Nowhere does this person say that they feel poor. If anything they are acknowledging they are well off, but wondering why they feel lost and unfulfilled in spite of their material prosperity. It's not exactly an unknown notion, that people can feel unhappy despite being financially and materially well-off.
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.
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.
Do you feel poor or do you feel not-rich? There's a difference, and not-rich = middle class. Poor is thinking twice before buying a pack of gum. Poor is hand making clothes out of scrap material. Poor is waiting on EBT before doing the grocery shopping.
That really sucks for your friend. But they exemplify the difference between broke and poor -- they were broke, in a bad spot; but I assume they're gainfully employed now and managing well (I hope).
I've never been able to articulate my own feeling about wealth and poverty. I've been objectively poor at some points in my life. I became vegetarian in my early 20s when I was travelling because I couldn't afford meat. Even then there were some weeks where I didn't eat for a few days because I had spent all my money for the week. It sounds bad, but being hungry taught me how to prioritise and I don't regret it.
In other times of my life, I have quit my job and spent half a year writing free software, or training karate -- without any income. I also spent 5 years living in a run down shack spending less than $10K a year, when I was teaching English in Japan.
By many measures, I was living in poverty because I had almost no income, or I was spending almost no money. But at no time in my life have I ever thought of myself as poor. I have always had money in the bank and I have never really been in debt. When I went hungry it was because I stupidly spent my food budget on beer (or something similar). I didn't have money for food, but I did have money.
Money is an option to buy things and for me the feeling of being rich is the feeling of always having that option. You can be happy with less things, I think. Nobody actually needs a yacht to be happy, or a big house, or a collection of vintage wine. But I think it is really hard to be happy when you have no options. It is even harder to be happy when you spend your options in the future and have to suffer with crushing debt -- possibly enslaved forever.
I could choose to be hungry. I could choose to give up my job and do something that paid no money. I could choose to move half way around the world and live in a shack teaching English. That's incredible wealth for me. That kind of wealth is available to many people, but I think that most people can't see it, unfortunately.
There are a couple things to understand about being poor.
It's not about lack of money (though obviously having lots of money means you're not poor). It's about insecurity. I grew up in farm country in the 1980s. Nobody had money, but I didn't feel poor. When I moved to other parts of the country, that's when I encountered poor people. They had to worry about crime, schools for their kids, and being homeless.
When you skip meals because you have to put two gallons of gas in the car so you can get to work the rest of the week, that's when you're poor. Or when you're under constant stress because you're worried about what's going to go wrong next, and when you spend all your time on stuff like where you'll spend your last $12 because that's all you've got. It's hard to understand what it's like to be poor because you don't even realize that's part of the deal.
The other thing is that there's a saying along the lines of getting wealthy being mostly the same for everyone, but every poor person is poor for different reasons. One example is a guy I knew in the 1990s that worked hard at a low-wage job. He got hit by a car while walking across the street. The driver got away and left him laying there. He couldn't work for months. The non-poor person's solution is to move in with their parents or to have their parents send them money. Maybe put things on the credit card. Maybe take money out of savings. He didn't have those options. How do you financially recover from something like this if once you go back to work, you're making the same low wage?
As someone from a poorer (not poor, we live in the UK and nobody is poor here) background, I can relate to some of this. But a lot of it is way off the mark. As I read further it sounded more and more like a woe is me piece.
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because nobody else ate the Hot Cheetos that were stocked in our free snack kitchen
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I couldn’t restrain myself from eating and drinking myself into an absolute sickness anytime they threw a party and expressed no limits on our consumption
That's not being poor. That's being fat.
> Payday was marked in all caps on my calendar, every biweekly occurrence, forever.
That's not being poor. That's being bad with money.
> I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because I wouldn’t dream of Ubering in.
That's not being poor. That's being good with money.
> I gave back the Macbook. I kept the headphones.
That's not being poor. That's being a thief.
Overall I think coming from a poorer background is great for happiness. My girlfriend is from a similar background. We really enjoy small things that other people would take for granted. We've surpassed the quality of life we had growing up easily, so everything else is a bonus. If I were to write an article like this, it would be because I felt sorry for the "not poor" people, not to make people feel sorry for me.
You can still be extremely happy while being poor. It just means that they are happy in spite of being poor. That does not mean that a poor person will choose to not become rich if given the chance.
It's hard to explain what life is like as a formerly very poor™ person to people who have never experienced it.
Like, every once in a while I get a craving for poverty comfort foods like ramen with frozen veggies, a slice of American cheese, and a sliced up microwaved hotdog.
Or trying to explain why it's so hard for me to let go of a 20 year old pickup truck that still works because I used to sleep in it.
Or how no matter how much money I earn now I always feel poor and one step away from homelessness.
How I won't go and buy new clothes, why I shop at thrift stores and pawn shops when I can afford new, how I don't feel like I own anything, why I always plan for and expect the worst out of every event and encounter I have, how I dedicate my self to working hard so that the places I work at can't "afford" to fire me, so much so that I have been accused of being an overworker and a slave driver.
On an income basis I'm probably at the top for my entire family right now, but years of homelessness and over a decade of extreme poverty have made their marks on my life and I don't know if it will ever get better. I could win the lottery and I'd still be cutting coupons and searching deal sites for discount codes, wearing discount clothes and shopping in pawn shops.
"Money doesn't buy happiness, but having no money can sure buy a lot of misery." On a related note, it really grinds my gears when I hear well-to-do young adults from middle class families say money doesn't matter when they've never struggled to pay rent or for basic medical care.
The author didn't talk about the difference between wealth and income. That, to me is a key distinction in understanding people's choices and possibilities. I'd call someone who lacks income, broke, and one who lacks access to resources, poor. The article merely talked about different degrees of lack of income.
Some of this is poor people stuff but some of it strikes me more as depression/low self-esteem. Of course one can lead to the other and that may be the case for the author, but it’s not only poor people who feel depressed or suffer with low self-esteem so some of it seemed out of place.
Obviously examples like the guy who didn’t notice his paycheque bouncing are a sign people around you are wealthy though.
Most people don't realize how well-off they are since in most cases, their income move at a similar pace to their expenses. A person making $500k may feel poor and complain to their peers simply on the basis that they are living in an area that is more expensive, eating an assortment of foods at a higher premium, buying a car 15x the average used car, etc.
This is not about not having basic needs poor, it's about being middle class and chasing riches, expensive cars, homes, clothes, thinking life is about this and it will bring you happiness. Rich people surely aren't qualified to know what it's like to be poor, but they sure are for what it's like being rich by definition. The message is don't expect happiness and meaning be solved by money. That's the point of reading e.g. Marcus Aurelius (arguably one if not the most powerful person of its time) and see what happiness and the meaning of life is when you have everything, so that we middle-class can profit from that wisdom and don't waste our life chasing false dreams.
A lot of people who have never been poor refuse to acknowledge that a lot of poor people are poor in large part because they make bad choices. I think it makes them feel better.
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.
> Being dirt poor means having no savings, or being in debt in which case you have negative savings
Exactly.
I hate to say it, because I've often heard it coming from very financially privileged people as an accusation towards poor people, but in essence being poor is a state of mind, meaning it's not necessarily the lack of money and financial means that gets to you (even though that's not ideal, of course), it is the constant thought of not having money and financial means that eats at your soul.
I know because me and my parents stumbled upon a period of quite severe lack of financial resources about 20-25 years ago, in my adolescence years, and even though I've personally and thankfully managed to get out of it (thanks to free uni education) the feeling is still there, I suspect it will always be there till the day I'll be no more.
And, yes, whenever someone writes poverty tourism pieces like this one Common People is the first song I think about. Often times I come back listening to it on YT and watching the video just because.
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