Been marinating in my brain…
Bags of gasoline, toilet paper, water bottles, land, houses, gold, bitcoin, dogecoin, baseball cards, pokemon toys, amiibos, sneakers, you name it.
The media will frame this as the irresponsible and ignorant hoarding of your fellow man, the unending greed of American citizens; but I also have to think of this speaks to, oft unexamined in mainstream news outlets, the desperation of regular folks. They buy bags of gasoline not just for themselves but on the off chance they make it big. They hoard toilet paper on the off chance they can sell in excess. Everything is a hustle because when you are starving, are broke, got bills up to your neck, you have to hustle.
Or am I wrong? Is it a fundamentally American thing to reach certain stratas of society and just want to greedily turn every object into a cash-cow, a golden goose egg? Once you reach an extra 30k of income, and you don’t want to waste it on your dumb stupid family, you decide to gamble with it out of sheer boredom?
Who are these people really?
This connects with something I often find myself pondering whenever capitalism-defenders claim that selfishness and greed are just “human nature.”
If I had to boil human nature down to one simple concept, it’s self-preservation. They’re right in a sense, that this drive for self-preservation manifests as selfishness and greed, but only because we live in a capitalist society that pits people against each other and encourages selfish behavior. They take this symptom of capitalism and use it as a justification. If society rewarded cooperation and punished selfish behavior, we’d see people acting very differently.
I believe this tendency to “hustle” arises out of the irrationality of our system. Even if you grow up with a comfortable amount of money, you can take all the right steps that the meritocracy-believers tell you to and still get screwed. This is especially the case in times like now when inequality is increasing and everyone except the very richest is downwardly mobile. People are incentivized to accumulate as much of a financial cushion as they can, as they can lose it at any moment. This is where the hustle comes in – people are constantly looking for a way out, for some way to get a lot of money very quickly and not only escape precariousness for the time being, but to have enough of a cushion to never be poor again.