Betty Sue makes $286,000 per month on Etsy. She started with nothing, and now she’s filthy rich.

Come on, man. The chances of that happening to the average person are close to zero. Stories like this give people unrealistic expectations.

  • ShareMySims@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    31
    arrow-down
    5
    ·
    2 months ago

    Capitalist propaganda.

    “Aspiration” to be more precise, it’s one of the ways capitalists convince large segments of the public that they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires, who just need to pull their bootstraps up hard enough, and they will make it, like the people in the programme did (conveniently they never address things like racism, sexism, queerphobia, ableism, and other barriers that many people have to face just to survive, never mind thrive, and the fact that all of these barriers are artificial and created by people who benefit just as much from dividing society up and pitting us against each other, as they do from selling us rags-to-riches bullshit to get us to work harder to make them money).

    • Kintarian@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 months ago

      I’ve never understood “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” which is impossible. No matter how hard you pull, you can’t, say, jump a fence. The rich are inadvertently telling poor people that becoming rich by working hard is impossible.

      • ShareMySims@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        2 months ago

        I think that’s the point, just like with “a few bad apples”, the original intent of the saying has been subverted to help those in power keep the rest of us down (if you just do this impossible thing, you’ll be just like us! Why don’t you just do that impossible thing already, you useless lazy bastard? And so on. It’s part cognitive dissonance to make themselves feel like they’re “self made”, part gaslighting convincing us we’re just not trying hard enough).