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Comment by docbrown | Hacker News Reader

Growing up in poverty is much more than just going hungry every night. Poverty consumes each person that lives inside of it and strips them of their own individual identity. As the author said, if you look at the faces of people around you long enough, you will start to see pain, fear, uncertainty, and many more unspoken emotions that is tied to poverty.

Poverty makes a person begin questioning what it is they did in their life that brought them to this low of a point. Ignoring all of the economic reasons and social standings, poverty makes the person believe they are incapable of ever achieving anything more. It is when that same person begins to actually feel as if they can escape poverty that they also begin to have stronger fears of insecurity. For many, they feel as if they do not belong in a higher bracket. Trailer parks, frozen foods, and generic brands are all they ever knew and it’s all they should ever have.

Being around those with money who have never experienced this lack of worth is a terrible time for those who came from poverty. In their eyes, if they were given the opportunity to be so comfortable in life, they would do anything they could to spread joy to anyone who walked through their door. But for many families, a fridge full of groceries is common; an abundance of snack choices for your guests is nothing out of the ordinary. For those in poverty, this sense of wanting to give back to those who may need it more than you is something that is learned through hardship and life experiences.

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I had the opposite experience growing up poor (although knew plenty of people who feel as you did). For me, I constantly felt that my situation was "wrong" and didn't fit me. I didn't want to eat frozen food or wear K-Mart sneakers, I thought I deserved better. It pushed me to fight hard to achieve what I considered a reasonable standard of living. Had I taken the advice or followed in the footsteps of those around me, it never would have happened. Instead I focused on my love of computers (even if it existed more in my head than real life since we couldn't afford one for a long time). That focused carried me out of poverty and then some.

I'm convinced some subset of poor people that are high achievers will always reject their environment and refuse to settle.

I couldn't agree more. I fall squarely into this camp. I grew up with a father in prison and a school teacher mother that had to work 3 jobs to provide for myself and my three brothers. I always knew I could do better, and now I run a multi-billion dollar organization. I just knew I wanted more for myself.

My bigger concern now is how to raise up my four kids so that they come out motivated, hungry, willing to work, etc. I believe struggled makes great people, my kids won't know that type of struggle - fingers crossed. I ran the crucible, they won't... what does that mean for them?

I grew up similar - never thinking I’d have the same life forever. I’m certainly not as well off as I’d like to be yet, but I’m starting to get my life ready to have kids (4 or 5 years out I’d guess), and I’m already worried about spoiling them too much. I mean the entire motivation has been to start a family that didn’t have to have the same issues.

Would love to read something from a similar background and how they navigate raising self-motivated, but well taken care of kids.

> I believe struggled makes great people

It also crushes the rest, who might not be gifted or lucky enough to catch a break, despite their continual efforts. Not to disregard your circumstances, but humans irrationally see patterns in randomness. As a counter point: wealth also makes great people (pick any noted 16-19th century scientist, and there's a good chance they were wealthy & could afford to dick around long enough to discover fundamental laws. Alternatively, look at political, startup and corporate leadership)

True, it depends on the person. However, I think that trials, whether given by unfortunate circumstances or wise parents, give you an opportunity to improve in ways that simple wealth never could.

Struggle isn't noble. Struggle isn't a shortcut to character development. Struggle isn't something you should wish on anyone. Struggle is just struggle.

Plenty of people struggle. And plenty of people are assholes. There's plenty of overlap.

I've felt both extremes. As a child growing up in poverty, I felt my intellect didn't match the situation I found myself in. I remember being deeply angry watching other children squander opportunities/resources I would have taken 110% advantage of. As a young adult I based some (not all, but enough) of my life decisions on "what the hell do I need to do to ensure I am never in this situation again?"

Yet also as a reasonably successful adult, I still never entirely feel secure in my class position. Sometimes it's hard for me to tell whether I'm being responsibly frugal or still living in a mindset that I can't afford nice things. Or if I do buy something high end then I question if I actually splurged because of a mindset of not being able to hold onto money, if that makes sense.

My sister went to university in another city. I decided to get a software job immediately with 18 because I have a mental illness that prevents me from performing well in academia. I was still living with my mom. 3 years later she comes back. Turns out she lied and she didn't even take a single exam and my mom had to return thousands of € in child support payments (eligible until 25 if you are a student). Although I felt bad for mooching off my parents I managed to save a substantial amount of money and used it to buy a tiny apartment with the money. Now the big question is: Why the hell am I the success story in my family? It should be the other way around!

> Poverty consumes each person that lives inside of it and strips them of their own individual identity.

"The problem of being poor is that it take all your time."

I recently read Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy where a linguist finds himself in a completely foreign society where he cannot learn the language, can make no connection with anyone, and winds up on the streets when his money runs out. It isn't a perfect novel but it it foresees our society where the line between self-sufficiency and poverty grows thinner and thinner. Once someone falls off perhaps due to illness, job loss, or just bad luck it is increasingly difficult to get back up and people (including and indicting myself) just walk by. I am guessing that Levine's account is thirty or more years old. I hope that such kindness hasn't completely disappeared.

I had become poor like this once in my life. I had to ration my food so that it would last a week. I had to think many times before consuming anything as to how important it was for me. I had to think about transportation costs to interviews. I had to tell people that I couldn't pay them because I didn't have money.

One important thing I noticed that I became more superstitious. Like you mentioned, I kept questioning the paths I had traveled in my life, kept wondering if what I was going to do next was going to help or harm. It was really crazy. I could, of course, see that happening in myself, but the rationalization was, "what's the harm?"

I also think that's tied up with one's faith in oneself. And the eroding of that faith was quite surprising when poor. I guess some people have a strong faith in themselves. I didn't.

I also noticed that we focus on too many petty things in our lives. Social structures, peer acceptance, comparing ourselves for a sense of worth. None of these really matter at the end of the day (or life!).

Most of my four years of college were lived in this state. I never knew at the beginning of the week if I'd still have food by the end of the week. Instead of studying I'd lay awake all (ALL!) night running a loop over in my head trying to figure out if/how the money would last to next semester. It really takes a continuous cognitive toll.

An excellent read about this topic:

Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives (Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir)

The authors, through empirical research (awesome experiments) show that scarcity (poverty) makes people perform worse on IQ tests by ~17 points (which they regain as soon as scarcity disappears). Poverty makes day to day living an endless barrage of difficult decision making.

Andrew Yang mentions this in his U.S. Presidential campaign speeches as a benefit of UBI. I wish more people were listening to his message. From battered women to families where the sole earner has lost their job - all would benefit from a minimum income and make this a much better society.

This right here illustrates something I've been thinking about a lot - the various ways you can define freedom, and how differently it tends to be defined in the US compared to how I as a European define it. It seems that in the US it's common to define freedom as simply the absence of obligations and demands. So low taxes and small government = more freedom. Everyone gets to pay less in taxes so they are more free. For me this seems incredibly simplistic - it completely ignores the reality that actual freedom requires power, it requires opportunity, and it requires choice. Most poor people have no freedom, because they have neither power, opportunity nor choice. Poverty is completely crippling - you spend all your energy and focus on surviving, so you have very few resources to invest in bringing about a less desperate situation.

So I don't get why the 'land of the free', the 'greatest nation on earth' can can be so ideologically opposed to wealth redistribution and the concept of a wellfare state as it seems to be. Jeff Bezos would not feel less free if he was worth 50 billion instead of 100. But the freedom that money could create among millions of others is enormous. And I'm not just arguing this as a moral kinda thing, e.g. 'think of the starving children', I'm just as much talking about this as a pragmatic, how-to-make-the-economy-work-better sort of thing. It's not just handouts, it's investing in people that don't have the resources to invest in themselves. It's increasing the size of the middle class that is capable of buying things, creating a bigger market for entrepreneurs to sell stuff to. Get the money circulating instead of stagnating in some tax haven.

Is it because the Cold War has forever branded anything remotely resembling socialism anathema? Is it the propaganda from Fox News? Is it because the country's independence movement was kicked off with an opposition to taxes (the Boston Tea Party) and that has forever instilled the notion that taxes = bad in your very soul? I can see why those things would create resistance, but it just seems like such an ideological and not very pragmatic position at this point.

I mean, you said it in the first few sentences.

The ultimate state of being in the US is one of higher freedom.

What happens at the bottom end is neither here nor there.

I prefer the European model as well - but let's be clear about this - most socialist countries don't really care about this either from a moral perspective, it's more of a law and order thing and a different way of running a society internally.

The UK is leaving the EU in large part because a lot of people think immigration from other reasonably-developed countries is too high. The actually poor parts of the world are like a massive blind spot that we wave away into the category of 'asylum seekers' as if they're subhuman.

Everywhere and everyone has a blind spot somewhere.

While i agree with the overall sentiment of your comment, the whole thing about “Jeff Bezos worth $50bil instead of $100bil” ticked me off a bit. Mostly because it reeks of lack of knowledge and substance.

How do you propose making it happen? Note that by saying this, i dont mean “how do you convince him to do it”. I mean, what would be the process for doing that, assuming everyone is already on board with it.

99% (or close to it) of those billions of Jeff Bezos’ worth are in Amazon stock. How do you propose making his net worth only $50bil and making use of the rest? Making him give up half of the ownership in the company by giving his shares to the government, thus making the government a major shareholder in the company?

This is a genuine question, because i do not see how else shares can be feasibly taxed until the moment they are sold. And there is no way Jeff would be able to sell half of them, i bet there are rules that don’t even allow major shareholders cash out like that, since it would crash the value of Amazon overnight. And by the time he is done selling, he would have made way less than that, as the value of shares will be continuously dropping as he sells. Not even the mentioning the whole aspect of forcing someone to sell their shares and, thus, giving up their ownership in the company.

Making Jeff Bezos' net worth suddenly belong to other people would be a massive event, and if done clumsily would undermine the foundations of property and ownership, which so many things depend on. Even those aren't fundamental truths, but people really care about them. Not likely to happen without a catastrophe (e.g. WW3).

On the other hand, making it so someone like Jeff Bezos could never accrue $100bil in the first place is a lot more plausible.

> i do not see how else shares can be feasibly taxed until the moment they are sold.

Oh, that's just a matter of assigning a notional value through some accounting estimation process. The value might be wrong but that's ok, overpaid tax would be returned if a lower value was discovered at the next sale.

But why sell the shares anyway. If you're going to transfer $50bil (currently in shares) to lots of poor people, transfer the shares. I expect people would find a way to trade their microshares afterwards to get the things they need. Amazon would probably be happy to run the microshare-trading service for a small commission :-)

I know this isn't exactly the point, but 50 billion divided by the population of the US is $166 per person. Even assuming you could magically sell off all of his stock without it losing any of its value and only distribute it to the poorest 10%, you're still only talking about a few thousand dollars per person, once.

All the money of the richest people in the U.S. could provide the poorest with a good income for a year or two, but then it's gone and we still haven't addressed the cost of education or healthcare, or even started to address the fact that the poor in the U.S. are not particularly poor by worldwide standards.

From a pragmatic, how-to-make-the-economy-work-better sort of perspective, there mostly needs to be a lot more wealth, period, in the form of more housing, more energy (hopefully renewable), more food (though we waste a lot in the US), more healthcare, more everything. From a basic math perspective, it seem like redistribution gets us like 1% of the way there, and only in the U.S. Once you start redistributing around the world, you run into the problem that a whole lot of people are really desperately poor in a way that can just devour redistributed dollars unless those dollars are creating growth. This isn't to say that redistribution isn't a very useful tool, and I'm actually a fan of lots of spending on infrastructure and a social safety net, but I believe economic growth is how you erase poverty.

> All the money of the richest people in the U.S. could provide the poorest with a good income for a year or two, but then it's gone

That's actually not true.

Think about where all that money goes when people spend it.

And then the people who receive it spend it again. Etc.

Round in a circle, basically, so they will continue to have a good income for much longer than the back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests.

Perhaps in perpetuity if the redistribution continues; then it would be a system change rather than a one-off event.

That said, I completely agree with you about investment, especially in things like housing, and other forms of investment and wealth generation.

> I believe economic growth is how you erase poverty

If you believe in the idea that "what you measure is what you create", then it depends on how economic growth is measured.

Measures that look at growing the average wealth or economic activity of people in a population largely ignore poverty. Even with a lot of desparately poor people, because of the power law distribution of wealth, the poorest people contribute less to the average than their numbers would suggest.

For that sort of reason, I prefer the idea that a society is judged by how it treats its poorest people first.

(And by people I don't mean citizens, because non-citizen residents are real people too.)

Thank you for you comment! I think that’s a very good point about the money circulating, but at that point it feels like an end that could be achieved by printing money, but the problem isn’t really a lack of money, it’s a lack of things like housing and whatnot. I think perhaps printing money could help, but lots of places have tried to print their way to prosperity and it tends to end badly, so I don’t know...

That said, I do agree with what you said about measuring growth and poverty, but I think the simple math about redistribution is useful because while you can circulate dollars, you can’t circulate factories or farms or infrastructure. Wealth in useful forms throws off income that is a small percentage of what those things are worth, if you “consume” the wealth and not just the income, then the wealth is destroyed and doesn’t produce more wealth, and the numbers on redistributing income look even more bleak than the numbers on redistributing total wealth in dollar terms. And that’s what I feebly attempted to communicate, that there just aren’t enough productive assets in the world to produce all the things we as a species need to feel like we’re living our best lives and certainly not to do so sustainably.

> This right here illustrates something I've been thinking about a lot - the various ways you can define freedom, and how differently it tends to be defined in the US compared to how I as a European define it. It seems that in the US it's common to define freedom as simply the absence of obligations and demands. So low taxes and small government = more freedom.

That's an exaggerated and misleading description. Per person government spending in the U.S. ($22,500 per year adjusted for purchasing power) is well above the OECD average, and right between Switzerland and Germany: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/reg_cit_glance-2018-41-e.... (Factoring out the difference in military spending, about $2,000 per person in the U.S. versus $600 in Germany, doesn't change the ranking. The next country below Germany is Ireland, at under $20,000.) Four of the largest five EU countries (Spain, Italy, Germany, U.K.) spend less per person -- again, adjusted for purchasing power -- than the U.S. France is only a little higher, around $23,500. Excluding Norway (oil money) and Luxembourg (tax haven), the highest is Denmark, at $26,000.

We have a big government in the U.S. It's often not very efficient. We consistently spend more to get less in terms of education or healthcare. But that's a very different issue.

I grew up poor even by local standards during a civil war in a former communist state. Had 5 younger brothers and sisters living in a 30m2 apartment, electricity regularly being cut off, days without food, etc.

I identify with nothing you said - I could clearly identify the causes of the poverty in our family in my dysfunctional parents.

The biggest problem with being poor is when you get stuck at 0 it's incredibly hard to get out of that. Hard to start well at a new job when you got nothing to eat at home, don't know if your power is going to get switched off tomorrow and you might get evicted any moment.

I would say the first time I lost the fears you mentioned was when I hit the lowest point - when you decide your life isn't worth living the way it is - what do you have to lose ?

> I identify with nothing you said

> I would say the first time I lost the fears you mentioned

These statements seem self-contradictory.

But those fears weren't the thing holding me back - and overcoming them didn't really pull me out either - sure it put me in a different mindset once I got the opportunity - but it took getting help from my sister (who I supported earlier) now getting in a better situation where she could help me get out of that stuck at 0 while I deal with my debts and get the opportunity to do something.

This sounds off to me.

>Poverty consumes each person that lives inside of it and strips them of their own individual identity.

I have no idea what this means. What I know from personal experience is that poverty makes one care less about the future. And make stupid decisions like voting for the guy who gives out $1 bread, sprays money in the air and ends up stealing $10mil.

>Poverty makes a person begin questioning what it is they did in their life that brought them to this low of a point.

For someone born to a poor home, this doesn't apply

>In their eyes, if they were given the opportunity to be so comfortable in life, they would do anything they could to spread joy to anyone who walked through their door

Depends on where you grew up or what your parents said to you. Where I'm from, wealthy guys who were once poor don't spread joy, but pain & oppress others with their wealth. They make completely new friends, become extremely busy, develop amnesia and suddenly can't remember people from their days of poverty. They rub it in your face, won't give out $1 to help anyone but would buy you as many beers as you'd like.

Some people who escape poverty overspend, buy shiny wheels, drink their eyes out - buy, buy, buy to enjoy the life they never had in childhood and hasten their way to poverty.

Another set become withdrawn. The fear that the good fortune is temporary makes this class live very simple lives. To them, "Winter is just on the horizon."

Well the OP was saying that poverty has a psychological dimension and it seems to me you agree with that.

From your perspective that psychological dimension can be explained without much interiority (i.e. makes you do stupid things) but for the OP it needs explaining from the inside in terms of feelings.

You are both saying very similar things except you are applying very different value judgements to them.

If I had to guess I would say you have a rather more deterministic / mechanistic view of the human experience than the OP.

> What I know from personal experience is that poverty makes one care less about the future. And make stupid decisions like voting for the guy who gives out $1 bread, sprays money in the air and ends up stealing $10mil.

What do you mean by personal experience? That you were poor and made the named stupid decisions? Or that you know of poor people who made the named decisions?

Man, do I associate with "winter is coming." I grew up fairly poor and I got a start up lotto ticket. I wouldn't say I'm rich by any stretch, but I'm comfortable. I've expected the gravy train to end the entire ride.

Yeah, I know this feeling. I finished school with a teaching certificate in '09 when not even public schools were hiring, and took a series of manual labor temp jobs until someone was willing to hire me to clerk in their warehouse.

I'm making about 5 times as much per year now than when I started(I'm incredibly lucky), but I still remember what it was like to have to live frugally on $10.00/hr to $12.00/hr. I had to change oil and do repairs on my old GM truck myself, buy anything I needed from the Goodwill and fix it up, and generally try to make ends meet. Luckily rent was really cheap and the grocery store and a parts shop were in walking distance(~.5 mile one-way). And having the truck meant that I could move bulk items like a couch and a coffee table.

Living like that is why I don't buy new cars and have avoided trying to buy a house. Because at any time my luck could run out and I'll have to use my wits to stretch my means again.

If you have the option to go for it, I would question whether avoiding trying to buy a house is smart compared with renting, assuming that's the alternative.

If you can't keep up payments on a house purchase, you can still sell it (or the foreclosing bank will), and if that happens after a few years to cover costs, probably still come out ahead compared with renting.

Being scared of the gravy train stopping is exactly why I bought my house. By shoveling as much money I to it as I can, I can remove an expense long term. Paying only taxes and utilities seems better than paying rent and utilities.

I'm sad that you're getting downvoted for posting what you obviously experienced personally.

I can't agree or disagree with most of it, since it wasn't my experience, but I do want to change your mind on one point:

" And make stupid decisions like voting for the guy who gives out $1 bread, sprays money in the air and ends up stealing $10mil."

Perhaps it does make some people make stupid decisions, but I'm become very careful in what I label "stupid". When you've got un-met needs, you do what you have to in order to fulfill that need. If you can get free bread and money in return for a promise to vote a certain way, that's basic incentives.

The demographics of HN are well known. The average biases of said demographics are well known. It is telling but not exactly surprising that every single comment that claims to have first hand experience with poverty is disagreeing* with the GP and also grey and at the bottom.

*GP seems to be placing arguing that psychological factors are key to what makes poverty suck and most of the people disagreeing seem to think psychological factors are a non-issue or take a distant second place to more immediate material concerns (though they don't necessarily agree beyond that).

I think you commentary does apply indeed to Southern Africa.

Steps after poverty:

1. Buy a GTI

2. Pay the installment at the end of the month

3. Have no money until next pay day

There are even memes about it: salary R 18 000, debit order SMS R 17 990, remaining balance R 10.

> The fear that the good fortune is temporary makes this class live very simple lives. To them, "Winter is just on the horizon."

On one hand I still have this fear, but on the other it also is a bit comforting. I know I can survive on much much less because I have before.

It has definitely made me live simpler than others I know though.

> What I know from personal experience is that poverty makes one care less about the future.

That's interesting.

What I take from the psychological aspect of poverty is this:

Poverty makes one care a lot about the future. As in worry. Worry about the next meal, the next rent payment, paying that bill, how to socialise without paying for anything, keeping up appearances because you think getting a job (or a better one) depends on appearing successful, being scared to go to the doctor about that lump because you might end up homeless and still can't afford treatment anyway, wanting to not worry your family but not wanting to hide things, etc.

The problem is this occurs continuously - you can't afford a break from thinking about near-future needs, because some of them affect you every day (e.g. skipping meals to save cash, while making sure your coworkers don't notice), and some of them feel like threats every day (e.g. you never know when late rent will turn to an eviction, you don't answer phone calls from unknown numbers because you don't want to acknowledge contact if it's a debt collector).

This is a high, continuous cognitive load and that makes it harder to make good planning decisions. Both because there are more immediate needs, and because simply thinking clearly needs the luxury of a decent stretch of time not worry about other things. It's not even enough to have a short break, as it takes a long time to wind down from a state of perpetual back-of-the-mind worrying and juggling problems.

If anything, people who are reasonably well off and safe economically care less about the future, because they don't have to care, it'll be fine.

>> Poverty makes a person begin questioning what it is they did in their life that brought them to this low of a point.

> For someone born to a poor home, this doesn't apply

I think it does apply but in a less obvious way.

People born to poor homes are still shown what they could aspire to: A higher standard of living than they started in, and greater opportunities to aspire to.

If anything, they see more of that than the middle classes, because they start from a relatively disadvantaged position, but are seeing the same things on TV (say) as everyone else.

And so when they grow up to be responsible for themselves, if they believe it's not fixed and depends on themselves but they are still dirt poor, the question becomes "What haven't I done with my life that I should have?"

Removed: Apologies, I didn't think through when I wrote that. Hopefully, no one minds.

I think most people prefer a "small shit life" than death.

You talk about "bet on another life", so maybe you're talking about reincarnation though?

There are ways to combat poverty that are better than euthanasia.

Giving people money is a pretty good way to do that. Money that they can choose to spend as they wish.

Euthanasia should be available for people who suffer an illness that makes the life not worth living anymore.

The perspective that "illness makes the life not worth living" is not universal. Indeed, it is utilitarian or epicurean perspectives that lead to this way of thinking. Many Christian perspectives (and, I expect those of many faiths) will hold that there is tremendous value in living and enduring discomfort and suffering.

It's worth noting that these faiths spur believers on toward helping the poor and disadvantaged.

Just for the record: I have a disability (blind), and from my point of view, there is one category of people that tends to behave completely inappropriately towards me, and those are "believers". I tend to avoid them whenever possible, because they tend to treat me in a very disrespectful way. They dont notice, because their faith has trained them to treat me with a certain patronising spin.

TL;DR: Not all "disadvantages people" actually want the protection of religious fanatics.

Is this: "people try to help me and I don't want them to"? Or something else?

(Genuine question; that's not a negative judgement.)

Thats part of it. Unwanted help is definitely an issue. However, it doesnt end there. The more religious a person is, the more they take their time to explain to me how bad they think my situation is. Patronisation, pittying, and a general attitude of looking down at me.

> Patronisation, pittying, and a general attitude of looking down at me.

Which is hard to square with the "it‘s god‘s will" bs…

As the saying goes, "please Lord, save me from your people"!

I didn't say that illness makes the life not worth living. I said an illness that makes the life not worth living. What that is is a very personal decision and should be an option that a person can have. Note that it is pretty easy to safeguard such a system from impulse decision that are often caused by mental illness.

> Many Christian perspectives (and, I expect those of many faiths) will hold that there is tremendous value in living and enduring discomfort and suffering.

This is such a toxic part of christianity that causes so much suffering worldwide.

Voluntary giving is no substitute for state programs that give a guaranteed safety net.

Suffering is a part of life.

Do you think it's better if people just die to avoid suffering rather than learn to live the best they can despite that pain?

Why do you say "causes"?

Agreed on the last point, but also having to beg others to get enough food/shelter to survive ... if you want that then you need to take a look at your ego.

A lot of people think this way, until they are forced to deal with the real and visceral physical suffering themselves.

Just look at Mother Theresa. She was refusing administration of painkillers to people dying in agonizing pain at her hospitals (hospices?), because she believed that experiencing suffering in this way was a part of being a true christian and virtuous person (yes, that was her actual stated reasoning). All of this was immediately cast aside as soon as she herself got debilitated with painful suffering due to illnesses, however.

I do believe there is value in suffering, but there are different kinds of suffering, and what’s being talked about here (physical) isn’t the kind that has much value.

There might be value in living on and enduring, and you should be free to do that. What you should not be free to do is forcing others to suffer on if they don't find it valuable.

Current legal situation in most places is such a force, based on misguided claims of religions to universality.

If people choose to give their money to others, then that’s fine. The problem with society is that it is taken from us against our will.

The reason you are in the position to earn money and the poor person isn't, is luck.

No matter how you look at it. You had no influence on your genes, the culture you were born in, your upbringing and the socio economic status of your parents, how your genes were influenced by the environment and so on. All the little pieces that made you who you are, were outside of your control.

Now you can say "well I decided at some point to do this, and that is why I am successful." But there are lots of factors that let you into the position to make that decision.

If you had the same genes, the same upbringing and so on as a poor person, you would be poor as well. In fact you would be exactly that person.

We should be thankful for the systems that enabled us to achieve. From roads and a government that has made things relatively stable, and we should acknowledge the dark parts of our life that have helped tailor who we are. A lot of life is chance (your genes, where you were born, and to whome). However, I firmly believe that you are wrong in your last paragraph. You can argue determinism, but that is lazy. I escaped poverty and it was a lot of work. I chose to do that and I got lucky. It required both luck and hard work.

> However, I firmly believe that you are wrong in your last paragraph. You can argue determinism, but that is lazy. I escaped poverty and it was a lot of work. I chose to do that and I got lucky.

It doesn't need to be determinism. You have no control over random events as well. How exactly did you decide to chose the way you did? Why were you able to stick to the hard work part?

Of course you can assume some supernatural you that is able to make decisions for your brain. But there is no evidence for that. As far as we know, how the neurons are connected and how they interact with the rest of the environment determines all our longings and our decisions.

I find that Robert Sapolsky's "Behave: the biology of humans at our best and worst" is a must read for anyone who wants a small glimpse on the topic of why humans are the way they are.

If i understood it correctly, your whole argument can be boiled down to “we have no free will, because all our decisions are influenced by a ton of factors outside of our control, thus making us not in control of anything.”

While this is debatable, it is not a useful lens to look at the world through. Why work out or study or attempt to do anything difficult and work on improving yourself to try and achieve something? If you dont feel motivated, it is all your brain chemistry and other factors outside of your control. Poor you, and lucky all those other people who worked hard and tried achieving something, too bad your brain chemistry and outside factors didn’t convince you to work on yourself and improve things. Nothing you can do about it, so why worry about it, right? /s

I am not trying to evoke the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” point, that’s not what i am trying to say at all. A lot of things in life are definitely due to luck and factors outside of our control. But a lot of things require both hard work and luck, with luck alone not being enough.

Think about it. Imagine you randomly meeting Elon Musk at a grocery store, and you got lucky, he decides to have a conversation with you while waiting in line (it is a far-fetched scenario, i know, but bear with me here). He asks what do you do and what you are into. If you worked hard in the field of aerospace engineering and made significant contributions, that conversation can easily turn into a job or learning something new and cool. If you didnt work hard (regardless of the field), then the conversation will prolly be about some surface level topic like the weather or tesla stuff, and you are left with nothing at the end.

Just working hard isn’t enough by itself, but it ensures that you are prepared to take the most advantage out of a lucky situation that could present itself.

A Thomas Jefferson’s quote comes to mind as relevant as well: “I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”

If you are motivated by the belief that your efforts will make a significant long term beneficial difference to your life, go for it.

But what if it really isn't true? What if for each thing that appears to be obtained through your own effort, there are plenty of other random factors in your life that interact with your apparently-obtained gains and tend to cancel out the benefits by making something else worse?

Then you'd be labouring under a convincing illusion. One that probably can be examined by people interested in studying it.

If it could be studied, would you rather know the truth, or would you rather not even look, so you can stay motivated?

(Btw, I'm a fan of the quote as well. Above is written from a devil's advocate sort of approach.)

Personally I value truth quite high.

I find that reading behave gave me a new perspective on how to look at people that are less fortunate than me and how I think of "evil" people.

> While this is debatable, it is not a useful lens to look at the world through. Why work out or study or attempt to do anything difficult and work on improving yourself to try and achieve something?

Incentives and desires don't go away just because you came to the conclusion that free will as it is often used, does not exist.

I still have a desire to better myself and improve my life. I'm just clear that my ability to do that is the result of a cascade of events that I had no control over.

Everything that you own had been created within the support and context of society. Your food and water, the service that takes your waste away, the vehicle you drive, the vehicles that deliver your food and clothing, the roads, the maintenance of those roads, the products that you're using to post on this site . . . If it's against your will to contribute to these services, you can choose to live free of all of these societal abominations and live in the forest somewhere. But yes, society has a way of preventing freeloading.

> you can choose to live free of all of these societal abominations and live in the forest somewhere.

This is not actually possible and if it were I think a lot of people would.

Why is it not possible? Homesteaders are a thing. There are people who choose homelessness.

On whose land are you going to homestead?

There were other points in my post that were a response to your previous post.

If this is really your life outlook, you should perhaps seek guidance from a mental health professional.

Thanks. I might when my family can afford it again and not have to deal with usual healthcare fraud.

It is not good to make implicit assumptions that are not generally shared. Your post is either a cruel joke, or you assume certainty about something like reincarnation (another life). That might be "obvious" to you, but if you have just a bit of interest in what others think, you'd know that for a very large majority, that is not obvious at all. Do you write for yourself or for an audience?

I had a neighbour once that made the boldest claim about "what must be in the universe", never empathizing with others but just making the wildest claims about supernatural phenomena. She ended up being committed at an institution.

Yes, I am sorry. I left some details but after rethinking, perhaps I shouldn't share it to others after all.

As a note, I don't believe in reincarnation or anything similar. I wasn't implying any certainty there but seeing it as a vector for hope.

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