth of entertainment out of a dime (They should be able to see five or six picture shows with that!) that's the fault of the kid, or possibly of society.
I mean, wow. Just wow.
I like this post. Also, I feel an impetus to respond while there are still less than a zillion comments. Something about getting into a blogpost late makes it seem like it's not worthwhile.
I've been relatively poor my whole life. Then again, I've had it pretty good, what with cheap and sophisticated modern tech. I've never been "no dinner tonight" poor. But I also never had to work, and in fact my grandfather actively discouraged me from working while I was a minor.
My thought is that it's good to withhold "stuff" if you make very clear the purpose for the withholding of stuff, that is, the greater good to be gained by the sacrifice of the lesser good. Some of my Lenten fasts have been very hard for me but I remember them as being among the best days of my life.
Work is a means to an end, so I think that children should be taught to understand the objectively best means to achieve their ends, and to work for the sake of the ends to be achieved.
I do remember, as a homeschooled teenager, I thought listening to music was a waste of time. I didn't understand what there was to be gained by it. My grandfather bought me a stereo against my protests. Well, after that I got into music. I've never felt as internally "clean" since then, if that makes sense, but now I know why people listen to music, and I spend quite a lot of time listening to music.
I also recall feeling terror at the prospect of getting basic cable installed. That too passed, but again, it was only my conscience that was dulled.
On this particular issue, I think that at a certain point an honest Christian would step outside himself, see himself just the same as if he were another person, and then add to that the fact that God has caused him to be somehow joined to this particular "other" person. In such a way that he has a particular and special duty to care for this person, through a bond even more intimate than that of familial ties. At the point when the question becomes, "do I feed an unknown starving stranger or myself?" the answer must be, "myself, not because I deserve it more, but because God has particularly commanded me to take care of myself."
However, I think I get the gist. And I think this much is definitely correct: Christianity is much more radical than most Christians want to realize. I can't blame them, though, because first I would have to blame myself, and my excuse is that it's haaaaard.
3655772 The paper route was in the late 70s, and I don't remember what I was making. It could have been a dollar an hour, maybe even more. It was a lot more (per hour) in the summer than in the winter. I was way too young to have a real job, and paper routes get exemptions from labor laws then so they can hire 10-year olds and pay them a pittance. College was in the late 80s. I remember the $3000 figure but not when it ran out. I had 3 different scholarships, so it would certainly have lasted longer than a month.
Yeah, they were stuck in previous decades. I think they had no idea how expensive college had become, and I had no idea how cheap it used to be, so I never told them. They had their expectations for how people should act based on life in 1960, and I assumed they must be right.
$3K would have covered tuition at a medical school in the 1980s? That seems much too low.
lawschooltuitionbubble.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/real-annual-private-professional-school-tuition-2010.png?w=620
Source: Somebody on the Internet
3655931 That graph is real money, not nominal money; you'll note it is presented in inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars. (I spend a lot of time reading Paul Campos' articles on the ongoing scam that is law school tuition in American, so believe me, it's a distinction I'm familiar with.) That thirty grand for med school in 2010 real dollars would have been fifteen grand in 1988 nominal dollars, for example.
My Dad's final year of med school at the Ohio College of Podiatric medicine was in 1981, the year I was born. He paid "about three grand" for it, according to him. That's about eight grand in today's money, although of course Kent State (which absorbed the college awhile back) charges a lot more than that per-year now.
That said, the enormous explosion in tuition costs across the board really began in the early eighties. I tend not to let my Dad forget that he essentially went to college for free; he did his undergrad and most of his postgrad work in the late seventies, otherwise known as "taking on a low amount of debt during a period of high inflation." (My father is a good guy but he doesn't seem to grasp that my siblings and I have debt loads that back in his day were more commonly associated with mortgages than with college.)
And don't sell yourself short, a paper route was definitely a real job.
3655931 Oh, my. I'm older than Bad Horse (or darned close). College for me was in the early 80s, because my parents ran a Grade A dairy farm, and although I did not know what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, I knew *one* thing I did *not*
The first year in college was great. They paid for it. The second through sixth year was not so great. I had to pay for it. But I graduated, got married to a wonderful woman just as goofy as I am, and had four wonderful kids much the same. My parents were Christian, as was my whole family, up and down the tree, back from the day about four generations up where they fled Germany in the 1900s. Farm poor is different than city poor. You may be growing your own green beans and canning them for the winter, and storing a few hundred pounds of potatoes in the storm shelter for the same purpose, but you wind up driving vehicles worth more than the yearly income of some people, for about one week a year, and there's no doubt that your milk at breakfast is fresh. I'm not going back, no matter how sedimental I get. No vacations, twice a day, rain, shine, hail, snow, whatever. And cows are stupid.
I can relate. My family and its ups and down with money. We never really had a whole lot. I worked on and off with my dad growing up. If I wanted something, I saved my money and got. My parents rarely got us anything outside of birthdays and xmas. More so when we where all in are early to mid teens.
My current situation is not the best. We manage for the most part. I struggle with my kids and there apparent materialism. They get more stuff from there grandmother then they do from us. Which is less stuff (though there still is that) and more experiences. Trips to various places and events that we ourselves cant afford.
I am not sure what i am trying to say, it's 2:30 am and I really should be in bed. What I can say is I can really relate to what you are saying here in some way or to some degree.
3656099 A bigot is someone who's intolerant of other views. Intolerance is an action. Believing that someone with other views will go to Hell is not being intolerant of their views. Intolerant would mean that you took some action such as firing someone from a job or shunning them socially. Believing they'll go to Hell just means you feel sorry for them and try to help them. Calling someone (my parents, BTW) a "bigot" for believing someone's faith will doom them is like calling someone a bigot because they tell you you're going the wrong way to get where you want to go.
It's amazing, the trauma and broken lives we can -- and will -- endure without protest, just because we don't have the life experience to realize that it's unhealthy.
I'm glad you're in a better place now.
Your parents did it, I'm sure, with the best of intentions, but I'm glad you're in a better place now.
Damn, I didn't come here to feel feelings like these
3656140 Damn, I've overstated it if you get am impression of trauma. My childhood was fine; my parents were just tight with money when it came things we didn't need. But there was no real lack, except when I didn't tell my parents I was out of money because I was stupid.
3656747 It was nothing like that. I've not communicated the rest of the picture.
Prove to them their college degree is usually worthless, because the pool of well-paying jobs is smaller than the population and the American Dream of unlimited prosperity is a pipe dream, and tell them to apply at their local Wal-Mart or CVS.
Simple as that.
Uh, not that I'm biased or anything.
3655414 That was also moving.
3656287
Fair enough. Let me tell you where I'm coming from, then, so maybe you understand a bit better why I reacted to it as I did.
I grew up solidly upper middle class, the son of a scientist and a teacher. I wouldn't say I grew up spoiled -- I worked retail jobs as a teenager, and we lived in a suburban neighborhood in a modest house -- but there was never any question that my college would be paid for, and I don't remember ever once sweating the small comforts.
Then, after college, I spent most of my 20s and 30s severely struggling, and came within several hours of filing for bankruptcy in 2002 after I broke my arm and had to get it treated in a state where I didn't live (and couldn't get it covered under medical indigence programs because of bickering between the state program and the out-of-state hospital). I went into the newspaper industry after college, which was a lower-middle-class job at best (though definitely better than minimum wage), and skipped around through a series of apartments with various combinations of roommates who were financially doing no better.
I was never poor poor, because I got a good grounding in personal finance as a kid, and while I was struggling, lived a spartan lifestyle, budgeted so that I was taking in more than I was spending, and kept a financial cushion. I have known, though, many poor people, and many people who came from backgrounds of heavy poverty -- the kind where you are incapable of living in any way other than paycheck to paycheck, spending every available cent on luxuries because if you try to save it instead then it's just going to get wiped out by the next crisis, so you might as well enjoy yourself. (My soon-to-be-ex-wife did that, and it continually drove me crazy. To this day, she is running her own business and wholly incapable of making a budget. I lived in annual terror of a tax audit, because I basically had to make up numbers based on my best estimates of her receipts.)
My Seattle ex E. told me a story that sticks with me to this day, of the time when she lived in California with her psycho ex. One day she had cooked up a giant pot of rice and beans, and tripped and spilled it and the pot shattered on the floor, and she literally sat there over the ruined food sobbing because those were their meals for the rest of the week. That remains my defining line for grinding poverty -- the kind that marks you, the kind that leaves you with permanent scars. (And believe me, whenever money issues came up in that relationship, I saw the aftereffects of that trauma.) Thank the stars I've never personally been that desperate, though I've been friends with many people who have.
I am fully aware that, when you talk about waiting all week for your allowance of a single quarter so that you could play five minutes of Asteroids, you are talking about an entertainment budget rather than the necessities of life, and I'm sure that in many other ways you were comfortable. But when I hear you talk about your friend throwing a coat over the screen and ruining your week's game ... or making mad, mercenary dashes for Halloween candy ... the image that plays in my brain is my ex sobbing over a pot of spilled rice, and the only thing I can think is what sort of indelible trauma that must have etched into your young soul. I would find it very hard to believe that you can relay those sorts of anecdotes and yet not have persistent counterproductive habits/behaviors/fears that are a direct response to incidents like those.
Hell, look at me. I was limping along on a 10-year-old computer up until last Christmas, because I didn't feel like I could justify spending a few hundred dollars to replace it with a low-end modern machine, despite the fact that at that time I was earning several hundred dollars more than I was spending per month and watching it all flow into my savings account. I finally gave in when my account balance hit twice my usual "cushion" amount and was still growing; and in hindsight, I was an idiot to wait that long. Retraining myself to take care of myself, and to recognize the line between a luxury and a productivity-boosting discretionary expense, is an ongoing process. (Allowing myself luxuries? Still working on that one.)
Being poor marks you. Forcing your loved ones to act poor when you don't have to is ... geez. I think I feel as strongly about that as you feel about religion, if your comments in the Writeoff thread were any indication.
Ah, the kind of Christians that give us all a bad name…
Humanity always finds a way to screw things up, to take a sound principle and dial it to one extreme, then to the other, then to the other… We're great at moving that pendulum back and forth, and most of the time we think moving it (and moving it fast) is what's going to fix everything. Giving the pendulum a gentle nudge is surprisingly uncommon.
I know someone on the opposite end of the spectrum from your parents. Because their family has been touched by cancer, they won't allow their children to interact with any form of plastic for fear of it being carcinogenic.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions
Many Christians used to teach poverty, and now many teach prosperity. The pendulum swings, and like gravity God tries to pull it to the center where it will find some much needed rest for its soul.
It's been very humbling reading all these stories. It surprises me how easily I forget that others have had such different lives than me. Growing up money was always tight, and still is, though less so now. Currently one paycheck a month goes towards what will be a 9k tax deficit for my family this April (don't ask :p ). On many occasions throughout my childhood my father would ask me, usually during a car ride so to be away from my mother, if he could take the birthday or Christmas money I had gotten (from uncles and aunts and grandparents) and use it to pay our bills. One birthday my mother gave me a single toy which she had forgotten to give me on Christmas. Our first dog died because we couldn't afford treatment.
But this is the second to last thing I would change about my life. Yes, I learned a lot from these experiences, and yes they shaped me in many positive ways, but I do not believe it was our financial struggles alone that were responsible for that. Where I didn't always have the toys I wanted I had two brothers to play with. I was never so much told "no" as I was "sorry, we can't." And that makes a difference, I think. I knew my parents wanted to give me the things I liked, but they couldn't. And that was enough. Instead I had them and my brothers, and the relationships we formed have become invaluable to me. Yes, we enjoy our phones and our computers now, but we frequently spend more time with them than we do each other, and, I don't know, that bothers me. I think I was happier when I had less, not because I had less, but because it forced me to look to the meaningful things. Many families achieve that with lots of material wealth. But for the same reasons I am growing to despise larger households. They seem to draw their inhabitants outward instead of pushing them together, as if the walls were made of magnets.
I don't mind spending money, and I lack frugality in it. You ought to see me at Bronycon. (you probably really shouldn't)
I am very happy to hear you finally got to enjoy Christmas, Bad Horse. Like, really. Only recently did I begin again to enjoy it. It no longer feels hollow to me, and I think it's because I have righted my sights.
And maybe, one day, you and I can have an open, intellectual discussion about God and hell.
3658338
Do you mean large families, or large houses? "Household" quantity usually indicates the number of people, not the size of house.
3658724
Oopsie! That's pretty important to clarify, isn't it? I meant large(r) houses. And only that, for my family, they make it easier for us to spend time apart in our own little corners instead of together.
3658338
Well....not really, no.
Due to the enormous spread of Christianity, both the rich and powerful and the poor and oppressed have used it to justify their side of the class war. Like the controversy over poverty in the 14th century, with the Franciscans and the Dominicans and the Dulcinians arguing over things like whether Jesus owned his clothes as a pretext for whether the Catholic Church had temporal power, or the religious wars of the 17th century, when the proto-capitalist Protestants and the feudal Catholics fought over control of Europe. The religion has always been split right down the middle, because its holy book is so broad you can pick and choose anything to justify a side, and there are so many Christians from all walks of life with their own political/economic opinions.
3659282
Very true, thank you for the correction. I wasn't trying to classify all Christians for all time, but I sounded like I was, so my mistake. And you're certainly right, people can and will use anything to justify anything. We're creative like that ^.^
I had written a nice blurb about my father and his overwhelming tend to charity in this blog. I was soon notified, however, that saying such could potentially incriminate him and thus sully his reputation, never mind bring about unwarranted questions about his conduct as a government employee.
3657348
Thank you, but... goddamn it. I can't get anything right, I swear! MY DAD WAS AWESOME! END OF STORY. There, much better.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
3660785 Aaah! I refrained from deleting this post largely to save that comment.
I remember it was awesome, but I don't remember what it said. Oh well.
I deleted all my prior comments as well.
After thinking about it I decided it was a subject best not discussed on the Internet. Of course it was your prerogative to do so, but you've changed your mind. As for me, I apologize for having drawn the discussion out.
I got here a week late, and I missed everything. I'll never delete a post on your blog again. Can you just PM me the original text?
My parents pulled a similar quarter-a-week stunt on me, though for me it was in the 90s and I got a dime. For the most part that was fine, but I came to dread Christmas and my birthday because I'd feel like a leech getting gifts when I couldn't give anything back. Even now when money isn't an issue, I get depressed and try to keep away from people on those two days.
My parents did cover undergrad tuition, but I got a surprise when they gave only $600 for everything else. Splitting a really cheap apartment with 3 friends, that was good for about 6 weeks. I got a tutoring job pretty quickly that I ended up living week-to-week on, to the point where the number of hours I got to work determined whether or not I could get a snack between breakfast and dinner. $18 = bread, cheese, and milk for a week, and that was the standard. Life was pretty shitty when I got an hour less than I expected. I still remember being in my professor's office when he offered me a research position and a small fortune ($150/week) in exchange for what ended up being my soul. It was absolutely worth it.
3658338
There were a lot of stupid things my parents did thinking it was good for me, but I think the one thing I'll never get over is the complete lack of privacy they afforded me. There was a time in high school when my best friend died, and I really needed to get away from people. Living in a small house with "concerned" parents made that impossible. The vast majority of my spending now goes into making sure I live alone and always have the option of getting away from people. My family doesn't know where I live, and with any luck they never will. I don't know what they were hoping to achieve, but I suspect that wasn't it.
3674179
:(
I shared a bedroom with my younger brother for 18 years, so there was never much privacy except in the bathroom. When we really needed time we forced the other out of the room for a few hours, usually with lots of yelling.
3674179
Velveeta and macaroni, man. The same nutrients, but cheaper.
I tried Ramen noodles, but it turned out they were about 50% fat, and not really inexpensive at all on a per "nutrient" basis.
I had privacy from pretty early on, though! My parents had too many kids to be hoverparents.
3676927
I think Ramen can be made worthwhile if you add some vegetables or an egg and occasionally rotate with vegetables and cheese. In retrospect, I could have done far better than what I did. Before that point, I was living in a dorm with provided food, and before that I was living with my parents. I was pretty terrible at that the "buying food intelligently" thing.
3676201
You might want to reserve that frowny for someone else. It would be an understatement to say that my luck ever since has been extraordinary.
3677884
I have an abundance of frowny faces and shall use them as I see fit--just like my unfrowny faces ^.^
Besides, who said it had anything to do with luck?