>”I had everything I needed and wanted. I had all the resources I required to do well at school too, so I never felt underprivileged there either.”
This is written by someone who doesn’t understand that they were not poor.
Poor is only eating 3/7 days a week.
Poor is not owning pyjama’s, underwear or socks.
Poor is not having school books, and stationary.
Poor is being excluded from community events and activities because you cannot afford to participate.
Shit it irks me when people who haven’t lived poor try to explain how it’s just a matter of perspective.
Even people who decide they’re going to be homeless for a while by choice to you know, have that lived experience so they can say they know what it’s like make me grr, like if it’s ever a choice on any level you just don’t know what it’s like.
Poor is a fuzzy word that could mean many different things. I think what you are describing could be understood as "poverty" while what OP described could be understood as poor.
I think OP's point is that wealth isn't requisite for a fulfilling life. If you have a good home life, a community, and enough money for the essentials, you can live a "rich" life.
Sure wealth isn’t a requisite for a fulfilling life, but it’s pretty clear that OP wasn’t actually poor.
If you have a good home life, a community and enough money for the essentials (and everything you want - according to OP) you’re not poor.
People seem to be using simple financial metrics to define poor/poverty. They don't seem to understand that someone with 1000usd/mo (in the US) that chooses that lifestyle (usually has a decently supportive family structure to fall back on) is drastically better off than someone earning 1500usd/mo, that has two kids to clothe/feed and has zero opportunities to escape the cycle whereby the beater car that is all they can afford breaking down is a make or break it situation.
Maybe because poverty is mostly a relative concept/status/whatever? i.e. I'd bet I'm relatively poor compared to many people from there, or even from my own country (Living in an impoverished neighborhood on a suburb from a third world city, don't own a house or a car, haven't ever left my country nor even my state in more than 30 years, I've never been how paid vacations feels like...) but definitely am not poor compared to what I was 10-15 years ago, or compared to several people from my own neighborhood.
Surely if OP has all of their basic needs covered isn't poor for most people, but maybe some wealthy person can ponder them like they actually are.
Maybe because poverty is mostly a relative concept/status/whatever?
No, actual poverty involves physical survival being uncertain, it involve fear and the pain of hunger and the pain of other things related to an uncertain existence (untreated health problems, physically carrying the limit stuff you possess around, etc).
The term is poverty. Which poor definitely encompasses!
As always, 'need' and 'want' are somewhat up for debate.
Is medical care a need, or a want? For most of the world (by numbers), it's a want.
Is dental care a need, or a want? For most of the world (by numbers), it's a want.
Is a roof over your head that you own (or have control over anyway) a need or a want? For most of the world (by numbers), it's a want.
Is physical safety (reasonably free from random assault and physical violence) a need or a want? Depending on your region of the world, its a want.
Is a diet with meat and/or flavor a need or a want? Depending on your region of the world, it's a want.
Is schooling/formal education a need or a want? (and to what level?)
Depending on your region of the world, it's a want.
Etc.
But nothing in the article described someone who was even close to poor, let alone in poverty from my experience. Just not well off or rich, by American standards.
By most of the world's standards (by land area especially!) they were describing upper middle class.
Humans can survive on very little, and the basic level of objective 'need' is faaar below what HN might consider humane. So it's hard to draw a concrete or objective line.
If you were living in the Netherlands anywhere in the past 50-60 years, none of the things you’ve described would be ‘wants’, they would all be described as needs. And needs provided for by the state regardless of income at that (housing is a bit iffy at the moment).
Given that regardless of how much money you have you’d have access to all of those, how would you define poor?
What the OP describes is what my definition of poor was while growing up. There were simply no people around that had less than we had.
Of course by comparison with any country in Africa we were all filthy rich, but that’s not really a useful comparison to make. In the context we were living we were poor.
You might have been at the lowest income level, but society ensured you met no reasonable definitions of the word, correct?
You had what you needed, even by the high standards of the society you were in.
That is a good thing.
Very few societies (now or historically) are able to do that, let alone willing.
So I'd just say you were doing ok. Or comfortable.
Just because you didn't have anyone handy at any given moment to point at and say 'hey look, they have even less than we do!' doesn't mean you were poor. It just means you were less rich. There is a difference.
By that definition nobody is poor, which makes the word kind of useless, which means the definition changes. Which is definitely not how people think of themselves (as OP so helpfully told us).
I was wondering if this is just a case of a different definition for the word poor, and I find that the equivalent word in Dutch (arm) is defined as: “Not having a lot of something, especially money.” Which was definitely the case.
Whereas in English it’s: “of insufficient quantity to meet a need”, which was not.
There’s a different Dutch word (armoede) that indicates much more far reaching poverty, which has an almost equivalent definition to the English ‘poor’: “situation in which one does not have enough to live”
Poverty in English is: “the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions” which seems more equivalent to poor.
You said - you did not lack for the necessities. Not even housing! Nor schooling. Nor food. Not healthcare. Nor basic entertainment. Nor safety. Not even by the standards of the area, which were high. And it wasn’t at risk - it was a stable and reliable thing.
Poor people do lack these things. It’s part of the definition. I know, I’ve been there.
And I wasn’t very poor (but poor - issues with clothing, food, healthcare, housing sometimes), but I had friends who were very poor. Some didn’t end up growing up because of it. Some ended up growing up in a way they’re still in jail.
You were just in a very well protected bubble, which is awesome. But almost no one else is.
If you go to any society that isn’t in that kind of bubble (China, India, most of the US, Eastern Europe, Russia, 95% of Africa and South America), the difference is obvious. You were in a place that that ‘cliff’ just didn’t exist. Society pulled out all the stops and filled it in with cement.
Which is awesome for you!
Some of us grew up staring over that Cliff every day though, and that is where this discussion is coming from. Most people (even/especially rich people) in those societies are acutely aware of its existence, even if they work hard to stay very far away from it.
There is a line where needs aren’t possible to get met. Where it’s a hard, sometimes fast downward spiral to actual death, imprisonment, etc.
Where it’s a constant desperate scramble to have the basics necessary to survive, and often some of them just aren’t there sometimes, but they show up somehow just enough you somehow make it through. But man does it suck.
And that’s not even talking about actual poverty. Or what happens when a primary caregiver gets cancer. Or ODs.
I understand the point you're making, but it's probably best to avoid gatekeeping, especially when it comes to an inexact term like "poor".
"Living in poverty means not being able to afford medical care or access to basics such as electricity, shelter, and food. Improper nutrition can cause stunting and wasting, permanently impacting children’s development. Poverty in countries lacking access to clean water and sanitation leads to the spread of preventable diseases and unnecessary deaths, particularly of children."
I think it's probably going to do more harm than good trying to gatekeep the status of "poor" against any but the most egregiously out-of-touch claimants. E.g. asserting near-literal starvation as a prerequisite is just antagonistic to no useful end.
About 10% of US households experience food insecurity [0] — and that overlaps very heavily with the poorest US families, who have 32% experience food insecurity.
I’m pretty comfortably saying that if you always had enough food as a family, you were lower middle-class, not poor.
No. I was lower-middle class in a country with a social safety net, and the day my mother broke her car and had to fix it, we ate potatoes and were handed vegetable for months by a local producer, and we had to cut them because they were all partially rotten (but free!). Luckily my grandmother gave us eggs and milk regularly (yeah, countryside boy here, bite me), so we never missed on vitamins nor proteins, but each time we had cheese at school i was in heaven. The same thing happen in a city with less family support, and we would have been hungry (or at least would have suffered from deficiencies).
If all your needs are being met and you aren't personally struggling, then you aren't poor. This isn't gatekeeping. It's simply not what being poor actually is.
Yeah the linked post rubbed me the wrong way too. I don't know anyone who grew up poor who didn't know they were poor. Not being able to afford vacations or nice things isn't a sign of being poor
Being poor is dealing with housing instability, untreated mental illness, not calling 911 during likely medical emergencies, not being able to afford gas or bus fare to go to work, and generally catastrophe after catastrophe. People around you are also dealing with various catastrophes: abuse, imprisonment, alcoholism and addiction, and loss after loss after loss.
Being poor is traumatic. Even after you claw your way out of that hole, into a comfortable life funded by a comfortable tech salary, you never feel quite secure. You keep waiting for that next catastrophe to hit, and to be back in another job where you have to ask permission to use the bathroom or plead for time off to attend a funeral.
> Being poor is traumatic. Even after you claw your way out of that hole, into a comfortable life funded by a comfortable tech salary, you never feel quite secure. You keep waiting for that next catastrophe to hit, and to be back in another job where you have to ask permission to use the bathroom or plead for time off to attend a funeral.
Excellent point.
A related trait I've seen from some people who've made (or are making) an economic class leap up is that they're accustomed to soldiering through tough and unjust situations.
For example, imagine some really awful situation that shouldn't be happening, in a workplace or school or housing or safety or bureaucracy or similar.
Someone of more fortunate history might react like "WTF?! This is not OK! I don't even know what to do with this, other than get a lawyer!"
But the person who's been through many situations they shouldn't have been through, is desensitized to the injustice, and just getting through it somehow is familiar, so that's where their energy goes. (I don't think it's only fear of the next catastrophe, though that might also be a factor.)
The person with the "WTF?!" reaction, who demands their rights (and maybe has the family money to back it up) will probably have a better outcome from the unacceptable situation, and less stress and misery along the way.
> Being poor is dealing with housing instability, untreated mental illness, not calling 911 during likely medical emergencies, not being able to afford gas or bus fare to go to work, and generally catastrophe after catastrophe. People around you are also dealing with various catastrophes: abuse, imprisonment, alcoholism and addiction, and loss after loss after loss.
This take on being “poor” bothers me tremendously, because it equates being poor to something near sub-human or nearly irredeemable, and that’s an unfortunate take.
Except for the warm home environment and blissful ignorance of circumstances, the environment I grew up in was in many ways similar to the OP.
Medical issues were catastrophic, affordability of housing was at whim of landlords, and public transit was a real expense.
The financial strain was palpable but that didn’t mean our family or our immediate circle were criminals or drug abusers; but it did strain the stability of the family considerably.
> Being poor is traumatic. Even after you claw your way out of that hole, into a comfortable life funded by a comfortable tech salary, you never feel quite secure.
It is, because I certainly live this trauma daily and in many of my life choices, but by your measure I wouldn’t have been considered “poor”.
Tech had been good to me—I liked it when it was still a low-paying career and few considered Comp Sci as a major—but a more secure environment and I would have had a far more financially secure and comfortable life.
> This take on being “poor” bothers me tremendously, because it equates being poor to something near sub-human or nearly irredeemable, and that’s an unfortunate take.
With all due respect, equating these things with “sub-human” or “irredeemable” is something you’ve done, not something the original commenter did.
I don’t view being an alcoholic or someone imprisoned as sub-human or irredeemable. We grew up poor and many people in my family suffer from these catastrophes, but they aren’t sub-human or irredeemable.
These things happen to everyone, but they happen more frequently to those in poverty.
> Being poor is dealing with housing instability, untreated mental illness, not calling 911 during likely medical emergencies, not being able to afford gas or bus fare to go to work, and generally catastrophe after catastrophe
I think the dissonance is that this really only happens in the US. At least it’s not a thing in mainland Europe.
You can be poor while still having everything you need (even if others were more poor than you).
I grew up poor, but didn’t realize it until adulthood, because we had everything we needed. I rarely got new clothes, mostly wearing hand me downs or thrift shop purchases. We had food 7 days a week, but in the winter when dad was laid off from his construction job and worked part time where he could, someone from the church would drop off a big food box every week (as a child, I thought everyone got that box). The same church sponsored a Santa Clause that delivered gifts to us at Christmas time (mostly practical things like clothing, shoes, etc). At school I got a packet of free lunch tickets every week from the teacher, while almost all of the rest of the class had to bring in a check or cash from home. We did have family vacations in the summer which were almost always a tent camping trip to a state park within driving distance, dad still went to work from that vacation spot. Eventually he worked his way up the ranks at work to a better paying year round job and we move firmly into the middle class, but until grade 6 or so, we were definitely what I’d call poor.
These comments make me so angry. I can't properly articulate why. But I hate "you don't know what it's like - there are people POORER THAN YOU - you are not allowed to speak of POOR if you have not gone days without eating".
I can very well feel poor without being homeless and starving. I don't claim to know what it's like to be homeless and starving, but I sure as hell Feel Poor.
If you're eating 7/7 days a week, but what you're eating is mostly white rice and beans and your entire family lives in one room of an apartment shared with three other families, you're poor.
Pure caloric intake is not a good way of judging poverty in the developed world because calories are so cheap relative to everything else.
The point of the gp imo isn't that poverty is only absolute calorie limits but that there are levels of poverty that aren't "relative" or "a feeling" but an objective, miserable situation. Poverty involves a chronic lack of basic human needs, these are often described as food, clothing and shelter but they also include health care, physical safety, the ability leave abusive situations and so-forth.
I think if you’re genuinely poor, you do feel it. It’s a level of instability that just fundamentally undermines your sense of security on multiple levels (food security, job security, health security etc).
Sure there are those that cannot afford the frills in life, or they have to occasionally make sacrifices in order to make ends meet. Even wealthy people probably have times of financial difficulty if they have some unexpected financial loss, or a massive unforeseen bill forcing them to sacrifice a few of their luxuries or whatever, but when you’re actually poor, you have nothing left to sacrifice, you have nothing to fall back on, you end up walking a fine line of making difficult choices of whether to buy food to feed your kids, or pay the electricity bill to keep them warm (and you can’t have it both ways), and your mindset is about surviving the next week, there’s no planning for the next month, there’s no contingency planning for what if the car breaks down.
I think that’s what people don’t get.
I understand that the middle class can experience hardship, but I firmly believe there is a distinction between middle class hardship and being actually poor, and that’s not because I want to “gatekeep” poor or undermine other people’s experiences of hardship (because at the end of the day it’s all relative) but the OP who wrote this was not writing from a position of ever having truely been poor, because when all your needs are met, and you have the things you want, and you have the luxury of poor just being a matter of perspective, you’ve not really experienced poor.
People also attack people living in poverty for making poor decisions, but if you are poor, your entire brain is overwhelmed with thoughts of survival. Of course poor people are going to make poor decisions because they are not given the opportunity to think about anything else other than survival.
I think we could consider poor as having all of your needs but none of your wants. And if you have all of your needs and all of your wants, then you are absolutely not poor. I agree with you. You cannot 'be poor but not feel it'.
While it is true that children may not realize they are living in poverty, when they grow up, they look back and then realize the conditions. I can see the point of someone saying they never realized they were poor growing up, but if they look back, they must realize that they felt it but did not realize it at the time.
I absolutely agree with this. You do not need to homeless to be living in severe poverty, but poor people feel poor. To your point about 'choosing to experience homeless', going homeless by choice is called camping.
People claim, "I did not feel poor even if I could not afford the designer clothing..." Like, we are not talking about designer clothing. We are talking about basic clothing. Shoes that do not fit. We are talking about food. Never, never, never going to the doctor unless you are literally dying -- perhaps a broken bone being the only exception... maybe.
Interestingly, things are much better now than in the past for many. Even rural communities are often given the opportunity to have basic necessities. Some families act too proud to accept assistance, but they really should if they have children. They must humble themselves to accept the assistance that is provided because that is the whole point. They reap the benefits now to get themselves back on their feet so they can contribute to others that will also need it.
I see so many people act like they are going to starve if they do not eat two or three meals PER DAY. Yet, they have never actually known true hunger in their life.
Here’s a question I’ve lived: what if you live in comically
impoverished conditions such that the elements you’ve described are mitigated? Squatting in a half collapsed 1970 single wife trailer with raccoons sleeping on your futon couch.
The schooling is there, the meals are there, but you’re living a life so embarrassing you don’t mention it. Is that poor?
Yeah man, that’s poverty.
The thing about poor/poverty is that it completely shapes your frame of reference. Sometimes you don’t even know how impoverished you really are, just like how privileged people often don’t understand how privileged they are.
But I think, if you’re so embarrassed by your living conditions you don’t mention it, I’d say you’re poor, and you know you’re poor too, by virtue of the fact that you feel embarrassed - not that I think people should be embarrassed about being poor, it’s not a signal of some moral failing as a human being (in my opinion).
There are a few definitions of being homeless depending on the frame of reference. For a number of years I lived in a busted up unrentable storefront and it was certainly not by choice. It certainly fit a few of the government definitions of poverty and/or homelessness that are out there.
Being poor, being homeless, etc is a fuzzy thing in its nature. It’s not just being without everything.
My personal definition of being poor is having to make trade offs between food, shelter, and safety where you’re going without one or more on a regular basis.
I didn’t sleep in a bed, the place I slept in would pour buckets of water when it rained, it was cold in the winter, and the neighborhood could be unsafe at times. I didn’t go hungry since I always had the money for a $1 package of pasta and a $1.50 can of tomato sauce. I was able to go to school because my specific version of homelessness matched one that California recognized in order to waive tuition.
Ultimately life worked out for me.
15 years later I feel stressed for money due to all the asks my family makes of me, but I never feel poor.
And until I was homeless I didn't even know what being homeless was like.
For instance -- people say "there are millions of shelters! why are people living in tents?!" -- and I wondered the same thing. But then you go to a shelter and honestly, it is horrible for most people in shelters. Not only are you absolutely surrounded by people who (sadly) suffer from a slew of addictions and mental illness and want to steal from you, or fight you, or drag you into their endless drama, but the rules and regulations at shelters are so onerous that it makes prison seem like a holiday camp.
I now understand why people set up in a tent. They can support themselves, and be by themselves, and that agency is not to be under-rated.
Just because there’s grades of poor, does not mean the family eating rice 5/week out of a small apartment so they can afford school materials is not.
Someone making $100/month is poor, and someone making $1000/month is also poor, even though they can afford wildly different standards of living, simply because 99% of people earn more.
Yes. Jeff Bezos parents gave him a loan of $245,573, in 1993 money to start Amazon. This indicates that he grew up if not very wealthy, but solidly on the upper side of middle class. Growing up poor he would've probably not had the opportunities to get into Princeton (statistically), so probably would have had a harder time breaking in the hedge fund industry, giving him less cash on hand, and probably wouldn't have started Amazon. Maybe growing up poor he could have, but its more likely as a smart ambitious poor person, he'd have gone to whatever school gave him a good scholarship, and then ended up as an Engineer or some other safe profession and landed middle class.
He might have not founded Amazon if he was poor, but that's not a question anyone was asking.
The overwhelming majority of people, if they were given $245,573 in 1993, would not go on to build a trillion-dollar company. What Bezos accomplished was extraordinary, whatever way you look at it.
Yes, but he had safety nets upon safety nets to take risks. Of course, the more likely outcome is that he would have been ok but not a billionaire, but he had the luxury of aiming high because he would still be ok if he failed.
> > Would you say a person like Bezos would remain poor
> Yes. ... but its more likely as a smart ambitious poor person, he'd have gone to whatever school gave him a good scholarship, and then ended up as an Engineer or some other safe profession and landed middle class.
So by yes you mean...no. Unless middle class is now poor?
Anyone whose parents can give them a quarter of a million dollars as essentially fun money is so far divorced from reality than actual middle class people that it's hilarious to even attempt to make that comparison.
By the time Bezos started Amazon, he was already an SVP at DE Shaw, so he certainly could have found the money somewhere else. His mom had him as a teenager and his adoptive father was a Cuban refugee. That said, his grandfather was quite wealthy.
Someone with extremely valuable skills and knowledge? No, of course not. Even assuming he somehow didn’t know anybody from when he was rich, he’d know where to find people to talk to, and what to say, to start getting enough money to stop being poor pretty fast.
There was a popular submission to HN a few years ago that really opened my eyes to how having a low income can cause problems to compound, making things exponentially worse.
An example the author gives of this is car problems: people with low incomes often have older cars that are more likely to have issues. If their car breaks down, there's a chance they can't afford repairs, which means they're unable to commute to work. Perhaps because of this, they choose to stop making water bill payments or buying as much food while saving for repairs. Everything is very precarious—you're essentially one or two unlucky incidents away from ruin. That, to me, is what it means to "be poor" in the US.
Also, people in these situations use loans to pay for things like repairs, or for other things they need to buy if the paycheck has to go to repairs. If you've ever wondered why anyone would use a point-of-sale loan for groceries, this is one reason: to free up cash for something urgent that they can't use a loan for, like car repair from a shade tree mechanic in the neighborhood.
Since there are often multiple things stacked up that are slightly less urgent that you might expect they'd use savings for, there's no way in this life to get ahead enough to have savings. Something will always come along (if not for you, for your family or a close friend) that you must use those savings for, should you have them, but which you could scrape by without or using a loan if you didn't have savings. This results in a lot of poor people having no habit of savings or aggressively paying down debt, which imparts difficulty in climbing out of this cyclic trap once they do get a better job.
This is a good article, but to me, it illustrates well how the concept of a “middle class” has practically dissapeared in our culture. Is being “not rich” the same as being poor? The article doesn’t describe the childhood of a rich kid, but it doesn’t describe the childhood of somebody poor either. Perhaps this is an interesting consequence of the inequality we’re living in, we forget there’s actually an in-between that could be (perhaps?) a nice thing to also aspire for.
This reminds me of the University of Chicago Law professor who wrote a post about how he wasn't rich because after paying for three kids to go to private school, a gardener, a house cleaner, and retirement he only has a few hundred dollars of discretionary spending left each month... https://web.archive.org/web/20100920033403/truthonthemarket....
Part of the issue is that there are drastically different types of experiences, with different causes and different solutions, that are put under the umbrella of poverty. For example, the author states:
> when it was time to go home, it was simply a return to the warm space that I shared with my family.
It's good that he could do that. But that opportunity doesn't exist for people who not only don't have a warm space to return to, but may not have any permanent space to return to, and may not even have a family.
> Many of my neighbors also worked in the same catering company as my mom, which meant that there was an aura of familiarity that connected us all.
Again, it's wonderful that he has such memories. Even those of us who were never poor might find something enviable about that. But in some areas of concentrated poverty, the idea of many neighbors working at all is a non-starter, much less many neighbors working together. Or if there are jobs, they aren't catering jobs, they're dangerous work like mining and meatpacking, which leave wounded casualties in their wake who then become additional burdens on meager familial resources.
So one thing that rubs me the wrong way a bit is the way the author is basically saying "adjust your thinking and you won't feel poor." And while that might be good advice for people who can't afford luxuries, it's not so helpful for people who can't afford basic necessities like food and a roof over their heads.
One thing to note is that sounds like writer's family was not time poor, IE, family had enough time to ensure structure for the kids. Many families from low to moderate income levels seem to lack the time and wherewithal to manage this, often in ways that seem externally inscrutable.
I never even knew I was poor when I was a kid. I didn't have a bathroom in the house, just a toilet outside and a tin bath to wash in outside too. It didn't even register that other people had bathrooms. I had everything I needed. I had some computer books (no computer) and a pile of Lego, and I was GOOD.
I've been a millionaire twice.
Now I'm even poorer. I get all my food from the food pantries, and I own literally nothing. I've been reduced to zero. But I'm not unhappy! Someone was kind enough to put a roof over my head and I have an Internet connection and an IDE and I can crank out code all day until one day when I return to middle-class and can buy some decent coffee again.
Rich and poor are relative terms. Anyone reading this comment can feel rich in certain rooms and poor in others. There is only 1 person in the entire world that is the richest person they know.
My takeaway from this post is that how someone feels about being rich or poor is something they can control and it might be better to not feel poor most of the time.
Being poor (or not) has some objective level, but is mostly about the surroundings that a person finds themselves in. Feeling poor also needs to account for an individual's past. I've had times where I was flush with cash and those situations raised the bar for feeling rich vs poor for my present & future self.
I have a warm, dry nice place to live. I have food & security but I don't have the newest fad car or newest fad fashion. SO WHAT, I'm sure i'll get over it lol. I keep up with nobody but myself thanks.
Amen. I have a cold, dry place to live. But someone was kind enough to buy me a sleeping bag yesterday, so now I am warm. I have enough food to feed myself and not go hungry, which is a big improvement from being in jail lol.
Wealth disparity seems more tangible to me. If you grow up in a city that was transformed by tech but weren’t able to make the switch to computing, you can’t afford to live there any more, you have move. If your job was lost to automation, you’ve objectively lost your healthcare.
On paper, being poor is living close to the poverty line. But that line is calibrated for political reasons to be much lower, to lower the amount of people considered poor and to make governments look better.
> Our apartment was small, my mom prepared food for a tiny catering company, and my dad was abroad trying to get his small business off the ground. By all financial measures, we were poor.
A family with dual income that can afford for one member to live abroad while starting their small business isn't what most people would call poor. At best they were lower middle class en route to upper middle class.
Fuck "feeling poor". This is what poverty is like.
Poverty is going to work every day knowing that you are getting further behind not ahead and still sticking it out and busting your ass because if you lose your job your life is going to crater. Poverty is losing the home you bought because even though their is a government loan to catch you up you can't afford a lawyer to fight them to make them give you a pile of essentially free money to get your loan straight. Poverty is keeping your family together anyway and moving across the country to stay with family members.
Poverty is having your car break down and instead of going to the mechanic walking home 6 miles at 1AM for months. Poverty is starting that walk at 2AM because you spent an hour drinking coffee in the break room working up the motivation to walk after spending 8-10 hours doing physical labor. Poverty is borrowing a shopping cart from the grocery store a mile away so you can take your groceries home and letting your kid ride in it both laughing as you cruise through puddles in the rain then walking your purloined cart all the way back.
Poverty is getting harassed by the cops solely because you are out late at night and stopped for the 3rd time until you start thinking like a criminal and planning routes around them as if trying to get home was a crime. Poverty is getting arrested for using a bad world while walking away and not being able to afford a lawyer and having to write your own appeal.
Poverty is renting a cabin in the woods barely 200sq ft for 4 people with no running water and enjoying the scenery instead of bitching about whose turn it is to bring a bucket of water in.
Poverty is going on a fishing with your father after you came back home still waiting for the free asthma medication from the manufacturers patient assistance program to come through and laughing at his description of his clip on sunglasses as the "dorkmaster 2000s" instead of thinking about the fact that without medication you can't walk up a hill without feeling like you are going to asphyxiate and dreaming you are suffocating because you in fact are. Poverty is not asking for the money to cover them out of pocket because it costs $400 and nobody has that.
Poverty is living in a moldy apartment building with druggies because its cheap. Poverty is waiting years for your building to fix the mold issue in the walls that is leaking into the apartment because the building claims its not "that kind of mold" because the contractor call smell the bad kind of black mold until you actually get a sample so you can have it tested by a lab to prove it is in fact the kind of black mold that makes you sick.
Poverty is living in a building which a local drug dealer or some other unknown malefactor has tried to burn down twice in a row and instead of moving organizing patrols of the hallways at night to sweep for scumbags and helping set up a buddy system to get the disabled folks out if the alarm goes off and ultimately dealing physically with the probable culprit in the courtyard when he attacked a neighbor. Poverty is the cops accusing YOU of a crime for defending your neighbor.
Attitude is important. How you tell yourself your own personal narrative is important. Positively is important. But life doesn't give two shits if you "feel" poor. Poverty leads to factual privation and struggle and for a lot of folks its not a transitory heroes journey where our protagonist must pay his dues. Instead its a trap that many folks spend their entire life fighting and never quite leaving.
For myself I'm still fighting the tar and have no intention on being interred here but I also have no illusion that its a matter of not "feeling poor" It's a cold question of resources and effort not an emotional one.
>”But here’s the thing: I never felt poor.”
>”I had everything I needed and wanted. I had all the resources I required to do well at school too, so I never felt underprivileged there either.”
This is written by someone who doesn’t understand that they were not poor.
Poor is only eating 3/7 days a week. Poor is not owning pyjama’s, underwear or socks. Poor is not having school books, and stationary. Poor is being excluded from community events and activities because you cannot afford to participate. Shit it irks me when people who haven’t lived poor try to explain how it’s just a matter of perspective. Even people who decide they’re going to be homeless for a while by choice to you know, have that lived experience so they can say they know what it’s like make me grr, like if it’s ever a choice on any level you just don’t know what it’s like.