on money

enduring naivety and late-won materialism

A few months ago, I posted a tweet that said ‘I don’t understand how everyone else just knew what to do. like before graduating when they were doing a bunch of micro-internships ready for careers in management consultancy and magic circle law firms. how did they even know those were jobs’ and then a follow-up tweet that said ‘I’ve only just learnt that jobs come with benefits like private healthcare and gym memberships wtf is wrong with me’. This was, at least in part, bait; of course I understood the reason for this. As many people reminded me, it was class. My classmates had grown up with parents in middle class professions who had imputed to them a world of knowledge about the kinds of jobs, or careers, one could get—more than that, even the understanding that a career was a necessary part of life. A foundation for other things. Something you could build in a certain way that would make other aspects of life possible.

I simply grew up without that. Most of my family was on benefits and had been for decades; for the years my mum did work, it was in the third sector, running a community project based around healing, traditional land management and crafts. There was no progression and when it closed she went back to benefits. My grandmother lived on her late husband’s steelworker’s pension and made a little money from renting out caravan plots on her farm. My father, whom I only saw around once a year, built stoves and interactive sound installations and fire-breathing dragon figureheads for narrowboats and a giant robotic furry hand that rearranged itself into a sofa at the click of a button. None of it made much money.