I know it's unseemly in America to talk about how much money you make. The polite thing to do is to change the subject if someone else brings it up, retreat to one of your tastefully appointed investment properties and consume discreetly in the areas of blockchain drawings of primates and ten-figure dark-money donations to crypto-fascist political action committees. You don't want your wealth to make other people feel bad after all, do you? At least not right to their faces. What it does down the line when you own judges and state legislatures and whole congressional caucuses, punishing the non-rich for being not-rich, well, that's just the price of doing business. Nothing personal!
I can't not get excited and shout it to the moon, tacky though it may be, when circumstances shift out of nowhere and I come into some serious money all at once. It would be better if the government check was actually a check instead of just a blanking out of the negative balance, but still! Since the last time we talked, I'm looking at the prospect of being mid-four-figures heavier, baby. I'm not sure what I'm going to spend it all on immediately (I am a patriotic American after all and there is nothing more patriotic than buying stuff), but I think the first step is maybe just get it all in singles and make like an early 2000s entry-level hip-hop artist and just kind of throw it around in slow motion.
I know I do qualify for the student debt relief program because I a) definitely make less than $125,000 and b) I owe less than $10,000. That's right, I've been slow-walking this government teat-suckle for 25 years now and it finally paid off! Literally! It's such a satisfying culmination to see some fruit from this $25,000 or so seedling I planted way back when.
Part of the public response has been, I think, pretty close to Peak Boomer, a generation congenitally incapable of recognizing the third-basedness of their birth, red-facedly swearing up and down to anyone who will listen (and most of us who are just trying to enjoy the once-a-year turkey dinner) about the triple they don't quite remember legging out, but certainly must have hit at some point. No group of humans in the history of humans have done less with so, so much. It's not really a surprise to see them all come out gagging and kvetching about somebody else having the audacity to have something.
You'd think they'd get it better than anyone else, the simple joy of getting something for nothing. But that blindness toward things like relief in another human being is just built in, and there doesn't seem to be any way (if any facebook "debate" you've ever accidentally scrolled into has taught you anything) to reason them out of it.
I could try to explain that after having paid about $32,000 on $25,000 in loans over 25 years, with something like $7,000 still to go on the balance, I'm not really sure how it counts as a "handout" for me or some kind of debt avoidance. If I want them to celebrate my new prosperity, I'll have to consider demonstrating it in a way they recognize and respect, like blowing it all on supplements made out of cricket legs peddled by a YouTube fascist or giving it all away in Google Play gift cards to a nice Indian man on the phone who responded to the phone number in the pop-up ad that told me my Amazon account had been hacked. Human connection is all about getting on the other person's level.
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