Ytlaya posted:

I think this is a difficult problem (and possibly an impossible one to fix). I know a bunch of wealthy liberals, and they sorta-kinda care about helping people in theory but it never goes beyond discussions and is almost always limited to ideas that wouldn't be considered "radical." I think this is partly because wealthier people don't really understand what it even means to deal with hardship, in the same way as a man doesn't know how it feels to be a woman. Their lived experiences basically render them completely and utterly ignorant about what it's like to not have a comfortable, happy life. And these are people who I think, at their core, are good people. But it's impossible to communicate to them with just words what it's like to experience difficulty. As a result, it's impossible to really get these people to feel any sort of urgency, since the very concept of urgently needing help is foreign to them.

I distinctly remember this one time I was talking to this guy and he told me about how the most difficult and painful thing he had ever experienced was not being accepted into Harvard for undergraduate (he was accepted to NYU Stern, which is the college we both attended). He was dead serious and had absolutely zero clue that this was an absurd sentiment.