That Old Familiar Fear: On Money, Instability, and Cart Life
About 11 years ago, when I was living in Los Angeles, this older woman and someone I assumed to be her adult son became a fixture on a freeway on-ramp near my apartment. They were clearly new to being homeless. You could tell just by looking at them. They seemed shell-shocked.
I remember once driving past them with a friend and she said, perplexed, “How could that happen?” It seemed like it was a possibility she’d never even contemplated before, as if, until that moment, she knew that homeless people existed but thought of them as having always been homeless. Hers was not a world in which people became homeless.
I was beside myself. For me, becoming homeless had once seemed not only possible, but likely. Growing up I never wanted for anything but I could tell that my mom, who worked nights doing data entry for a medical lab, was always anxious about money. There were times when she could barely make rent. Creditors called constantly. At Christmas she’d cry because she didn’t have much to spend on presents. I grew up with the understanding that things were precarious and could fall apart at any minute. It felt like we were always just one significant, unexpected expense away from being on the street. It was a quivering fear that took up residence in the pit of my stomach.
Working jobs at which I was pulling in steady paychecks that were never going to make me rich but also left me with no fear about my ability to pay my rent and to save some money each month, I thought I’d left that fear behind forever. But now, as the months of unemployment stretch on and I’m not sure where I’m going to end up, I’m finding I was wrong, and I’m starting to carry around that fear in the pit of my stomach again. The life that seemed modest a year ago–renting a small studio apartment here in Berkeley–is starting to feel extravagant and unsustainable. But I don’t know what to do about it. I’m realizing all over that I don’t care about earning money for money’s sake, I don’t care about being able to buy a big house or take expensive vacations, but I sure do care about a sense of stability. Stability is the only luxury I crave. I don’t want to live in fear again.
I played through Richard Hofmeier’s game Cart Life again a few weeks ago, as Melanie, a woman going through a divorce who moves in with her sister and starts running a coffee cart in the hopes of proving to the court that she can financially provide for her daughter. After you play through a week as Melanie, the game ends, and her status changes to this:

I like how it says “fine” twice, like a person who doesn’t know that things are going to be fine at all but is trying to convince herself that they will be fine, a person for whom giving in to despair is not an option. Maybe things will be fine and maybe they won’t, but you have to believe that they will, and operate under the assumption that they will, or they definitely won’t.
Cart Life is a grueling game that makes you feel like your whole life is hanging by a thread, and it makes every financial decision anxiety inducing. The difference between taking a bus and taking a cab can be getting to your destination an hour faster, but the difference in cost can also represent an hour or more of your work, and every dollar counts. (This always reminds me of the period I went through in real life of walking 45 minutes to and from my job at a coffee shop when a bus would have gotten me there in no time, because bus fare also would have represented about 1/8th of what I’d be earning during my shift.) Your characters in Cart Life get hungry and exhausted but you want to push them to work as long as possible because they need every cent they can possibly earn. My friend Scott mentioned the game a few days ago when talking about his own experiences being poor:








Yeah. Another thing I love about Cart Life is how it deals with these utterly compassionless bureaucratic and capitalist systems that don’t give a fuck about individuals and can crush the humanity right out of people but how in doing so, the game itself is so human, so concerned with the plight of the individual who has no power to change these systems. The best she can do is fucking fight to survive and stay afloat within them. And the game is wise about how being put in this position can undermine our entire sense of self. When the system tells us we are of little value, it’s really easy to start to believe it.



I don’t have kids, I only have myself to worry about, and yet sometimes I am wracked with feelings of failure. But I know that I didn’t fail at my job. I love what Laura Hudson wrote in a piece about Bloodborne, a game I’ve been playing a lot lately:
What Bloodborne offered was what I’d always really wanted from the jobs, the people, the places I had found it so difficult to quit, the bottomless maws of time and energy that took everything, and gave nothing back. It was what I believed they could be, if I only tried harder, believed more, and just kept on grinding. But it wasn’t that I failed at them; it was that they had failed me.
They were just shitty games, I realized suddenly. I should have quit all of them a lot sooner. There are just so many better games to play.
And sometimes I think I am playing a better game, now, or at least on the path toward one. I’m doing writing that feels more meaningful and personal. I’m collaborating with friends on projects I really believe in. But everything still feels so unstable, and that deeper sense of personal satisfaction isn’t going to help me make rent. Am I moving forward or am I falling back? It’s all tremendously disorienting.
Melanie’s story in Cart Life ends with a beautiful moment. Her sister Rebecca shows up at the courthouse before the custody hearing to tell her that everything is going to be all right, and it’s written with an honesty and specificity that make it feel true.














Yeah, I’m scared.
Cart Life understands that statements like this from people we care about, even if they’re not based on anything, can be so much more than empty reassurances. The support of friends and family can be what sustains us and prevents us from feeling like the fear is going to swallow us whole.
Everything’s fine. It’s going to be fine.
Notes
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