This article resonated with me. Being homeless is far, far more difficult than being part of the rat race. What it comes down to is, people feel that they suffer an indignity that someone would dare risk everything to be free rather than be conscripted to an employer. It threatens their entire religious heteronormative worldview that life is about pulling the yoke to provide for one's children. If they have to suffer, then everyone else should too. Why should that guy get out of working when I have to get up at 6 am tomorrow? And so on and so forth.

Since wealth inequality is so extreme now globally, all labor slides into full-time and overtime. Some people look at the risk-reward value proposition of that, and correctly opt out. We label them homeless. But personally, I think of them as starving artists, freedom fighters and probably gifted. Some of the most dynamic people that I have ever met were on drugs, suffering with some form of mental illness like PTSD/ADHD/manic-depressive or one step away from living on the streets. Luckily they became computer programmers.

To a first-order approximation, homelessness is a measure of how authoritarian a society is. The choices are the $100k+ career at 40+ hours per week, menial labor at 50-60 hours per week, or homelessness. We pretend that there are 20 hour per week jobs that pay enough to launch a business, but of course that's all make-believe. It's not really even possible to work every other year, or have two people apply to the same job so they can alternate shifts. Systems of control lock us down by rents and medical bills and debts to the point that anything short of indentured servitude is not sustainable.

I'm seeing that it's nearly impossible to live off the grid in a medium-sized city in the northwest where people actively work to ban city camping and prevent giving tiny homes to the homeless. Surely it must be impossible in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. So I dunno, after a lot of trying to create some kind of free life for myself, after 20 years of struggle and poverty, I might just have to throw in the towel and get a job at a major corporation. I might be a slave then, but at least the system would provide for my basic needs.

This isn't the future I signed up for, and more and more every day I am coming to terms with the fact that the American Dream is probably dead. I've found the Office Space/Fight Club/Mr. Robot portrayal of the working world to be uncannily accurate. I actually enjoy earning a paycheck and working with people as it happens, but when burnout sets in and I finally find myself unemployed again, the 6 months of living expenses that I've saved after years of lost life doesn't feel like much of a consolation prize. The people who have it figured out are the sociopaths, able to skim income from other people's labor and rationalize it by calling it capitalism. But there is no future in hard work. And lately, no market for it either.

This is a garbage comment and I'm not sure I even believe half of it, but it felt real in the moment so I'm going to go ahead and just post it.

EDIT: In the spirit of offering solutions rather than dwelling on problems, I think that an answer can be found in the gig economy, sustainability and expanded consciousness. Maker communities with urban gardens and such might have enough strength in numbers to provide basic needs between the extremes of homelessness and the 9-5 job. I'm trying to move in that direction but the forces that be don't make it easy.