Yes, move. And then move again, and then keep moving. Whatever you do, never question the neoliberal dogma that you are the cause and the solution for everything.
I can’t believe we are still at the “just move” stage of the discussion.
Never Question
Clarissa's Blog 
One of the neverending litany of completely dumbass defensive phrases going around, allowing the wealthy and people who already own homes, to shield themselves from looking at reality. My top favorites:
-Just work harder
-Move somewhere cheaper
-You’re just lazy
-I did it, so of course you can do it. Stop your whining.
-You’re probably just stupid.
-Learn a trade
All clearly uttered by people who have lost contact with their families, never in their lives worked for an hourly wage, have not bothered to consult easily-accessible data about average income expectations for any trades whatsoever, but somehow they all “know a guy” who makes $180k as an electrician (if true: because he bloody owns the contracting company: this is not most electricians and frankly I think they are making it up, or are whitecollar illiterate and don’t know the difference between an electrician and an electrical engineer), and who probably begrudge the pittance they pay the appliance repairman when the fridge breaks, wishing that could be outsourced.
One of the many, many reasons I think we need to draw a clear line between “internet people” and “I heard this in person, with my own ears”.
I’m not at all sure that these people are all real. It would make total sense to me if at least 85% of them were self-disabled basement orcs LARPing as successful men online. Largely because the actual successful men I know IRL spend zero time commenting in internet forums, because they are busy and have active social lives.
-ethyl
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Do people giving this advice actually have real jobs and families? Moving either implies changing a job (good luck with that!) or a significant commute. We actually really thought about that. Once I realized that I will be driving 1 hour each way in traffic we just gave up on that. It would be different if I were childless, but that kind of a commute either implies the child is doing it with you (if their school is near your work) or you are one hour away from your child’s school. Or you can outsource taking care of your child to someone else. (That’s a big no for me.) Advice is cheap, living with your decisions is not.
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Shapiro is rich and has a portable online job. One would hope that people in these situations were aware of how coddled and smug they sound to others but no such luck.
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Even the ones who are still close with family: they just assume everybody can rent a beach house, fly the whole family in for a holiday week, and have a nice visit a couple times a year. They have guest rooms. They can get a hotel.
It’s impossible to convey the realities of working-class existence to such people.
-ethyl
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They could at least keep quiet and not lecture people. It’s so annoying. The tactless cluelessness really gets to me.
“But why don’t you use your trust fund?” somebody once asked me when I explained that I couldn’t travel abroad for the summer because I had to work.
Yes, how come I never thought of such an easy solution?
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“we are still at the “just move” stage of the discussion”
The tone is definitely ‘let them eat cake’…. and they have no idea how awful they sound to relatively normal people….
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And they have completely, utterly, forgotten that it was the working class that won them this last election.
-ethyl
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We have a bit of a similar thing going on at academic conferences. People drone on and on about the importance of centering marginalized voices and such and nobody is listening. Then you get up and start talking about precarity, about delayed childbirth, about how instead of access to capital we were persuaded to accept as a form of capital a large number of sex partners – and people run after you into the quad, trying to hug you, shake your hand, and say that finally, finally somebody said something that matters. People are tired of the gaslighting.
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