A homeless man who turned his life around by offering book reviews

We're also pretty sure now she also has a serious mental disorder as well. I doubt she'll ever hold down a job again in her life. Even if she gets clean.

And capacity. Many people on the street have serious health problems or other obstacles to productivity. I lack neither intelligence nor a work ethic, but I do have health problems. I have been homeless 5.5 years, though I blog, do freelance work, etc.

Edit: You also need opportunity. Being homeless can be a huge barrier to opportunity, both in practical terms and due to stigma. People don't want to hire homeless people.

Anyone interested in reading more on this topic, I rec. this book. It's about people who are near-homeless, not fully homeless, but it's one of the best things I've read on the topic. The author lived with the subjects for several years & does a superlative job of telling their story in that sort of explanatory way (not judgmental or absolving) that HN readers seem to appreciate.

https://www.amazon.com/Evicted-Poverty-Profit-American-City/...

(excerpt of the book here: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/08/forced-out)

It's a good story, and it inspires tons of people who are in bad situations, as well as people who are in good situations but are doing nothing with it. What more do you want? Solve global warming?

Don't turn this into "you can't always win just because you work hard" trope. This is a beautiful story that inspires people and that itself is powerful.

This is probably the most easily "treatable" condition.

Basically, you can be smart and motivated, but not have the resources (family, friends, money) to pull yourself together. You may not even have a computer, a car, or a house. You can't shave, let alone get a clean set of clothes or transport to an interview. You can't put together a resume and so on.

This is sad because a few months of housing, internet, food, and basically time support could turn this person's life around.

Of course, people who have mental illness or have paid their due for a crime and so on also deserve help. I am not arguing they don't.

I just mean that it costs so little for so much good in the former case.

What this guy did was "Anything but what was keeping him down."

And he's very fortunate that he was able to overcome his particular problem, addiction, on his own.

The key to problem 2 is to a) Intervene with yourself, or b) Get help to intervene with yourself, or c) Be fortunate that a kind soul or community intervenes on your behalf.

b) and especially c) are tough in today's developed, "don't look at them" world.

I know this is a stupid, and almost patronizing comment from me, but seriously, at this point in our society, every shred of humanity is meaningful.

That quote made it seem like no big deal for him to stop using drugs, but there are plenty of hard-working and reasonably intelligent people that are unable to do it.

He's definitely an outlier among the homeless population.

A story like this presents a way out of poverty and homelessness ... for a few people. Which is great, saving a single person is always a victory. But it doesn't scale.

I know this because I've been homeless. I'd say greater than 90% of the folks that I encountered in my homeless period were there because they were content to be there.

If they wanted to change their lot, there was more than ample opportunity to do so, between available services and working nearly ANY kind of job.

It took me about 4 months of working to get off the street.

Those two problem can be classified as:

1. Taking personal responsibility. 2. Not taking personal responsibility.

The moment you make up your mind that you are not responsible for your problem, you essentially remove any incentive to take action at your end. Essentially making it impossible for any real solution to work.

Im not saying people do not fail for reasons beyond their control. But if you do away the personal responsibility part, you permanently shut down the door for taking action from your end.

He could have stayed on the street had he not kicked his drug habit. I am amazed that your comment doesn't mention his drug addiction at all - he wasn't just "down on his luck".

That he got over his addiction without support is amazing, but let us not pretend that smart, hard-working individuals can't get addicted to drugs. If you have an addiction, please don't be afraid to get help.

I'm currently homeless. I chose this about 7.5 months ago, even though for part of this time I was employed full-time at $18/hour. I wanted to help my ex-wife with her rent after I moved out, and to put the rest of my money toward dental work, health care, health food, and relocation. I graduated with Research Honors with a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from a top university in my field in 1995. As an embedded software engineer at a fast-growing wireless telecom company, 1995-2000, I earned extra stock options for my performance, such that in 2000, when I resigned, the current valuation of just the options I forfeited was around $500,000. But now, now I am homeless. And I am finding the stress of it is dragging me down, such that it may become a vicious cycle if it isn't already.

A story like this tends to make people uncomfortable; especially, people seem to scramble to tell themselves that they and their loved ones cannot possibly share such a downward trajectory. I must have done some really stupid things in order to deserve this, right?

In a nutshell, I think that I did make some less than wise choices, but possibly not any of the ones that you are imagining. I did not develop a drinking problem, gambling problem, or any of the other moral faults that most people imagine. I also did not have a bad work ethic. In fact, one reason I resigned was that due to the huge incongruity between my work ethic and others judgments of me as they tried to figure out what I had stopped accomplishing much. Frankly, it hurt my feelings, and I was tired of being insulted, although I understood where they were coming from: Unless a medical professional labelled me as sick, a smart guy who has ceased to perform well must be lazy, right?

I could make a case that my work ethic was too good: I refused to be paid more than I thought I was worth, and I also decided at some point to focus on doing whatever work the market was under-valuing. This could have been good for humanity had I succeeded (it was a mooonshot I was attempting) but it was bad for me personally.

What happened to me? I would say that gradually and in stages (starting with a dad with poor anger management and moving 12 times by age 12, across states and internationally), I developed some kind of trauma syndrome, in the direction of PTSD if not that per se. If you have read about trauma, you may know that the effects can come on cumulatively and gradually. A few head injuries along the way may have helped, though all of them happened before I entered university.

This is also a story about the failure of health care. When the actual care didn't fail, the marketing of it did, such that it took me forever to identify trauma as the central problem. Before that I thought it might be "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome," but this didn't quite fit; my fatigue wasn't constant but more mental and triggered by challenging mental tasks; eventually I learned that CFS and Fibromyalgia are highly correlated with trauma and can be caused by it.

I am working on writing something about this, telling the whole story, or as much of it as can helpful to readers. I also seek worthwhile venues in which to publish it. The tension I sense is between finding sufficiently thoughtful readers and finding readers who won't be so sensitive to my horror story that they put on their protective blinders. I need readers who are willing to read honestly.

Still, it is nice to see people escape bad circumstances on their own, as long as we don't turn it into justification for selfishness.

He admits he had problems with drugs, and that his life spiraled out of control. Do I think we should have treatment programs so it doesn't get this bad? Yes, of course. But some people don't think there's a problem, or need help until they hit bottom. It's part of their problem. Many times you can't commit someone to treatment against their will, at least in the US.

In this complicated world, where we view everything through our own subjective lens (consciousness), we have to admit that the individual has a role to play. How do they frame their reality? Are they giving up? Do they just feel "down on their luck"? Do they have that will? Why do some people fail in the face of adversity and others succeed? Are they just having "a good time" (with drugs)? Is there a mental illness at play? Understanding the problem is key to solving it.

If someone has completely given up on making their life better, then they are basically choosing to be poor, because their mind has accepted there is no other choice (no matter how slim the chance of success). They may not have any other choice but to be poor, but to stop improving basically ensures it. Some people lose the will to live, while others do not. (This isn't just people in extreme poverty either, but poor people marginalized by society, or people that become poor after being rich)

Let me just run a parallel to another public health crisis - obesity. I'm fat. Always have been. But the big difference to me is consciously making the choice I'm going to do what it takes to get rid of it. We all know that exercising and eating are in our control, they are choices we make. They might be painful choices, but we have them. But when we convince ourselves it's not possible ("it's genetic", "i'll never be thin", "i lack the strength", etc), we do give up, and that's basically losing the battle before you start. Sure, we could blame everyone who's putting bad things in food, and selling us french fries, but we also know that they wouldn't be selling them if they weren't so good. And that we all have a choice of how many times we eat them. Even if we only made healthy food, some people would still eat too much. There's always personal choice at play. If anything, society is the culmination of people's personal choices on a macro scale.

Do I think we need to help the poor and provide services? Of course. But we also need to give them hope. A lot of people don't know the government services that could help them, because they aren't looking, or have given up. Just getting services to people is a challenge, and relies on people wanting to accept help, and being able to accept those services to help get them back on their feet, and giving them the tools to stay on the up and up.

"Helping secure legislation in the US, Canada and EU on transparency in the extractives sector to help fight corruption and ensure more money from oil and gas revenues in Africa is used to fight poverty."

and

"Successfully advocating for official development assistance, which has increased globally by $35.7 billion between 2005 and 2014."

It's pretty hard to draw the conclusion that they're some kind of bootstraps-only ideologues. Every time I see someone make a claim that an article about someone getting themselves out of poverty somehow implies that society doesn't owe the poor anything, I can't help but think it says more about the person making the complaint than it does about the article.

There's probably some kind of ideal form of government intervention that will take the most out of poverty; and then there's probably some form of minimalistic form of humane intervention for the hopeless.

Don't forget the myth that they could be mentally ill or just dumb having IQ below 70. Because bad things does not happen to good people.

Mental illness is the root of the problem. From homelessness to suicide rates to general well being, we need a better mental health care system in place.

I've been reading "Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging" by Sebastian Junger and it draws a pretty clear connection between what we consider a "successful person" and unhappiness. In essence, people were happier when they lived simpler lives in tribes, and as society grew to place value on financial/personal independence and move away from the tribe system of survival - people became more unhappy and mental illness/suicide rates rose.

The more we segregated people by wealth/social status, the more isolated people feel and mental illness rates creep higher and higher.

This article just reinforces the idea that only lazy/dumb people are homeless, and only those who "put in the work" deserve recognition.