When this book came out, I was working in a busy bookstore in a fairly small town. We had a stack of them at the counter, and I read bits on my breaks. While I was glad to see a popular book addressing the problems of the working poor, I couldn't help but feel like she'd taken a vacation in my life and then made a bunch of money writing a book about it, something she could only have achieved because she had already been in a position of privilege. Your average house cleaner, lacking an advanced degree and a publishing advance to live on while writing, couldn't have written it. And while it's unarguably a Good Thing to have anyone speak up for the voiceless masses, did the low-paid workers of America get anything tangible out of it?

At any rate, I was standing at the counter one night when a well-dressed couple came in. The woman pointed at the book with excitement. "Look, honey, that's the book!" she said. "The one where she took all those terrible jobs! I heard she even worked as a WAITRESS!" Her tone expressed incredulous horror. Then, in unison, they both froze and ever so slowly looked up at me. I had on my best customer-service poker face, but they looked mortified and fled without buying anything.

I've had a lingering dislike for the book ever since.

The two sentence summary of this book is: PhD and respected writer decides to find out how the other two-thirds live. To this end she goes undercover as an unskilled laborer at three minimum wage jobs (waitress, Wal-mart employee and Merry-Maid) each in a different city, each for one month.

Things I liked:
The premise.

Things I hated:
1. Her shocked tone of discovery. Newsflash! Living on minimum wage is hard/nigh on impossible! Educated people have it pretty easy comparatively! Entry level minimum wage work is kind of demeaning!

2. Her colonial-anthropologist-among-the-natives style that came across (to me) as super patronizing. Don't these people understand that easy office jobs are just on the other side of a college degree? Don't they understand history enough to fight for unions?

3. Her total shock that no one found her out as an educated person! Working in a diner in the next town over, she was never recognized! Shock!

4. This mostly just lost her style points, but she made a point to always have a working car (it wasn't HER car, but she rented a working car in every city she went to) and had a thousand (two thousand?) dollars of start-up capital to pay first and last months rent and eat while waiting for a job. I think her cover story (which again, she was hurt when no one asked for/cared about) was that she was a newly divorced former stay at home wife, on her own for the first time- so I guess it's conceivable she would have had a little cushion- but I would have found it much more interesting if she'd actually committed to the premise a little more. Especially because she was there such a short time. I know that working minimum wage jobs isn't fun, but couldn't you commit to more than a month? What do you find out in a month?

5. This is really the one that gets me- at the end of her time with the Merry Maids she "comes out" to her co-workers, telling them that really, she's a PhD! And writing a book! The main response is "So you won't be here to cover your shift tomorrow." Once again she is shocked and hurt! But man, if there was ever a teaching moment, she's been working with these women at back-breaking, soul sucking work for no pay and she's surprised that they're worried about how they're going to get though the next day? AGH.

(And also, WTF was she spending money on? I'm also a single healthy person with no debt or dependents and a working car, and I spend less than a thousand dollars a month sustaining my life style. I don't think I live THAT cheaply.)

It just seemed like she was writing from this privileged bubble of white upper-crust academia that I didn't know existed. She was presenting as astonishing findings what I assume to be facts of life for a majority of people.

So. That is why I didn't like this book. My mom, on the other hand, who has actually worked as a waitress to support herself, loved it.

This is one of those ubiquitous books, being a national bestseller as well as a staple on labor and feminist reading lists. I was never motivated to read it because I kinda assumed that I was already familiar with the issues and in agreement with the conclusions. I was also a bit reluctant to open it because the methodology struck me as potentially problematic. I feared that Ehrenreich's “going” low-wage would be offensive by claiming an unfounded authority of the subject of poverty by a temporary adventure, or being disingenuous to or even intruding on other low-wage earners with whom she would encounter.

I finally picked up the book as part of an assigned curriculum for a class I was teaching. While I did have a good understanding of the barriers to escaping poverty and its effects on low-wage, and especially women, workers, “Nickel and Dimed” really helped me feel the issues much more. For me personally, the book succeeded in adding a psychological and emotional dimension to poverty labor. At one point she describes being treated by management in a way that made her have the same feelings as when she was bullied in junior high, revealing the sometimes dehumanizing experience of work. There is also the psychological abuse felt by domestic workers who clean extravagant homes but live in substandard housing, or healthcare workers who lack healthcare for themselves.

Ehrenreich shows the “hidden costs” of being poor. The obstacle of security payment to rent an apartment, the lower energy level and higher risk of sickness from malnutrition, and the crushing sensation of insecurity. Indeed, the costs are so much more than monetary. This book really conveys how poverty labor affects one's entire outlook and worldview.

Happily, Ehrenreich's methodology was self-aware and critical. She never forgets that she as a researcher cannot truly know poverty in the same way as the workers she acquaintances and befriends, nor can she fully express their experiences. But the author's participant-observation magnifies both her experience and those of others. The result is something much more penetrating than a journalistic endeavor and much broader than a personal case study. It is clear that Ehrenreich does not ask for the reader's sympathy, but it was difficult for me to not wince at the harrowing descriptions of her attempts to survive as a waitress, a domestic cleaner, a Wal-Mart employee.

Given the integrity to Ehrenreich's approach, the sincerity in her prose, the clarity in her analysis, and the power of stories of the workers she meets, I was dismayed at how many of my students clung to myth that to succeed in America one only needs to work hard. The only time that some of these students became shocked and sympathetic is when Ehrenreich shows the reader of the real risk of homelessness for low-wage earners, and cites the statistic that indeed, it is estimated that almost one-fifth of the homeless are employed. Interestingly, there was something about the issue of shelter that caused some of the class to challenge their accepted ideas about work and prosperity. “Nickel and Dimed” demonstrates how the system of work is stacked against workers, how democracy and civil liberties are “checked at the door” upon entering the workplace, yet some students still believed that the workers themselves were somehow responsible for their poverty. This shows the need to not only fight againat poor working conditions, unregulated sectors, and the disappearance of social services, but also the dominant cultural attitudes towards work.

3 stars
*not really recommended*

short review for busy readers: a journalist tries out low-wage jobs in 3 different work sectors in 3 different parts of the US to see if they are liveable. Answer: they aren't. Very "my story." Hard data is tacked on at the very end. Meant to be a magazine article or article series. Sassy, conversational writing style. Over 20 years old now, but still relevant in many ways.

in detail:
I didn't enjoy this one from Ehrenreich nearly as much as her Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, mostly because while that book was largely history and data-driven, this one is very personal.

And I far prefer non-personal facts and big-picture connections to "my personal struggle" stories.

There's also a huge difference between this book and the one I just read, Eating Animals. While Jonathan Safran Foer took 3 years for his investigation into the US meat industry, Barbara Ehrenreich took all of 3 months for her investigation into low-wage work. 1 month in each of the jobs - waitress, maid and retail - she investigated.

Hers was not meant to be a deep-dive. Foer's was. But both take a human-interest angle meant to open the eyes of the middle class, not preach to the choir or the converted. Which is something it seems a number of reviewers of this book disliked, thinking it was meant as a handbook for low-wage workers on how to actually get by, or that it was a deep, data-driven dive into the subject of wage slavery, à la Foer.

It's neither.

What it is, is a middle class white woman (no shame in that) seeing if she can cope with how people (mostly women) less fortunate than herself are forced to live.

Is she overly congratulatory that she made it out alive after a month? Yes, because we all pat ourselves on the back when we manage something new and challenging and want to tell people about it.

Could she have done better? Of course, but how would it even occur to someone who has always lived in their own home to look for shared accomodation, for example, or try the YWCA and not a motel? We come from where we come from and our experience is our experience.

But does it all come off as kinda powder puff at best and slumming at worst?

Yeah, it does. But Ehrenreich's heart and mouth are in the right place, as she rightly assumes her own class level would have no clue (and possibly not even thought about) the lives and exploitation low wage workers have to cope with daily. Or how those of her own class treat such workers.

They say that anyone who has ever had to wait tables treats wait staff nicely. That's not always true - there are some real asshats out there - but it's mostly true.

Walking a mile in someone else's shoes is alway a good idea. Nobody says you have to walk to the moon, though, and Ehrenreich doesn't. But she at least put the shoes on, and that's what counts.

I am glad that somebody attempted this "experiment" of leaving their upper/middle class life to try to see what it was like to live like the working poor. I do think it could have been done better, and maybe different conclusions drawn from the experience, but definitely a good start. I the 15+ years since this book was written, I believe it is only harder to try to squeak out an existence - economically or otherwise - working for such low wages. My eyes have been open and my points of view have changed dramatically the last couple years when it comes to my view point about this. I sincerely believe America is in a crisis that needs to be addressed in the near future if we expect to still be considered the "greatest" or "wealthiest" or anything else "est" in the developing world - to say the least. Our societal compassion and humanity is at an all time low! We should be ashamed at how we treat so many in our society.

Steal this book! The author deserves no royalties. She is condescending, patronizing and proselytizing to the converted. Of course it is hard to make a living on minimum wage. This surprises her? She found it difficult for few months? Try a few years. I’d like to knock that PhD tone out of her voice. This book is so painfully elitist, I had to quit half way through or put my fist through a wall. I decided to keep the bones in my hand intact. Thank God I didn’t buy this book. It was thrown my way by another pissed reader. Well look at it this way—now I have something to line the cat litter box with. I certainly won’t ask anyone else to read it.

In 1998, Barbara Ehrenreich undertook an experiment. She wanted to see how and if it was possible to get by on low-wage labor, so she decided to do it herself. She traveled across the country, taking a handful of minimum wage jobs and living as cheaply as she could to see if she could make do with the little money she was making, and to get a sampling of what it was like to live as many Americans do.

Though there have been plenty of valid criticisms of this work - the most common being that this author was merely a tourist in low-wage labor with the always-present option of figuratively and literally going home again - but I see a lot of value in this book in the way it opened a lot of people's eyes to how impossible it was (and still is) to get by when working the lowest-paying jobs.

More thoughts on Booktube.

The first time I read this book was probably in 2002. I was 20 years old and had recently failed out of my fancy, expensive private university - partly because of illness, partly because of bad choices, and partly because I had to work three jobs on top of a full course load to be able to afford that school. By 2002, I was working at Target for around $7 an hour and had spent several months sleeping on my aunt's couch while I saved enough money for first and last months' rent on an apartment in a government-subsidized low-income housing complex. I struggled to pay my rent (which was "only" $365 a month, utilities not included) and got rather familiar with the three-day pay-or-vacate notice, spent a lot of time waiting for Tacoma's inadequate public transportation in the rain, and one of the most exciting moments of my life at that time was when the grocery store across the street put Top Ramen on sale at 10 for $1. I lived next door to a weed dealer, once called 911 when I spotted someone dressed all in black prowling around people's balconies at midnight, got a couple of terrifyingly indecent proposals from men in the parking lot, and spent a lot of time fending off Army recruiters. If I was scheduled for a closing shift at Target, I often got out of work after the buses had stopped running, which meant I either had to find a ride from a coworker or spend 2 hours' salary on a cab. In a nutshell, I was poor and miserable.

So when I read this book, it was like a revelation. I was overwhelmed at the fact that someone many social ladder rungs above me had actually noticed us down there at the bottom and tried to do something about it. The poor in America really are invisible and I usually felt like I was the only person I knew who was struggling that hard (which was probably not true, but these aren't the kind of topics people like to talk about). So to have my experience validated like that, without the kind of judgment that usually came along with it ("Why didn't you just stay in college?" "Can't you manage your money?" "No wonder you're so poor, you just had lunch at McDonald's." "You must be very irresponsible.") was incredible to me.

I've moved up in the world quite a lot since then - after having spent my first 25 years living in poverty, I got married to a lovely man who came from a family that was much better off than mine. We struggled financially the first few years we were married, as just about everyone does, but now I'm writing this review on a fairly nice computer in a home that I own, and although my daughter has just outgrown all of her shoes I'm not worried about how we're going to pay for new ones. But I have not forgotten what my early life was like.

Obviously this book isn't a perfect representation of that world, since Barbara Ehrenreich starts her experiment with considerable advantages - some starting capital, a lifetime of good medical care, a car, and no small children, to start with. But it's a reasonable approximation and she does acknowledge these advantages and point out that most people down at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale don't have them. On the whole, though, it's an accurate and compassionate account of what that kind of life is like, accompanied with plenty of broader information about the working poor and the circumstances - personal, economic, and political - that tend to keep them there.

If I mentioned every point she made that made me think YES, EXACTLY, I'd basically be quoting the entire book (my Kindle edition is filled with highlights) so I won't do that. Just, please, read it, especially if you believe that welfare recipients should be drug tested or that these people wouldn't be poor anymore if they would just stop smoking. Do us all a favor and find out what that life is really like.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Millions of Americans work for poverty-level wages, and one day Barbara Ehrenreich decided to join them. She was inspired in part by the rhetoric surrounding welfare reform, which promised that any job equals a better life. But how can anyone survive, let alone prosper, on $6 to $7 an hour? To find out, Ehrenreich moved from Florida to Maine to Minnesota, taking the cheapest lodgings available and accepting work as a waitress, hotel maid, house cleaner, nursing-home aide, and Wal-Mart salesperson. She soon discovered that even the "lowliest" occupations require exhausting mental and physical efforts. And one job is not enough; you need at least two if you intend to live indoors.

Nickel and Dimed reveals low-wage America in all its tenacity, anxiety, and surprising generosity -- a land of Big Boxes, fast food, and a thousand desperate strategies for survival. Instantly acclaimed for its insight, humor, and passion, this book is changing the way America perceives its working poor.

: Let's get something out of the way right here and now: Ehrenreich has had a lot of snarky feedback about the fact that, in researching and writing this book, she's "playacting" and her privileged background as a PhD-having writer shows in every "condescending" moment of expressing surprise at how ground down her temporary colleagues are. She is the target of "ghetto tourism" accusations. And so on and so forth. I suppose for the stupider members of the audience the concept "investigative journalism" isn't familiar. She, a journalist, stepped out of her own life to investigate an important situation in American society. So we're clear: Her responses are part of the story. They are MEANT TO BE PART OF THE STORY, YA DIMWITS. Her privilege is showing because she's privileged and she's doing these crap jobs to see what it's like. Guess what? IT SUCKS. So she responds as anyone from her background would.

Not to mention her ancestors weren't middle class, they were the very people she's reporting on...with the important difference that their labor was rewarded adequately to support their families. How things change when the bidness bastards get their greedy mitts on the levers of power:

My aim here was much more straightforward and objective — just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day. Besides, I've had enough unchosen encounters with poverty in my lifetime to know it's not a place you would want to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear.

I guess that passage whipped past the haters. Or they just decided it didn't matter for some arcane reason. Anyway, I consider that specious argument laid to rest. Allons-y!

As a nouveau poor person, I can tell you I've never come close to breaking even on any transaction of any sort. The reason:

There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs. If you can’t put up the two months’ rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can’t save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store.

You get fat when you're poor because the only food you can afford is shitty, processed, and low-quality store-brand offal. No apartment? No fridge. No fresh anything, even assuming you go pay a buck for an apple (do the math when you're in the produce section). No milk, only "creamer" (terrifying stuff, look at the label sometime) for your coffee, tea, cereal. I personally am incredibly lucky because my most recent roommate left me his fridge when he had to go to the nursing home. Imagine! Frozen veggies!! Luxury.

Ehrenreich brings us to the brink of a hideous cesspit of greed with this ongoing slimy, nauseating sludge of reality soup:

As Louis Uchitelle has reported in the New York Times, many employers will offer almost anything—free meals, subsidized transportation, store discounts—rather than raise wages. The reason for this, in the words of one employer, is that such extras “can be shed more easily” than wage increases when changes in the market seem to make them unnecessary. In the same spirit, automobile manufacturers would rather offer their customers cash rebates than reduced prices; the advantage of the rebate is that it seems like a gift and can be withdrawn without explanation.

Salary or wages become expectations, and can't have the hoi polloi expecting a decent living! After all, where will all those scumbag banksters get the extra zero on their bonus checks from if minimum wage is set at a livable level?

So Ehrenreich, an educated woman, has a thunderstruck moment of realization:

To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample evidence that animals — rats and monkeys, for example — that are forced into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming "depressed" in humanlike ways. Their behavior is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin (the neurotransmitter boosted by some antidepressants) declines in their brains. And — what is especially relevant here — they avoid fighting even in self-defense ... My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers — the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being "reamed out" by managers — are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you are actually worth.

She realizes that her response is typical of people whose lives are lived at this depth of society. Imagine how someone less able than she is internalizes this hideous reality. To her credit, she thinks about this, even though her genetic privilege of intelligence prevents her from fully experiencing its soul-crushing impact. And it's the bored upper classes who guzzle antidepressants by the fistful. Something's very wrong with that....

Of course, the opiate of the masses is now TV not Jeebus. Even there the poor person is slapped and kicked and punched with the expectation that we're all one big middle-class world:

Maybe it's low-wage work in general that has the effect of making you feel like a pariah. When I watch TV over my dinner at night, I see a world in which almost everyone makes $15 an hour or more, and I'm not just thinking of the anchor folks. The sitcoms and dramas are about fashion designers or schoolteachers or lawyers, so it's easy for a fast-food worker or nurse's aide to conclude that she is an anomaly — the only one, or almost the only one, who hasn't been invited to the party. And in a sense she would be right: the poor have disappeared from the culture at large, from its political rhetoric and intellectual endeavors as well as from its daily entertainment. Even religion seems to have little to say about the plight of the poor, if that tent revival was a fair sample. The moneylenders have finally gotten Jesus out of the temple.

Really, what else needs be said? Can you watch your sitcom or your vampire show the same way after being awakened to the impact that its assumptions have on the maid who polishes your moss-covered three-handled family gradunza, the immigrant smiling as she hands over your greaseburger and fries with a molto grandissimo vat of fizzy death juice (which for gods' sweet sake STOP PUTTING IN YOUR BODY NOW!)?

I think the point of this book is best summed up here:

When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.

If this isn't enough to shame you into activism on behalf of the people who mow your, your neighbor's, and the local church's lawn for a lousy $40 or so; bring your lazy ass a pizza in her own car, paying $4 or so for a gallon of gas and insurance and then you tip her $2 or $3; or teaching your snot-nosed privileged peanut-allergied unvaccinated brats while her own kids are a constant worry because the school system doesn't provide daycare, then I have no hope for your soul.

Ehrenreich works in scut jobs and writes about it. She has been plowing the field for many a year and does another good job here.

This book addresses what I, and others I'm sure, like to call middle class myths about being poor. Some of these myths include: if you work 40 hours a week you can afford housing, if you work 40 hours a week you can afford health insurance, if you work 40 hours a week you can afford food, if you work 40 hours a week you can afford a savings account, if you work 40 hours a week you can afford to take a day off to take your kids to the doctor, and so on and so forth. It is addressed from a first person account, too, as the book is about what happens when the author decides to live for several months at a time off just the money she earns from "working class" jobs. She starts out with a little start up money, but other than that has to find a job, housing, food, etc on the low wages earned by working as a waitress, for a cleaning company and finally at Wal-Mart.

Several years ago I started interning at a clinic where we saw homeless and indigent clients, and before I started I imagine smelly, scruffy men off the street coming in for counseling. We did have some of those, but what surprised me is that the majority of the "homeless" or "seriously indigent" people we saw were working mothers who just simply couldn't afford to live in our society and it shocked me into realizing that there are people in my country, and my city, who are working the best jobs that they can find at 40 or 50 hours a week and still can't afford to actually live in our community. Ehrenreich introduces you to these same people- some of them live in their cars, some in hotels, most of them on the couches of family and friends who are in the same position.

While I think a lot of us know, or at least have to assume, that these people exist we like to think its a temporary place to be, until they finally decide to pull up the ol' bootstraps and get serious about life. What this book shows is the grim reality that for the overwhelming majority, though, there really is no way out. Living and working like this only puts you deeper in a hole that, at this point in our country, is almost impossible to climb out of. It is very easy for those of us firmly in the middle class to sit back and feel good about ourselves that we've "worked hard" and "made choices" to have what we have, and to avoid being where "those people" are. However, what I know to be true, and what this book also reinforces, is that the majority, yes I would say 90%-95% of what separates "us" from "them" is circumstances beyond anyone's control- where you were born, who you were born to, the disasters that did or did not befall you, and the hard work done by those who came before in a time where hard work allowed really allowed you to get by.

I heard someone say that the horrible thing about Capitalism is that in order for it to work well, someone has to be going without. This book puts a name and a story to those "someone's", and I think you'll find like I did when I worked at that clinic, that once you have a person attached to the label of "poverty" you can no longer see them the same way. And maybe you really start to examine whether a system that only allows me the possibility of prosperity by requiring someone to be down and out is really worth defending anymore.

Dear Barbara Ehrenreich,

How do I resent thee? Let me count the ways:

1. You are a wealthy, highly educated person who went on a half-assed, anthropological slumming vacation.

2. When said vacation was over, you told your coworkers: "Surprise! I'm not a poor person after all! I'm going back now to my comfortable life!"...and then you were surprised that those coworkers were mostly worried about the fact that they'd have to work the next shift with one less person.

3. You also were surprised that the aforementioned coworkers were neither impressed nor appreciative that you turned out to be a wealthy, highly educated person writing a book about how hard it is to be a poor person.

4. You were slightly offended that nobody saw through your waitress costume; you assumed that smart people are visually recognizable, and it didn't seem to occur to you that real poor people might also be smart and educated.

5. The experiences you had while pretending to be a poor person may have instilled in you some amount of sympathy for poor people, but you will never really know what it's actually like to be poor. It was certainly nice enough of you to decide that you shouldn't judge a class of people until you'd walked a mile in their shoes...but you only managed to walk about three paces before your feet hurt and you decided you had seen enough.

A real poor person does not have a couple grand to "start" with, or to stay afloat between jobs, after finding his or her working conditions intolerable and suddenly quitting. Nor does a real poor person, when he or she develops some nasty rash from said intolerable working conditions, have a private doctor who will phone in a prescription for soothing ointment. Since a poor person does not have access to said doctor, he or she has to just suck it up and go to work itchy.

I'm glad that this book might bring some much-needed insight to middle-and-upper-class people to whom it had never before occurred that it's actually really shitty to make minimum wage, that people working shitty service jobs have bad attitudes for very good reasons, that a person can work very hard and still be very poor, and that there are myriad external obstacles that keep poor people from pulling themselves up by their proverbial bootstraps.

What I am NOT glad about is that this could have been an excellent, enlightening book about the less abstract aspects of our country's economic structure...but it was not. Instead, it was just a nauseatingly narcissistic exploration of the author's personality.

What many people seem not to understand is (among other things) that there is not only one kind of poor person (or only one kind of "working class" person), that poverty is not just a condition, but a cycle, and that contemporary poverty is not some ahistorical thing that just recently appeared when people started having poor money-management skills and learned how to make crack. Contemporary poverty is a result of Capitalism, but one doesn't have to be a commie liberal to know that.

Sure, there are many poor people who are crack addicts. There are also many, many rich people who are coke addicts. I'm sure that if poor people could afford real cocaine, they would buy that instead of crack, but alas, good cocaine is too expensive for poor drug addicts who make bad decisions.

People who are not poor make many of the same decisions that poor people do (like acquiring a drug habit, or having children, or quitting a job). One big difference is that people with enough money can afford to make bad decisions.

Another big difference is that your life feels a hell of a lot different when you don't have an easy out. Maybe working as a waitress is kind of fun and interesting and not too stressful if you know you'll only be doing it until you get bored. It's another thing entirely when your only other real, long term option seems to be some other kind of awful service job, and when you know that this is your life, not a break from your "real" job and "real" life. When you feel tired and desperate and angry and resigned all the time, when every day you perform the emotional and physical labor of serving people who treat you like shit and pay you practically nothing, how are you supposed to gather enough energy and hope to seek out a better life? You probably can't. Instead, you probably are going to buy some beer or weed and enjoy the few moments of your life that you can. Maybe that's a "bad decision"...or maybe it's just a survival strategy.