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Comment by ngold | Hacker News Reader

Imagine being so poor you can't concentrate on what tomorrow is. That is what being poor does to you. It robs you of thinking.

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I've been there. Once you start thinking to yourself that there is no long term future ahead of you, the kind of choices you make becomes almost like a sick joke. Buy some fruit and vegetables to eat so that you can feel nourished and live a long life, or eat some feel good salty sugar loaded fast food because you have no fucking future anyway? Study and gain employable skills or play video games right now because you're going to die homeless next month after you can no longer pay rent due to a pandemic?

I know you are using your experience as an example...but I think with real poverty, you probably wouldnt know much about nutrition and neither would your parents...with enough caloric difficiency and without proper nutrition, much of the decision making/studying/long-term-planning abilities degrade quite rapidly.

That's the thing. I was pretty self-aware and I still made those choices. Imagine how much worse it is for people who don't even know what they're doing to themselves. They'll just keep pushing on ahead while their mind and body deteriorates.

Those choices are pretty hard - modern junk food has been engineered to reinforce unhealthy consumption, the US (mostly) dictates international laws around junk food restriction[1] and it's exporting the terrible free-market approach to food choice. Some of these junk foods should be heavily taxed or just outright illegal.

1. Here's coke being terrible https://www.marketwatch.com/story/coca-cola-fought-regulatio... and there are some other wonderful examples around tobacco use in south east asia.

>you're going to die homeless next month

Help me understand how someone could believe something along these lines for more-or-less their entire life. The fact is that poor people live long lives of many decades; they observe others around them just like them living many decades. There's nothing close to a rational reason to discount the future that hard.

How does one end up believing that every month is their last when it clearly isn't? I know people who are persistently poor act like they believe it, but I didn't think they literally consciously thought it was true.

Humans are not immune to inertia.

Well said.

People don't believe they'll literally drop dead next month. But they believe they'll get kicked out of their apartment if they can't pay rent. If that happens, they might end up losing their job after not being able to show up for a few days in order to find a new place if that's even possible. Being poor is miserable. You know how you might lament that due to your full time job you have so little time to spend on your interests and hobbies? Likewise, poor people have very little time or the mental bandwidth to think about doing things that only pay off in the long term. They're focused on surviving to next month. So they spend money on groceries instead of on coding lessons or something which won't get them a better job any time soon. They're probably right anyway. What's the point of learning to code when companies wouldn't hire them in a million years instead of a college graduate or someone with previous experience in the field. So you can imagine how many people are condemned to forever working food service jobs or other such work.

I guess it just doesn't check out with me. I've been around poor people. I've lived with them. I'm sure some of them are working constantly (probably more the ones with kids, which they shouldn't have had in the first place), but generally they don't seem to be particularly busy. Most of them, if they wanted to sit down and start learning web tech from online tutorials (or improve their future in any other way), had the time and resources. They were just not interested. Even things that would save time like 'stop smoking pot 7 days a week' - just nope.

Neglect is a truly wretched cycle. When a child's parents cannot afford and value things like basic dietary nutrition and care, it creates cerebral abnormalities [1] due to lack of neuro-cognitive development.

It's then up to half-hearted social/governmental intervention to prevent it from becoming the same for the child's eventual offspring - a hail Mary that rarely lands with some individuals getting on a better path.

[1] https://www.apa.org/pi/families/resources/newsletter/2012/07...

Or it's too hot or cold because you don't have temperature controls, so you could lose a few months of studious productivity per year.

This is hugely underrated. My room's poorly insulated so when it's hot, it's like a microwave in here and when it's cold, I can feel it to my bone (I remember almost crying some nights in 2018 because it was so cold). There's no central heating and the AC is outside my room and doesn't reach my room at all. When it was cold, I would stay in bed longer. Then I wouldn't be able to spend longer than 5-10 minutes sitting at my desk before going back to under a blanket. When it's hot, I would feel so incredibly lazy and drained of energy and ultimately do nothing except lie on the floor hoping for better days. Now that I have a fan and a small space heater, things are a lot better.

This becomes even worse if your food supply is limited. Your body produces less heat if you’re not eating enough calories, which can make you feel cold even in a normal temperature.

Poverty is also thought to have caused the diffidence in performance in the marshmallow test[1]. Poor kids learn to take advantage of the moment and distrust the future. And poor kids tend to be lower earners in later life than wealthier kids due to advantage differences[2][3]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

[2]https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/06/marshmall...

[3]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/095679761876166...

In other words, the submission title is misleading: the effects of poverty are type of trauma. We're not talking about "too poor to afford the latest game console" here; we're talking about people who have trouble with things at the lower levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs [0].

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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

Imagine having such a shit life that you best move on without looking back. The brain will adapt and stop feeding you that garbage that is your memories. Everything you wanted to be doing hurts when you see others do it. I don't know how scientific it is but I think woman want to have babies. Eventually just seeing one makes a painful experience. If only you could suppress association, turns out you can.

I remember in high school, some of my peers participated in the 30 Hour Famine, to help get a better understanding of this.

Isn't there some joke about being "too poor to pay attention"? Looks like it ended up being true.

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