It would appear from the about page and the article that he has the requisite skills to earn an income that should move him out of the "poor" category:
- auto mechanic
- digital tech
- landscaping
I'm not trying to dismiss the difficult realities associated with being poor. But if you have the skills to make more money and bring your family out of the "poor" category, why wouldn't you do that? IMO, basic financial security for your family should trump "I like to work outside."
He obviously has different priorities, which is fine. But I'm not sure the search for sympathy/empathy in the blog post is warranted.
It's also owning lower quality goods, that plague you by breaking all the time. So the maintenance cost (time and energy) is quite high. It's almost better not to have things when you're poor, because the things you have are just a big headache.
I think it's also that increasingly working people are living in old houses that were never built properly, and now have lots of problems. And even new things you buy, are just kind of annoying. I have an LG electric stove. Instead of modulating heat, it pulses the burner top. So you can't effectively lower the heat, just extend the time it takes to cook. The oven timer doesn't turn off, it tries to keep the food warm, and plays chime every minute. Exactly opposite of what I want, since I cook food for my dog and want the food to cool off. And it's stuff like that, the constant annoyance of dealing with badly designed products, and things breaking. I had 2 driers break (all plastic parts), and a washing machine that started leaking oil inside that damaged the clothes in the last year. It's the cumulative effect of dealign with lower quality things.
Very true but I also think that being poor is a mindset to change. I've known of people that would couch surf but they were never poor. We knew, they knew, that at anytime they could turn it around, and they did. They wanted to do things that were not the norm so they chose not to follow society's norms so they lacked money and they lived day to day. Once they changed their mind set they were able to work their way to an American middle class. It was not easy but they did it. They had little money but they were never poor.
Then there's the other side. Families that can never get out. Families that have been poor for generations. Sure there are valid reason but I also think it's a mindset that needs to change. The multi-million dollar question is: how?
> I've known of people that would couch surf but they were never poor.
I think there are some other types of behaviour that might not reflect their financial circumstances.
For example: couchsurfing because they're frugal or penny-pinching, or growing up with a "scarcity" mindset. These people aren't necessarily "broke" or "poor".
I have poor friends, they spend more on Netflix, Gym, Starbucks, IPhones, steam games etc then me, and they are poor for atleast last 10-20 years. I almost never have any of these and I have given them that classic suggestions like the cancelling the gym membership that he/she rarely or never uses, and it doesnt work, they keep spending money on garbage with money they don't have.
I see this all the time in developed countries. The “poor” in a place like America are different from the poor elsewhere. Often times, the poor in America are just people making bad decisions, living beyond their means. You see it in the places they choose to live in, the cars they own, the number of children they have, etc.
The post does a good job of describing a phenomenological difference between being broke and being poor, and its account seems plausible to me. But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two. I've known working class folks who seem like they're getting by fine, even if they're occasionally "broke", and I've known working class folks who are constantly in financial crisis, and definitely fit in the category of "poor". I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?
They don't have the same skills. One is far more skilled at existing while poor.
I grew up in Africa. The poverty I saw, as a child, was foundational in my own personal development.
There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes.
I have family that dedicated most of their life to fighting poverty (with very limited success). They believe that poverty is probably the single biggest problem in the world, today. Almost every major issue we face, can be traced back to poverty.
Income inequality is one thing, but hardcore poverty, as described by the author, is a different beast, and creates a level of desperation that is incredibly dangerous.
> I have family that dedicated most of their life to fighting poverty (with very limited success).
Yes, it's very difficult to defeat poverty. But it has been happening world-wide. Poverty has been going down world-wide for 200 years. It's not so much through the efforts of individuals or even governments, just a network effect of technological advancements and opportunity creation (made possible by those advancements), and perhaps (almost certainly) by credit that makes those advancements go faster.
So much of this poverty is hidden because it makes people feel uneasy and yet it needs to be exposed, not as a means to shame them or to give you pity to feel bad about yourself but to realise, there is an imbalance and we are all part of it in a small way. That collectively, as nations, we don't need to give up a little to make a lot of change.
Because as it stands there is this notion of person all responsibility, to be Atlus holding the weight of the world. For example, it is estimated that in at lot of poorer counties, the surgery to prevent many forms of vision loss costs $20. That is wild, but it can be a source of self inflicted shame. So you want to buy Mario Kart World, it is $80... Is my enjoyment of this game worth more than the vision of 4 people? That is a wild trip to work through. There is a memorial for Mahatma Gandhi that has an incription, something like "Think of the poorest person you have ever meet and ask yourself how your next action will help them". I wish more folks would ask that.
When you see these monstrous fundings for all manner of AI stuff and wonder where we went so wrong.
The folk I respect the most are those that give up the trappings of excess in the hopes of advancing others rather than hoarding wealth like dragons. To do the opposite of what many influencers do. We need more folk like that.
> Income inequality is one thing, but hardcore poverty, as described by the author, is a different beast
This is something I never thought of but certainly rings true. The left always talks about income inequality and poverty as if they are one and the same. And then rebuttal almost always rebut against income inequality (or being "broke") and not poverty. By conflating the two, we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Perhaps we need politicians who will accurately define poverty and policies for getting folks out of poverty, and then once everyone can afford to eat, we can talk about income inequality.
Not sure why that comment got downvoted. I guess that "income inequality" is the Boogeyman Du Jour.
I'm unhappy with it, but it is also a lot harder to address, than hardcore poverty.
A popular thing for people to do, is wring their hands and complain about problems that can't be solved, while ignoring the ones that can be addressed.
Fighting poverty is going to be tough, but fighting income inequality would be orders of magnitude more difficult, because of the entrenched and powerful folks with investment in the status quo.
If we split them, we can deal with the "low-hanging fruit" of poverty, maybe even leveraging the vast resources of the very rich, who might be more willing to help, if they didn't see it as a threat.
I'm confused whether the author is poor, has been poor, has never been poor but has deep understanding of what it's like for other reasons (friends, family, etc.). He writes
> I have a van that is falling apart. It needs a lot of work that we cannot afford to do.
but I think that should be read as "Imagine that I have ...", because, from his About page, he seems to have an irrigation and landscaping business and plays around with technology on the weekend.
I think the article would have been more effective it had been clearer exactly on what basis the author is writing about the experience of poor people.
The geographic variation on the semantics of poverty always amaze me.
Poverty and having a credit card, a van, and a house to live in. No matter how maxed out or broken all of those are, having them automatically means you are not poor in most of the world's point of view.
Not to say that the struggles aren't real or that we shouldn't empathize, of course. Just that what strikes me most about these kinds of posts is how the semantics simply implode if you expand your context window just a bit, looking at a broader perspective country-wise.
Sure. That’s the theory. Then I read the book Evicted and I understood. One of the people gets a small windfall. Enough to stop the treadmill. What she does is buy something nice for herself because she “deserves a treat”.
Also the sums of money here are humongous. Someone is net -$40k? They need $40k more per year to not be poor? That is the British median income. So this shortfall in money a person needs to be not poor in the US is what half of the people in the UK live under, total.
Heck even in Germany that’s the 40th percentile or so.
This shows how poor Europeans are compared to Americans. Some half of them are in this comparative state of misery.
"Poor" is why razor blades are behind a glass case at Walgreens. Because people steal razor blades, not (just) to use, but to sell at a discount to other poor people.
There is also the interesting situation of "newly poor" people getting crushed much faster than people who have been poor a long time. There are community safety nets that bubble up from everyone being cornered all the time. You don't go to the mechanic, but ask that guy who charges $100 and can hack something together so you can get to work this week. You know an old lady around the corner who will take your kids in for the night if you don't make it home for some reason. These aren't solutions, they are patches and stopgaps. But this is also the strength of community that to be more common in the U.S. before suburbs made every family an island.
It's way more nuanced than this. Ultimately poverty comes down to an individual's ability to be self-sustaining.
Take a software engineer, take away their house, job, and all of their money so they are homeless and have literally nothing ("broke"): how quickly can they reach a stable self-sustaining state again?
Probably pretty quickly:
- Ask family for help (they are anchored in a higher place to help bootstrap you up again - borrow some money, temporarily move back in with parents, etc)
- Get a new programming job
- Build a small nest egg
- Done, back to a self-sustaining state in a short time frame
Now take a kid from Baltimore who dropped out of high school and who has no skills. Repeat the scenario
- Ask family for help (they probably aren't in much of a position to help - they can't pull you up when they aren't anchored in a higher place)
- Get a new job (good luck when you have few marketable skills. The high(er) paying jobs for people with no marketable skills usually involve selling drugs/sex)
- Can't build a nest egg easily
Poverty (in the USA at least) is mainly a product of your family situation and your knowledge/marketable skills. If you have an unstable family and no marketable skills, escaping poverty is extremely difficult without an external actor helping to pull people up.
Understanding poverty starts with empathy. People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that. It's not that simple! You can't just mind your way out of poverty! This isn't a math problem.
It's an optimization problem, which I would consider a category of math problems. Not wanting to perform a solution or not being able to figure out a solution, or know how to find someone to solve it for them is a mind problem.
Yes, but understanding the other mindset you're referring to requires some empathy too.
There are three paths to poverty: by birth, by bad luck, and by some definition of choice. No one chooses to be poor, of course, but we all have that school friend or a distant relative who consistently made bad decisions (drugs, gambling, skipping school, excess spending, terrible relationship choices, etc) and ended up in a bad spot more or less as a consequence of that.
Individuals who think that all poor people only have themselves to blame are bozos, but pretending that no one ever bears personal responsibility for poverty is wrong too. If we're "schooling" someone who has a personal story like that, we're not going to make them see the light.
A better position is to say that yes, sometimes people mess up, but it's good for the society as a whole to improve the outcomes for "at-fault" crowd too. This requires tailoring the solutions, because not everything can be solved with cash.
"Solidarity" was the old word – at least in much of Europe – and was more than just a word but a value people held. It was already becoming rare when I was young in the 90s and while it's still mentioned on occasion, as a moral value it seems largely absent in today's political discourse.
When my grandparents talked about their childhood they talked about Nazi occupation, seeing childhood friends blown up, losing siblings, famine, and those types fun memories. Obviously a very different childhood than I and most people here had. Death may be the great equaliser, but a good ol' famine goes a long way in showing people that we're not so different, and that in the end we're all in it together. It's perhaps not surprising that solidarity was a much more important value for their generation.
It's interesting how many comments here are knee jerk annoyance at this blogpost, which in my mind does a good job outlining two different financial situations and how flippant suggested solutions for escaping poverty don't make sense.
The fact that many of us here have so much compared to others in our community however you define it is disturbing and not helpful information for our day to day lives so we do what we can to ignore it.
Gee. I wonder why people find a blogpost telling them to fuck off and acting like they don't know that quitting Starbucks is only relevant to those who go to Starbucks annoying?
I am normally a knee jerker but i grew up in a big family with very little. Between broke and poor. Almost going to food banks but not quite. This is pretty spot on to what it is like.
Even broke, something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening. Id buy the McDonald’s 1$ drink with free refills and calorie load on that all day reusing the cup. He doesnt touch on the shame of it you feel esp in todays us culture.
It's honestly amazing how many people hold a powerful a conviction that the world is essentially fair; that the poor must have some moral failing which justifies their poverty. If it's happened to thousands of people—if you see the afflicted every day—then it must just be a plague of poor morals. We'll believe anything before we accept that we're lucky, and that we owe something to those who aren't.
It's even more annoying when you consider that most proposals that gain any type of traction can't even ever approach the "I have everything now so I'm not going to work because I'm so lazy"-type abundance that the fear-mongers try to sell you. If we just were able to use some of all this wealth to create an absolute baseline of "enough money to not starve, have any kind of roof over your head and not be trapped in your current situation", I wonder what society could've looked like.
I understand the sentiment. I grew up lower middle class but with financially illiterate and neglectful parents and had a great deal of food scarcity and other things that caused me to leave home at 17. It was really difficult. The first place I managed to get, was a room for $750 a month and I took home $900. I had no car and had to take the bus everywhere. It's true - everything just piles up when you are stretched thin.
What I ended up doing was finding a cheap place to live in a crappy area with a buttload of roommates, started searching for promotion at my job, got one, which gave me more financial leeway and time (more flexible schedule) to pursue a degree at a community college, which was free because of my income. From there I went to a good state school which was also free due to my income and did well and got a degree in CS and was hired by a professor's startup. This whole process took like 15 years of brutally difficult grinding.
A lot of people in my spot, that have "made it" (although I still bear the scars all over the place, and I am handicapped in habitual ways, especially financially, that I may never get over without hundreds of thousands of $ of therapy), will look down on people like this author for "not trying hard enough."
I think it's bullshit. I got extraordinarily lucky and had a streak of nothing too "bad" happening (didnt get a crippling illness, car mostly stayed good, grades stayed stable, didnt get laid off), plus innate talents not everyone has. I think it's a myth a lot of people tell themselves that they "made it" because they just worked hard enough. The truth a huge amount of the time is you got lucky. Hard work + luck yields opportunity, but not all opportunities pan out. My career may dead end because of AI and I may end up in the same spot again for all I know. All I can do is keep trying.
It's the official ideology of capitalist countries, to think that were all equal in the eyes of the govt and if youre not on the same economic level it must be cause you're fundamentally different/flawed.
It's a type of thinking that does not take into consideration peoples material reality (even their own) and manifests as narcissism and egotism in those who employ this thought.
It seeks to detach material reality from peoples life and simply judge based on merit, or a sort of spiritual value or other attributes. It is an idealist ideology.
To counter this idealist thought: I assure you, if you were me you'd be doing exactly what I'm doing. The real explanation for life is to look at the material basis of said life. Poverty is a hole full of material and psychological ills. Stress, coping mechanisms and just straight up lack of knowledge, lack of opportunities, lack of someone to teach you, lack of a proper learning environment, the psychological effects alone could kill a rich kid, let a lone the material ones.
I once saw people start their month with 0 on their bank account, and live in the negative monthly credit their bank allows.
Them having a job (luckily), means they just about manage to fill that debt back at the end of the month, covering the debt and the small bank interest.
They end up paying the bank money bit by bit every month, yet they stay locked in that negative money pit.
It’s like being permanently broke, and it all started with one a bad month of extra payments…
I climbed out of extreme adolescent poverty (for the U.S.) brought on by my mother's cancer diagnosis pre-ACA to become a top 1% earner in my cohort.
Practically speaking as a 15 year old teenager I started 30k (56k) in today's dollars in the hole per year or my family went homeless and hungry.
The complete stupidity of people who think poverty and homelessness are in any way indicative of moral fiber, work ethic, discipline, etc. is undeniable.
Having now spent many years with the intelligencia, cocaine, DMT and crypto gambling class I must say.
The working poor are morally better than all of them and the majority of the homeless are too.
The moral value of the way any of these groups spend their first available 50k chunk in comparison to their wealthy counterparts is just vastly superior.
Maker geeks of all stripes are the only group I've seen that I can distinguish as interacting in a more meaningful ways.
Poverty is a multi factorial societal issue, no amount of mindset is enough to get you out alone but a vastly superior mindset IS required to get out and that's a failure of society because the wealthy are immoral and _don't want the competition and often times do want the cheaper labor._
It's a constant effort to widen the leverage gap.
The poor shouldn't have to have a vastly better mindset, grind, cognitive powers just to get to the baseline in a dead end job, we are crushing the best among us instead of ensuring that their above average capabilities are contributing to society at large, instead they are being used to get out of the hole we made for them.
While I get it, I disagree with some of the premise... especially the idea of working two jobs. My dad has worked multiple jobs at a time when I was growing up... I've worked multiple jobs at a time as recently as this year. Now, I'm getting old (50yo) and really couldn't handle it as well as I could in my 20s, but I still did it.
It's not a permanent solution, but it's not a bad thing to do when you need to in order to pull ahead. For that matter, self study and personal advancement. It's hard to get into some jobs as an autodidact... I've been a software developer for going on three decades without a formal education. There are plenty of times I can't get through the HR screening alone. That doesn't mean you don't try, or don't put in effort to improve your position in life or yourself.
I get being broke and poor... I grew up relatively poor. It sucks. I also worked very hard to get where I am. It's not always where I want to be, but that's life to an extent. My opinions don't always align with everyone else though... I just don't like the idea of giving up, or not putting in extra effort when it's an option to pull you ahead.
I say this having spent about a year out of the past 3 years without regular income and massively in debt with medical issues I cannot cover, and cannot currently afford insurance (due to debt payments). It sucks, and I can't change the past... I can only put in the effort I need to improve the future.
> You can’t afford to go to the movies, but will stay home and watch what’s new on Netflix.
I never had Netflix nor Spotify and I am not poor. I always thought that having Netflix and Spotify is some kind of luxury. Not a big one, but those services are not cheap, if you're on a tight budget.
In the book "Starling House", being poor is defined as: you make a list for what you need, another for what you want, and then you throw away the second list.
130 comments
[ 7.4 ms ] story [ 90.8 ms ] threadIt would appear from the about page and the article that he has the requisite skills to earn an income that should move him out of the "poor" category:
- auto mechanic
- digital tech
- landscaping
I'm not trying to dismiss the difficult realities associated with being poor. But if you have the skills to make more money and bring your family out of the "poor" category, why wouldn't you do that? IMO, basic financial security for your family should trump "I like to work outside."
He obviously has different priorities, which is fine. But I'm not sure the search for sympathy/empathy in the blog post is warranted.
Now that I know what it means to be poor what should I do?
Then there's the other side. Families that can never get out. Families that have been poor for generations. Sure there are valid reason but I also think it's a mindset that needs to change. The multi-million dollar question is: how?
I think there are some other types of behaviour that might not reflect their financial circumstances.
For example: couchsurfing because they're frugal or penny-pinching, or growing up with a "scarcity" mindset. These people aren't necessarily "broke" or "poor".
They don't have the same skills. One is far more skilled at existing while poor.
I grew up in Africa. The poverty I saw, as a child, was foundational in my own personal development.
There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes.
I have family that dedicated most of their life to fighting poverty (with very limited success). They believe that poverty is probably the single biggest problem in the world, today. Almost every major issue we face, can be traced back to poverty.
Income inequality is one thing, but hardcore poverty, as described by the author, is a different beast, and creates a level of desperation that is incredibly dangerous.
[0] https://blog.ctms.me/about/
I do feel like that we really could end global poverty if we tried, and that people like me ought to contribute.
I came into the comments looking for this sentiment.
We have a fairly good safety net here in my country, I've lived on study and unemployment benefits when I was young.
But when the author mentions they can't just make $300 appear out of nowhere, I can't help thinking that it _is_ possible, its just dangerous.
update: That's why we have good safety nets. Its dangerous for everybody.
Yes, it's very difficult to defeat poverty. But it has been happening world-wide. Poverty has been going down world-wide for 200 years. It's not so much through the efforts of individuals or even governments, just a network effect of technological advancements and opportunity creation (made possible by those advancements), and perhaps (almost certainly) by credit that makes those advancements go faster.
Because as it stands there is this notion of person all responsibility, to be Atlus holding the weight of the world. For example, it is estimated that in at lot of poorer counties, the surgery to prevent many forms of vision loss costs $20. That is wild, but it can be a source of self inflicted shame. So you want to buy Mario Kart World, it is $80... Is my enjoyment of this game worth more than the vision of 4 people? That is a wild trip to work through. There is a memorial for Mahatma Gandhi that has an incription, something like "Think of the poorest person you have ever meet and ask yourself how your next action will help them". I wish more folks would ask that.
When you see these monstrous fundings for all manner of AI stuff and wonder where we went so wrong.
The folk I respect the most are those that give up the trappings of excess in the hopes of advancing others rather than hoarding wealth like dragons. To do the opposite of what many influencers do. We need more folk like that.
This is something I never thought of but certainly rings true. The left always talks about income inequality and poverty as if they are one and the same. And then rebuttal almost always rebut against income inequality (or being "broke") and not poverty. By conflating the two, we're throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Perhaps we need politicians who will accurately define poverty and policies for getting folks out of poverty, and then once everyone can afford to eat, we can talk about income inequality.
I'm unhappy with it, but it is also a lot harder to address, than hardcore poverty.
A popular thing for people to do, is wring their hands and complain about problems that can't be solved, while ignoring the ones that can be addressed.
Fighting poverty is going to be tough, but fighting income inequality would be orders of magnitude more difficult, because of the entrenched and powerful folks with investment in the status quo.
If we split them, we can deal with the "low-hanging fruit" of poverty, maybe even leveraging the vast resources of the very rich, who might be more willing to help, if they didn't see it as a threat.
> I have a van that is falling apart. It needs a lot of work that we cannot afford to do.
but I think that should be read as "Imagine that I have ...", because, from his About page, he seems to have an irrigation and landscaping business and plays around with technology on the weekend.
I think the article would have been more effective it had been clearer exactly on what basis the author is writing about the experience of poor people.
Poverty and having a credit card, a van, and a house to live in. No matter how maxed out or broken all of those are, having them automatically means you are not poor in most of the world's point of view.
Not to say that the struggles aren't real or that we shouldn't empathize, of course. Just that what strikes me most about these kinds of posts is how the semantics simply implode if you expand your context window just a bit, looking at a broader perspective country-wise.
Also the sums of money here are humongous. Someone is net -$40k? They need $40k more per year to not be poor? That is the British median income. So this shortfall in money a person needs to be not poor in the US is what half of the people in the UK live under, total.
Heck even in Germany that’s the 40th percentile or so.
This shows how poor Europeans are compared to Americans. Some half of them are in this comparative state of misery.
There is also the interesting situation of "newly poor" people getting crushed much faster than people who have been poor a long time. There are community safety nets that bubble up from everyone being cornered all the time. You don't go to the mechanic, but ask that guy who charges $100 and can hack something together so you can get to work this week. You know an old lady around the corner who will take your kids in for the night if you don't make it home for some reason. These aren't solutions, they are patches and stopgaps. But this is also the strength of community that to be more common in the U.S. before suburbs made every family an island.
Take a software engineer, take away their house, job, and all of their money so they are homeless and have literally nothing ("broke"): how quickly can they reach a stable self-sustaining state again?
Probably pretty quickly:
- Ask family for help (they are anchored in a higher place to help bootstrap you up again - borrow some money, temporarily move back in with parents, etc)
- Get a new programming job
- Build a small nest egg
- Done, back to a self-sustaining state in a short time frame
Now take a kid from Baltimore who dropped out of high school and who has no skills. Repeat the scenario
- Ask family for help (they probably aren't in much of a position to help - they can't pull you up when they aren't anchored in a higher place)
- Get a new job (good luck when you have few marketable skills. The high(er) paying jobs for people with no marketable skills usually involve selling drugs/sex)
- Can't build a nest egg easily
Poverty (in the USA at least) is mainly a product of your family situation and your knowledge/marketable skills. If you have an unstable family and no marketable skills, escaping poverty is extremely difficult without an external actor helping to pull people up.
It's an optimization problem, which I would consider a category of math problems. Not wanting to perform a solution or not being able to figure out a solution, or know how to find someone to solve it for them is a mind problem.
Yes, but understanding the other mindset you're referring to requires some empathy too.
There are three paths to poverty: by birth, by bad luck, and by some definition of choice. No one chooses to be poor, of course, but we all have that school friend or a distant relative who consistently made bad decisions (drugs, gambling, skipping school, excess spending, terrible relationship choices, etc) and ended up in a bad spot more or less as a consequence of that.
Individuals who think that all poor people only have themselves to blame are bozos, but pretending that no one ever bears personal responsibility for poverty is wrong too. If we're "schooling" someone who has a personal story like that, we're not going to make them see the light.
A better position is to say that yes, sometimes people mess up, but it's good for the society as a whole to improve the outcomes for "at-fault" crowd too. This requires tailoring the solutions, because not everything can be solved with cash.
When my grandparents talked about their childhood they talked about Nazi occupation, seeing childhood friends blown up, losing siblings, famine, and those types fun memories. Obviously a very different childhood than I and most people here had. Death may be the great equaliser, but a good ol' famine goes a long way in showing people that we're not so different, and that in the end we're all in it together. It's perhaps not surprising that solidarity was a much more important value for their generation.
The fact that many of us here have so much compared to others in our community however you define it is disturbing and not helpful information for our day to day lives so we do what we can to ignore it.
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23617188
Even broke, something as simple as a parking ticket is borderline life threatening. Id buy the McDonald’s 1$ drink with free refills and calorie load on that all day reusing the cup. He doesnt touch on the shame of it you feel esp in todays us culture.
I am lucky to get out of the cycle.
Paragraph level upvoting needs to be a thing.
What I ended up doing was finding a cheap place to live in a crappy area with a buttload of roommates, started searching for promotion at my job, got one, which gave me more financial leeway and time (more flexible schedule) to pursue a degree at a community college, which was free because of my income. From there I went to a good state school which was also free due to my income and did well and got a degree in CS and was hired by a professor's startup. This whole process took like 15 years of brutally difficult grinding.
A lot of people in my spot, that have "made it" (although I still bear the scars all over the place, and I am handicapped in habitual ways, especially financially, that I may never get over without hundreds of thousands of $ of therapy), will look down on people like this author for "not trying hard enough."
I think it's bullshit. I got extraordinarily lucky and had a streak of nothing too "bad" happening (didnt get a crippling illness, car mostly stayed good, grades stayed stable, didnt get laid off), plus innate talents not everyone has. I think it's a myth a lot of people tell themselves that they "made it" because they just worked hard enough. The truth a huge amount of the time is you got lucky. Hard work + luck yields opportunity, but not all opportunities pan out. My career may dead end because of AI and I may end up in the same spot again for all I know. All I can do is keep trying.
It's the official ideology of capitalist countries, to think that were all equal in the eyes of the govt and if youre not on the same economic level it must be cause you're fundamentally different/flawed.
It's a type of thinking that does not take into consideration peoples material reality (even their own) and manifests as narcissism and egotism in those who employ this thought.
It seeks to detach material reality from peoples life and simply judge based on merit, or a sort of spiritual value or other attributes. It is an idealist ideology.
To counter this idealist thought: I assure you, if you were me you'd be doing exactly what I'm doing. The real explanation for life is to look at the material basis of said life. Poverty is a hole full of material and psychological ills. Stress, coping mechanisms and just straight up lack of knowledge, lack of opportunities, lack of someone to teach you, lack of a proper learning environment, the psychological effects alone could kill a rich kid, let a lone the material ones.
This is a goal, not a claim.
> and if youre not on the same economic level it must be cause you're fundamentally different/flawed.
This is a complete non sequitur, and is nothing like classical liberal thought.
Them having a job (luckily), means they just about manage to fill that debt back at the end of the month, covering the debt and the small bank interest.
They end up paying the bank money bit by bit every month, yet they stay locked in that negative money pit.
It’s like being permanently broke, and it all started with one a bad month of extra payments…
Practically speaking as a 15 year old teenager I started 30k (56k) in today's dollars in the hole per year or my family went homeless and hungry.
The complete stupidity of people who think poverty and homelessness are in any way indicative of moral fiber, work ethic, discipline, etc. is undeniable.
Having now spent many years with the intelligencia, cocaine, DMT and crypto gambling class I must say.
The working poor are morally better than all of them and the majority of the homeless are too.
The moral value of the way any of these groups spend their first available 50k chunk in comparison to their wealthy counterparts is just vastly superior.
Maker geeks of all stripes are the only group I've seen that I can distinguish as interacting in a more meaningful ways.
Poverty is a multi factorial societal issue, no amount of mindset is enough to get you out alone but a vastly superior mindset IS required to get out and that's a failure of society because the wealthy are immoral and _don't want the competition and often times do want the cheaper labor._
It's a constant effort to widen the leverage gap.
The poor shouldn't have to have a vastly better mindset, grind, cognitive powers just to get to the baseline in a dead end job, we are crushing the best among us instead of ensuring that their above average capabilities are contributing to society at large, instead they are being used to get out of the hole we made for them.
It's not a permanent solution, but it's not a bad thing to do when you need to in order to pull ahead. For that matter, self study and personal advancement. It's hard to get into some jobs as an autodidact... I've been a software developer for going on three decades without a formal education. There are plenty of times I can't get through the HR screening alone. That doesn't mean you don't try, or don't put in effort to improve your position in life or yourself.
I get being broke and poor... I grew up relatively poor. It sucks. I also worked very hard to get where I am. It's not always where I want to be, but that's life to an extent. My opinions don't always align with everyone else though... I just don't like the idea of giving up, or not putting in extra effort when it's an option to pull you ahead.
I say this having spent about a year out of the past 3 years without regular income and massively in debt with medical issues I cannot cover, and cannot currently afford insurance (due to debt payments). It sucks, and I can't change the past... I can only put in the effort I need to improve the future.
I never had Netflix nor Spotify and I am not poor. I always thought that having Netflix and Spotify is some kind of luxury. Not a big one, but those services are not cheap, if you're on a tight budget.