this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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What "person in question"? There is no "person in question" here. We are not talking about the financial problems of anyone specific. We are talking about the problem in general.
When a person comes to the hospital with a knife popping out, you want the medical crew to focus on taking the knife out while preventing the patient from bleeding to death. When there is a public debate about how so many people are getting stabbed, the debate should be about preventing them from getting stabbed, not about the specifics of how to safely pull a knife out of a living person's flesh.
The advice is directed towards people struggling with money. Any one of them would be the person in question.
You have a good analogy there but in this instance the people are already stabbed (struggling with money). At that point advice on how to stop the bleeding might have a more immediate and direct effect than someone telling them how knife crime is a solvable problem. One is more immediate and helps on a personal level and another might help on a societal level at some point in the future. Two different things, really.
The thing is that the people you tell to stop buying their coffee to-go aren't just bleeding. They are also being sucked dry.
The knife alone isn't the best metaphor, but with an additional leech it's closer to reality. And the doctor isn't removing the leech he's just removing the knife so you can still produce blood for the leech to suck out of you.
Also the doctor is paid by the leech to tell you how you can produce more blood but you shouldn't expect to actually have more of it in your system. You see how hard the leech is working on extracting that stuff from you right? That's basically a 24/7 job.
I don't think a leech is the best analogy since what you're talking about is a massive society wide issue that might never get properly solved. It's something to strive for but compared to the issue at hand (struggling to make ends meet), it's rather abstract. Meanwhile the advice here is pretty direct and could have near immediate effect. It's just two very different things.
The leech is the company you are working for. Companies are getting away with paying you so little because you are removing every little expense that is still left in your life. Fighting for better pay is very much practical.
A single person doesn't have much power in that fight. Not the same way they have over part of their own spending. I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but two very different things.
I agree they are different things, I just wanted to object to this being an abstract problem. It's a very practical one with very practical solutions. They do take time to implement though because it takes organised action.
I originally thought you were talking about the wider societal problem, which compared to personal spending can get pretty abstract.
Also, separate comment because it's a separate thing. The analogy is actually perfect. We should be worrying about both things, the knife and the leech. The knife needs more immediate attention because the leech is actually pretty good at keeping it's wound clean and not kill the host immediately.
The problem I have with the sentiment of the tweet of the bank is the very likely intended focus on just the one side of this issue. Part of why this is a long-winded social issue is because many people don't take the time to analyse the situation more broadly. Because they have to deal with all the knives in their arms, and get reminded of yet more knives, that the leech can't ever become the focus of the attention.
I agree with that we should focus on both, the immediate issue and the larger issue behind it.
The point being that tweets like the one in question are designed to do the opposite. They are designed to pull attention towards the knives and never to look at the leech.
I guess it's possible. I felt like it just wasn't well thought out.
The advice is directed toward imaginary people that the company conjured out of memes and stereotypes. Yes, there are people struggling, but how many of them fit the "takes a cab every day to eat out and drink coffee" template?
I know all too many people like that.