We spend a lot of time pretending a perfectly equal society is just one policy away. Like if we pass the right law, elect the right people, or repost the right infographic, suddenly everyone lines up, behaves themselves, and history politely corrects its own mistakes. As if life works that neat. It doesn’t. Life is never that tidy.

A truly classless, perfectly fair society has never felt realistic to me, because people themselves are not built equally in thought, temperament, or appetite. I’m not even talking about money yet. I mean the wiring. From the minute we arrive here, we’re absorbing different information, different traumas, different privileges, different lies, and different lessons. We may begin as blank canvases, but life paints on us quick, and not with a steady hand. By adulthood, no two people are carrying the same map, and no number of motivational quotes is fixing that.

Some people grow toward empathy. Some grow toward fear. Some toward greed. Some toward community. Some are easy fi convince. Some side-eye everything and trust nobody. Gullibility, ambition, compassion, selfishness, paranoia, generosity, all of it gets mixed differently depending on what life handed you and how your mind learned to survive it. That alone makes perfect equality feel less like a destination and more like a philosophy uni students spit bars about.

Governments have tried to close that gap. Public education. Universal healthcare. Democratic systems, at least on paper. Labour laws. Social programs. Regulations meant to stop the strong from feeding endlessly on the weak. These things matter. They are necessary. They are civilization trying, however imperfectly, to behave like civilization.

But those systems are always in conflict with another force: people who benefit from inequality.

Not everybody wants fairness. Some people only like equality when they can still picture themselves sitting slightly above it. Very few of the few are eager to surrender what their families built through generations of exploitation, inheritance, exclusion, or pure luck dressed up as merit.

People like status. People like competition. People like hierarchy. Mandem like being the man. The alpha still wants the beta to know the script, know the seating arrangement, know when fi laugh and when fi stay quiet. A surprising amount of what we call success is really just socially acceptable one-upmanship with better tailoring and a LinkedIn profile.

That’s the problem for egalitarians. You are trying to build balance inside a species that often mistakes domination for competence. Bare people confuse control with leadership and call it ambition.

We talk a lot about work-life balance, but maybe we should speak more honestly about justice and injustice balance. Not in the criminal sense, not whether a guilty man walks free, but in accepting that some parts of human society may never be fully equal. Some inequalities are structural, some are biological, and some are simply the stubborn result of human nature refusing to attend the seminar.

That doesn’t mean we give up. It means we stop chasing perfection like its arriving next day delivery and choose our battles properly.

Universal access to clean water should not be controversial. Neither should food, shelter, education, healthcare, or basic dignity. Those are the places where egalitarianism should stop being treated like radical theory and start being treated like basic maintenance. That is probably as close to ideal as we get, and ideal matters, even when perfection doesn’t.

Because perfection is a scam. Stability is the real flex. Quiet peace. Bills paid. Fridge stocked. That kind of luxury.

What worries me now is that we seem to be moving in the opposite direction. We live in an age of short-form attention spans, journalists performing like influencers, and political classes that seem permanently sponsored by the same people selling the distractions. Bread, circuses, and sponsored content.

It becomes difficult to imagine a more equal future when even the prospect of climate collapse cannot force collective seriousness. If the planet itself cannot make people cooperate, it raises uncomfortable questions about what actually will.

Maybe egalitarianism was never supposed to be a finish line. Maybe it is just maintenance. A constant argument against greed, against arrogance, against that ugly little instinct in people that keeps turning neighbours into competitors.

My daughter loves the brands. My ex-wife loves them too. Mandem Dayv? At this chapter of life, I’m more of a Lands’ End and Carhartt man. Nothing glamorous. Clothes built for weather, work, and the kind of life where your laundry needs to survive more than your social calendar. They’re by no means cheap, but they’re durable, practical, and stitched with the kind of honesty I respect. Believe me, my clothes need to last as long as humanly possible.

No disrespect to Lululemon, Aritzia, Ralph Lauren, or Nike. Stylish? Obviously. Trendy? Without question. Affordable when you’re on social assistance? Brother, please. Practical for a growing child? Brother, please.

Had I manifested a more fiscally voluptuous existence for myself, maybe I’d be out here moving reckless, casually dropping nine bills on a Moncler hoodie. But I am poor in the old-fashioned sense. My priorities are food, rent, hydro, and the sacred duty of keeping the Wi-Fi alive.

That said, I understand that shoes, for many people, are not clothing. They are religion.

Shoes matter in the playground. They matter for confidence. They matter in that savage little ecosystem where children will cuss each other over anything… laces, logos, the wrong shade of pimple patch. Drip is social currency before kids even know what currency is. And somehow this theology follows us right into adulthood, until one day you wake up either pregnant or forty and find yourself speaking about arch support with the solemn authority of a UN delegate.

So when my daughter pleaded for new kicks… because apparently all her friends got new kicks, and naturally they had to be Nike… I did what every financially traumatized parent does. I redirected. Gently. Strategically. We went to the Nike clearance store, and by some miracle clearly not approved by my bank account, they had the exact shoes she wanted. Discounted. Hallelujah. BUT BUT BUT! They were the same size as the shoes she was wearing.

Hear me now, this presented absolutely no issue for my daughter, because children operate entirely on vibes, peer pressure, and immediate gratification. Logic is a distant rumour to them. But for me? This was a direct violation of Shoe Doctrine.

You do not buy new shoes in the same size for growing feet! It’s financial blasphemy!

The next size up, at retail, was over a hundred dollars… more than double what I was prepared to spend. So, I suggested she ask her mum to split the cost.

Her mum replied, “Tell your dad to buy them and I’ll send the money later.”

Now listen. As a decorated veteran of this particular war theatre, I recognized enemy propaganda immediately. Absolutely not, I said.

My daughter and her mother then continued their diplomatic negotiations without my involvement, like two cultural committees arranging parade routes while I, the municipality, am left funding the roads, the barricades, and the inevitable cleanup.

This morning, my daughter casually informed me that her mum had found the shoes in Korea and would be mailing them. I simply said, “Okay, cool.”

Externally: calm father. Internally: pure vex.

Because my ex-wife parents through retail therapy. Grand gestures stitched together with guilt, apologies disguised as shopping bags, luxury as emotional camouflage after chaos. Unnecessary spending on unnecessarily expensive things. And I check the slips. I see the invoices. Some of those shipments cost the equivalent of twenty percent of my monthly survival budget.

She’ll send luxury clothes. Medium-sized Jellycat plushies (parents know exactly what kind of financial terrorism that is), and name-brand shoes. UGG winterized sneakers were the previous monument to status I could not afford. But somehow never the boring, unsexy mechanics of actual support. Food costs. School costs. Life costs. The unphotogenic realities.

No one posts a back-to-school property tax and solid waste management receipt on Instagram. And so, with one pair of shoes, she managed to trigger me twice. And the real “kicker”?

The package will arrive. Canada Post will “yo hold up, there’s duties bro”. And they’ll be paid by me… the villain. The wicked father. Too strict about screen time. Too annoying about “the socials.” Too unreasonable about shopping. Too obsessed with saying no to things that cost money.

Meanwhile, Mum remains the patron saint of style and profile, EMS boxes floating in from overseas like luxury care packages from the Church of Aesthetic Salvation, each one brimming with dopamine and hopeful absolution.

Yeah.

There’s no humiliation in asking for help. Know that.

I’m on several waiting lists for therapists covered by the system, and it would be a stretch to pretend the system itself isn’t stretched thin. So I wait. Quietly. Patiently. Like most people trying to access anything public in this province, you take your number and sit with your problems until someone calls your name.

I’m firmly pro mental healthcare. I think access should be expanded massively. My daughter’s been seeing a therapist for nearly six months now, and I do think it’s helped. It’d probably help more if she’d decided for herself that she wanted to go, but hopefully the seed’s been planted. Maybe later in life, if she needs help again, there’ll be less hesitation, less pride, less of that stubborn instinct to suffer quietly.

There should be no humiliation in asking for mental health help.

When I was just boydem Dayv, my mum took me to see a child psychiatrist a few times after my parents split. I remember it positively. Looking back, I think that planted the same kind of seed in me. So, when university depression came knocking, I didn’t hesitate to get help. Same thing lately, trying to process losing my mum while navigating the low-grade warfare of single fatherhood.

But therapy can be a proper hit-or-miss ting. You’re basically speed dating therapists.

Luckily, my daughter got paired with a genuinely excellent therapist straight away. I’m fairly sure the shrink my mum found way back “came highly recommended,” which may explain why we only went a handful of times. University was luck again. I ended up with an excellent psychiatrist in Ottawa who helped me properly, first in person, then later over the phone after I moved. Then he retired and I tried finding someone local after that, but like I said, it’s hit or miss. At the time, life wasn’t actively on fire, so I more or less gave up looking.

During my years of expatitude, options for help were fewer and the culture around mental health was often somewhere between nonexistent and “have you tried drinking about it?” So I coped the way a lot of expats do. With alcohol.

I gave up drinking in 2019. Since then, somehow, life has gotten worse and worse. Funny how sobriety doesn’t always mean sunshine and lollipops.

I signed up for help, and I keep my ears open for more options. My daughter’s therapist passed along a few recommendations, and one of them actually had room for me right away. That’s either good luck or a warning sign. Hard to say.

Fifty-minute sessions. Once every four weeks.

I’m not entirely sure how effective that schedule is meant to be. Feels a bit like trying to put out a house fire with a monthly cup of water, but that’s what an overstretched system offers, so you take it.

I’ve seen this therapist twice. The first session was standard enough. Intro questions, background, basic life inventory. Nothing felt particularly off.

The second session, though, had me looking around like I’d accidentally walked into a job centre instead. The therapist warned me that social assistance wouldn’t last forever and that I needed to find employment as soon as possible—even if that employment paid less than the assistance itself.

I had to stop and ask if I’d heard that correctly. Even if it paid less? That wasn’t advice. That was poverty cosplay disguised as professional guidance. I pushed back immediately. What kind of logic is that? How does deliberately becoming poorer improve literally anything? Was this therapy or recruitment for the worst employers in Ontario?

I’ve only been on assistance for about a year. In my mind, that’s hardly a lifelong hammock of laziness. My daughter is eleven. I left work when my mum was hospitalized because I literally could not get there on time anymore. Life rearranged itself around illness, and then rearranged itself again after death. These things do not snap back to “normal”.

And I’ve been in regular contact with my Ontario Works caseworker. Not once has there been any indication that my support is in danger.

In fact, I had a call with my caseworker yesterday, and there was full agreement that taking a job paying less than social assistance is, professionally speaking, a deadass gerb strategy.

And so the system is paying someone to improve my mental health, and their professional contribution is suggesting I should financially destabilize myself for character development.

I had a best friend once. Met him in Korea through Tumblr, back when Tumblr was actually a place for weird creatives instead of a digital graveyard. If you checked the stats back then, me and him were doing numbers. We both shot street photography, both had that same slightly unhinged sense of humour, and Seoul gave us plenty of room for nonsense. He was genuinely hilarious to be around. Sharp, chaotic, creative. The kind of friend where every random outing could turn into a story you’d still be laughing about ten years later.

Then he moved back to the States.

And slowly, like watching milk go bad in real time, man turned into a completely different person.

He did this, did that, ended up back in his home state doing home state things with home state people. Joined some kind of “church,” discovered culture-war YouTube, and suddenly started using the word faggot with genuine enthusiasm, like slurs were a substitute for a personality. At one point, he offered to mail me a Gavin McInnes book like he was handing me sacred scripture. I believe ANTIFA calls it “red-pilled.” I prefer “men with weak identities and low standards looking for applause.”

He refused to stop referring to me in crude ways, so I ended the friendship. Simple. Free country, free choices. If your whole new personality is smug contrarianism, offensive memes, and trying desperately to offend the same progressives you once tried to impress, cool. Pattern your life. Just do it far away from mine.

At the time, he had a partner and they were both deep in that church life together. Proper red-state religiosity. I figured he’d looked around, clocked his partner’s father, local politics, and the social ladder, and decided the Right looked like the winning team. So he switched jerseys. Happens all the time.

And honestly, it would’ve been fine if he’d just stayed over there and lived his new life in peace.

But apparently, it’s harder for some people to stop being friends with me than it is for me to stop being friends with them. What can I say? I’m affable. Memorable. A delight.

Then, weirdly, he started a nonprofit providing dog food to low-income dog owners. Which, to be fair, is objectively kinder than most of his personality at that stage. I’m not sure if it still exists, but credit where it’s due. Though he also emailed me offering, in jest I assume, to take all the stock from my “failing” business. Very supportive. Real community-minded stuff.

This formerly fun-to-be-around man then made fake Instagram accounts to send people homophobic messages and make it look like they were coming from my “failing” small business. Proper loser behaviour. Just small, mean, and embarrassingly juvenile. The kind of thing you’d expect from a teen, not a grown man.

Every now and then he pops back up like bad diarrhea. Recently it’s been silly comments on LinkedIn and even sillier emails buried in the spam folder. One message trolling me for not having a job at my age. Another accusing me of losing my virginity to a child prostitute in Vietnam. Never even been to Vietnam.

Imagine typing that out, hitting send, and then getting dressed for church on Sunday.

Merica.

There’s this mad little routine I’ve developed where I wake up bright-eyed at 2:30 in the morning. No alarm, just eyes open, brain online. I’ll get dressed, put the kettle on, brew coffee proper, step outside for a small toke, scroll through the digital wasteland, answer a few messages I probably should’ve ignored, and by about 5:00am I’m suddenly exhausted again. Then it’s back to bed until the 7:00am alarm goes off.

Truth is, it doesn’t even bother me. I’ve always been an early riser. As a yute, I was up before Saturday morning cartoons even started, just posted there waiting for the world to switch on.

In Geumho-dong, Seoul, I was up before the neighbourhood rooster had sorted himself out.

In Colombo and Abuja, that first call to prayer always landed like a strange kind of comfort… reminding mandem the world was already moving.

I get things done in the AM. A lot of these posts start in those quiet early hours when the house is technically asleep and the world feels less demanding. Of course, “quiet” is relative. My daughter is in her room, probably dreaming up fresh and innovative ways to address me with disdain, impatience, and that particular brand of casual contempt screenagers master. The cats, naturally, treat peace and focus like personal enemies. I still have no clue what came crashing down in the house a couple hours ago, but judging by the silence after, I assume they handled it internally.

And in those hours, Mandem Dayv thinks.

Today the thinking drifted toward celebration. How humans are obsessed with marking time. Birthdays, New Year’s, anniversaries, harvests, first steps, first teeth, babies’ first hundred days… all these ceremonial check points we build like little roadside shrines to prove the journey means something. Maybe because most of life isn’t fireworks. Most of it is admin. Bills. Repetition. Quiet disappointments. Mundane graft. So when something survives long enough to be noticed, we put candles on it.

Today is my birthday. I am 49 years old.

Beyond the usual “well, at least I’m alive” and “it could be worse, I’m not in a Sudanese IDP camp” perspective checks, I can’t say I’m feeling especially festive. Birthdays, to me, are supposed to celebrate more than biological survival. They’re meant to mark growth. Evolution. Some evidence that the years have been converting into wisdom instead of just receipts and knee pain.

And if I’m being honest, there’s not a whole lot of triumphant character development happening in this suburban bungalow at present.

I am poorer than I was this time last year. Considerably poorer than I was a decade ago. My daughter’s attitude toward me does not exactly scream “father of the year,” and most days I feel less like some wise patriarch and more like a man standing in the kitchen wondering how every decision somehow led back to needing more cat litter.

A lot of the time I’m reminded of “Trapped” by Circle Jerks, that old punk hymn for mandem who suspect they may have architected their own prison.

Not because life is some dramatic Shakespearean downfall ting, but because sometimes adulthood really does feel like slowly, professionally, and respectfully painting yourself into a corner. No windows. No doors. No ladder.

And yet… no regrets.

The song reminds me I’m not the first man to feel cornered, and I definitely won’t be the last. Misery loves company, but maturity learns to call it perspective.

So yeah!

Happy birthday to me.

I used to think a life packed with strange roads, odd jobs, and foreign addresses was a proper pathway to success. That if you stayed open-minded enough, travelled far enough, and kept yourself around enough different kinds of people, you’d eventually arrive at some version of wisdom… or at least stability. And to be fair, expatitude did give me that in pieces. It put me around all sorts of geniuses, wastemen, schemers, saints, and every shade in between. It taught me tolerance, perspective, and how quickly comfort can become temporary. I still rate that path for anyone drawn to it. But I’m also living proof that it doesn’t always land where you think it will. Consider this your warning label.

When I decided to pin my future to the career path of the woman I loved, it didn’t feel like some reckless gamble. It genuinely made sense. The idea of becoming the house husband, the quiet domestic support role behind the big career, suited me more than most men would admit. I never minded the invisible labour, the thousand little tasks that make a home function without applause. And it helped that she genuinely aspired to that hard drinking, work first, Northeast Asian salaryman existence. She wanted the office, the late nights, the obligation dinners, the whole corporate mythology. I thought maybe we were building something balanced.

But balance only works if both people respect the weight being carried. Somewhere along the way, I think she started believing that because she brought home the salary, she was carrying the entire structure. The paid labour became the only labour that counted. Everything else… raising the child, managing the house, became background noise to her office gossip. And if I’m being honest, I think some of that came from the same old misogynist ideas dressed up in modern clothes: that work only matters if someone cuts you a cheque for it. I swallowed a lot of that quietly because, as the travelling spouse, options were limited and compromise was part of the ticket.

Then my daughter was born, and all that theory got tested against real life. Once the breadwinner went back to work, it became impossible to ignore. I wasn’t sat at home on some leisure flex, gaming my days away while my wife stayed out late doing soju diplomacy with coworkers. I was at home raising a child who missed her mother. I was doing the night feeds, the tears, the routines, the thousand tiny negotiations that make up fatherhood. The work became visible to me in a way it clearly never did for her.

And the moment I knew the whole experiment was cracked was painfully simple. When a salary man comes home late after soju and noraebang, he stumbles in, mumbles something useless, and goes straight to sleep. Everyone accepts that. But when my wife came home late from those same nights, she’d wake our daughter up just to say hello. Not for the child… for herself. To satisfy her own guilt, her own need to be seen as present. And then I’d be left dealing with the tears, the broken sleep, the next day’s fallout. That was the moment I understood we were just remixing old selfishness in newer language.

So it went like that. A flawed modern marriage. Maybe that’s all marriages, I don’t know. I’ve only had the one, and respectfully, that’ll do for me. No sequels needed. Mandem retired from that franchise.

I’ve forgotten where I meant to take this, so I’ll leave it here: clichés survive for a reason. Even a broken clock gets its moment twice a day. If you’re putting all your eggs in one basket, just make sure when that kitchen gets hot, you’re not the only one standing there holding the pan.

It’s all my fault. Or at least, that’s how it feels most days. The good things pass quietly, barely noticed, but every mistake, every shortcoming, every answer that wasn’t good enough gets catalogued like evidence in some lifelong case against me. Fair enough. I’m hardly the only single parent carrying this kind of weight. Every parent is dealing with some version of this. I’ve just chosen to write mine down.

We all live with the consequences of our actions, even if it often seems like the higher up the ladder you climb, the less those consequences ever seem to land. Down here on ground level, though, they land heavy. Long story short: my daughter is addicted to the screen, and my attempts to deal with it have been, at least in my totally-not-mentally-ill opinion, consistently undermined by my ex-wife, then resisted with full dramatic force by my daughter herself. It has been nothing short of theatre.

When I was growing up, there was no such thing as “screen time” because there was barely any screen to regulate. We had a television with a handful of channels, a radio, and a rotary phone. Entertainment was slower, more communal, and more limited. Apart from the telephone, most of it happened together. Until the VCR showed up, you had to be present when your show was on. Nothing was on demand. You adapted your life to the world, not the other way around.

That whole era got lynched by the algorithm and shareholder greed. We live in peak individualism now, where every app is designed to isolate, monetize, and hold attention hostage. Learning how to parent inside that reality has not exactly been one of my strengths because, fundamentally, I am a homebody with a soft spot and a daughter whose whining can wear down concrete.

It started innocently enough. YouTube Kids together after dinner. Disney Channel while I cooked. The smart TV felt like progress. For a little while, that new-school era of screen-time togetherness felt wholesome. It was shared. It was manageable. It felt like parenting, not outsourcing.

But convenience is undefeated. Life gets busy. The move to Nigeria. Airports, long-haul flights, jet lag, errands, logistics… the screen became the perfect solution for every little “just this once” situation. It helped during the chaos, and slowly, almost invisibly, it became part of everything. By five or six years old, the habit was already rooted.

And yes, I know, I gummed it up. But in my defence, the separation from my wife was messy, and that made every boundary harder to hold. When I moved back to Canada, she gave my daughter a phone and demanded I get her a number so they could stay in touch without my “interference.” So, to prove I wasn’t the villain in her narrative, I got the SIM.

Then the ex sent the iPad for Christmas. She was number one with my daughter once again. Then came the iMac for “writing essays.” Ex back in the “lead” of the game I was never playing. So, it was screens everywhere, without my blessing. And when it came time to say enough… to shut it off, to enforce a break… I was the bad guy.

Not just the bad guy either. The villain. The recipient of the tears, the accusations, the sharp little words that stick longer than they should, and lately, the more physical expressions of that frustration that are harder to absorb pain-free. I knew the screen time was too high. I knew it for a long time. But I’m a pushover. I give in too easily. I told myself she would grow out of it, she’d adapt, she’d learn to cope, but often I’m just being weak.

Back when it was only YouTube Kids and a few harmless games stuffed with ads, it all felt less dangerous. App Store purchases and downloads were locked down, the obvious traps seemed covered. But in hindsight, YouTube and Roblox were more than enough. That was the soil where all the later problems got planted.

Now she’s older, and the battlefield has shifted. Her friends at school already have Snapchat, TikTok, and every other social app they are too young to be using, so now the pressure is external too. It’s no longer just boredom or habit; it’s status, belonging, social survival. And my refusal to cave on that front has made me public enemy number one in my own house.

The socials have always been my red line. That was easy when she didn’t care what happened after school ended. Now it’s different. Now the pressure is real, and so is the resentment. Her hatred of my policies has reached levels I honestly didn’t think possible. But lately, her behaviour has made it clear: I should have done this years ago.

So now I’m doing what I should have done from the beginning. I’m reining it in. Properly. Device simplification. Harder boundaries. Because the longer I wait, the worse it gets. To any parent trying to do the same: Godspeed.

There is no clean victory lap here. The routines, the dependency, the anger… all of it built up slowly, and none of it comes with a silver lining. I know full well it is going to get worse before it gets better. But choosing the harder short-term pain will mean she has a better long-term chance. At least that’s the hope!

I’m also strangely encouraged that governments are finally starting to acknowledge this problem as more than just individual parental failure. I support Bill C-216, which would set age limits for social media and AI chatbots for youth in Canada. Because this cannot just be every exhausted parent fighting trillion-dollar attention machines alone.

As one advocate put it: consider road safety. We engineer safer vehicles, establish age minimums, create regulators, and require driver education. Digital safety deserves the same seriousness: age guardrails, platform accountability, and digital literacy. That part, at least, feels like common sense.

Maybe I should have been stronger at the beginning. No, scratch that. I should have been stronger. Full stop. But regret is cheap. So here we are. Day one. Again.

Maybe I’m stuck in my own little media bubble, or maybe mandem just ain’t outside like that… but its looking like life’s getting properly untenable for more n more. Out here in my little corner of Ford Nation it’s not always obvious at first glance but you see it if you’re paying attention. Bus stops. Timmies parking lots. Walmart aisles. You see it in the driveway too… diesel compensation trucks just sitting there, going nowhere.

Mandem Dayv don’t even make eye contact with Metro or Loblaws anymore. Starsky’s and PAT? Special occasions only. Found myself in Giant Tiger the other day for fair price coffee, even clocked some produce that might be worth a second look.

Even if you’ve done everything they told you, put your nose to the grindstone in school, crossed your t’s, dotted your i’s, minded your p’s and q’s like a good yute, most still come out the other side and it’s crickets. You try to cover all your bases, leave no stone unturned, check all the boxes like you’re ticking off some invisible checklist… and still can’t land nothing that pays proper. Just bare circling, tryna nail down something stable that never seems to lock in.

Then man start chatting like it’s a you problem.
“Get your ducks in a row.”
“Button it up.”
“Square everything away.”
“Tie up your loose ends.”

Like life’s just some admin ting you forgot to finish and that’s why doors aren’t opening.

Then the tone shifts.

“Get your act together.”
“Buckle down.”
“Shape up or ship out.”

Man telling you dig in your heels, take the bull by the horns, stand on your own two feet… sink or swim. All dressed up like motivation, but really it’s just a polite way of saying you’re on your own.

So what does it even mean to “make something of yourself” right now? What are you rising to? An occasion that’s already been patterned, where a small set of people eat and everyone else just gets told to go back to school, try harder, and firm it?

At some point you clock it proper… it’s not that people are lazy. It’s not that man didn’t try. It’s that even when you do everything right, it still might not buss.

And the older generation love to tell it like they had it harder. Like it was just grit and discipline that carried them through. But they came up in a time where money was actually moving… spent across the board in ways they don’t even clock now because it felt normal. Then a certain slice of them had surplus and leveraged it. They invested, compounded, and started demanding more – more productivity, more efficiency, more nimbleness – from everyone else.

And yeah, you can chase efficiency and still look after people. But that’s not what happened. When the mandate is year-on-year growth, what you’re really mandating is year-on-year pressure. Year-on-year squeeze. Quiet little cuts to dignity that stack up over time.

That snowball’s been rolling for decades. What we’re dealing with now isn’t a mystery! It’s the result. And in 2026, the group with real surplus to leverage is so small we’ve got a word for them: oligarchs.

So now man’s talking about “individual responsibility” like that’s the answer. But all that sink-or-swim talk ignores the obvious. People were never meant to do this alone.

Many hands make light work. People used to pull together more, shoulder to shoulder, sharing the load. Governments – federal down to municipal – moving in the same direction, singing from the same hymn sheet. Fewer people left to drown.

We need systems that actually step in when it’s peak and ease off when it’s not. Not this constant pressure setting where everything’s maxed out all the time.

I don’t know where things are heading for me or my daughter. But one thing’s clear. If we don’t start pulling together, nothing good is coming for the rest of us just trying to cross the road.

Despite all the quasi–far-right cosplay, culture-war theatrics, and niche identity-issue strats, Pierre Poilievre’s desire to put Canada back in the cuck chair economically just bothers the hell out of me. There’s something about the posture that feels small. Not top-don behaviour. Glaze-the-foe diplomacy dressed up as strategy.

He’s got that rhetoric about moving past tensions, securing trade, and avoiding rupture… the kind that gets certain undereducated mandem tingly in the belt-buckle vicinity. But when you look at how he wants to get there, its peak cuck chair diplomacy. Tell me you’re not up for the challenge without telling me you’re not up for the challenge.

The whole thing reads like battered-spouse geopolitics. Canada getting ready to smooth things over, accommodate tantrums, and call it pragmatism. No real leverage. No real backbone. Just quiet acquiescence dressed up as realism.

He’s basically calling for Canada to capitulate to the mood swings of the United States and hoping they’ll reward us for being cooperative. And I genuinely can’t understand how so many party faithful see that as strength. He might as well call it compliance-sovereignty.

He wants to big-L leverage Canadian resources and big-A align policies with the United States in exchange for free trade on steel, aluminum, autos, lumber, and full exemption from “America First” rules. On paper, that sounds tidy. But when you put down your phone and think about it, it starts to look like Canada offering concessions first and hoping goodwill follows.

Leveraging Canadian resources sounds like subsidized raw materials to me. Energy, crude, rare earths at fixed long-term rates that might look fine today but could easily turn into loss-leader territory tomorrow. Fuck that.

And aligning policies? That’s where the real shift starts to show. Less environmental oversight. More privatization creeping into healthcare and education. Increased military spending. Loser regulatory frameworks. A slow drift toward American-style governance structures that “traditional” Canadians historically haven’t chosen for themselves. In 2026, the word alignment has no place near the United States.

In my humble big-city opinion, Pierre Poilievre, his party, and the faithful who see this as strength are leaning into a sitting-in-the-cuck-chair mindset. The idea that Canada should quietly accommodate power rather than build its own is peak cuck. And the whole thing feels uncomfortably similar to the way Donald Trump and parts of his base look at the shiny power of Vladimir Putin and his fawning Russian flock. They admire the strength from afar while downplaying the cost of it on society.

It’s not confidence. It’s insecure pragmatism. The cuck chair.

And in a resource-rich country like Canada, that kind of posture is basically canspoitation.

In 1964, my grandparents purchased with a mortgage an Etobicoke bungalow for a little over fourteen thousand dollars. Back then, my grandfather worked the assembly line at Campbell’s Soup, and my grandmother worked as a receptionist at Gulf Oil. Respectable working-middle-class jobs. Decent pay. Decent benefits. Nothing flashy. Just honest work and a realistic path to ownership. A proper working-class pattern where, if you kept your head down and did your job, you could build something.

The quick version of how they got to Canada is something out of another era. An out-of-wedlock pregnancy during a Roman Catholic era meant marriage in 1944, in what is now Slovakia.

Back then, it was part of what I jokingly call Hapsburgiastan. From the fragments I’ve gathered, my grandfather may have been part of some kind of secret society, and his consular job seemed to involve a few shady shenanigans along the way. Nothing concrete. Just pieces and whispers. To properly pattern the story would probably mean hiring a researcher in Hapsburgiastan to dig through archives and translate documents. You know, Som chudobný a nehovorím po slovensky! I’m broke, and I don’t speak Slovak!

Rumour has it his consular job… and maybe those quiet connections… took him across Europe and Asia for both official business and side hustles. But whatever happened in Paris during the post-WW2 years seems to have landed him in the crosshairs of his new comrades in Moscow. After that, things moved quickly. A steamer trunk. Wife and kids. A rushed trip to the port. Mid-fifties, ship to Montreal. No ceremony. Just a quiet exit and a hard reset.

I’m shaky on the next chapter, but I know he became a miner in Rouyn-Noranda for some stretch before eventually moving to Toronto. Another restart. Another drift. Building from scratch in a new country.

The point is, even after all that upheaval, buying a house wasn’t easy but it also wasn’t out of reach. A factory worker and a receptionist, with two kids, could realistically save, plan, and eventually own. That was the deal. That was the social contract.

Fun fact: the building my grandmother worked in wasn’t far from the church where I recently worked. These days, I think it houses some kind of prep school for the upper-crust. Same streets. Same city. Different world.

Because today? A factory worker and receptionist couple would be hard pressed to afford rent, let alone rent and save for a mortgage. That path feels locked off now. Ownership has drifted into pipe dream territory for anyone without boomer parents leaving tidy sums of post-war fiscal exuberance, invested wisely and passed down.

And here’s the elephant in the room that no one really wants to talk about: in the 1950s and 60s, wealthy Canadians paid a hell of a lot more tax than they do now. They were still rich then. They are stupidly richer now. That’s the difference. Not hustle. Not grit. Not avocado toast and Starbucks.

Back then, wealthy individuals had fewer mechanisms to avoid realizing taxable income. Today, income can be structured, deferred, and reshaped. Capital gains benefit from lower inclusion rates. Taxes get postponed. Wealth compounds quietly. Meanwhile, wages don’t keep up, and the ladder that once existed gets further out of reach.

So, while I’m high fives for high levels of immigration, I keep coming back to a hard question. If families can’t land in Montreal like my grandparents did, find respectable work, and after a decade or two of discipline and fiscal prudence save for a down payment… then what exactly are we offering? Opportunity, or just survival?

We live in a resource-rich country, with a class of old money, a smaller class of new money, and then the rest of us. The mandem piecing together careers, or multiple gigs, all optimized to deliver maximum value to shareholders, not stability for workers.