A more distant but very wealthy family member once said that people wouldn't be so poor if they just saved up money. That perfectly illustrated the difficulty rich people have understanding poor people to me.
I was really young, but that really stuck with me.
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.
Since he compared to Billionaires, I think he means poor in resources (as you have no abundance); but probably someone who has enough resources not to worry about a meal or housing.
Perhaps because he likes the idea of poverty being a pit that's progressively harder to dig your way out of. Don't have the money to pay for the road access which will get you to your job? Should've thought about that and been rich in the first place!
In his defense, he's really comparing ~$200k to ~$400k, not poverty to $400k. Beyond a certain point, the more money you have, the less extra money matters.
Do people really think poor people choose to be so? Nobody wants to be poor.
That no one wants to be poor is obvious enough, but it's hardly the same as whether or not they choose to be. The poorest person I know has an IQ of 186 and a PhD in chemistry. He chooses to live on government disability and not work, even though he's quite capable of doing so. But he he shares a quality I've noticed in all of the poor people I know personally: a belief the world owes him a living. Everything in his screwed-up life is someone else's fault, never his, no matter how much damage he inflicts on others.
That isn't all poor people, but it's a lot of them.
Somebody on Quora once wrote beautifully about how it's impossible for the rich to ever understand what it's like to be truly, horribly poor- because there is no escape. There is no safety. The writer described how, even when he was in dire straits, at the back of his mind he knew that he could count on maybe extended family or something or someone to pull him out of trouble. The poor have no such privilege. True despair means being truly, completely cut off.
So there's really very little a rich person can do to walk in the shoes of a poor person- because even if say, Bill Gates gave away ALL his fortune and got himself into crippling debt or something- at least some people will recognize that he's Bill Gates, and treat him differently for it.
No simple solutions to offer here, just saying dis shit is complex.
I'm richer than the poor people the article alludes to, I grew up poor.
I can't give you any advice until I know why you don't want to be poor. What would be different in the world where the poor person in question (you?) wasn't poor?
I think a billionaire knows better about that.
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