11 ms·

I'm sure how people deal with stress and difficult situations varies from person to person. My personal story and 2-cents: When I was 17 I went through a peri

by redm 9y ago

I'm sure how people deal with stress and difficult situations varies from person to person. My personal story and 2-cents: When I was 17 I went through a period of near destitute. I was living on my own, my father had passed away, and I had dropped out of school. Yet, I found myself with some very good jobs, such as GE Capital, a big Oil and Gas companies IT department, etc. Regardless of the opportunity, my arrogance, ambivalence, or immaturity (take your pick) cost me a series of good jobs in short order. The result was I had no money, no electricity, no gas for my car, and not much to do. Eating cold beans out of a can in the dark tends to force you to re-think your priorities. In my case, I got very motivated very quickly and dug myself out of that hole after a few months. I think that's the point Orrin Hatch was trying to make. If I had a fallback, I would have, without a doubt, kept coasting along from job to job. I've never looked at work or money the same way since as I never want to find myself there again. So long story short, being poor (by my own doing) didn't necessarily motivate me, but looking into oblivion sure as hell did.

autokad 9y ago
i grew up poor, and it was frustrating to see the stupid mistakes my family and people around me would make over, and over, and over. then people like the researchers in this article say infuriating things like 'their bad decisions are just because they are cognitively tired, and actually many of them could be even considered shrewd!" being cognitively tired does play a role, but more so because they are cognitively lazy. their bad / lazy decisions are confounded by the fact they are trying to solve problems caused by making bad decisions in the first place. on top of that, most dont value education. i typed a long story but deleted it. in short, 4/6 of us siblings dropped out of school, those same 4 had a large life insurance policy from the airforce which they blew almost immediately. we have so many opportunities in this country, but it still does require that we go to school, work, and use our head. i am aghast on how so many people simply refuse to THINK. so many people with money problems have no idea how much money annually they spend on ANYTHING. how can you even begin to talk to someone about getting out of poverty, if they wont even calculate how much they are spending on that 5$ starbucks and 600$ phone.
- MrLeap 9y ago
  Also grew up poor, and seen people of all income levels be cognitively lazy. I felt like I really started to get the way success works when I saw successful people waste money. I saw individuals make flippant decisions to throw away 50,000$ on software that their organization will never use. MSDN licenses for 100 people that can't and never will code. I've seen a salary man whose job it was to install software on tablets one day a year, the rest of the year he watched Netflix. I'm aghast when I see well off people just burn money. There is an entire population of people who find success via a different road than intelligence or intrinsic value. I've seen things that would make your blood boil.
  - jjeaff 9y ago
    But there's a difference. That company wasting $50k is the equivalent of a poor person buying the brand name bread instead of store brand. Not a life altering decision. Make that a $5m purchase and the higher ups in the company will probably spend a great deal of time weighing the pros and cons. I have seen people in fire situations get a one time windfall of $8,000 dollars and spend all of it for a down payment on an expensive car. That's the kind of decision making that keeps you poor.
    - ntsplnkv2 9y ago
      Simply isn't true-if that were the case companies that make millions would never go bankrupt-yet they do. Why? According to you, they'd spend a great deal of time weighing pros and cons... The fact is you can't always weigh pros and cons and always get a positive outcome. There are many poor people that will always be poor-but entire industries have spent decades making decisions weighing pros and cons and completely collapsed because of things outside of their control. Why can this principle not apply to a portion of the poor?
      - jjeaff 9y ago
        I'm sure it does apply to a great deal of the poor. My comment was simply that some people make terrible financial decisions. Are you implying that no one is poor due to their own decisions? It's all just things outside their control?
tamrix 9y ago
I think comments like these are more likely propaganda than real experiences. They keep feeding you the lie that you're going to be successful if you keep believing in the system. When we all know statistically America is worse than ever before. You read the parent comment and think the poor and just lazy and all your have to do is work yourself a slave and suck corporate dick. But it's never a top comment adding that helping the poor could reduce the problem. Nope, it's always the corporate stooge.
- zouhair 9y ago
  This is why I hate the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness"[0] with a passion. Really hate it. [0]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/
- cgmg 9y ago
  > I think comments like these are more likely propaganda than real experiences. So you are calling redm a liar. Do you have anything to back up that accusation? Or are you calling them a liar purely because it suits your poorly-constructed narrative? > When we all know statistically America is worse than ever before. "We all know..." is false. What you mean is probably more along the lines of "This is what I think, without having done any research to support my wild claim." > You read the parent comment and think the poor and just lazy Where did the GP call the poor lazy? > and all your have to do is work yourself a slave and suck corporate dick. See above. > Nope, it's always the corporate stooge. Why are you accusing redm of being a 'corporate stooge'?
- eanzenberg 9y ago
  How is America statistically worse than before? Compared to when?
  - NegativeLatency 9y ago
    Compared to a time when minimum wage provided a decent standard of living.
    - 9y ago
zouhair 9y ago
You being 17 when that happened helped a lot too. If the same happens when you are 40 or 45 getting out of the gutter would be nigh on impossible.
- chlorophyl 9y ago
  I agree with this. I was destitute when I was 18, but I managed to come back through a series of part time jobs. I've always lived within my means but since my job do not really pay much anyway, it's very hard to save. Now that I'm 40 and poor again (lost my job due to cutbacks), it is impossible for me to recover. Getting new jobs are much harder and people are pretty discriminative towards my age. Nowadays, even employers choose younger people for part-time jobs, since I'm over the hill agewise and overqualified.
  - kbart 9y ago
    Why impossible? It's just a mindset. People do switch careers at >40 years, it's far from impossible.
    - oblio 9y ago
      The social pressure can be overwhelming, unless you're not super-super strong, mentally. We cannot assume the average person to be so strong. Why is the social pressure overwhelming? Socially sometimes it seems that it's better to crawl into a cave and never be seen in your poverty, than be seen as a 40-45+ year old doing janitorial work (or other kinds of jobs most people find degrading, despite the fact that to your face they will deny it), by your friends and family. Also a lot of people can't accept the downturn in their lives. That's how you get alcoholism, depression, drug abuse. It's much harder to wake up and say: I've failed all these years, I need to start over.
    - zouhair 9y ago
      If we go by anecdotes, I knew only two persons who switched careers at mid life successfully: one was a woman and the other a man and both had a spouse who brought decent money to the household and was supportive.
Waterluvian 9y ago
I have a safety net and it has enabled me to take risks I never would have if failure meant homelessness for my family. I think that's why all the trimmings of a "socialist" society are so attractive to me. I hear what you're saying. You felt motivated because there was nothing to enable your coasting. But it can also work in the other direction.
- RobertRoberts 9y ago
  Unfortunately taking risks to better yourself and having it work out are the exception not the rule. And I have to assume that a non-socialist society supports this better in almost every way, based on historical evidence in my own head. (flawed as that may be)
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    Not taking risks (doing nothing) will never "work out". Those who do not have the capital cannot take risks in the first place.
    - RobertRoberts 9y ago
      Is it not possible to make something "work out" without taking risks? A quote from the olden (perhaps wiser) days, was "don't quit your day job", has this sage advice been lost? Unless we are going to avoid widely classifing a "risk" as something "scary" or "hard", then isn't changing jobs risky?
      - nosmas 9y ago
        I think the definition of a risk is very relative though. If someone is barely making ends meet (with no signs of improving their situation if they keep their same routine), then taking time to educate themselves (a vocation school, getting resources on how to stretch a dollar, etc.) may seem like a risk. When you don't have education, time, or money every decision you take on your day to day is a risk. I'm not going to pretend that some people don't thrive when looking at the poverty void -- they are the exception to the rule. There are also those who coast on gov't funding. There's probably many reasons why someone would coast, but if I'm in a system that has so thoroughly forgotten about me since birth (e.g. not having any opportunities for better education for one), why would I want to partake in it? I think the cost of a few people not trying to make changes for the better is by far outweighed by helping those you need support in their most desperate time. It's not about giving people a safety net when the have moonshot ideas to start a business. It's to have a safety net when they need a bit of time to improve themselves, which when you have little time and money is a huge risk.
adrr 9y ago
100% of society can't be brought out of poverty. Here's an example: If we motivated everyone to get a college education, we would have people flipping burgers who are college educated making min wage and living in poverty while struggling to put food on the table.
- NegativeLatency 9y ago
  Not everyone needs college, there are trade schools and the like that can help you get a better job. Why can’t minimum wage be raised to provide a better standard of living?
  - sparkie 9y ago
    Because when you raise minimum wage, that means employers of the minimum wage earners need to push up their prices so that they're still making the same profits. (Actually, the same is not good enough, the profits need to exceed the previous years). The price of everything ends up inflating and minimum wage earners end up getting less for their money, despite having "more of it".
    - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
      Yes, but you're acting as if they're not better off. Minimum wage workers will be better of despite a slight increase in the price of goods.
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      That would only be true if the goods minimum wage workers produce are being bought only by minimum wage workers. In reality the price also goes up for incomes above minimum wage so in a sense raising the minimum wage is a transfer of money from higher earners to lower earners.
      - jjeaff 9y ago
        In reality what happens, is those jobs go away (jobs like retail) and they are replaced with slightly higher paying jobs (like Amazon warehouse worker) except at a rate of about 1 new job for every 10 previous jobs.
MisterBastahrd 9y ago
You were temporarily embarrassed and broke for a little while. That isn't poverty.
thomastjeffery 9y ago
On the flip side, I have never experienced poverty, and don't have the motivation of "looking into oblivion" to push me into another dead-end job. But does that mean I deserve that experience? Should I be put in a situation where I have to fight to survive? I think that is unreasonable. There exist better motivations. I am capable of work that is much more attractive to me than entry-level labor jobs. The idea that I am less valuable as a person because I am dependent; or that I ought to be compelled by my social situation to do stressful unfulfilling work does not sit well with me. That is where I strongly disagree with Sen. Hatch. We are capable as a society of helping more than the most destitute. We should promote individual liberty, so that people can do work they are passionate about. I don't believe that those living on welfare should be compelled to do work that they have no desire to do. We should instead work to provide them opportunity and counsel so that they can find their passion and follow it. Taxation is theft, but the current Republican party (including Sen. Hatch) has used that as an excuse to push an agenda that works against those who are barely getting by, while working for those who have inherited obscene amounts of wealth. That, in my opinion, is worse than the theft itself.
- pm90 9y ago
  > Taxation is theft, but the current Republican party (including Sen. Hatch) has used that as an excuse to push an agenda that works against those who are barely getting by, while working for those who have inherited obscene amounts of wealth. That, in my opinion, is worse than the theft itself. I don't understand how you can hold this view in light of what you said before that paragraph. How do you suppose we come up with creative solutions to social problems, and of helping the destitute and others, without any wealth or income? Our taxes are what fund those programs.
  - thomastjeffery 9y ago
    I'm not sure you understood me clearly. I believe taxation is theft, but that that fact is no excuse for allocating spending of tax dollars unwisely. What the Republican Party, and many Libertarians seem to think is that because taxation is theft, anything that depends on taxation is immoral, and therefore taxes are free to be allocated immorally. That conclusion is fallacious, absurd, and malicious. You can disagree with me on the fine point of taxes being immoral in the first place, but that is precisely not my point.
pjonesdotca 9y ago
You also need to take into consideration how incredibly lucky you were. "Pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps" is a myth and always has been.
theandrewbailey 9y ago
I've been watching a lot of Jordan Peterson lately, and your story sounds exactly like part a lecture he'd give. It's sad that you figured it out the hard way.

by redm 9y ago

autokad 9y ago

i grew up poor, and it was frustrating to see the stupid mistakes my family and people around me would make over, and over, and over. then people like the researchers in this article say infuriating things like 'their bad decisions are just because they are cognitively tired, and actually many of them could be even considered shrewd!" being cognitively tired does play a role, but more so because they are cognitively lazy. their bad / lazy decisions are confounded by the fact they are trying to solve problems caused by making bad decisions in the first place. on top of that, most dont value education. i typed a long story but deleted it. in short, 4/6 of us siblings dropped out of school, those same 4 had a large life insurance policy from the airforce which they blew almost immediately. we have so many opportunities in this country, but it still does require that we go to school, work, and use our head. i am aghast on how so many people simply refuse to THINK. so many people with money problems have no idea how much money annually they spend on ANYTHING. how can you even begin to talk to someone about getting out of poverty, if they wont even calculate how much they are spending on that 5$ starbucks and 600$ phone.

MrLeap 9y ago
Also grew up poor, and seen people of all income levels be cognitively lazy. I felt like I really started to get the way success works when I saw successful people waste money. I saw individuals make flippant decisions to throw away 50,000$ on software that their organization will never use. MSDN licenses for 100 people that can't and never will code. I've seen a salary man whose job it was to install software on tablets one day a year, the rest of the year he watched Netflix. I'm aghast when I see well off people just burn money. There is an entire population of people who find success via a different road than intelligence or intrinsic value. I've seen things that would make your blood boil.
- jjeaff 9y ago
  But there's a difference. That company wasting $50k is the equivalent of a poor person buying the brand name bread instead of store brand. Not a life altering decision. Make that a $5m purchase and the higher ups in the company will probably spend a great deal of time weighing the pros and cons. I have seen people in fire situations get a one time windfall of $8,000 dollars and spend all of it for a down payment on an expensive car. That's the kind of decision making that keeps you poor.
  - ntsplnkv2 9y ago
    Simply isn't true-if that were the case companies that make millions would never go bankrupt-yet they do. Why? According to you, they'd spend a great deal of time weighing pros and cons... The fact is you can't always weigh pros and cons and always get a positive outcome. There are many poor people that will always be poor-but entire industries have spent decades making decisions weighing pros and cons and completely collapsed because of things outside of their control. Why can this principle not apply to a portion of the poor?
    - jjeaff 9y ago
      I'm sure it does apply to a great deal of the poor. My comment was simply that some people make terrible financial decisions. Are you implying that no one is poor due to their own decisions? It's all just things outside their control?

tamrix 9y ago

I think comments like these are more likely propaganda than real experiences. They keep feeding you the lie that you're going to be successful if you keep believing in the system. When we all know statistically America is worse than ever before. You read the parent comment and think the poor and just lazy and all your have to do is work yourself a slave and suck corporate dick. But it's never a top comment adding that helping the poor could reduce the problem. Nope, it's always the corporate stooge.

zouhair 9y ago
This is why I hate the movie "The Pursuit of Happyness"[0] with a passion. Really hate it. [0]: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0454921/
cgmg 9y ago
> I think comments like these are more likely propaganda than real experiences. So you are calling redm a liar. Do you have anything to back up that accusation? Or are you calling them a liar purely because it suits your poorly-constructed narrative? > When we all know statistically America is worse than ever before. "We all know..." is false. What you mean is probably more along the lines of "This is what I think, without having done any research to support my wild claim." > You read the parent comment and think the poor and just lazy Where did the GP call the poor lazy? > and all your have to do is work yourself a slave and suck corporate dick. See above. > Nope, it's always the corporate stooge. Why are you accusing redm of being a 'corporate stooge'?
eanzenberg 9y ago
How is America statistically worse than before? Compared to when?
- NegativeLatency 9y ago
  Compared to a time when minimum wage provided a decent standard of living.
  - 9y ago

zouhair 9y ago

You being 17 when that happened helped a lot too. If the same happens when you are 40 or 45 getting out of the gutter would be nigh on impossible.

chlorophyl 9y ago
I agree with this. I was destitute when I was 18, but I managed to come back through a series of part time jobs. I've always lived within my means but since my job do not really pay much anyway, it's very hard to save. Now that I'm 40 and poor again (lost my job due to cutbacks), it is impossible for me to recover. Getting new jobs are much harder and people are pretty discriminative towards my age. Nowadays, even employers choose younger people for part-time jobs, since I'm over the hill agewise and overqualified.
- kbart 9y ago
  Why impossible? It's just a mindset. People do switch careers at >40 years, it's far from impossible.
  - oblio 9y ago
    The social pressure can be overwhelming, unless you're not super-super strong, mentally. We cannot assume the average person to be so strong. Why is the social pressure overwhelming? Socially sometimes it seems that it's better to crawl into a cave and never be seen in your poverty, than be seen as a 40-45+ year old doing janitorial work (or other kinds of jobs most people find degrading, despite the fact that to your face they will deny it), by your friends and family. Also a lot of people can't accept the downturn in their lives. That's how you get alcoholism, depression, drug abuse. It's much harder to wake up and say: I've failed all these years, I need to start over.
  - zouhair 9y ago
    If we go by anecdotes, I knew only two persons who switched careers at mid life successfully: one was a woman and the other a man and both had a spouse who brought decent money to the household and was supportive.

Waterluvian 9y ago

I have a safety net and it has enabled me to take risks I never would have if failure meant homelessness for my family. I think that's why all the trimmings of a "socialist" society are so attractive to me. I hear what you're saying. You felt motivated because there was nothing to enable your coasting. But it can also work in the other direction.

RobertRoberts 9y ago
Unfortunately taking risks to better yourself and having it work out are the exception not the rule. And I have to assume that a non-socialist society supports this better in almost every way, based on historical evidence in my own head. (flawed as that may be)
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  Not taking risks (doing nothing) will never "work out". Those who do not have the capital cannot take risks in the first place.
  - RobertRoberts 9y ago
    Is it not possible to make something "work out" without taking risks? A quote from the olden (perhaps wiser) days, was "don't quit your day job", has this sage advice been lost? Unless we are going to avoid widely classifing a "risk" as something "scary" or "hard", then isn't changing jobs risky?
    - nosmas 9y ago
      I think the definition of a risk is very relative though. If someone is barely making ends meet (with no signs of improving their situation if they keep their same routine), then taking time to educate themselves (a vocation school, getting resources on how to stretch a dollar, etc.) may seem like a risk. When you don't have education, time, or money every decision you take on your day to day is a risk. I'm not going to pretend that some people don't thrive when looking at the poverty void -- they are the exception to the rule. There are also those who coast on gov't funding. There's probably many reasons why someone would coast, but if I'm in a system that has so thoroughly forgotten about me since birth (e.g. not having any opportunities for better education for one), why would I want to partake in it? I think the cost of a few people not trying to make changes for the better is by far outweighed by helping those you need support in their most desperate time. It's not about giving people a safety net when the have moonshot ideas to start a business. It's to have a safety net when they need a bit of time to improve themselves, which when you have little time and money is a huge risk.

adrr 9y ago

100% of society can't be brought out of poverty. Here's an example: If we motivated everyone to get a college education, we would have people flipping burgers who are college educated making min wage and living in poverty while struggling to put food on the table.

NegativeLatency 9y ago
Not everyone needs college, there are trade schools and the like that can help you get a better job. Why can’t minimum wage be raised to provide a better standard of living?
- sparkie 9y ago
  Because when you raise minimum wage, that means employers of the minimum wage earners need to push up their prices so that they're still making the same profits. (Actually, the same is not good enough, the profits need to exceed the previous years). The price of everything ends up inflating and minimum wage earners end up getting less for their money, despite having "more of it".
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    Yes, but you're acting as if they're not better off. Minimum wage workers will be better of despite a slight increase in the price of goods.
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    That would only be true if the goods minimum wage workers produce are being bought only by minimum wage workers. In reality the price also goes up for incomes above minimum wage so in a sense raising the minimum wage is a transfer of money from higher earners to lower earners.
    - jjeaff 9y ago
      In reality what happens, is those jobs go away (jobs like retail) and they are replaced with slightly higher paying jobs (like Amazon warehouse worker) except at a rate of about 1 new job for every 10 previous jobs.

MisterBastahrd 9y ago

You were temporarily embarrassed and broke for a little while. That isn't poverty.

thomastjeffery 9y ago

On the flip side, I have never experienced poverty, and don't have the motivation of "looking into oblivion" to push me into another dead-end job. But does that mean I deserve that experience? Should I be put in a situation where I have to fight to survive? I think that is unreasonable. There exist better motivations. I am capable of work that is much more attractive to me than entry-level labor jobs. The idea that I am less valuable as a person because I am dependent; or that I ought to be compelled by my social situation to do stressful unfulfilling work does not sit well with me. That is where I strongly disagree with Sen. Hatch. We are capable as a society of helping more than the most destitute. We should promote individual liberty, so that people can do work they are passionate about. I don't believe that those living on welfare should be compelled to do work that they have no desire to do. We should instead work to provide them opportunity and counsel so that they can find their passion and follow it. Taxation is theft, but the current Republican party (including Sen. Hatch) has used that as an excuse to push an agenda that works against those who are barely getting by, while working for those who have inherited obscene amounts of wealth. That, in my opinion, is worse than the theft itself.

pm90 9y ago
> Taxation is theft, but the current Republican party (including Sen. Hatch) has used that as an excuse to push an agenda that works against those who are barely getting by, while working for those who have inherited obscene amounts of wealth. That, in my opinion, is worse than the theft itself. I don't understand how you can hold this view in light of what you said before that paragraph. How do you suppose we come up with creative solutions to social problems, and of helping the destitute and others, without any wealth or income? Our taxes are what fund those programs.
- thomastjeffery 9y ago
  I'm not sure you understood me clearly. I believe taxation is theft, but that that fact is no excuse for allocating spending of tax dollars unwisely. What the Republican Party, and many Libertarians seem to think is that because taxation is theft, anything that depends on taxation is immoral, and therefore taxes are free to be allocated immorally. That conclusion is fallacious, absurd, and malicious. You can disagree with me on the fine point of taxes being immoral in the first place, but that is precisely not my point.

pjonesdotca 9y ago

You also need to take into consideration how incredibly lucky you were. "Pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps" is a myth and always has been.

theandrewbailey 9y ago

I've been watching a lot of Jordan Peterson lately, and your story sounds exactly like part a lecture he'd give. It's sad that you figured it out the hard way.