7 ms·

Poverty especially sucks when you're all alone like it seems this person was. Where I grew up, most of the people were poor, but we had rich lives for the most

Poverty especially sucks when you're all alone like it seems this person was. Where I grew up, most of the people were poor, but we had rich lives for the most part. Lots of family dinners and outings. The people with more would let you take the leftovers home. You can't really train this and we all definitely need a social safety net, but I do think our closed off society prevents us from helping each other too.

loblollyboy 8y ago
Exactly - I’m from upper middle class and while this meant I was lucky enough to go back home when unemployed, all my peers were just career oriented and it’s very lonely to be ‘a loser’ - I recently moved in w some old coworkers/friends in a diff city who are from a diff socioeconomic background. At first they just let me stay in the apt, now I make more than them (though not a lot). We share like family and look after eachother. Sometimes I wish I made more, like the other day when we were all posting our salaries, or when I browse ‘Who’s Hiring’ - but other ppl are more important than anything (unless you’re like a genius or something), you can lose work, money, etc. The internet can make you feel more isolated, being isolated can make you crazy - you need people, mostly to talk to, but also to depend on and to help in turn.
- WoodenChair 8y ago
  I’m surprised you would even think your experience is comparable enough to the person in the original article to post in this thread. She was sick, had a disabled child, and no safety net. It sounds like you were single, healthy, with no dependents and an upper middle class family as a safety net. Perhaps there are other hardships you didn’t explain? How is your anecdote relevant to a discussion surrounding the issues the woman in the original article faced? Yes, being alone sucks. Is that your point?
  - crumpets 8y ago
    Reread the comment you replied to and it’s parent, then decide if shitting all over the comment was still appropriate. Op’s very first sentence admitted how relatively privileged he/she was.
  - Jare 8y ago
    Perhaps this > you need people, mostly to talk to, but also to depend on and to help in turn was his point? I think it's a valuable thing to say. In turn, I'd ask you to please try to be more charitable when reading other people's posts.
  - pertymcpert 8y ago
    How is this kind of narrow minded comment allowed on HN mods?
    - dang 8y ago
      Please don't take HN threads further off topic. If you see an egregious comment, flag it, as requested in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. You're also welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. Venting about it here doesn't help; we don't see most of the posts. All it does is lower the signal/noise ratio of a thread even further. The reason I know about this subthread is that another user flagged the GP comment. Had you added a flag of your own it would have killed it as well.
      - pertymcpert 8y ago
        Maybe you should make the flag button visible.
  - dang 8y ago
    This crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed here. It also breaks this guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here? We'd be grateful.
- testpostpls 8y ago
  Money is often used as a tool to control others.
agumonkey 8y ago
I think the recent decades turned us away from ~natural gathering/solidarity mindset. Consumerism drugs you thinking the best thing is to satisfy envy with things, and without a context of cultural sharing habits, many people end up alone struggling thinking people are selfish because today's mainstream is selfish and so it's hard to connect.
- sametmax 8y ago
  Not that simple. Social connections require work, they also are slow and unreliable. Before the information age, to get to know something, talking was the main way. But now with books, panels, displays, packaging, signs, internet, GPS, etc., we have access to a huge quantity of information without having to talk to each others. And we choose to do so because on average it's faster, more accurate, and avoid to deal with annoying people. After all, human relations also include a part of risk. I lived 2 years in Africa, and there, you don't have that much information immediately available. You are back to talking, creating a social network and playing the game. People are way more friendly there, there is greater solidarity. But things are also way slower, unreliable, and you are a lot more at the mercy of popularity games even in the most simple activities. This century we have been mutating our lives in deep ways, very fast. And it's not all bad. But we will need some time to reconcile the efficiency of our new life styles with the social needs we have at the primitive level. A few decades is way too short for that to have happened already, especially since we are not done with technical progress.
  - meditate 8y ago
    I don't see much of a difference. There still is a popularity game and it's played with corporations, not people. Though I agree that it's not necessarily a bad thing in comparison.
    - sametmax 8y ago
      Yes, but your popularity doesn't affect your experience of buying bread or your ability to reach a destination. In Mali you may get more expensive and shittier products for being disliked. You may have a hard time finding a good guide to accompany you somewhere. You life literally depends on what others think about you. It still true for us, but an order of magnitude less after high school.
aerovistae 8y ago
Where did you grow up?
- xeromal 8y ago
  Northern GA
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
On the flip side, I much more fear poverty with a family than without. I didn’t need much to make it as a single person, but now I have responsibilities.
- hopler 8y ago
  You are referring to having children, which is only one example of having family.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    We typically refer to the rest as an extended family, but I guess you could call my concern as one for having an immediate family. Of course, different cultures have different ideas about all of this (I’m specifically biased by growing up in an American nuclear family unit far away from extended family connections with no help during financial difficulties).
    - crumpets 8y ago
      I’m an American and I sure as hell don’t refer to my parents as my “extended family” even though I’m married with children.
      - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        Neither do I, even if they aren’t around anymore, but that is hardly the point grand parent was making.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - thedaemon 8y ago
    No, they were referring to the difference between having to support yourself versus the responsibility towards having to support your family. This could be their grandmother. It could be their children. It could be their pack of dogs. It doesn't matter, the point is singular vs multiple responsibilities of basic necessities.
blablabla123 8y ago
Yup, to some degree if you have the money you can buy yourself a safety net. If you neither have money nor the social safety net, the thing left is what government may provide. I grew up with a divorced mother that could provide only a small social safety net through family and an unstable financial situation. Although my financial situation is very stable since I've graduated - with small gaps - I'm extremely careful about my spendings and earnings, and instabilities worry me a lot.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  We all have to do our part to extend safety nets to those in our spheres of influence. I have done very well in life, mostly through what I attribute to luck and being at the right place at the right time. In return, I treat checking in and providing a helping hand (temporary housing, an extra line on my cellphone plan, or in some cases plain old cash) to extended family, friends, and others I encounter as a second job. Societal fabric isn’t going to be solved through anything other than effort on the part of individuals.
  - icelancer 8y ago
    > Societal fabric isn’t going to be solved through anything other than effort on the part of individuals. Very much indeed. We largely get the world we collectively bargain for.
    - crumpets 8y ago
      It’s what we collectively create, not bargain. There is nobody on the other side of society to “bargain” with.
      - eropple 8y ago
        Sure there is. There is a huge swath of society whose precepts revolve around "fuck you, I got mine." What are politics but bargains between those two positions? (They want to be they; we can only oblige.)
0815test 8y ago
I'd even argue that "relative" poverty at least (i.e. once one escapes actual, severe deprivation, which is mostly a factor in underdeveloped countries but not entirely unknown in the West, either) is all about the "being alone" factor. The best "anti-poverty" policy, once material abundance is achieved (and a UBI can help with that) is to promote social inclusion and to strenghten institutions that provide social capital. Conservatives understand this very well, BTW; strong social capital is key to the conservative worldview, whereas a "liberal" is often more inclined to see the world in terms of material relations of production and an inherently-unstable balance of power, and even the very notion of social atomization might be entirely foreign to them.
- nubbins 8y ago
  A lot of conservatives see the value in private arrangements (ie social capital) over public programs certainly, but I think their pro big business policies and suburbanization, inequality etc drive social atomization at least as much as the lefts policies do. Its a complicated problem and as long as we remain deeply commited to economic growth and individualism its hard for me to see how we can solve it.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    While I have many thoughts about organized religion, one way that I see it benefits people is that it does give people a sense of community. And when you think you have an invisible being in the sky that will take care of all of your needs, a government provided social safety net isn’t that important to some people.
dd36 8y ago
This is why I really liked the startup Josephine. I wish it’d make a comeback.
Consultant32452 8y ago
Those people you're talking about, your friends, neighbors, and family used to be what we were referring to when we talked about the social safety net. Now we mean govt programs. I'm not saying it's a causation, but somehow we gained the govt safety net and lost the old social one. I think we're all really missing out on something great and I don't know if we can ever get it back.
yibg 8y ago
Growing up in a poor immigrant family was a weird version of this. Most of us were poor and certainly provided emotional support in this regard. However from what I could see as a child there wasn’t a lot of material support. Maybe something with not wanting to trouble others.
roel_v 8y ago
Not only is she alone (as in 'single' - not to equate 'single' with 'alone' or 'lonely'...), she adopted three special needs children, too (I got this from following the link to her blog and then the 'about' section). From reading between the lines, it also seems she moved from the British countryside to a big Canadian city, likely leaving behind most of her social support network. Of course it's easy for me to 'judge' (I mean, I'm not really - to each their own) from my position as a software developer with a working spouse and a traditional family in a Western European country, but still - when you're already not in a very stable position, why take huge risks like adopting three special needs children?
- samcodes 8y ago
  Raising children is the primary function of society. Someone going beyond their means in order to raise more, harder to raise children should be celebrated. That we would see any fault is damning evidence that our society is malfunctioning.
  - roel_v 8y ago
    "Raising children is the primary function of society." Uh, says you. If people can't afford something, maybe they shouldn't get it - children included.

loblollyboy 8y ago

Exactly - I’m from upper middle class and while this meant I was lucky enough to go back home when unemployed, all my peers were just career oriented and it’s very lonely to be ‘a loser’ - I recently moved in w some old coworkers/friends in a diff city who are from a diff socioeconomic background. At first they just let me stay in the apt, now I make more than them (though not a lot). We share like family and look after eachother. Sometimes I wish I made more, like the other day when we were all posting our salaries, or when I browse ‘Who’s Hiring’ - but other ppl are more important than anything (unless you’re like a genius or something), you can lose work, money, etc. The internet can make you feel more isolated, being isolated can make you crazy - you need people, mostly to talk to, but also to depend on and to help in turn.

WoodenChair 8y ago
I’m surprised you would even think your experience is comparable enough to the person in the original article to post in this thread. She was sick, had a disabled child, and no safety net. It sounds like you were single, healthy, with no dependents and an upper middle class family as a safety net. Perhaps there are other hardships you didn’t explain? How is your anecdote relevant to a discussion surrounding the issues the woman in the original article faced? Yes, being alone sucks. Is that your point?
- crumpets 8y ago
  Reread the comment you replied to and it’s parent, then decide if shitting all over the comment was still appropriate. Op’s very first sentence admitted how relatively privileged he/she was.
- Jare 8y ago
  Perhaps this > you need people, mostly to talk to, but also to depend on and to help in turn was his point? I think it's a valuable thing to say. In turn, I'd ask you to please try to be more charitable when reading other people's posts.
- pertymcpert 8y ago
  How is this kind of narrow minded comment allowed on HN mods?
  - dang 8y ago
    Please don't take HN threads further off topic. If you see an egregious comment, flag it, as requested in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html. You're also welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. Venting about it here doesn't help; we don't see most of the posts. All it does is lower the signal/noise ratio of a thread even further. The reason I know about this subthread is that another user flagged the GP comment. Had you added a flag of your own it would have killed it as well.
    - pertymcpert 8y ago
      Maybe you should make the flag button visible.
- dang 8y ago
  This crosses into personal attack, which is not allowed here. It also breaks this guideline: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting here? We'd be grateful.
testpostpls 8y ago
Money is often used as a tool to control others.

agumonkey 8y ago

I think the recent decades turned us away from ~natural gathering/solidarity mindset. Consumerism drugs you thinking the best thing is to satisfy envy with things, and without a context of cultural sharing habits, many people end up alone struggling thinking people are selfish because today's mainstream is selfish and so it's hard to connect.

sametmax 8y ago
Not that simple. Social connections require work, they also are slow and unreliable. Before the information age, to get to know something, talking was the main way. But now with books, panels, displays, packaging, signs, internet, GPS, etc., we have access to a huge quantity of information without having to talk to each others. And we choose to do so because on average it's faster, more accurate, and avoid to deal with annoying people. After all, human relations also include a part of risk. I lived 2 years in Africa, and there, you don't have that much information immediately available. You are back to talking, creating a social network and playing the game. People are way more friendly there, there is greater solidarity. But things are also way slower, unreliable, and you are a lot more at the mercy of popularity games even in the most simple activities. This century we have been mutating our lives in deep ways, very fast. And it's not all bad. But we will need some time to reconcile the efficiency of our new life styles with the social needs we have at the primitive level. A few decades is way too short for that to have happened already, especially since we are not done with technical progress.
- meditate 8y ago
  I don't see much of a difference. There still is a popularity game and it's played with corporations, not people. Though I agree that it's not necessarily a bad thing in comparison.
  - sametmax 8y ago
    Yes, but your popularity doesn't affect your experience of buying bread or your ability to reach a destination. In Mali you may get more expensive and shittier products for being disliked. You may have a hard time finding a good guide to accompany you somewhere. You life literally depends on what others think about you. It still true for us, but an order of magnitude less after high school.

aerovistae 8y ago

Where did you grow up?

xeromal 8y ago
Northern GA

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

On the flip side, I much more fear poverty with a family than without. I didn’t need much to make it as a single person, but now I have responsibilities.

hopler 8y ago
You are referring to having children, which is only one example of having family.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  We typically refer to the rest as an extended family, but I guess you could call my concern as one for having an immediate family. Of course, different cultures have different ideas about all of this (I’m specifically biased by growing up in an American nuclear family unit far away from extended family connections with no help during financial difficulties).
  - crumpets 8y ago
    I’m an American and I sure as hell don’t refer to my parents as my “extended family” even though I’m married with children.
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      Neither do I, even if they aren’t around anymore, but that is hardly the point grand parent was making.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- thedaemon 8y ago
  No, they were referring to the difference between having to support yourself versus the responsibility towards having to support your family. This could be their grandmother. It could be their children. It could be their pack of dogs. It doesn't matter, the point is singular vs multiple responsibilities of basic necessities.

blablabla123 8y ago

Yup, to some degree if you have the money you can buy yourself a safety net. If you neither have money nor the social safety net, the thing left is what government may provide. I grew up with a divorced mother that could provide only a small social safety net through family and an unstable financial situation. Although my financial situation is very stable since I've graduated - with small gaps - I'm extremely careful about my spendings and earnings, and instabilities worry me a lot.

toomuchtodo 8y ago
We all have to do our part to extend safety nets to those in our spheres of influence. I have done very well in life, mostly through what I attribute to luck and being at the right place at the right time. In return, I treat checking in and providing a helping hand (temporary housing, an extra line on my cellphone plan, or in some cases plain old cash) to extended family, friends, and others I encounter as a second job. Societal fabric isn’t going to be solved through anything other than effort on the part of individuals.
- icelancer 8y ago
  > Societal fabric isn’t going to be solved through anything other than effort on the part of individuals. Very much indeed. We largely get the world we collectively bargain for.
  - crumpets 8y ago
    It’s what we collectively create, not bargain. There is nobody on the other side of society to “bargain” with.
    - eropple 8y ago
      Sure there is. There is a huge swath of society whose precepts revolve around "fuck you, I got mine." What are politics but bargains between those two positions? (They want to be they; we can only oblige.)

0815test 8y ago

I'd even argue that "relative" poverty at least (i.e. once one escapes actual, severe deprivation, which is mostly a factor in underdeveloped countries but not entirely unknown in the West, either) is all about the "being alone" factor. The best "anti-poverty" policy, once material abundance is achieved (and a UBI can help with that) is to promote social inclusion and to strenghten institutions that provide social capital. Conservatives understand this very well, BTW; strong social capital is key to the conservative worldview, whereas a "liberal" is often more inclined to see the world in terms of material relations of production and an inherently-unstable balance of power, and even the very notion of social atomization might be entirely foreign to them.

nubbins 8y ago
A lot of conservatives see the value in private arrangements (ie social capital) over public programs certainly, but I think their pro big business policies and suburbanization, inequality etc drive social atomization at least as much as the lefts policies do. Its a complicated problem and as long as we remain deeply commited to economic growth and individualism its hard for me to see how we can solve it.
- scarface74 8y ago
  While I have many thoughts about organized religion, one way that I see it benefits people is that it does give people a sense of community. And when you think you have an invisible being in the sky that will take care of all of your needs, a government provided social safety net isn’t that important to some people.

dd36 8y ago

This is why I really liked the startup Josephine. I wish it’d make a comeback.

Consultant32452 8y ago

Those people you're talking about, your friends, neighbors, and family used to be what we were referring to when we talked about the social safety net. Now we mean govt programs. I'm not saying it's a causation, but somehow we gained the govt safety net and lost the old social one. I think we're all really missing out on something great and I don't know if we can ever get it back.

yibg 8y ago

Growing up in a poor immigrant family was a weird version of this. Most of us were poor and certainly provided emotional support in this regard. However from what I could see as a child there wasn’t a lot of material support. Maybe something with not wanting to trouble others.

roel_v 8y ago

Not only is she alone (as in 'single' - not to equate 'single' with 'alone' or 'lonely'...), she adopted three special needs children, too (I got this from following the link to her blog and then the 'about' section). From reading between the lines, it also seems she moved from the British countryside to a big Canadian city, likely leaving behind most of her social support network. Of course it's easy for me to 'judge' (I mean, I'm not really - to each their own) from my position as a software developer with a working spouse and a traditional family in a Western European country, but still - when you're already not in a very stable position, why take huge risks like adopting three special needs children?

samcodes 8y ago
Raising children is the primary function of society. Someone going beyond their means in order to raise more, harder to raise children should be celebrated. That we would see any fault is damning evidence that our society is malfunctioning.
- roel_v 8y ago
  "Raising children is the primary function of society." Uh, says you. If people can't afford something, maybe they shouldn't get it - children included.