A Boring Dystopia

This is contextless ragebait. A lot of the outrage in this thread seems to boil down to:

• Children are too young to be working because factories. This teenager isn't working in a factory. The reason children were maimed and killed in factories isn't because they were too young to handle the machines; the machines were dangerous. Adults were and are also killed in mines and factories.
• Poor children shouldn't have to work to get nice things because people shouldn't be poor. Amazing idea. How soon do you think that can happen? It's not just the poor who need work to afford things.
• Children shouldn't have to work to survive because parents. Not always available, and, no, 'put bad parents in jail' isn't a solution. State custody is almost always worse.
• Children shouldn't be working in service roles because abuse. I'll touch on this soon.
• Children shouldn't be working for strangers because stranger danger. This isn't a problem that disappears just because you hit an arbitrary age, especially if you're a woman.

I'll preface by saying I am antiwork and anticapitalist, and I support youth liberation.

I grew up in a poor household where I was emotionally and physically abused by my parents and siblings. This numbed me to the abuse I would experience in service roles, but also just as frequently in office jobs. When I was 14, both of my parents were permanently disabled and I was ready to get on with the rest of my life when I realised I was never going to have time to be a child. I dropped out of school and started working multiple jobs, on and off the books. My situation was not unique where I grew up. The income allowed me to survive, to escape my 'family', finish and continue my education, and eventually flee the country to get functioning healthcare and a basic standard of living by the age of 18.

This was only possible because I begged, pleaded and humiliated myself to garner enough sympathy from the paternalistic Morality Police who thought I couldn't possibly know what I wanted for myself, and who thought my place was memorising bullshit in school and being confined to the house with my parents. who thought my parents weren't abusing me but that I made that up because I was 'spoiled'(?). It took six years for the ageist remarks to slow down; six years of constantly reäffirming my personhood and defending my intelligence and trying to 'pass' as an adult. Even then, in my twenties, it was 'are you here with your parents?' 'why aren't you studying, partying, travelling or doing drugs?' 'what do you know about [insert line of work]?' Maybe because I'd already been in the industry for ten years and I have bills to pay? Unthinkable, apparently.

I should not have had to go thru any of that, but I wasn't going to wait for the revolution. If I had lived the 'ideal' sheltered life that my lower middle class peers received: my life would have begun suddenly and abruptly — dropped in the deep end — in my mid-to-late twenties with all the skills and worldliness of an infant. Please stop presuming to know everything that is 'good' for young people. Please stop acting like the authority on when and how someone should be allowed to live their life. Under the current system: most people couldn't be said to be full 'adults', but instead permanent adolescents. One could find several things wrong with this image, but the presence of a teenager doesn't even rank in the top ten on that list. Attack the system, not the people trying to live under it.

Honourary mention to everything @[email protected] wrote: https://lemmy.world/comment/6630731