The Victors

Think about it on a societal level, which is after just a composite of individual reactions. You can set the slider from Completely Permissive to Completely Judgmental. Too permissive and no one will feel wrongly judged for needing help, but then any number of people will be completely shameless about exploiting. Set it too judgmental and you'll deter bad faith usage but you'll also have unnecessary confrontations and make a lot of people feel like shit about needing them (in addition to whatever other issues they already have to deal with).

You can apply this to almost anything. There's strengths and weaknesses to each and nuances in how to do it and so forth, but at a large scale, you're trying to balance it out in a way that's fair and kind enough but also prods people a bit too.

One meta part of this for me is that apart from the merits, there can be a bit of rationalizing going on. In that, seeing a fat sloblike person in a cart, you can have a visceral negative reaction. Which, whatever. You can run with it and justify why that's actually justified, or you can catch yourself and ask, ok, do I really need to give a shit here? Do I know what's going on and how much does this matter? And, whatever, people can bitch about minor things, there's no rules, but decades of social media and message board posting has taught me there very much are a lot of people who will have a gut reaction and have absolutely no sense that they don't have to defend that to the hilt. They can let it go or fight against it and ask themselves it it's really justified or a hundred other things, but there's a class of person that completely ignores that and just can't do anything but try to rationalize why they're right to feel that way.

That can go both ways though; I can recall years of Twitter posts where people were deeply committed to arguing that they HAD to order Doordash every day, there was simply no other way of living because they couldn't go out and they couldn't cook or even order premade meals and etc etc. And look, maybe that's true of like 1 guy but at some point you have some agency/options here, and you just want to rationalize. I'm not even sure what the point of those debates was. I guess they wanted to feel justifed? But, it doesn't even matter. If you can afford it, then sure, spend $15 to get a lukewarm Starbucks. Fuck if I care. Likewise, if you can't, then you're fucked if you're spending all that money on Doordash whether or not social media gives you permission or tells you to do better.

Whether that's true of the debate below I don't know; I only briefly skimmed the discussion so I'm not casting any stones.