Go back to my family and friends.
Re-read the title.
Re-read the kobayashi maru test.
I’m a woman so I would become a temp prostitute. I would avoid hard drugs. Bank roll and buy a van. Live in van. Great success.
Very important post. We need solutions, not judgements or moralistic catchphrases that are impossible (bootstraps)
The dirty hippie should get a job.
Don’t be daft. Hippies are smelly. Commies are dirty. Did you not read your Capitalism For Dummies handbook?
I was there last year. I sat in the men’s shelter and job hunted. Then I ran my money out at hotels before moving in with a friend from the men’s shelter.
A lot of those other dudes at the men’s shelter who literally couldn’t do a job were basically fucked though. It’s depressing that I can’t do anything for them and they’re all on timers before they gotta face the weather and evil police.
I mean, realistically I probably don’t
OP’s mother already has me on retainer
I did this pretty much, except I did have a car and family, but I was stubborn and refused help from my family, so really just the car.
Get to a bigger midwest/ rust belt city (Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, St Louis, Cleveland) cost of living is low which is good for you, and in my experience not many people are moving there so tons of people are hiring at jobs with no requirements (I got a job in like 2 days). Try and get two jobs close to each other, probably downtown. You’ll save up money way quicker and have less time to deal with living on the streets.
Find a public park, preferably one with those grills and a water fountain. You can cook food over a fire on thee grill, simple things like oatmeal or ramen. The one I stayed in had bathrooms that were open during the day (at night I just did my business in the woods, used a bag for number 2). It also had an old public building that was closed down but I could climb on top and sleep under the eaves out of sight and the weather. I kept my stuff in my car but I could have kept it there.
For electricity charge you’re stuff at work, and get a backup battery, they’re only like 30 bucks and it’s super important. Libraries are a godsend for a million things, electricity and bathrooms chief among them. After 3 months you should be able to save enough for a shitty apartment and have the job history. Lie if you need to, they won’t check more than your current job 9/10 times.
Sell some plasma, spend the money on Fent and kill myself.
If I were homeless I’d just buy a house, duh
If you live in a blue state, then you get in touch with the housing first types who will get you into a small home and off the street. Then you rebuild your life.
If you live in a red state, you hitchhike to a blue state and do the first step.
i dunno, the premise of this question seems to me like homelessness is a riddle that homeless people just have not figured out. im pretty sure that if the answer could be crowdsourced in eight hours from eighty sysadmins on the toilet, it wouldn’t be such an intractable problem
Hey! I’m not on the toilet.
right now…
eighty sysadmins on the toilet
I’ll be damned if that isn’t the most succinct and accurate description of Lemmy that I’ve ever seen.
… so that’s why shitposting is such a huge deal on lemmy.
Homelessness is never a choice. It is always circumstantial (i.e. very very bad luck and nobody to turn to for help) or based on something like a mental health or substance abuse disorder.
I’ve met enough homeless people in San Francisco who live that way on purpose to know that first sentence isn’t 100% true.
Everything we put up with in life is a choice, even if the only other option is bad (i.e. suicide). People in a bad situation may say that they choose it, only in order to maintain a sense of control and personal agency. It’s not really meaningful to say that some homeless people choose to live that way, unless we know what their alternatives are. And if they have options that most people would consider better, I’d argue that they’re not what most people mean by the homeless problem.
No, I mean they have told me they like living like that; not by consequences of their own actions. Like modern day Diogenes. Just a super minimalistic lifestyle that includes not having a home. There is a scene for that kinda thing in San Francisco.
Suicide isn’t an option. I know nobody will believe me, but I’ve done it. I just woke up in a slightly different parallel universe: this one.
Other people die. The self does not. Death only exists out there.
For me, my homelessness was caused by being abused and then abandoned by my family members and the resultant depression.
I am incredibly lucky that I have had people come through and support me and give me a place to crash and distractions from my misery long enough for me to process it until I could get back to a decent working mental order.
On a purely financial basis I’m doing really fucking good. I made a little over $150,000 last year, I live in a three-story home, I drive a relatively new car and things are generally pretty good for me in that aspect, but I also have practically no friends and very few people that I can rely on that live anywhere near me and there are unseen costs attached with reaching those levels of depression and misery that I don’t have the ability to express in text format.
But yeah if it had just been on me none of that shit would have ever happened in the first place. It wasn’t that I was lazy. It wasn’t that I was miserable. It wasn’t that I was useless. I didn’t have issues with drugs.
I was my high School valedictorian.
I did everything that I was supposed to do the way I was supposed to do it.
I still got to experience several years of homelessness because the people who chose to bring me into this world also chose to use me as a punching bag and then throw me away when I got old enough that if they continued to beat me mercilessly they would go to jail for it.
It took me a total of 12 years to pull myself up out of that funk and get back on solid ground again.
Glad to hear that you’ve done so much better. Hoping that you can surround yourself with people that bring you peace.
It seems like 100% the problem is a lack of support. Substance abuse is tied quite a bit to having a lack of support and connections to healthy people. It’s why things like AA help people, they have access to a real person who cares about their recovery. Bad home life, being abused, mental health leading to homelessness, it all sounds like ways of saying “unsupported and left to the elements.”
For me, it was a lack of internal drive. I’ve been homeless twice. Both times, a lack of drive. But more deeply, that came from a lack of emotional support when I was a child, so you could be right.
I either kill myself or charm my way to a warm bed and some semblance of stability while I climb up the job skills ladder.
I view the latter option as morally reprehensible, but I guess if I’m honest from the get go, I could justify it.
Find some houses in the suburbs and start mowing lawns.
Almost at 69 up🫶otes
Probably join the military, get a degree for 4 years of my life and start fresh. Hope there’s not a new war in the mean time and if there is, still probably beats being homeless.
This is for sure a solution. It’s a quick way to get you out of homelessness, get you a paycheck, education, and a pretty likely way to get some job skills.
I mean, I wasn’t homeless and used it for that exact reason. If you’re going to risk being sent to die, might as well get everything you can out of it.
