There’s an adage that struggle builds character. Struggle helps because it contains several layers to a person. Struggle hardens one’s mind to be persistent in face of demoralizing times. Struggle indicates mistakes were made in the journey. Struggle can show an innocent person what it’s like to hurt and to reinforce the need to get out of that state.
Fortunately, the American system and culture rewards taking risks and embracing failure in the pursuit of goals. This is highly unlike many other cultures of perfectionism such as China or Europe which hedges risk and punishes experimentation preemptively. The American system has social safety nets like unemployment insurance, homeless shelters, food pantries, medicare/state insurance/medicaid, and social security that one can live off without savings though with difficulty (but it’s still better than China. European social security might be too high and makes people rely on the government too much which might be a bigger burden on youth compared to the US). America’s meritocracy, though completely not perfect and likely never will be through nepotism or social goals like achieving DEI quotas, rewards those who are ambitious and talented. The continuity of ambition and talent means a productive workforce, a continuously growing and competitive economy against global rivals, and most importantly continual innovation that improve people’s lives. Those innovations come small in the form of businesses taking advantage of new discoveries or making incremental improvements (consider almost every home appliance; they’re all much better compared to decades ago). The private sector also ensures talent, wisdom, experience, and technical knowledge doesn’t die down in the face of shrinking public sector budget. The continual rise in innovation rate and money earned/tax revenue in a variety of industries means a greater amount of talent that can contribute back to public sector discoveries, funding, and innovations. This is a great cycle.
(Aside: the latest Jason Arday situation is an example of how pushing quotas elevated a liar who then punished those who tracked those lies down (before the racist professor and media) through lawyers. But it also shows, just like in Silicon Valley, how we’re also bad at meritocracy by using random signals to gauge someone because truly gauging someone as an outsider is difficult. In Silicon Valley, you have to pretend to be autistic, especially for women who have greater pressure and sexism surrounding the industry).
However, there are those who suffer. Suffering occurs when one is incessantly put down. Democrats love pointing out certain communities and races are put down from prejudice. One area is education; with higher educational attainment, crime rate lowers and socioeconomic mobility usually increases. However, Ben Shapiro’s observation showcases why educational attainment is not stymied from prejudice. It’s both a problem of culture and funding, both can be solved at the local level but aren’t, and American politics blames the federal government when the federal government can’t actually do anything about it. Black women were the literal “computers” at NASA and continue dominating in education compared to their peers. The South’s higher education level is still on average the lowest and partly warrants the perception on the South’s culture on higher education (from a non-race perspective. This is the agricultural culture issue and brain drain due to the South not having many large corporations and dense talent hubs besides NASA in Alabama).
On the other hand, Republican politicians continue trying to propagandize through the media that there are too many handouts, and they should be lowered dramatically or as many such as President Bush Jr and President Trump suggest abolished. What I would like to point out is that many people rely on those handouts because of rising costs and real wage, though keeping up with inflation, is not keeping up with costs, especially with the dominant expenses of life.
It is because of the large safety net in America combined with the culture of risk, ambition, talent, and gaining experience and upward mobility that makes America one of the best examples of a continuously growing society with a decent model of good human behavior (even with all its horrible flaws like exploitative billionaires, NIMBYism, etc.). However, from my 20s, I’ve almost always had most of my friends be 10 years older than me, and the consistent theme is their career drive slowing down. In NYC, tons of people have ambition as the city is very self-selecting, but, when I talk to folks who just graduated from a prestigious university, they just want to live life and have their comfortable salary. I imagine the majority of the population isn’t ambitious. Should we punish them for not being ambitious?
This is the point of suffering that folks are experiencing today. I believe that people are required to be productive. The utopian perspective that society can get by via communism is ludicrous (and the microeconomic model of my contemporary democratic socialism with worker collectives is still full of issues that neglect human nature and the reality of business in general). There is no utopia; someone has to do work, so let people be ambitious in the places they want. The people who aren’t ambitious which is the majority must contribute in order to maintain societal functionality.
They should still be productive and contribute to society. They should strive to get promotions, up to a certain degree or skill/experience level. Because to me, that strive is the struggle. The struggle should be in the journey. With rising costs, people who just wanted to struggle a little bit and simply remain productive in their working capacity shouldn’t struggle from costs or wage loss or unemployment. We should strive to get them off the streets and be productive (unless it’s too late due to their mind getting completely destroyed from negativity or drugs). Lots of people are suffering because they work paycheck to paycheck in shitty conditions and working hours.
People should be productive. I don’t think they should stop working less than 30 hours a week (which is practically 40 hours because let’s face it most people don’t work 40 hours, but they are at work for 40 hours).
Let those who struggle the most be the ambitious. Struggle builds character. It’s why we read stories and learn about the Hero’s Journey format. But those are heroes with big stories. The big founders, CEOs, heads of states, etc. are the ones who should struggle the most. Struggle is in the journey; struggle is in the competition of business, in competing for jobs, in life for the girl/guy, etc. Struggle is what enables people to develop which cascades into developing innovative companies and inventions. It’s up to one’s goal and how long someone wants that journey to be for the struggle to last that long. The wages and cost increasing should be political dangerous to the American system of politics. The fact that it’s not being resolved properly by Congress and President Trump and Biden is really annoying.