Who Can Actually Earn a Living Wage

I’ve Been Thinking… About Who Can Actually Earn a Living Wage

We say it all the time — “If I can do it, anyone can.”

But can they, really?

Because that phrase assumes the same starting line.

The same body. The same brain. The same access to education, stability, and mental health.

And that’s just not how people — or life — work.

So before we celebrate the living wage we’ve earned, maybe we should pause and ask:
how did we get there?
Who helped us?
Who couldn’t follow the same path, even if they tried?

1. The Education and Credential Gap

Only about 27.8% of adults in Oklahoma hold a bachelor’s degree or higher — compared to 36% nationally.

That means nearly three out of four Oklahomans don’t have the credential that many higher-paying jobs require.

We’ve built an economy that says, “just go to college,” but college costs more than most people make in a year.

And once you do get that degree, Oklahoma isn’t exactly flooded with jobs that pay enough to justify the debt.

Employers use “college required” like a gate code — not to measure skill, but to filter out the people who couldn’t afford to play the game.

We’ve built a system that values paperwork over people.

2. The Spectrum of Ability and Intelligence

We all know someone who couldn’t do our job — and plenty of jobs we couldn’t do either.

Not everyone is built for sales calls, management, or spreadsheets.

Some people are wired for structure, repetition, and hands-on work — and society still needs those jobs done.

We talk about “unskilled labor” like it’s an insult, but every one of those jobs holds up the world the rest of us stand on.

Yet we’ve built a pay scale that assumes complex work deserves comfort, and simple work deserves struggle.

The average CEO in Oklahoma earns more before lunch than a service worker makes all month.

And somewhere between those two lives is an 18-year-old just trying to make it — no degree, no safety net, just a job that barely covers gas and groceries.

If every job that must exist for society to function isn’t livable, the problem isn’t work ethic.
It’s the hierarchy we built around it.

3. The Mental Health Reality

Around 1 in 5 Oklahomans experiences a diagnosable mental illness each year.
About 1 in 20 lives with a serious one — bipolar disorder, PTSD, severe depression.

If you’ve ever tried to get disability benefits for mental health, you know how hard it is.
Most people are denied multiple times before approval — if they’re approved at all.

That leaves thousands of Oklahomans in limbo: too sick to work full-time, not “sick enough” to qualify for help.

If you wake up every day wanting to be productive but your brain refuses to cooperate, what does personal responsibility even mean?

4. The Accessibility Problem

Even if you can work — how many jobs actually pay a living wage and are accessible to your body, your mind, or your education level?

Most of Oklahoma’s largest job sectors — food service, retail, cleaning, care work — pay between $14 and $16 an hour.

That’s around $30,000 a year, if you’re lucky enough to get full-time hours.
Yet a single adult needs about $42,000 a year just to meet basic living expenses.

You can’t “budget harder” out of a math problem that was never designed to balance.

We keep saying “people just don’t want to work,” when the truth is: there aren’t enough jobs that let them live once they do.

5. The Reflection: If You’ve Made It

If you’ve made it — congratulations.
Truly. You’ve done something worth being proud of.

But before you say “If I can do it, anyone can,” ask yourself how.

Did you have help?
A supportive boss?
A parent who let you crash on their couch until you saved up?
Did your brain let you focus when it mattered most?
Did your body hold up through the hard seasons?

Now compare yourself to your neighbor.
Then to an 18-year-old graduating high school this year.

Could they, with the jobs available today, afford to live alone in Oklahoma — rent, utilities, groceries, gas — on what they’ll be offered for their first job?

If not, then we’re not talking about motivation anymore.
We’re talking about math, empathy, and the moral courage to fix what we know is broken.

6. The Takeaway

A living wage means nothing if the people who need it most can’t access it.

Education, mental health, and circumstance — they’re all part of the equation.

And the moment we start pretending everyone begins on equal footing, we stop being a society and start being a scoreboard.

I’ve been thinking…

Maybe the goal isn’t to prove we can survive harder than the next person.
Maybe it’s to build a world where survival isn’t the measure of success at all.

Stay curious. Stay human. And always, be kind.