I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money

1. Hope for the best but prepare for the worst. 2. If you want to survive, remember to secure your own oxygen mask before securing the oxygen masks of others. 3. Whatever you do, though, don’t forget about the others.

We’re all just doing our best to get by; sometimes you’re on the giving end, other times you’re on the receiving end.

You don’t get anything you want in life by keeping what you want a secret.

Wage labor is all exploitation in the end. We’re coerced into accepting employment because we’ll die if we don’t. There’s no choice there. There’s barely even an illusion of choice.

It’s amazing how much extra cash flow is freed up when one person isn’t hoarding all the money at the top.

In 2019, Microsoft Japan implemented a four-day workweek without reducing pay for its workers. The result? Productivity increased 40 percent.

The commodification of housing is an evil that will never make sense to me. How have we let greed go so far that the very things we need to stay alive, things like shelter, have become reduced to commodities for the rich to profit from while the rest of us struggle?

As long as there has been money, there has been debt. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t have either, but we don’t live in a perfect world. We live here, now.

Drew loved to learn about physics and space. It made him feel small and insignificant, but in a way that eased some of the pressure he felt about needing to make it in today’s dystopian soul-crushing world.

Was life really an endless string of being bounced around from company to company, from Owner to Owner, being seen as a line item on a balance sheet—a number to get as low as possible to maximize profits?

Don't listen if anyone ever tells you it's a dog-eat-dog world. Dogs are pack animals. We're stronger together.

We went home that night and fell asleep in each other’s arms. “I love you,” he told me before we went to bed, kissing me on the forehead. The next morning, I woke up, and Drew was gone. In the canyon by our house, he’d shot himself in the heart.

Nothing in capitalism is easy.

Real estate investors want to create a nation of renters, and it’s easy to see why: there’s massive profit in price-gouging people for rent.

I sat down with a notebook and wrote down my plan for the future: 1. pay off my debt 2. save a down payment for a house 3. plan for my retirement 4. help everyone I care about do the same

If love is to understand someone and be understood by them, as I’ve always suspected, it’s possible there were no two people more in love in the history of the world than Drew and me.

Millennials might have been the first generation in U.S. history to collectively realize that capitalism was built on a house of cards, while the rich took bets on when and how it would fall.

why should the people on top make the most money when the people on the bottom do the most work?

The minimum wage today is worth 31 percent less than it was in 1968. By contrast, housing prices have more than doubled when adjusted for inflation.

In 2021, 73 percent of Americans ranked financial issues as their number one cause of stress—above politics, work, or family—and these numbers are highest in Generation Z and Millennials, with over 80 percent of people born after 1980 reporting that they find their finances to be a source of stress.

Don’t feel bad about owing money to a bank. They’re evil bloodsucking mega-corporations and they don’t care about us.

To put it succinctly, if everyone owns a burger shop but refuses to work in it, who will flip the burgers?

The American Dream tells us that we can change our economic reality if only we work hard enough, but time and time again, we see that class mobility is a myth.

The same standardized tests that ranked me in the top 0.01 percent of all academic performers had been created from a system originally developed by the eugenicist Carl Brigham to help separate test-takers by race and economic background. I was smart enough to know that school didn’t measure intelligence; it just measured how good you were at school.

I was on MySpace; I had a Xanga online diary.

Punk might be dead, or it might be more alive than ever—growing like weeds through the cracks of the concrete that is our daily lives struggling to get by in a system of capitalism.

I might be looking for a fight. You can take the girl out of Fresno, but you can’t take the Fresno out of the girl apparently.

We all know it’s fair, deep down in our kindergarten brains, where we learn the difference between right and wrong, and all about how sharing works, but that doesn’t stop it from being shocking. People tell themselves quiet lies to normalize the suffering. By some calculations, income inequality in the United States today is worse than it was in France in 1789. They cut people’s heads off for that one.

It feels revolutionary, which is sad in its own right. It shouldn’t be revolutionary that people who work are paid enough to have shelter.

It turns out if you give money to a broke, scrappy, loudmouth punk kid from Fresno, she wants to use that money to take care of her community in whatever way possible, including getting them into stable housing.