Hot day in

 It was a hot one so I stayed in.  Not much going on. 

I spend too much time reading through such cheerful subreddits as r/collapse, r/homeless, r/povertyfinance, etc. I guess on one level I feel like I'll learn some tip or clue that changes how I do my life or something. This never seems to happen though. 

One pattern I see is that for most Americans, it's not just supporting yourself, you have to support one or more cars also. If you don't support one or more vehicles, you quickly end up homeless, carless, living in a hut made of pallets and tarps, and living off of food banks and "bum feeds". 

But - a huge pattern I've started thinking about is while there are sure a lot of people with degrees or experience in some field, a huge number of the hard-times stories are from people with, effectively, no skills at all. Not even interpersonal skills or the "gift of the gab". They had no career-mindedness at all, drifted through high school, etc. I'm not going to fault anyone for not graduating high school if they had to get to work, as that's how my life went, but you can always GED it and go to junior college or trade school or even a 4-year college if your SAT is good enough and while I don't remember my score even I was able to take the SAT. 

Another huge pattern I've just noticed that spurred me to write this is, of all the sob stories I've not read any where the person had serious skill at a musical instrument, or at anything artistic and I'm going to include in "artistic" not only painting and drawing but even things like wood-carving or hand-lettering of the type used in traditional sign-painting. 

Are people "burying" these skills and resignedly moving into their car or the local tent camp or homeless shelter? When you're in extremis you reach for anything so I can't believe this would be the case. I have to conclude that people with some kind of real skill are not ending up homeless - or homeless enough to cry for help on Reddit - at all. 

They're either taking that skill and going out and using it, or their skill enables them to network enough to not end up on the street. Or, I have to say in many cases, they're middle-class or better and our class system, so adept at preserving itself, is simply not allowing them to fall too far. 

My father, for instance, should have ended up homeless. But pure WASP Ivy League graduates are not supposed to end up homeless in our class system, and indeed although he probably didn't do any paying work from the age of 50 on, he lived quite comfortably, owning a car and living in his aunt's old apartment which according to Zillow is worth just under a half-million dollars. My mother of course died in illness and poverty because the class she came from allows for that to happen. 

So maybe the kind of people who get themselves born into the social class where things like 10 years of classical violin training or making the Junior National Team in tennis or understanding the difference between impressionism and fauvism are the norm, are taken care of in some mysterious way. The ruling class, even the lower reaches of it, can't afford to have them captured by the other side, their class enemies. 

But I like to think that a skill or area of expertise is protective merely because it allows a person to build up a network of other people who are doing fairly well.