I think it's easy to oversimplify poverty - and wealth. It's easy to assume that "having things" makes you wealthy, and "not having the same things" makes you poor. For example: many children, kids, have smart phones, these days. If a kid didn't have a smart phone, would that make them poor? Seems like you need food, shelter, clean water - but pretty much everything else is extra. Does this matter? (perhaps not)
In the last week or so I've been researching "tent cities" in my area - Seattle.
There are a few, they appear to be their own tiny countries - almost cut off from their surroundings, like tiny bubble universes, budding on the surface of the super membrane, not yet detached, no longer connected.
This is, in many ways, the story of the homeless generally - "not yet detached, no longer connected".
Homless people, nearly, disappear from society.
Arguably, in the days of "frontiers", there was always some place to "pick up and start again" - America is no longer that nation. The frontiers, whatever they were, are closed. Of course, some will say "frontiers of technology and science" are still wide open, and that might be true - but for the dislocated, the disenfranchised, the broke, the busted, the castaways of our society? For these, the frontiers, for all practical purposes, are closed.
It seems like satire to talk about "shopping around for tent cities", but compared to my other options? - I don't know.
I have been interviewing in Seattle for a couple of weeks now, and, honestly, I'm probably not 100% in the right place for this - but, TBH, the software engineering interviews I'm going to feel like rigged contests, designed for me to fail. I even considered faking my resume and going for a more junior role - but those junior roles don't really exist.
I am considering a non-software engineering role, but that, too, has challenges. Where would I go work, at 48 years old? At this point?
So I'm here, thinking, considering, and surfing the web ... looking at various "tent cities".
(tent city no. 3 looks primo, right now)
