Why do we lack a safety net?

Ever have a day where you just don’t want to do anything, but need to do basically everything? Today is one of those days. Most of the time when the feeling hits I have at least a buffer that I can use to relax and not have to worry, but unfortunately that’s not the case this time. Why the hell we built a society like this is beyond me, but here we are.

My mental health has never been great. I mean I live with depression, anxiety, PTSD, and a whole list of other issues that make life hard. Hell, if I’m being honest, and why wouldn’t I be, my issues make breathing hard some days. Everything feels like work, pretending to be normal is already an exciting exercise and add to that the last almost year of stress on top of the last four years and I’m surprised I’m functioning.

We humans built a society that requires us to function at our best all the time or we run the risk of being homeless. That is unless we’re at the top, then we don’t have to do anything. It’s a good system for those born into power and money, not so much for the rest of us. I would settle for a system that prioritized my mental health, one that I could fall and there would be things in place to catch me.

Instead we rely on gofundme and the such to get healthcare or help each other with our mental health issues. I mean we’ve started crowdsourcing our safety net and that’s not a good thing. It’s good in the sense that a lot of you care, which makes me happy. It’s bad in the sense that a lot of people who do care aren’t doing much better than the people they are helping. Heartwarming, sure, but it shouldn’t be that way. We shouldn’t have to worry about failure, imagine all the things we could accomplish if failure didn’t mean homelessness and being shunned from society.

How many brilliant ideas will never come to fruition because they lived in the minds of people who were disadvantaged? Who, through no fault of their own, were born into circumstances that set them up for failure. How many times has the cure for cancer lived and died with someone because society didn’t care about them? Or fuck it, here me out, what if one mediocre and extremely average person who would never cure anything or advance the world in any sort of way could fail and not be homeless?

The problem with being average is that so many of us are, it wouldn’t be the average otherwise. Why does that make a life less worthy than the people who could cure cancer? That’s the real problem, right? We value people, not based on the fact that they were thrust into this world without a choice, but on what they can do to progress society. Life is hard, cold, cruel, and the truth is, it doesn’t have to be, but we let it.

Look at how many people here in the US are dead and yet we still have calls to open up and save the… free market! Who the fuck cares about the economy when the government literally has the power to end this fucking suffering, but chooses not to do a damn thing for the people who need it most?

I guess the point of today is just that the people in charge, and to a certain extent each of us, put more value into the things a person can do instead of just respecting people for the simple fact that they exist. I have work that I need to do because I don’t get a safety net, but imagine what life would be like if we had one?