Being Poor vs. Feeling Poor
moretothat.com
moretothat.com
>”But here’s the thing: I never felt poor.”
>”I had everything I needed and wanted. I had all the resources I required to do well at school too, so I never felt underprivileged there either.”
This is written by someone who doesn’t understand that they were not poor.
Poor is only eating 3/7 days a week. Poor is not owning pyjama’s, underwear or socks. Poor is not having school books, and stationary. Poor is being excluded from community events and activities because you cannot afford to participate. Shit it irks me when people who haven’t lived poor try to explain how it’s just a matter of perspective. Even people who decide they’re going to be homeless for a while by choice to you know, have that lived experience so they can say they know what it’s like make me grr, like if it’s ever a choice on any level you just don’t know what it’s like.
The schooling is there, the meals are there, but you’re living a life so embarrassing you don’t mention it. Is that poor?
Being poor, being homeless, etc is a fuzzy thing in its nature. It’s not just being without everything.
My personal definition of being poor is having to make trade offs between food, shelter, and safety where you’re going without one or more on a regular basis.
I didn’t sleep in a bed, the place I slept in would pour buckets of water when it rained, it was cold in the winter, and the neighborhood could be unsafe at times. I didn’t go hungry since I always had the money for a $1 package of pasta and a $1.50 can of tomato sauce. I was able to go to school because my specific version of homelessness matched one that California recognized in order to waive tuition.
Ultimately life worked out for me.
15 years later I feel stressed for money due to all the asks my family makes of me, but I never feel poor.
I think OP's point is that wealth isn't requisite for a fulfilling life. If you have a good home life, a community, and enough money for the essentials, you can live a "rich" life.
"what!? I was able to save on 1000usd/mo... with a kid!"
assets are either greater than your liabilities, or they're not. the dollar amounts aren't really relevant.
Surely if OP has all of their basic needs covered isn't poor for most people, but maybe some wealthy person can ponder them like they actually are.
No, actual poverty involves physical survival being uncertain, it involve fear and the pain of hunger and the pain of other things related to an uncertain existence (untreated health problems, physically carrying the limit stuff you possess around, etc).
Not being able to afford basic needs needs a stronger term like ‘starving’.
As always, 'need' and 'want' are somewhat up for debate.
Is medical care a need, or a want? For most of the world (by numbers), it's a want.
Is dental care a need, or a want? For most of the world (by numbers), it's a want.
Is a roof over your head that you own (or have control over anyway) a need or a want? For most of the world (by numbers), it's a want.
Is physical safety (reasonably free from random assault and physical violence) a need or a want? Depending on your region of the world, its a want.
Is a diet with meat and/or flavor a need or a want? Depending on your region of the world, it's a want.
Is schooling/formal education a need or a want? (and to what level?) Depending on your region of the world, it's a want.
Etc.
But nothing in the article described someone who was even close to poor, let alone in poverty from my experience. Just not well off or rich, by American standards.
By most of the world's standards (by land area especially!) they were describing upper middle class.
Humans can survive on very little, and the basic level of objective 'need' is faaar below what HN might consider humane. So it's hard to draw a concrete or objective line.
Feel free to browse [https://www.dictionary.com/browse/poor]
Given that regardless of how much money you have you’d have access to all of those, how would you define poor?
What the OP describes is what my definition of poor was while growing up. There were simply no people around that had less than we had.
Of course by comparison with any country in Africa we were all filthy rich, but that’s not really a useful comparison to make. In the context we were living we were poor.
[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/poor]
You might have been at the lowest income level, but society ensured you met no reasonable definitions of the word, correct?
You had what you needed, even by the high standards of the society you were in.
That is a good thing.
Very few societies (now or historically) are able to do that, let alone willing.
So I'd just say you were doing ok. Or comfortable.
Just because you didn't have anyone handy at any given moment to point at and say 'hey look, they have even less than we do!' doesn't mean you were poor. It just means you were less rich. There is a difference.
I was wondering if this is just a case of a different definition for the word poor, and I find that the equivalent word in Dutch (arm) is defined as: “Not having a lot of something, especially money.” Which was definitely the case.
Whereas in English it’s: “of insufficient quantity to meet a need”, which was not.
There’s a different Dutch word (armoede) that indicates much more far reaching poverty, which has an almost equivalent definition to the English ‘poor’: “situation in which one does not have enough to live”
Poverty in English is: “the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions” which seems more equivalent to poor.
You said - you did not lack for the necessities. Not even housing! Nor schooling. Nor food. Not healthcare. Nor basic entertainment. Nor safety. Not even by the standards of the area, which were high. And it wasn’t at risk - it was a stable and reliable thing.
Poor people do lack these things. It’s part of the definition. I know, I’ve been there.
And I wasn’t very poor (but poor - issues with clothing, food, healthcare, housing sometimes), but I had friends who were very poor. Some didn’t end up growing up because of it. Some ended up growing up in a way they’re still in jail.
You were just in a very well protected bubble, which is awesome. But almost no one else is.
If you go to any society that isn’t in that kind of bubble (China, India, most of the US, Eastern Europe, Russia, 95% of Africa and South America), the difference is obvious. You were in a place that that ‘cliff’ just didn’t exist. Society pulled out all the stops and filled it in with cement.
Which is awesome for you!
Some of us grew up staring over that Cliff every day though, and that is where this discussion is coming from. Most people (even/especially rich people) in those societies are acutely aware of its existence, even if they work hard to stay very far away from it.
There is a line where needs aren’t possible to get met. Where it’s a hard, sometimes fast downward spiral to actual death, imprisonment, etc.
Where it’s a constant desperate scramble to have the basics necessary to survive, and often some of them just aren’t there sometimes, but they show up somehow just enough you somehow make it through. But man does it suck.
And that’s not even talking about actual poverty. Or what happens when a primary caregiver gets cancer. Or ODs.
Being born rich lets you take a lot more risks.
> Yes. ... but its more likely as a smart ambitious poor person, he'd have gone to whatever school gave him a good scholarship, and then ended up as an Engineer or some other safe profession and landed middle class.
So by yes you mean...no. Unless middle class is now poor?
The overwhelming majority of people, if they were given $245,573 in 1993, would not go on to build a trillion-dollar company. What Bezos accomplished was extraordinary, whatever way you look at it.
About 10% of US households experience food insecurity [0] — and that overlaps very heavily with the poorest US families, who have 32% experience food insecurity.
I’m pretty comfortably saying that if you always had enough food as a family, you were lower middle-class, not poor.
[0] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic...
"Living in poverty means not being able to afford medical care or access to basics such as electricity, shelter, and food. Improper nutrition can cause stunting and wasting, permanently impacting children’s development. Poverty in countries lacking access to clean water and sanitation leads to the spread of preventable diseases and unnecessary deaths, particularly of children."
https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news-stories/global-...
Your own quote says the person you’re replying to is right — and the linked post wasn’t describing living in poverty.
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.
Excellent point.
A related trait I've seen from some people who've made (or are making) an economic class leap up is that they're accustomed to soldiering through tough and unjust situations.
For example, imagine some really awful situation that shouldn't be happening, in a workplace or school or housing or safety or bureaucracy or similar.
Someone of more fortunate history might react like "WTF?! This is not OK! I don't even know what to do with this, other than get a lawyer!"
But the person who's been through many situations they shouldn't have been through, is desensitized to the injustice, and just getting through it somehow is familiar, so that's where their energy goes. (I don't think it's only fear of the next catastrophe, though that might also be a factor.)
The person with the "WTF?!" reaction, who demands their rights (and maybe has the family money to back it up) will probably have a better outcome from the unacceptable situation, and less stress and misery along the way.
This take on being “poor” bothers me tremendously, because it equates being poor to something near sub-human or nearly irredeemable, and that’s an unfortunate take.
Except for the warm home environment and blissful ignorance of circumstances, the environment I grew up in was in many ways similar to the OP.
Medical issues were catastrophic, affordability of housing was at whim of landlords, and public transit was a real expense.
The financial strain was palpable but that didn’t mean our family or our immediate circle were criminals or drug abusers; but it did strain the stability of the family considerably.
> 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.
It is, because I certainly live this trauma daily and in many of my life choices, but by your measure I wouldn’t have been considered “poor”.
Tech had been good to me—I liked it when it was still a low-paying career and few considered Comp Sci as a major—but a more secure environment and I would have had a far more financially secure and comfortable life.
With all due respect, equating these things with “sub-human” or “irredeemable” is something you’ve done, not something the original commenter did.
I don’t view being an alcoholic or someone imprisoned as sub-human or irredeemable. We grew up poor and many people in my family suffer from these catastrophes, but they aren’t sub-human or irredeemable.
These things happen to everyone, but they happen more frequently to those in poverty.
I think the dissonance is that this really only happens in the US. At least it’s not a thing in mainland Europe.
I think we could consider poor as having all of your needs but none of your wants. And if you have all of your needs and all of your wants, then you are absolutely not poor. I agree with you. You cannot 'be poor but not feel it'.
While it is true that children may not realize they are living in poverty, when they grow up, they look back and then realize the conditions. I can see the point of someone saying they never realized they were poor growing up, but if they look back, they must realize that they felt it but did not realize it at the time.
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.
Pure caloric intake is not a good way of judging poverty in the developed world because calories are so cheap relative to everything else.
Just because there’s grades of poor, does not mean the family eating rice 5/week out of a small apartment so they can afford school materials is not.
Someone making $100/month is poor, and someone making $1000/month is also poor, even though they can afford wildly different standards of living, simply because 99% of people earn more.
I grew up poor, but didn’t realize it until adulthood, because we had everything we needed. I rarely got new clothes, mostly wearing hand me downs or thrift shop purchases. We had food 7 days a week, but in the winter when dad was laid off from his construction job and worked part time where he could, someone from the church would drop off a big food box every week (as a child, I thought everyone got that box). The same church sponsored a Santa Clause that delivered gifts to us at Christmas time (mostly practical things like clothing, shoes, etc). At school I got a packet of free lunch tickets every week from the teacher, while almost all of the rest of the class had to bring in a check or cash from home. We did have family vacations in the summer which were almost always a tent camping trip to a state park within driving distance, dad still went to work from that vacation spot. Eventually he worked his way up the ranks at work to a better paying year round job and we move firmly into the middle class, but until grade 6 or so, we were definitely what I’d call poor.
For instance -- people say "there are millions of shelters! why are people living in tents?!" -- and I wondered the same thing. But then you go to a shelter and honestly, it is horrible for most people in shelters. Not only are you absolutely surrounded by people who (sadly) suffer from a slew of addictions and mental illness and want to steal from you, or fight you, or drag you into their endless drama, but the rules and regulations at shelters are so onerous that it makes prison seem like a holiday camp.
I now understand why people set up in a tent. They can support themselves, and be by themselves, and that agency is not to be under-rated.
People claim, "I did not feel poor even if I could not afford the designer clothing..." Like, we are not talking about designer clothing. We are talking about basic clothing. Shoes that do not fit. We are talking about food. Never, never, never going to the doctor unless you are literally dying -- perhaps a broken bone being the only exception... maybe.
Interestingly, things are much better now than in the past for many. Even rural communities are often given the opportunity to have basic necessities. Some families act too proud to accept assistance, but they really should if they have children. They must humble themselves to accept the assistance that is provided because that is the whole point. They reap the benefits now to get themselves back on their feet so they can contribute to others that will also need it.
I see so many people act like they are going to starve if they do not eat two or three meals PER DAY. Yet, they have never actually known true hunger in their life.
An example the author gives of this is car problems: people with low incomes often have older cars that are more likely to have issues. If their car breaks down, there's a chance they can't afford repairs, which means they're unable to commute to work. Perhaps because of this, they choose to stop making water bill payments or buying as much food while saving for repairs. Everything is very precarious—you're essentially one or two unlucky incidents away from ruin. That, to me, is what it means to "be poor" in the US.
https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-the-experience-of-be...
Since there are often multiple things stacked up that are slightly less urgent that you might expect they'd use savings for, there's no way in this life to get ahead enough to have savings. Something will always come along (if not for you, for your family or a close friend) that you must use those savings for, should you have them, but which you could scrape by without or using a loan if you didn't have savings. This results in a lot of poor people having no habit of savings or aggressively paying down debt, which imparts difficulty in climbing out of this cyclic trap once they do get a better job.
> when it was time to go home, it was simply a return to the warm space that I shared with my family.
It's good that he could do that. But that opportunity doesn't exist for people who not only don't have a warm space to return to, but may not have any permanent space to return to, and may not even have a family.
> Many of my neighbors also worked in the same catering company as my mom, which meant that there was an aura of familiarity that connected us all.
Again, it's wonderful that he has such memories. Even those of us who were never poor might find something enviable about that. But in some areas of concentrated poverty, the idea of many neighbors working at all is a non-starter, much less many neighbors working together. Or if there are jobs, they aren't catering jobs, they're dangerous work like mining and meatpacking, which leave wounded casualties in their wake who then become additional burdens on meager familial resources.
So one thing that rubs me the wrong way a bit is the way the author is basically saying "adjust your thinking and you won't feel poor." And while that might be good advice for people who can't afford luxuries, it's not so helpful for people who can't afford basic necessities like food and a roof over their heads.
I've been a millionaire twice.
Now I'm even poorer. I get all my food from the food pantries, and I own literally nothing. I've been reduced to zero. But I'm not unhappy! Someone was kind enough to put a roof over my head and I have an Internet connection and an IDE and I can crank out code all day until one day when I return to middle-class and can buy some decent coffee again.
My takeaway from this post is that how someone feels about being rich or poor is something they can control and it might be better to not feel poor most of the time.
Being poor (or not) has some objective level, but is mostly about the surroundings that a person finds themselves in. Feeling poor also needs to account for an individual's past. I've had times where I was flush with cash and those situations raised the bar for feeling rich vs poor for my present & future self.
A family with dual income that can afford for one member to live abroad while starting their small business isn't what most people would call poor. At best they were lower middle class en route to upper middle class.
Fuck "feeling poor". This is what poverty is like.
Poverty is going to work every day knowing that you are getting further behind not ahead and still sticking it out and busting your ass because if you lose your job your life is going to crater. Poverty is losing the home you bought because even though their is a government loan to catch you up you can't afford a lawyer to fight them to make them give you a pile of essentially free money to get your loan straight. Poverty is keeping your family together anyway and moving across the country to stay with family members.
Poverty is having your car break down and instead of going to the mechanic walking home 6 miles at 1AM for months. Poverty is starting that walk at 2AM because you spent an hour drinking coffee in the break room working up the motivation to walk after spending 8-10 hours doing physical labor. Poverty is borrowing a shopping cart from the grocery store a mile away so you can take your groceries home and letting your kid ride in it both laughing as you cruise through puddles in the rain then walking your purloined cart all the way back.
Poverty is getting harassed by the cops solely because you are out late at night and stopped for the 3rd time until you start thinking like a criminal and planning routes around them as if trying to get home was a crime. Poverty is getting arrested for using a bad world while walking away and not being able to afford a lawyer and having to write your own appeal.
Poverty is renting a cabin in the woods barely 200sq ft for 4 people with no running water and enjoying the scenery instead of bitching about whose turn it is to bring a bucket of water in.
Poverty is going on a fishing with your father after you came back home still waiting for the free asthma medication from the manufacturers patient assistance program to come through and laughing at his description of his clip on sunglasses as the "dorkmaster 2000s" instead of thinking about the fact that without medication you can't walk up a hill without feeling like you are going to asphyxiate and dreaming you are suffocating because you in fact are. Poverty is not asking for the money to cover them out of pocket because it costs $400 and nobody has that.
Poverty is living in a moldy apartment building with druggies because its cheap. Poverty is waiting years for your building to fix the mold issue in the walls that is leaking into the apartment because the building claims its not "that kind of mold" because the contractor call smell the bad kind of black mold until you actually get a sample so you can have it tested by a lab to prove it is in fact the kind of black mold that makes you sick.
Poverty is living in a building which a local drug dealer or some other unknown malefactor has tried to burn down twice in a row and instead of moving organizing patrols of the hallways at night to sweep for scumbags and helping set up a buddy system to get the disabled folks out if the alarm goes off and ultimately dealing physically with the probable culprit in the courtyard when he attacked a neighbor. Poverty is the cops accusing YOU of a crime for defending your neighbor.
Attitude is important. How you tell yourself your own personal narrative is important. Positively is important. But life doesn't give two shits if you "feel" poor. Poverty leads to factual privation and struggle and for a lot of folks its not a transitory heroes journey where our protagonist must pay his dues. Instead its a trap that many folks spend their entire life fighting and never quite leaving.
For myself I'm still fighting the tar and have no intention on being interred here but I also have no illusion that its a matter of not "feeling poor" It's a cold question of resources and effort not an emotional one.
hug