I love this article. I felt my blood pressure rising as I read the first section.

For anyone struggling with the problems he uses for examples, I think the example exhortations ("Just start running!" "Just be yourself!") illustrate that you should be skeptical about advice from someone who has never solved the problem in question, or solved it accidentally with resources you don't have. It's possible you can learn from their advice, but there's a good chance it won't apply to you in a simple way.

Tellingly, in the first part of the article, it was easy for me to gloss over the parts that touch on problems I don't have. Where I got upset was when it talked about the problems I do have. I think a great deal of the disconnect comes from people with privilege being unable to imagine how people can survive without it. Their prescription is for everybody to live like they have privilege, which is the only thing they can imagine, and accept the suffering that results. Some people can eat whatever they naturally gravitate towards and be healthy... so you should eat anything you want, and if you end up with diabetes, that's the proper outcome for you. Some people can afford $22 avocado toast every day, so you should eat that toast, and if you run out of money for rent, that's fine, that's what happens to people like you. Some people can be blithe and careless about their mental health and be happy, so you should be careless too.

No matter what empathetic language you dress it up in, I think it's a pretty brutal message, that the way the most privileged people are able to live is the only way worth living. You should study like you're a Harvard legacy, manage your money like a trust fund baby, and take care of your body like you're the twenty-year-old offspring of a model and a professional athlete with centenarians on both sides of the family, because that's the only way worth living.

Seen from that perspective, telling people not to bother with individual solutions to their problems is an even more flamboyant display of privilege than someone saying "just be frugal!" or "fix your mental health issues with exercise!" Offering someone a solution, however inadequate, at least acknowledges that their lives require effort and compromise, and that a life of effort and compromise is worth living. It's shitty and inadequate, but it's better than being told that you simply must eat that $22 avocado toast because life without $22 avocado toast would be too ghastly.

I get the 30,000 foot political perspective. Collective and individual solutions are different and therefore competing, and politics doesn't allow for complexity or nuance, so public desire for collective solutions can only come at the expense of belief in individual solutions. I see that logic. However, because people are currently facing these problems alone, they are resorting to individual solutions, and many people are benefiting from individual solutions in ways that matter to them, even if it looks meager and meaningless from a more privileged perspective. It comes off as awfully snobbish and disconnected when you deny the value of the benefits (however small) that people realize from their efforts to manage their health, their finances, etc. And you don't have to do that to promote collective solutions. At least let's hope not, because if so, that's a really tough messaging problem to solve.