Serious question: what far-left subreddits? Not trying for snark, I really don't know what the left equivalent of like... /r/DylannRoofInnocent would be on reddit.
Holy crap, dude, I make $35k a year and my life is fine. What on earth were you spending money on (10 years ago!) that you were miserable spending 60,000 dollars a year?
But is this because of the academic jobs crisis? As pretentious and/or divisive as public intellectuals can be, I do ultimately agree that high-level public discourse is good to have, and a liberal arts education is not a bad thing. But I'd much rather have lots of people with a broad education who were also working in sustainable jobs than a large class of highly-educated people with no other options than being a public intellectual. The n+1 class is sustained at the whims of a smaller group of funders and spenders, who can exert as much influence over how they publish as an academic body could. It's cool that lots of people are expressing political views, but I think they'd do so publicly (on blogs and such) even without an academic jobs crisis, and damage to academia can have long-term, less positive effects.