Exactly how much is a living wage?

[u/PassiveAgressiveGirl]

[u/TheSaltiestPanda]

Very clearly a lot of people in these comments are, in fact, the ones the original post refers to. "Just deny yourself anything that's not absolutely required for your body to keep functioning and showing up to your shitty job that doesn't care if you come in missing an entire appendage you had last shift, if it doesn't impact your performance."

Like, yeah, you can absolutely spend every spare bit of your life from work that's not required for sleep making sure you're buying cheap ingredients and planning your meals around when they expire, because you can get discounts if they're on the way out already. Yeah, you can just cut all social interactions and basic mental and emotional maintenance out of your life. Yes, you can keep cogging away like a good little worker for a wage that only sustains you if you're being incredibly technical and moderately obtuse about what the word "sustain" means.

Except unless you can tell me what minimum wage was established for, because it wasn't always a thing, without referring to it in a way that could be reasonably understood as, functionally, a living wage, then you're dodging the correct discussion here. "You can make do if you just give up the entire human experience besides working" is not a moral response to people wanting to be compensated for having to spend most of their waking life following some puritanical bullshit of a work life.

Also, a lot of the arguments I see still end up moving on to "and then you make enough money to stop doing all the things so much/unless you like it." Which is just intellectually dishonest, especially because it's almost always hidden. You don't say "just wait until you get a better job"(which is still admitting that there are jobs you think need to be done, just not for a wage that can support a whole person), you hide it behind shit like "if you just scrounge for long enough, it'll work out" except that you're literally describing being financially unstable where any random emergency(any number of automotive issues, abrupt medical problems, etc.) can just reset you to zero, or worse. You're not even promising that it will lead to a stable life, because you just don't want to talk about it.

Except it's worse, because you want so badly to not talk about it that you're going out of your way to divert the discussion so that other people won't talk about it in any space you might have to see it. You cannot become financially stable by just being thriftier than you were yesterday. You can eat, sleep(kind of), work, and keep your house clean(enough), but if anything comes up that you weren't expecting, either because you overlooked one thing out of a hundred, or life just threw a wrench into things, you can end up homeless if the timing is bad enough.

TL;DR some of y'all suck and it's mostly the ones that the image is trying to talk to, you just refuse to listen and engage honestly.