Millionaire tries to prove becoming wealthy is easy by becoming homeless and making a million in a year - and of course fails miserably and quits, citing reality ( www.dailymail.co.uk )

CileTheSane , 2 months ago

Black wanted to help his friends rebuild their lives

By not actually helping and instead saying "it's not that hard. Look, I'll do it!"
He then proceeded to not do it.

AllonzeeLV OP , 2 months ago

To me the most sickening and predictable part is that he basically declared victory instead of actually learning and conceding his point.

Grandwolf319 , 2 months ago

Something that I didn’t see mentioned (except maybe one comment).

Even without considering connections or know how, He was not burned out, not at all.

That’s why all these experiments are faulty in principle. People don’t become homeless when they are ready for a challenge. They become homeless after they become burned out.

After the 10 months, he was as close as he has ever been in his life (still not there since he had $60K) to being homeless and that’s when he couldn’t continue and had to quit. Lol

Trollception , 2 months ago

Also substance abuse or mental disabilities... or both.

creditCrazy , 2 months ago

That's one reason why I've always been told never to give money to homeless people sure it could help but most of the time they are just going to blow it on drugs so if you actually want to help give them food or a comb or cologne so they can make themselves more presentable in a job interview

kibiz0r , 2 months ago

Try it with:

• No state-issued ID (and depending on the state, missing pre-reqs for getting one)
• No bank account
• Outstanding debt
• Bad credit
• Blemished background check
• No recent rental history (or recent evictions)

We have plenty of ways to mark people as undesirable, which are harder to fix than having zero cash on hand.

JustZ , 2 months ago

Also: the dude was in and out of the doctors office,.obviously didn't give up his health coverage, and had a relationship with both of his parents.

DreadPotato , 2 months ago

Black ended the challenge having completed 10 months, with just 60 days left to run. He had managed to make a grand total of $64,000.

Pretty damn far from a million, but much more than many make in a year still. I do wonder if he used contacts/network he made while wealthy, that would easily completely invalidate the point he was trying to make.

Killing_Spark , 2 months ago

Even if he didn't use contacts just experience, education and soft skills are worth a lot

AngryPancake , 2 months ago

He quit because real life problems were affecting his ability to make money. Welcome to reality. What's his takeaway? He stopped his poor life social experiment because he wanted to focus on his health, but if we try to focus on our health, we simply aren't making money.

He stopped at the top of the rabbit hole, he should've gone in.

TempermentalAnomaly , 2 months ago

Nickeled and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich is one person's deacent. It was awful for her.

Catoblepas , 2 months ago

I had an economics teacher get us to read that as a class in high school and it was formative as hell on me. It was all pre-ACA too so the stories some of the workers had about their health problems and lack of medical care were just horrendous.

Lettuceeatlettuce , 2 months ago

Now try it again but give yourself amnesia so you don't have any prior knowledge of skills or lessons learned from before.

Give yourself a severe drug and/or alcohol addiction for several years so you develop chronic health problems and hardcore substance dependence.

Experience enough traumatic events that you develop some severe form of mental illness, preferably multiple at the same time.

Destroy all your contacts from your former life, don't record anything or log anything because you can't have any permanent support group. Surround yourself only with people as or more desperate than you.

Make sure your social problems have caused you to rack up a significant number of criminal charges, bonus points for felonies that stay on your record for all to see if anybody even considers hiring you.

Now you're close to experiencing what many homeless folks' lives are actually like. This guy's "experiment" is asinine. Just another sigma grindset bootstrap husk social influencer who has no idea what it is actually like to have nothing.

His conclusion is that people are homeless because why? They aren't grinding hard enough? Because they aren't putting in the hours? Because they just don't really want it bad enough? Miss me with that bullshit.

Icalasari , 2 months ago

Honestly, I do like he did it though. Now people can go, "Even he, with all his experience, his contacts, his health couldn't manage it. So why are people buying the idea that a regular person can?"

Lettuceeatlettuce , 2 months ago

Very true.

nilloc , 2 months ago

If he isn’t a sociopath, he’ll go on to advocate for basic income, housing rights, universal healthcare, and free education.

I’m not gonna hold my breath though.

Supervisor194 , 2 months ago

Denying yourself any semblance of joy and slaving away for 14 hours a day until your health is totally fucked - and he's in his 20s! Oh but he scraped up an extra 60k.

I dunno about you guys, but sign me up!

KevonLooney , 2 months ago

That's the craziest part. He knew exactly what to do to be successful and managed to only earn a basic middle class wage. Add anything else: significant debt, a partner to spend time with, addiction problems, mental issues, health issues, and you're not going to have time for any of that.

Do these people who got lucky really think everyone else is just dumb? Yes, I could scour craigslist for free shit to resell but I have a life.

cuerdo , 2 months ago

Yes, I think they do, It is a combination of:

• Survivor bias, where they only have good knowledge of their own lucky experience/
• Lack of empathy, so they are unable to understand how each persons circumstances are different.
• A pinch of Narcissism, where they do think they deserve their luck.

echodot , 2 months ago

Also they claim to have done everything for themselves because for some reason they discount the huge loan they got from their parents. Assuming they even have to pay it back.

kinsnik , 2 months ago

Even if they hadn’t had a loan, the security that the safety net of knowing that of all goes wrong, you can still go to mommy and daddy and have a perfectly fine life, is massively overlooked. Even here, where people are criticizing all sort of valid problems with his “experiment”, no one mentioned the he knew that he could stop whenever he wanted; so there was never any desperation that massively affect the mental wellbeing of poor people.

downpunxx , 2 months ago

they didn't include all his doctors visits, over the 10 months, he was supposedly "working himself up from the streets by his bootstraps", I wonder, not having applied to public health benefits from the state, who, exactly paid for all those doctor visits (or was that part conveniently left out as well)