Started from the bottom, now we're here
Say I never struggled, wasn't hungry, yeah I doubt it
I done kept it real from the jump… I was tryna get it on my own
— Drake, Started From the Bottom
Until very recently, I was the kid who insisted being the first person in my family to go to school wouldn’t affect me in the slightest. I’ll be the first to admit I was wrong. It does make it harder. But, it also makes it so much more rewarding. Every day is one step further, one more experience under my belt, and knowing that I worked hard to be where I am.
I am proud to be the first in my family to work toward a college degree… I was raised to be a hard worker.
— random student interviews I found on google
Came From Nothing
Came From Nothing 2
Came From Nothing 3
— the titles of Young Thug’s first three mixtapes
Coming from nothing is part of the American dream.
This idea is everywhere. We’re drowning in it. Its most distilled form is found in rap music; many rap about how they came from deep poverty, no finanical support from anyone, and had to make it on their own.
And I get it. There are lots of poor black people in the hood. A successful black person wants to extend the ladder down to them, inspire them, say look, I did it, so you can too. And same for being the first in one’s family to go to college: there are lots of kids who view college as both highly desirable and out of reach, so people tell their own stories: look, I did it, so you can too. It’s all very positive and heartening.
But those first-in-my-family stories aren’t for you. And those rappers are rich and have great lives and if they were still poor a lot fewer would sing about it. And white people should have never started listening to rap music.
Just kidding, fine, you can listen to rap - this idea goes way further back. Frederick Douglass wrote Self-Made Men in 1859. You can see why this concept - the self-made man - would be so important to a man like Douglass. But here is the problem, here is the danger, the trap: when someone with successful, moneyed parents listens to this stuff, over and over again, for years while quite young - and they will, since our culture is laced with it - they begin to think that they are worse for not having had to struggle with money. They want to struggle with money, maybe they want to hustle, they want to be on their grind, they want the feeling of stacking paper, they don’t want people to know that they could have been or were funded by their parents in their early adult years.
Maybe this is part of why white American teenagers are so obsessed with moving out of their parents’ houses at 18. My mother subscribes to my substack and I am worried she will read this and think it is about parenting styles or whatever, but there was never any hope for me to have had a different goal at 18, the hooks of the self-made man had wormed their way into me long before, and I never even knew it, I just knew it was something I had to do, that only a loser takes money or housing from his parents once he gets older, everyone knew that. So I moved into my own place. A $300 room on Lake Street, three blocks from where they killed Haaf in 1992, where mysterious vehicles would meet other mysterious vehicles at the end of the block in the middle of the night, where once I was standing on the porch at midnight and a woman with a baseball bat walked ferverously down the sidewalk, whacking each chainlink fencepost with a baseball bat, where the police once raided our building and I woke up to them booting my door open and they held me at weaponpoint (not sure if taser or gun) while they secured the floor. I mean it was a fun year in many other ways but goddamn!
One of my roommates was a Mexican guy and one night he was like, by the way, what’s up with you guys (he meant WHITES) and moving out of your parents’ house right when you turn 18? I don’t get it? What’s the rush? I couldn’t answer him, of course. I’m surprised I was able to process the question. It was too obvious. You have to move out of your parents’ place when you turn 18. But if it wasn’t obvious to him… huh.
I admit I still like this idea of moving out early, a man should have his own space, but for god’s sake, don’t move out and stop taking money from your parents at the same time! I did that, I was this person, I wanted to hustle, I wanted to grind, and so at 18 I moved three miles away and accepted no money and worked multiple minimum wage jobs in order to pay for it. I listened to Biggie Smalls rap to all the people that lived above the buildings that I was hustlin' in front of… called the police on me when I was just tryin' to make some money to feed my daughter… and everybody in the struggle while walking to my shift working the register at a gas station and felt pride. I knew even then, logically, that it was silly, but guess what, the pride was still real. This is deranged! At 17, I knew I would not have to struggle, this lack of struggle felt almost existentially threatening, and so I constructed a life in which I would have to struggle.
90’s parents were worried listening to rap would make their children violent mysoginists, but never thought to worry about it valorizing poverty. Poverty should only be valorized to the poor, to inspire them to escape it; never to the well-off. People find it distasteful when someone flaunts wealth in front of those without it - but what I’m talking about here is flaunting the being-without-it in front of those who have it. Don’t get tricked. Struggle is only cool in the past tense - it’s only cool if you get out.
In the fall I was at the bar talking to a woman to distract her so that my buddy could chat up her friend, and in fact I feel I am a terrible wingman and never know what to say, so we were talking about mundane topics like “where did you go to high school”, and she said some school outside of the city that I’d never heard of and then, before I could say anything, followed up with three or four more sentences right away, saying she knows I must hear she went to that school and think less of her, that she is a bit embarrassed at attending such a moneyed high school, and that she isn’t proud of it.
I was like, dude, at my high school we had african-american vs. somali wars where they drew knives on each other and we all had to go through metal detectors for two weeks after. A younger female friend of mine went to a notorious school in St. Paul where people would wait in the men’s room with weapons to rob guys when they went to take a leak. When she wore a skirt she’d get catcalled 50 times in a single day. This is not enviable, this kind of thing can make you tougher but I imagine it can also just straight traumatize you, some of these city schools are awful places and at this point it is not easy to imagine them ever becoming places where teenagers could feel consistently safe.
No, just kidding, all of that is true but I didn’t say any of it, I had just met this woman, I was just killing time while watching my buddy try and pick up her friend out of the corner of my eye, and anyway I wasn’t quick enough to think of it. But the sick thing is that the above paragraph almost feels like a humblebrag to me, even now: “kids at my school had knives, isn’t that badass?”.
I tried to convince her that there is nothing wrong with having a nice school, and parents who could support you & you gratefully accepting that support, and peers who had the same. But she wouldn’t have it. She said I had a unique way of looking at things - a compliment typically reserved for when the listener thinks what you’ve said is a bit batty. She said it in a way that made me think there was maybe a 10% chance my words would have any lasting impact. Not 0%, at least. But really it is sad - she had lived the dream, but the dream lacked danger and culturally-approved methods of struggle, so she couldn’t mentally appreciate it. I failed to convince her and so I’m writing this essay instead.
So at this point perhaps you are thinking that struggle does indeed suck, but you come out harder and tougher at the other end, and therefore it is worth it. A canonical contrast might be between someone like the person just out of high school, working three jobs, exhausted all the time, trying to make ends meet, on the one hand
and the young man who takes sailing lessons, using his father’s sailboat, on the other.
Ask people which of these two people is gaining more life experience, and often they’ll say it’s the former.
But I’ve worked on an overnight janitorial crew, and at McDonald’s, and at a gas station. The things you learn at such places are… not terribly useful. Industrial cleaning techniques to shine the floors of large retail stores don’t help me today when I’m sweeping my floors at home, and having tired people get mad at me at McDonald’s probably made me go a bit backwards in my social abilities, not forwards. (I got good at pissing rude people off without outwardly looking like I was arguing or insulting them, just with little tricks with my posture and pace of speech).
Like, if I told you I wanted to become a better person, so was going to go have some strangers be rude to me while I just stood there and took it, while fry-oil fumes worked their way into every fiber of my shirt, you’d think I was crazy. Or I hope you’d at least ask me if I had considered alternate methods of character-building! Yet people still imagine that employment in a job like McDonald’s cashier builds character.
(I don’t mean to pick on McDonald’s here. The people who worked there were nice to me, and the customers weren’t the worst. The worst place I ever worked was Walgreens. Those fluorescent lights… that particular rare breed of old lady [not rare inside a walgreens] who gets most of her social interaction by arguing about nothing with hostage service employees… for example I was in line buying some energy drinks at another walgreens two years ago and one of these creatures answered “no” to “do you want your receipt” and then, the moment it entered the trash bin, decided she wanted it after all, and insisted the cashier dig through the trash to get it… the cashier wouldn’t do it… the wraith insisted… the cashier resisted… I heckled the demon from my place in line to assist the victim… we won that time at least… i’ll never work at walgreens again no no no dont make me do it i’ll never go back never i never i)
Now consider sailboat kid. Here is the key: as a result of his experience, he knows how to sail. He can put a boat in the water and navigate that water safely. That’s a real skill that applies to the real, physical world. I’d say more about him, but that’s the whole story: he’s learning to do new cool stuff.
I did have one minimum wage job that did actually build character. That was working at Abercrombie & Fitch in 2010. Mainly, I think, because my coworkers were happy, well-adjusted people. We were happy to be there, as were most of the customers. The people who worked there spent time together outside of work, I made some good friends that I look back on fondly, and there were few enough of us that it felt like I was actually part of a team. On big store re-arrangings we would all come in at 7am and work a bit then go get breakfast at Pike’s Place at the Seattle waterfront - one week my buddy and I had volunteered for 7am shifts every day and every night we’d stay up until 3 in the morning drinking - I’ve never been so tired in my life - on one morning I woke up and staggered to the bathroom and turned the overhead light on and threw my head back and stared at it with eyes wide-open while making a gutteral noise in my throat I don’t think I’ve made before or since. Of all the retail jobs I worked, it was the furthest from “the struggle”, but it was the one that gave me the most useful lessons on how to live and act.
Don’t confuse “working yourself to the bone” with “improving yourself”. Weightlifting is like this too. Lifting for 6 hours a day is stupid - the returns to your time fall off quickly. Better to lift for an hour every other day or so. Schooling for children is like this too. Crushing a child with hours of homework every night is going to make them a worse person, not a better one, because you’ve taken away time they could use to play outside, or read fiction, or play games online with their friends. Most of my personal growth has happened on my leisure time. If you took that away, and had me only work 16 hours a day and sleep, I’d be worse for it. Such a life is not how you get human flourishing. Interspersing on-the-job work with walks, and exercise, and reading, and chilling, and seeing your friends - that’s how you grow into the kind of person you should want to be. And that’s why have-to-work-myself-to-the-bone-poverty is bad, and should be avoided, reduced, eliminated. Not valorized, or viewed as a necessary step in becoming a complete and valid person.
Additionally… on money. The self-made rich man is remarkable because he is rare. The any-kind-of-rich man is also rare. Lots of people go deep into debt and only pay it off in their thirties. A young person dreaming of being self-made successful in a way that involves money has bad odds, and they should increase their odds by dropping the “self-made” part. It just isn’t necessary, and it’s more a desire for clout than something of substance.
This means that, if your parents have the means, and you are young, you should take a loan from them, not the bank! When you take a loan from a bank, you have to pay interest. That interest is money that could have been kept in the family, but is instead being paid to like Chase Bank or whoever. If your family can afford to loan you the money without impacting how they live, be willing to take it from them.
Of course sometimes one cannot actually secure a loan from their parents on acceptable terms. If your parents move to Alaska and offer to buy you a great house in Alaska too, well, maybe you pass. But often, agreeable terms can be reached, and the best thing about family is that you don’t need a lot of terms - you already know each other. The modern system of getting a bank loan is a marvel of social technology, because it allows you to borrow a lot of money from people you don’t know. But that doesn’t make it better than borrowing money from people you do know!
Bank loans are brillaint at making loans available to people who don’t come from families with money. But if you come from a family with money, role-playing as someone without it by taking a bank loan is more a symptom of “make it on my own” sickness than it is anything to be proud of. And does the difference between “self-made” and not self-made really come down to borrowing money from a bank, instead of from family? Either way, you made an agreement with people and 60k appeared in your bank account. Those people being strangers hardly makes the borrowing more valorous.
Life with money, life without debt, a job with consistent hours that you can take a day off from on short notice, like short as in “I woke up and don’t feel like working so I took the day off” - these things are awesome. I would like to see everyone in such a state. This will never happen, so songs and cultural memes valorizing the struggle will always exist. But before taking them to heart, make sure you need to. Struggle to write a book, or become good at your sport, or create something at your job that thousands of people will use and benefit from. Labor, but as much as you can, make that labor high-value, however you define value. Just so long as you don’t make the mistake of defining Everyday Struggle, in itself, as high-value.
I know how it feel to wake up fucked up… stress-filled day, mad bills to pay… another day another struggle… I don’t wanna live no more.
That’s not aspirational.
Interesting. Growing up in another country, attending a prestigious high school or college wasn't something people were humble about. The rich, because it showed everybody that they were connected. The poor, because it showed everybody that they were intellectually superior.