Long time lurker, but unfortunately I have no idea how formatting works on the phone, but anyways.
I(18M) had a two hour conversation with my dad(56m) tonight, talking about minimum wage and how there’s no chance in the world for me to survive not living in his house.
I spent a long while explaining that the minimum wage was originally designed to be a Livable Wage, to which he’d say “the only people who should be working minimum wage is people who are as young as you or senior citizens who don’t need the money.”. I went inside, grabbed a piece of paper, and showed him the literal math itself that would say I need to work 100+ hours on minimum wage to survive in this country. We agreed that the bare minimum to live was 2400$ where I am. (Rent, car, insurances, food, gas, water, electricity). We did not include things like “being happy about being alive”, god knows that wouldn’t fit the budget.
He was adamant that minimum wage wasn’t supposed to live of off, and that you were supposed to grow as a person, like learn specialized things and get more experience that will give you more money with better hours. I explained that with 168 hours a week, I would need to work 100 hours minimum to be able to afford to live (7.25x100x4). Now, with the remaining 68 hours, say you get 7 hours of sleep a night, you’re left with 19 hours a day, now with 2 30min meal breaks a day (assuming I’m working double shifts), I’m left with 12 hours, what about getting to work? It’s taken me 20-30min to get to work every day, which leaves me with 5 whole hours a week that isn’t allocated to sleeping, eating, driving, or working.
Even with 5 hours a week left in my life, he still wouldn’t understand how there is literally no time in my life to do that learning and growing to get those better jobs in the first place.
Am I Crazy or what’s going on?