“Work hard, follow the rules, and you will be rewarded for it”

On the greatest lie ever told

Farmers Working in the Field, Vincent van Gogh (1888) 

The tragic story of Phillip-James Herron has been making the rounds again online. 

Phillip was a 34-year-old single father of three kids who killed himself while waiting to receive his Universal Credit (UC) welfare payments. At the time of his death he had £4.61 in the bank. 

After his death, his mother, Sheena Derbyshire, discovered Phillip owed some £20,000 in loans, including one from a pay day lender who was charging him 1,000 percent interest. She also found an eviction notice from Phillip’s landlord. He was on the verge of losing his home. 

In his suicide note Phillip wrote that “his family would be better off if he wasn’t there anymore.”

Moments before he killed himself, Phillip uploaded a picture to social media of him crying. 

This was 4 years ago.

Not much has changed since then. As greedflation soars, wages remain stagnant, and the cost of living rises, it appears that people are more desperate than ever. 

Feeling helpless, many are turning to social media to voice their struggles. While I normally avoid TikTok, I‘ve been moved by the stories of ordinary people expressing deep anguish over the cost of living. These videos should be shared widely.

Many of these TikTok compilations are available on YouTube (one of which is linked below): 

One parent shared: 

“I am so tired of feeling helpless as a parent. I thought by teaching them what I learned, which is you work hard, you get a good job, you’re gonna get the things in life that you need. Worked for me, why wouldn’t it work for them? Because it doesn’t. Because the world has fucking changed. And now I see them struggling. And before my generation comes at me, I understand struggling is a part of life. But there’s a difference between struggling and drowning.

So we struggled and it was tough, but we made it, we knew there was a light at the end of the tunnel.

It seems like kids today no matter how much they struggle, they get further and further down into the water into the drowning point.

What the fuck is going on and how do we help them as parents?

She continues,

There used to be an upper class, middle class, lower class. It’s literally turning into the ultra wealthy and everybody else is just poor. . . It seems like you can never get ahead.

Another says, 

“I get up every morning at 4:30am. . . I let my dog out, feed him, get him situated, play with him for a bit. 5am I start getting ready for work. I’m out the door for 6am. My shift starts at 7am. Work from 7am-4pm. Leave for the day. Takes about 45 min to an 1 hour cause of traffic. I do this every fucking day 5 days a week just to get a damn paycheque that leaves as soon as hits my account.

All this to say: I got a job, don’t get me wrong, my dude he works. Sometimes 12 hour days. He comes home. He’s hurtin, he’s sore, he’s tired. I’m hurtin. I’m mentally tired from being with fucking people all day and their attitudes. Y’all I am stressed the fuck out. And what’s crazy is that this paycheque barely fucking helps. 

I live a very simple life. 

I’m sick of coming here to get a paycheque that barely even helps. . . Working class people [are] stressed the fuck out. They can’t even go to the damn doctor because their jobs are shit. What is the fucking point? 

These are not isolated cases. People are struggling everywhere. 

These are the same people who did all of the ‘right’ things: they followed the rules, got educated, got respectable jobs. They didn’t take short cuts, they didn’t break the rules. They did what the vast majority of us do: They did what they were told. And they promised they would be rewarded for it.

But like most of us, they haven’t been rewarded at all. Quite the opposite. They’re drowning under a mountain debt, some are moving back home with their parents who are also struggling to get by, some can barely afford basic necessities like rent and groceries— they’re all living in a constant state of anxiety, teetering on the edge of complete mental and physical collapse. This, in turn, creates a slew of mental health issues that slowly suffocates them inside out.

More people are stealing to survive, some are on the verge of losing their homes, others have found themselves on welfare for the first time ever. And our leaders have done nothing to alleviate these burdens the vast majority of people are facing. The opposite is happening. The wealth gap continues to grow at record rates. The Brookings Institution found that income inequality has risen over the past four decades in most advanced economies and major emerging economies, which together account for about two-thirds of the world’s population.

This is no way to live.

Indeed, some people are realizing there is no way out and they are choosing to opt-out of living altogether. This bears repeating: People are suffering so much due to circumstances beyond their control that they would rather die than continue living. This is the level of desperation we’ve reached, and not a single one of our leaders is doing anything about it.

In Canada, some people are seeking the government’s stamp of approval to die because they can’t bear living in poverty any longer. This is made possible by the Canadian government’s expansion of MAID (medically assisted death program) which now includes people whose deaths are not ‘reasonably foreseeable.’ In 2024, these amendments will include those with a mental illness. 

Canadian woman Jacquie Holyoak told CBC she is considering MAID because she cannot afford to live any longer. She has fibromyalgia and lives on disability benefits that barely helps pay the bills. She said it’s a choice she wouldn’t have even considered if she had some money. 

Winnipeg woman Sathya Dhara Kovac successfully received assisted suicide at age 44. She lived with a degenerative disease, and as her condition worsened, she simply couldn’t afford the cost of living any longer.

In her obituary, she wrote:

“Ultimately it was not a genetic disease that took me out, it was a system.” 

Kovac couldn’t even get dignity in death. She sought out the government to facilitate her death— the same entity responsible for creating these unliveable conditions in the first place. This is the ultimate betrayal. The government now makes it easier to kill yourself than provide essential social support to those in need.

Soon after the MAID amendment passed, 219 people with non-terminal illnesses received assisted dying in 2021. In 2021, there was a total of 10,064 MAID deaths. As this number continues to grow each year, it is expected that people with mental illnesses who will receive MAID will also increase as the mental illness provision is set to pass in 2024. 

Source: Third annual report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada, 2021

This is the result of a system that rewards the greedy capitalists — not you, or me, or Phillip, or Sathya, or Jacquie.

They said if we just followed the rules and worked hard, we would be comfortable enough to own a home, have a car, pop out a couple of kids, and maybe even go on vacation once in a while.

But with the incredibly shrinking middle class, these luxuries are now reserved for the wealthy upper class. We are in a state of crisis and humanity is losing to the ruling few. 

Techno globalists and greedy politicians all make life as difficult as possible for you to opt out or seek alternative ways of living. 

More people are getting angry — and some are using this righteous anger for good. This is one of the few upsides of our current situation. Groups like The Lifeboat Academy and Freedom Cell Network are helping others find more meaningful ways of living that prioritizes self-sufficiency and community.

I hope we can use this moment to continue harnessing existing movements and creating new communities that will unify, not divide the masses. 

-Rozali Telbis