… I have one of those wearable devices that monitors my heart rate, sleep quality, activity level, and calories burned. Mine is called an Oura ring, and at the end of the day, it told me what I already knew: I had been “unusually stressed.” When this happens, the device asks you to log the source of your stress. I scrolled through the wide array of options—diarrhea, difficulty concentrating, erectile dysfunction, emergency contraceptives. I could not find “financial issues,” or anything remotely related to money, listed.
According to a poll from the American Psychiatric Association, financial issues are the No. 1 cause of anxiety for Americans: 58 percent say they are very or somewhat anxious about money. How, I wondered, was it possible that this had not occurred to a single engineer at Oura?
For all of the racial, gender, and sexual reckonings that America has undergone over the past decade, we have yet to confront the persistent blindness and stigma around class. When people struggle to understand the backlash against elite universities, or the Democrats’ loss of working-class voters, or the fact that more and more Americans are turning away from mainstream media, this is why…
Archive: https://archive.is/r42Ba
My therapist recently in her visit notes, put in “scare quotes” that my fears of potentially losing my SSDI (I am currently going through a semi regular, every 5-7 years review) are “rational and justfified”.
She called me the next day to suggest I try to apply to Medicaid.
Not only am I already on Medicare, which I explained to her, and I have tried to qualify for both simultaneously, and failed multiple times… which I also explained to her… not only she would know this already if she had any useful experience with clients on Medicare/Medicaid…
She suggested this to me on the literal same day that the Big Beautiful Bill was getting massive media coverage for being set to cut Medicaid by what, 2/3rds of its funding gone?
I don’t class my therapist as some kind of oligarchichal technocrat, but uh yeah it would be nice to not be gaslit by my apparently utterly detached from reality therapist, whom I literally have to pay money to see so that Social Security believes I am still disabled.
Wonderful nonsense system we have here.