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Al Bundy peaked in highschool, never went to college, was a shoe salesman at the mall. Al Bundy had an, at least, three bedroom single family home in a nice neighborhood, supported a family of four plus a dog on his single income, had ample free time to spend with family and friends and to spend on hobbies.

Al Bundy: Failure and constant butt of jokes in the 1980s, unobtainable vision of success in the 2020s

I wanted to reminisce about the Daily Show when it was at its best. John Stewart and Stephen Colbert were huge for me. Realistically though they aren’t the right kind of people for the type of role model your talking about. Part of the left’s problem is that the language and style that are used is too intellectual. It contrubitues to the right being able to dismiss progressives as “coastal elites” Part of Bernie’s appeal is that he seems very down to earth and straightforward and that’s one of the reason that the right has so much trouble going after him. We need a progressive plumber.

To your point, I think that there is a fundamental issue with how we talk about success and failure. We effectively target white straight cis men setting them up so that they can never really succeed. As the majority, at least in terms of social and political power, we recognize that they have significant privilege in our culture. We weaponize that privilege such that all successes are external (the system is pushing them up) and all failures are internal (must be something wrong with them if they can fail despite having all of those advantages). Everyone else, to varying degrees depending on how much social and political power we perceive them to have, has the opposite logic applied to them. We say that their success is personal and special because they do it in spite of the system working against them and we blame their failures on the system.

There is of course legitimacy to that reasoning. There are many roadblocks that, especially visible, minorities face that white straight cis men do not. That doesn’t make this mindset not problematic though. The biggest issue with it is that we apply the general to the individual. Does a rural white kid whose parents both work retail have more privilege than Jaden Smith just because of his skin color? That’s of course an extreme example but the point is that the totality of a person’s circumstances is more than just how their biology is perceived by the culture. Privilege does make success easier as compared to people in otherwise similar circumstances but it certainly doesn’t guarantee success or mean that successes don’t have to be worked for.

I like How to Cook That. It’s cool when YouTubers are legitimately educated on the subjects they do videos on.

I guess it’s worth a shot but you’d a few hundred years after the Norse abandoned their settlements in North America and about 120 years before Columbus’s first voyage.

I’m in the US and in a place that native Americans didn’t have settlements. I’m very familiar with the area and have hunted, hiked, and camped here my entire life. With no preparation or modern equipment I give myself about a week before I get eaten by wolves or a bear, maybe gored by an elk or bitten by a venomous snake. I don’t expect that I would see another human during that week. Native hunting parties visited the area so it’s not impossible that I would see someone but it’s very unlikely.