[vintermann]

Apropos Greta Thunberg, I noticed on the top of the "no stupid questions" subreddit the question "How can people like Greta Thunberg afford to be a full time activist?". The submitter was a one-month old account, one of their posts was in the whatismycqs subreddit - a sure tell for bot/farm accounts.

[wolvesechoes]

Yet it is rather serious question - most people spent most of their time to sustain themselves. I think that it is pretty bad for democracy that political action is delegated to only those few that are able to gain sponsorship and don't need to work to eat.

We do not need professional activists, quite the contrary.

[ben_w]

> most people spent most of their time to sustain themselves

Do they? Or do they get convinced by adverts that their lives won't be complete unless they spend more than they can afford on an endless stream of shiny promises?

I've always found it very easy to put a huge fraction of my income to one side because all my hobbies are cheap or free.

I've sometimes expressed surprise at how much other people buy, or spend regularly, and in one case the response was approximately "of course I need to spend £2500/month after my mortgage, there's the £50/month phone and same for internet, there's Netflix, I eat out twice a week, there's the car (which I like taking across the channel to France and driving around a lot), there's …"

Meanwhile, I'm mostly content living off my €1k/month passive income, of which 25% is spent on mandatory social and health insurance; and the only thing I'm unsure about at this income level is visiting friends and family on the other end of a 2h flight where the airport isn't all that close to any of them.

[subscribed]

Yeah, I'll tell my family we need to move to the mouldy 1 bedroom flat because a guy in the internet says so. That'll help with the mortgage bit;

Also kids need to manage their expectations and instead of having active hobbies (that require some minimum hardware but lots of activities), they should try sculpting with clay instead. Especially that with the asthma they'll get from the black mould they'll be in no position to be very active anyway.

I've seen clay on the field, so we'll save money here. We can also collect their art through the winter to bake them in the sun once they're ready (to save on the oven).

School? Right, we need to move to the closest one, why let them have friends or aspirations.

Now work, hmm, that's easy. Instead of going to the work I get paid a lot but commute cost over £5k a year, I'll take something that pays 1/6 of my original salary but we can save on the commute. Will he'll with arguing why we need to move to the smaller place and ditch their activities.

Living costs a lot.

And if I sound absurd so do you by suggesting your life choices are applicable to everyone or they're just convinced by adverts to spend.

[ben_w]

You're inventing a fictional narrative unrelated to anything I just said.

Especially as this was in the context of how Greta Thunberg, who, to the best of my knowledge, has no kids of her own and thus doesn't need to also cover the cost of their hobbies or how to get them to school, and furthermore in the context of "how does she manage to be a full-time activist with no obvious means of support?" where such things as "commuting" is more like "hitchhiking on someone else's yacht for 2 weeks": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_voyages_of_Greta...

You can do a lot of travel very cheaply when your reputation alone is sufficient for people to give you a free lift across the Atlantic ocean as part of your own activism against, in that case, the CO2 emissions of flying. Should that be limited, given the travel itself was part of the attempt at activism to move people away from air travel, but also it took 2 weeks and therefore probably wouldn't do any such thing?

(For those without this advantage, I'm reminded of Tom Scott explaining how he managed to do so much on-site filming around the world for relatively little money; my own cheapest flight was under a tenner, an effect somewhat spoiled by the cost of the British Rail ticket from the airport to my actual destination).

[wolvesechoes]

> Especially as this was in the context of how Greta Thunberg, who, to the best of my knowledge, has no kids of her own and thus doesn't need to also cover the cost of their hobbies or how to get them to school

And comes from the rich middle-class background. But let's ignore that, because all that matters is small financial discipline.

[vintermann]

You are both ignoring what my actual point was, which was that some organized propagandist wants the discussion to be about Greta Thunberg's virtue or lack of it.

[ben_w]

> And comes from the rich middle-class background. But let's ignore that, because all that matters is small financial discipline.

I didn't say to ignore it.

I said it's possible to live cheaply.

Vimes' Boots isn't nothing.

You said this was a "serious question"; but do you now recognise that a simple observation of "oh look, she's from a rich middle-class family" (a fairly large group) means it is not?

[jacquesm]

> my own cheapest flight was under a tenner, an effect somewhat spoiled by the cost of the British Rail ticket from the airport to my actual destination

The cost of any trip to the UK is a constant...

[K0balt]

Copium is a powerful drug.

[wolvesechoes]

> Do they? Or do they get convinced by adverts that their lives won't be complete unless they spend more than they can afford on an endless stream of shiny promises?

> Meanwhile, I'm mostly content living off my €1k/month passive income

This means you have sufficient capital to sustain yourself this way, and probably a place to live with no rent or mortgage. This also means you had either a rich family or earned quite a lot in the past what allowed you to collect this capital. And lastly this means you don't have family to support.

Well, maybe everyone could decide to grind few years (though in my country the minimal wage is not much greater than your "passive income", so grind options are limited) and then decide to not have a family and don't buy a phone. We would then have a whole society of full-time political activists, but then there is a question why any action matters.

Your comment reeks of classism. "Oh, they really do not try enough. Just get up earlier and cancel your Netflix sub".

[ben_w]

> And lastly this means you don't have family to support.

Last I checked, neither does Greta Thunberg.

As she's the one whose lifestyle you find to be a "serious question", this feels like you're making an "arguments as soldiers" reaction here rather than taking the actual point that it is very possible to live cheaply if this is your goal in life.

> This means you have sufficient capital to sustain yourself this way,

Irrelevant. My income being €1k/month is what matters, not how I get it.

> and probably a place to live with no rent or mortgage. This also means you had either a rich family or earned quite a lot in the past what allowed you to collect this capital.

And in my example I wrote the other person saying "after my mortgage", for a reason.

That aside, it can also mean I live somewhere cheap: I've always been able to live this cheaply, even when I was renting. It's been a while since I was at university so double these numbers for inflation, but University halls were about £70/week at the time for the nice option; the cheap ones (which I was dumb enough to go for in the final year, do not recommend) were £40/week.

I was still paying rent through the pandemic. At every point in my life, when I have paid rent, it has always been low enough that a £1k/m or €1k/m income would have had enough left over for food and bills, yes including during the pandemic. That my income was often higher is of course how the savings I do have, happened.

At university, I made a game of the food options, which was in retrospect not actually sustainable, but what was sustainable last I checked (pandemic) was £1/day. I didn't spend all of my student loan (£3k/year but also that's only spent term-time and see previous point about inflation), even without part-time work at university.

Living cheaply is possible, if that is your goal.

> Well, maybe everyone could decide to grind few years (though in my country the minimal wage is not much greater than your "passive income", so grind options are limited)

She's Swedish, Sweden is in the EU, she clearly has a good gasp of English, so she has many minimum wages to choose from.

> and then decide to not have a family and don't buy a phone.

She's 23. And now you seem to be saying that people shouldn't be free to choose to not have families before turning 23.

Also, there's a big gap between "don't buy a phone" and "spend £50/month on the contract".

> We would then have a whole society of full-time political activists, but then there is a question why any action matters.

I could say this about 100% of professions. Even if we were all farmers, or all poets, or all software developers, or all soldiers. And, of course, politicians, who are, you know, paid to do politics full-time. Or worse, lobbyists, who are what you imagine Greta Thunberg to be, except they wear suits and don't hitch lifts and do get paid enough to support a family.

It's called "division of labour".

> "Oh, they really do not try enough. Just get up earlier and cancel your Netflix sub".

My Netflix example was simply one item on a long, long list. Hence the bit where I wrote about the example person, "spend £2500/month after my mortgage". Because that was what he spent, after his mortgage, every month. On himself. With no family.

This was a real person who made regular trips to France in a huge Lexus and drove without regard to fuel efficiency or indeed the speed limit. They couldn't imagine not spending all the money they spent, having all of the things all of the time. They were also single, living alone in, if I remember correctly, a 5-bed house they owned. They could not even imagine earning less than £60k in c. 2010, when the median UK wages were less than half that (and full-time minimum wages were about £12k) and unlike him those lower wages everyone else had often did support a family.

Overall, a lifestyle such as the visible parts of Greta Thunberg's (I have no idea what her hobbies are, naturally) can be sustained by part-time minimum-wage work.

If her goals in life are to be what she appears to be, that's not expensive, it's about knowing people who let you bunk on a sailing boat for a fortnight; and not a fancy one either, the kind small enough that, to quote: "the Malizia II has no toilet, fixed shower, cooking facilities or proper beds".

If you're complaining that people shouldn't be free decide not to be parents by 23, that people shouldn't be free decide to spend two weeks at a time in those conditions for what they believe in, because *you* prefer to raise a family and find such conditions appalling, that's your mistake, not a "serious question" about her.

Honestly? Your inability to imagine that Greta Thunberg's lifestyle could be anything other than a "serious question" sounds very much like the thought process I saw in my example of Mr. speeding-Lexus-lives-alone-in-5-bed-house, though obviously his specific details were different, he couldn't imagine anyone choosing to have kids for one.