Mental State of the Poor
mohit.me
mohit.me
It turned out that in my next pay period, someone in accounting had forgotten to file time sheets on time, so all the employees who were not paid a salary had to wait until the next period, which was another two weeks. Following the next pay period, I didn't receive any work for 4 weeks. Over the next few days, it followed that my university raised tuition by 2k (for international students) and was due very shortly, and my car died whilst out and about, resulting in having to tow it home.
I spent the next 6 weeks living off of about $15-$20 / week. Although this is still very doable, when you are faced with buying a new tube of toothpaste, buying dinner for a few days, and running a load of laundry, you will of course choose the food.
Everything quickly deteriorates. Your clothes get dirtier and dirtier, because you are wearing them all continuously. Your lack of hygiene becomes noticeable (can I really afford a haircut?). Your shoes develop tears and holes from all the walking (could not afford public transport). The worst part of it all, is looking at other people who are more than comfortable and wishing for their help but being far too embarrassed to ask for it.
It is an extremely rut to get out of. It's very hard to achieve goals when you have such little energy. The easiest way to prevent this situation is to increase the size of your emergency fund, by definition, you cannot plan for emergencies. I should not have used my emergency fund to move apartments and do some last minute traveling.
Please don't take this as offense, but it does seem logical that if you operate on limited supplies you'd go for a very primal - just survive today mode. I'm pretty sure ANY person that has no fallback to rely upon would go into same mode.
I heard that steady supply of cash does help them a lot. Like a monthly wage. That way you can say, ok if I skip this trash meal and go learn something, maybe I can live more decently.
Definitely. Although pairing that with help from someone who isn't from a poverty stricken mindset is key. Having a friend who comes from a more "stable" background that puts effort towards relating to you goes a really long way.
So lets start:
1) there is nothing wrong with sleeping long periods of time. Just a century ago most of the Europe hibernated over winter. Awake time could be as little 6 hours, but in that time you could do normal work. My great-great grandfather carved wonderful sculptures during winter time.
2) healthy food is bullshit. Only valid number under that conditions is energy content. The more fat the better. Leafs are for rabbits.
3) I think author skipped a few meals, and got depression out of that. With some practice and reasonable body fat, 3 days without food is not a big problem.
4) Dining out (in McDonnalds) or ordering stuff online is not luxury, but necessity. It might be cheaper to buy stuff this way. How are you going to cook at home if you are homeless?
5) I do not agree with connection poor = depressed. For example some really poor people can still save money for cheap holiday. By putting down this equality, you will be only helping people who are "miserable enough". This creates whole industry with really nasty side effects.
Also Social state is not the solution. I live in state with "good social system". However it has number of conditions, for example if your grandfather has a pension, you are not entitled for any social benefits. Want to marry? Forget it, your family would loose significant part of income.
Lovely part is taxation. If I would send invoice for webdesign for 1000 euro, I would only make 280 euro profit. VAT, income tax, and compulsory social and health insurance would eat most of it.
And the absolute worst part is that everyone has to pay social and health insurance (60euro per month). So if homeless guy (or prisoner after release) gets a job, their first have to pay hundreds euro to cleanup their Social Security number.
But I do strongly feel that state should ensure that poor has means for improvement. I am further afraid that without that, many people would be inclined to take extreme steps which may cause harm to society in unforeseen ways. More than state, I would like to see rest of the society have better attitude towards poor. Probably we don't need higher taxes and channelling of money/resources by some people(who see long term benefits) towards the poor can help them a lot.
Much like "drop 15 americans on a tropical island" life is pretty easy for the experienced locals, pretty tough for a guy with only two days experience. What I'm getting at is poor people tend to get pretty good at a poverty lifestyle. It has a lot more to do with priorities than with the contents of a wallet.
For example, I was a little disturbed by the guys description of putting himself into low-grade hypothermia; little food and no heat tends to do that after awhile. I am well aware its a social faux pas to wear a sweater or two, and maybe warm sweatpants instead of designer jeans. Or a hoodie. But given the choice of death by hypothermia or wearing two sweaters at the same time, I think the average poor dude would wear two sweaters, regardless of what a temporary tourist would do. I live in a cold climate, and I've been poor, and I thought it was super creepy reading how he slipped into hypothermia, mental effects and all. I expected it to end in an ambulance or lost toes from frostbite or something.
I mean, come on guys, he just wrote something and put it on his personal website. It's not like he went to the President claiming he knows how poor live their lives and asked him to tax you to help them. Chill...
The first is its merely a factual observation that there's a social media trend of non-poor people goin it alone pretending to be poor for a very short amount of time and then writing about it, usually online. There seems to be no area for opinion about this factual observation.
Secondly this is example X of the same experiment with basically the same conclusions. It would be WAY more interesting for someone to try an experiment of say, teaming up with someone who knows how to be poor? Agile / pair programming development techniques applied to being poor for a weekend? That would be very interesting. Being poor is a learned skill, to some extent, so its not necessarily insightful that the first couple days of a new skill don't turn out so well. Try any craft, like perhaps metalworking, or any skill, like perhaps a new programming language, or any sport, like perhaps snow shoeing, and your first couple days are probably not going to be very successful and thats not entirely insightful. Its not much of a critique that fifty people have independently released version 1.0, and here is an obvious next step roadmap for version 2.0, someone Please try it?
The third thing which is the only valid critique I raised is the story as presented was hair raising because I live in a cold climate almost all my life and have many cold climate outdoor hobbies and I know plenty of first aid as relates to cold climates, and the subplot of the story was a pretty good autobiographical example of early stage hypothermia, to the point of being creepy to read. Feel cold for awhile, and hungry, then the brain gets really foggy, then unusual ideas start flowing as the body shuts down, then extremely sleepy... I genuinely thought it was going to end with an ambulance. Nothing wrong with an experiment or observation taking, but try not to get hurt? Listing the symptoms of hypothermia in a story format is interesting but distracts from the main story. I think this is a calm, fair, reasoned, and fundamentally useful critique.