I get where you're coming from, but I don’t think it holds up the way you’re framing it. Pinning the root of their trouble on a decision made in 1994 is a bit of a reach. You’re talking about a 30-year-old choice—one that may not have panned out financially, sure, but let’s not act like anyone who steps off the traditional path is just writing themselves into a future of failure. People take risks. Sometimes they pay off, sometimes they don’t. That doesn’t make someone reckless or undeserving of support three decades later. You’re applying hindsight like a hammer, and it oversimplifies everything that likely happened in between.

And honestly, the “$200k job to start a band” line feels a little too convenient. Maybe he quit for health, burnout, family reasons—we don’t know. Framing it as a dumb, selfish move is an assumption dressed up as fact. Life’s not a spreadsheet. People don’t always make optimal economic choices, and pretending everyone has the foresight, stability, and circumstances to do so just isn't realistic.

As for the $37,000 car—yeah, that’s not ideal. But again, you’re pulling one purchase out of what’s probably a complicated financial picture and using it to write off their entire decision-making process. Have you priced reliable vehicles lately? Even used ones? You don’t know if that was their only option after a breakdown or if it was financed under pressure. It’s easy to diagnose “bad choices” from the outside when you’re not in the thick of it.

And about “doing what you have to”—I agree in principle. Life is about hard choices. But let's not pretend that “just move to a cheaper state” is some silver bullet. Moving costs money. Leaving behind your doctors, your social support network, everything familiar—that’s not nothing. It’s not just a matter of pulling up Zillow and hopping a U-Haul to West Virginia. The fact that you think that’s a simple fix kind of underlines how disconnected this solution is from the reality of aging in poverty.

You say they have no Plan B. That’s fair, maybe. But they also don’t have many cards left to play. Working at 81 isn’t ideal—but it’s what they’ve got. And instead of asking “why didn’t they plan better 30 years ago?” maybe ask why we expect any 81-year-old to be keeping a job just to afford rent. That’s not a personal failure—that’s a systemic one. The fact that they’re still working shows grit. The fact that they have to shows a breakdown in the system we’re all supposed to be able to rely on someday.

You’re focused on their past decisions like they were filling out a retirement strategy on a clean whiteboard. But most people aren’t living with that level of control, especially over decades. You don’t know their full story, just some snapshots, and you’re building a moral framework around it. That’s fine if you want to play armchair financial advisor, but don’t pretend it’s empathy.

And yeah, they're in a bad spot. But treating them like a cautionary tale instead of real people facing a brutal system isn’t going to help them—or anyone else headed in the same direction.