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Growing up in poverty is much more than just going hungry every night. Poverty consumes each person that lives inside of it and strips them of their own individ

Growing up in poverty is much more than just going hungry every night. Poverty consumes each person that lives inside of it and strips them of their own individual identity. As the author said, if you look at the faces of people around you long enough, you will start to see pain, fear, uncertainty, and many more unspoken emotions that is tied to poverty. Poverty makes a person begin questioning what it is they did in their life that brought them to this low of a point. Ignoring all of the economic reasons and social standings, poverty makes the person believe they are incapable of ever achieving anything more. It is when that same person begins to actually feel as if they can escape poverty that they also begin to have stronger fears of insecurity. For many, they feel as if they do not belong in a higher bracket. Trailer parks, frozen foods, and generic brands are all they ever knew and it’s all they should ever have. Being around those with money who have never experienced this lack of worth is a terrible time for those who came from poverty. In their eyes, if they were given the opportunity to be so comfortable in life, they would do anything they could to spread joy to anyone who walked through their door. But for many families, a fridge full of groceries is common; an abundance of snack choices for your guests is nothing out of the ordinary. For those in poverty, this sense of wanting to give back to those who may need it more than you is something that is learned through hardship and life experiences.

thrwaway69 7y ago
Removed: Apologies, I didn't think through when I wrote that. Hopefully, no one minds.
- crummy 7y ago
  I think most people prefer a "small shit life" than death. You talk about "bet on another life", so maybe you're talking about reincarnation though?
- xorfish 7y ago
  There are ways to combat poverty that are better than euthanasia. Giving people money is a pretty good way to do that. Money that they can choose to spend as they wish. Euthanasia should be available for people who suffer an illness that makes the life not worth living anymore.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - troyjfarrell 7y ago
    The perspective that "illness makes the life not worth living" is not universal. Indeed, it is utilitarian or epicurean perspectives that lead to this way of thinking. Many Christian perspectives (and, I expect those of many faiths) will hold that there is tremendous value in living and enduring discomfort and suffering. It's worth noting that these faiths spur believers on toward helping the poor and disadvantaged.
    - mlang23 7y ago
      Just for the record: I have a disability (blind), and from my point of view, there is one category of people that tends to behave completely inappropriately towards me, and those are "believers". I tend to avoid them whenever possible, because they tend to treat me in a very disrespectful way. They dont notice, because their faith has trained them to treat me with a certain patronising spin. TL;DR: Not all "disadvantages people" actually want the protection of religious fanatics.
      - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
        Is this: "people try to help me and I don't want them to"? Or something else? (Genuine question; that's not a negative judgement.)
        mlang23 7y ago
        Thats part of it. Unwanted help is definitely an issue. However, it doesnt end there. The more religious a person is, the more they take their time to explain to me how bad they think my situation is. Patronisation, pittying, and a general attitude of looking down at me.
        Hendrikto 7y ago
        > Patronisation, pittying, and a general attitude of looking down at me. Which is hard to square with the "it‘s god‘s will" bs…
- Aloha 7y ago
  If this is really your life outlook, you should perhaps seek guidance from a mental health professional.
  - thrwaway69 7y ago
    Thanks. I might when my family can afford it again and not have to deal with usual healthcare fraud.
- plmu 7y ago
  It is not good to make implicit assumptions that are not generally shared. Your post is either a cruel joke, or you assume certainty about something like reincarnation (another life). That might be "obvious" to you, but if you have just a bit of interest in what others think, you'd know that for a very large majority, that is not obvious at all. Do you write for yourself or for an audience? I had a neighbour once that made the boldest claim about "what must be in the universe", never empathizing with others but just making the wildest claims about supernatural phenomena. She ended up being committed at an institution.
  - thrwaway69 7y ago
    Yes, I am sorry. I left some details but after rethinking, perhaps I shouldn't share it to others after all. As a note, I don't believe in reincarnation or anything similar. I wasn't implying any certainty there but seeing it as a vector for hope.
OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago
I recently read Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy where a linguist finds himself in a completely foreign society where he cannot learn the language, can make no connection with anyone, and winds up on the streets when his money runs out. It isn't a perfect novel but it it foresees our society where the line between self-sufficiency and poverty grows thinner and thinner. Once someone falls off perhaps due to illness, job loss, or just bad luck it is increasingly difficult to get back up and people (including and indicting myself) just walk by. I am guessing that Levine's account is thirty or more years old. I hope that such kindness hasn't completely disappeared.
scotty79 7y ago
> Poverty consumes each person that lives inside of it and strips them of their own individual identity. "The problem of being poor is that it take all your time."
vezycash 7y ago
This sounds off to me. >Poverty consumes each person that lives inside of it and strips them of their own individual identity. I have no idea what this means. What I know from personal experience is that poverty makes one care less about the future. And make stupid decisions like voting for the guy who gives out $1 bread, sprays money in the air and ends up stealing $10mil. >Poverty makes a person begin questioning what it is they did in their life that brought them to this low of a point. For someone born to a poor home, this doesn't apply >In their eyes, if they were given the opportunity to be so comfortable in life, they would do anything they could to spread joy to anyone who walked through their door Depends on where you grew up or what your parents said to you. Where I'm from, wealthy guys who were once poor don't spread joy, but pain & oppress others with their wealth. They make completely new friends, become extremely busy, develop amnesia and suddenly can't remember people from their days of poverty. They rub it in your face, won't give out $1 to help anyone but would buy you as many beers as you'd like. Some people who escape poverty overspend, buy shiny wheels, drink their eyes out - buy, buy, buy to enjoy the life they never had in childhood and hasten their way to poverty. Another set become withdrawn. The fear that the good fortune is temporary makes this class live very simple lives. To them, "Winter is just on the horizon."
- scandox 7y ago
  Well the OP was saying that poverty has a psychological dimension and it seems to me you agree with that. From your perspective that psychological dimension can be explained without much interiority (i.e. makes you do stupid things) but for the OP it needs explaining from the inside in terms of feelings. You are both saying very similar things except you are applying very different value judgements to them. If I had to guess I would say you have a rather more deterministic / mechanistic view of the human experience than the OP.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  The post your replying to is complete drivel. It really just reeks of some romanticised, middle class guilt perspective of the poor. I grew up in complete poverty, in what was basically a drug den. I really can’t relate to anything that was written there, and it doesn’t describe anybody I knew growing up. But I guess upvoting that comment will make some people feel good about themselves, so there you have it...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
m12k 7y ago
This right here illustrates something I've been thinking about a lot - the various ways you can define freedom, and how differently it tends to be defined in the US compared to how I as a European define it. It seems that in the US it's common to define freedom as simply the absence of obligations and demands. So low taxes and small government = more freedom. Everyone gets to pay less in taxes so they are more free. For me this seems incredibly simplistic - it completely ignores the reality that actual freedom requires power, it requires opportunity, and it requires choice. Most poor people have no freedom, because they have neither power, opportunity nor choice. Poverty is completely crippling - you spend all your energy and focus on surviving, so you have very few resources to invest in bringing about a less desperate situation. So I don't get why the 'land of the free', the 'greatest nation on earth' can can be so ideologically opposed to wealth redistribution and the concept of a wellfare state as it seems to be. Jeff Bezos would not feel less free if he was worth 50 billion instead of 100. But the freedom that money could create among millions of others is enormous. And I'm not just arguing this as a moral kinda thing, e.g. 'think of the starving children', I'm just as much talking about this as a pragmatic, how-to-make-the-economy-work-better sort of thing. It's not just handouts, it's investing in people that don't have the resources to invest in themselves. It's increasing the size of the middle class that is capable of buying things, creating a bigger market for entrepreneurs to sell stuff to. Get the money circulating instead of stagnating in some tax haven. Is it because the Cold War has forever branded anything remotely resembling socialism anathema? Is it the propaganda from Fox News? Is it because the country's independence movement was kicked off with an opposition to taxes (the Boston Tea Party) and that has forever instilled the notion that taxes = bad in your very soul? I can see why those things would create resistance, but it just seems like such an ideological and not very pragmatic position at this point.
- esotericn 7y ago
  I mean, you said it in the first few sentences. The ultimate state of being in the US is one of higher freedom. What happens at the bottom end is neither here nor there. I prefer the European model as well - but let's be clear about this - most socialist countries don't really care about this either from a moral perspective, it's more of a law and order thing and a different way of running a society internally. The UK is leaving the EU in large part because a lot of people think immigration from other reasonably-developed countries is too high. The actually poor parts of the world are like a massive blind spot that we wave away into the category of 'asylum seekers' as if they're subhuman. Everywhere and everyone has a blind spot somewhere.
rubber_duck 7y ago
I grew up poor even by local standards during a civil war in a former communist state. Had 5 younger brothers and sisters living in a 30m2 apartment, electricity regularly being cut off, days without food, etc. I identify with nothing you said - I could clearly identify the causes of the poverty in our family in my dysfunctional parents. The biggest problem with being poor is when you get stuck at 0 it's incredibly hard to get out of that. Hard to start well at a new job when you got nothing to eat at home, don't know if your power is going to get switched off tomorrow and you might get evicted any moment. I would say the first time I lost the fears you mentioned was when I hit the lowest point - when you decide your life isn't worth living the way it is - what do you have to lose ?
- barrkel 7y ago
  > I identify with nothing you said > I would say the first time I lost the fears you mentioned These statements seem self-contradictory.
  - rubber_duck 7y ago
    But those fears weren't the thing holding me back - and overcoming them didn't really pull me out either - sure it put me in a different mindset once I got the opportunity - but it took getting help from my sister (who I supported earlier) now getting in a better situation where she could help me get out of that stuck at 0 while I deal with my debts and get the opportunity to do something.
yboris 7y ago
An excellent read about this topic: Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives (Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir) The authors, through empirical research (awesome experiments) show that scarcity (poverty) makes people perform worse on IQ tests by ~17 points (which they regain as soon as scarcity disappears). Poverty makes day to day living an endless barrage of difficult decision making.
- AareyBaba 7y ago
  Andrew Yang mentions this in his U.S. Presidential campaign speeches as a benefit of UBI. I wish more people were listening to his message. From battered women to families where the sole earner has lost their job - all would benefit from a minimum income and make this a much better society.
thunderbong 7y ago
I had become poor like this once in my life. I had to ration my food so that it would last a week. I had to think many times before consuming anything as to how important it was for me. I had to think about transportation costs to interviews. I had to tell people that I couldn't pay them because I didn't have money. One important thing I noticed that I became more superstitious. Like you mentioned, I kept questioning the paths I had traveled in my life, kept wondering if what I was going to do next was going to help or harm. It was really crazy. I could, of course, see that happening in myself, but the rationalization was, "what's the harm?" I also think that's tied up with one's faith in oneself. And the eroding of that faith was quite surprising when poor. I guess some people have a strong faith in themselves. I didn't. I also noticed that we focus on too many petty things in our lives. Social structures, peer acceptance, comparing ourselves for a sense of worth. None of these really matter at the end of the day (or life!).
- phaedrus 7y ago
  Most of my four years of college were lived in this state. I never knew at the beginning of the week if I'd still have food by the end of the week. Instead of studying I'd lay awake all (ALL!) night running a loop over in my head trying to figure out if/how the money would last to next semester. It really takes a continuous cognitive toll.
malvosenior 7y ago
I had the opposite experience growing up poor (although knew plenty of people who feel as you did). For me, I constantly felt that my situation was "wrong" and didn't fit me. I didn't want to eat frozen food or wear K-Mart sneakers, I thought I deserved better. It pushed me to fight hard to achieve what I considered a reasonable standard of living. Had I taken the advice or followed in the footsteps of those around me, it never would have happened. Instead I focused on my love of computers (even if it existed more in my head than real life since we couldn't afford one for a long time). That focused carried me out of poverty and then some. I'm convinced some subset of poor people that are high achievers will always reject their environment and refuse to settle.
- seoulbran 7y ago
  I couldn't agree more. I fall squarely into this camp. I grew up with a father in prison and a school teacher mother that had to work 3 jobs to provide for myself and my three brothers. I always knew I could do better, and now I run a multi-billion dollar organization. I just knew I wanted more for myself. My bigger concern now is how to raise up my four kids so that they come out motivated, hungry, willing to work, etc. I believe struggled makes great people, my kids won't know that type of struggle - fingers crossed. I ran the crucible, they won't... what does that mean for them?
  - cududa 7y ago
    I grew up similar - never thinking I’d have the same life forever. I’m certainly not as well off as I’d like to be yet, but I’m starting to get my life ready to have kids (4 or 5 years out I’d guess), and I’m already worried about spoiling them too much. I mean the entire motivation has been to start a family that didn’t have to have the same issues. Would love to read something from a similar background and how they navigate raising self-motivated, but well taken care of kids.
  - sangnoir 7y ago
    > I believe struggled makes great people It also crushes the rest, who might not be gifted or lucky enough to catch a break, despite their continual efforts. Not to disregard your circumstances, but humans irrationally see patterns in randomness. As a counter point: wealth also makes great people (pick any noted 16-19th century scientist, and there's a good chance they were wealthy & could afford to dick around long enough to discover fundamental laws. Alternatively, look at political, startup and corporate leadership)

thrwaway69 7y ago

Removed: Apologies, I didn't think through when I wrote that. Hopefully, no one minds.

crummy 7y ago
I think most people prefer a "small shit life" than death. You talk about "bet on another life", so maybe you're talking about reincarnation though?
xorfish 7y ago
There are ways to combat poverty that are better than euthanasia. Giving people money is a pretty good way to do that. Money that they can choose to spend as they wish. Euthanasia should be available for people who suffer an illness that makes the life not worth living anymore.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- troyjfarrell 7y ago
  The perspective that "illness makes the life not worth living" is not universal. Indeed, it is utilitarian or epicurean perspectives that lead to this way of thinking. Many Christian perspectives (and, I expect those of many faiths) will hold that there is tremendous value in living and enduring discomfort and suffering. It's worth noting that these faiths spur believers on toward helping the poor and disadvantaged.
  - mlang23 7y ago
    Just for the record: I have a disability (blind), and from my point of view, there is one category of people that tends to behave completely inappropriately towards me, and those are "believers". I tend to avoid them whenever possible, because they tend to treat me in a very disrespectful way. They dont notice, because their faith has trained them to treat me with a certain patronising spin. TL;DR: Not all "disadvantages people" actually want the protection of religious fanatics.
    - pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      Is this: "people try to help me and I don't want them to"? Or something else? (Genuine question; that's not a negative judgement.)
      - mlang23 7y ago
        Thats part of it. Unwanted help is definitely an issue. However, it doesnt end there. The more religious a person is, the more they take their time to explain to me how bad they think my situation is. Patronisation, pittying, and a general attitude of looking down at me.
        Hendrikto 7y ago
        > Patronisation, pittying, and a general attitude of looking down at me. Which is hard to square with the "it‘s god‘s will" bs…
Aloha 7y ago
If this is really your life outlook, you should perhaps seek guidance from a mental health professional.
- thrwaway69 7y ago
  Thanks. I might when my family can afford it again and not have to deal with usual healthcare fraud.
plmu 7y ago
It is not good to make implicit assumptions that are not generally shared. Your post is either a cruel joke, or you assume certainty about something like reincarnation (another life). That might be "obvious" to you, but if you have just a bit of interest in what others think, you'd know that for a very large majority, that is not obvious at all. Do you write for yourself or for an audience? I had a neighbour once that made the boldest claim about "what must be in the universe", never empathizing with others but just making the wildest claims about supernatural phenomena. She ended up being committed at an institution.
- thrwaway69 7y ago
  Yes, I am sorry. I left some details but after rethinking, perhaps I shouldn't share it to others after all. As a note, I don't believe in reincarnation or anything similar. I wasn't implying any certainty there but seeing it as a vector for hope.

OldGuyInTheClub 7y ago

I recently read Metropole by Ferenc Karinthy where a linguist finds himself in a completely foreign society where he cannot learn the language, can make no connection with anyone, and winds up on the streets when his money runs out. It isn't a perfect novel but it it foresees our society where the line between self-sufficiency and poverty grows thinner and thinner. Once someone falls off perhaps due to illness, job loss, or just bad luck it is increasingly difficult to get back up and people (including and indicting myself) just walk by. I am guessing that Levine's account is thirty or more years old. I hope that such kindness hasn't completely disappeared.

scotty79 7y ago

> Poverty consumes each person that lives inside of it and strips them of their own individual identity. "The problem of being poor is that it take all your time."

vezycash 7y ago

This sounds off to me. >Poverty consumes each person that lives inside of it and strips them of their own individual identity. I have no idea what this means. What I know from personal experience is that poverty makes one care less about the future. And make stupid decisions like voting for the guy who gives out $1 bread, sprays money in the air and ends up stealing $10mil. >Poverty makes a person begin questioning what it is they did in their life that brought them to this low of a point. For someone born to a poor home, this doesn't apply >In their eyes, if they were given the opportunity to be so comfortable in life, they would do anything they could to spread joy to anyone who walked through their door Depends on where you grew up or what your parents said to you. Where I'm from, wealthy guys who were once poor don't spread joy, but pain & oppress others with their wealth. They make completely new friends, become extremely busy, develop amnesia and suddenly can't remember people from their days of poverty. They rub it in your face, won't give out $1 to help anyone but would buy you as many beers as you'd like. Some people who escape poverty overspend, buy shiny wheels, drink their eyes out - buy, buy, buy to enjoy the life they never had in childhood and hasten their way to poverty. Another set become withdrawn. The fear that the good fortune is temporary makes this class live very simple lives. To them, "Winter is just on the horizon."

scandox 7y ago
Well the OP was saying that poverty has a psychological dimension and it seems to me you agree with that. From your perspective that psychological dimension can be explained without much interiority (i.e. makes you do stupid things) but for the OP it needs explaining from the inside in terms of feelings. You are both saying very similar things except you are applying very different value judgements to them. If I had to guess I would say you have a rather more deterministic / mechanistic view of the human experience than the OP.
AmericanChopper 7y ago
The post your replying to is complete drivel. It really just reeks of some romanticised, middle class guilt perspective of the poor. I grew up in complete poverty, in what was basically a drug den. I really can’t relate to anything that was written there, and it doesn’t describe anybody I knew growing up. But I guess upvoting that comment will make some people feel good about themselves, so there you have it...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

m12k 7y ago

This right here illustrates something I've been thinking about a lot - the various ways you can define freedom, and how differently it tends to be defined in the US compared to how I as a European define it. It seems that in the US it's common to define freedom as simply the absence of obligations and demands. So low taxes and small government = more freedom. Everyone gets to pay less in taxes so they are more free. For me this seems incredibly simplistic - it completely ignores the reality that actual freedom requires power, it requires opportunity, and it requires choice. Most poor people have no freedom, because they have neither power, opportunity nor choice. Poverty is completely crippling - you spend all your energy and focus on surviving, so you have very few resources to invest in bringing about a less desperate situation. So I don't get why the 'land of the free', the 'greatest nation on earth' can can be so ideologically opposed to wealth redistribution and the concept of a wellfare state as it seems to be. Jeff Bezos would not feel less free if he was worth 50 billion instead of 100. But the freedom that money could create among millions of others is enormous. And I'm not just arguing this as a moral kinda thing, e.g. 'think of the starving children', I'm just as much talking about this as a pragmatic, how-to-make-the-economy-work-better sort of thing. It's not just handouts, it's investing in people that don't have the resources to invest in themselves. It's increasing the size of the middle class that is capable of buying things, creating a bigger market for entrepreneurs to sell stuff to. Get the money circulating instead of stagnating in some tax haven. Is it because the Cold War has forever branded anything remotely resembling socialism anathema? Is it the propaganda from Fox News? Is it because the country's independence movement was kicked off with an opposition to taxes (the Boston Tea Party) and that has forever instilled the notion that taxes = bad in your very soul? I can see why those things would create resistance, but it just seems like such an ideological and not very pragmatic position at this point.

esotericn 7y ago
I mean, you said it in the first few sentences. The ultimate state of being in the US is one of higher freedom. What happens at the bottom end is neither here nor there. I prefer the European model as well - but let's be clear about this - most socialist countries don't really care about this either from a moral perspective, it's more of a law and order thing and a different way of running a society internally. The UK is leaving the EU in large part because a lot of people think immigration from other reasonably-developed countries is too high. The actually poor parts of the world are like a massive blind spot that we wave away into the category of 'asylum seekers' as if they're subhuman. Everywhere and everyone has a blind spot somewhere.

rubber_duck 7y ago

I grew up poor even by local standards during a civil war in a former communist state. Had 5 younger brothers and sisters living in a 30m2 apartment, electricity regularly being cut off, days without food, etc. I identify with nothing you said - I could clearly identify the causes of the poverty in our family in my dysfunctional parents. The biggest problem with being poor is when you get stuck at 0 it's incredibly hard to get out of that. Hard to start well at a new job when you got nothing to eat at home, don't know if your power is going to get switched off tomorrow and you might get evicted any moment. I would say the first time I lost the fears you mentioned was when I hit the lowest point - when you decide your life isn't worth living the way it is - what do you have to lose ?

barrkel 7y ago
> I identify with nothing you said > I would say the first time I lost the fears you mentioned These statements seem self-contradictory.
- rubber_duck 7y ago
  But those fears weren't the thing holding me back - and overcoming them didn't really pull me out either - sure it put me in a different mindset once I got the opportunity - but it took getting help from my sister (who I supported earlier) now getting in a better situation where she could help me get out of that stuck at 0 while I deal with my debts and get the opportunity to do something.

yboris 7y ago

An excellent read about this topic: Scarcity: The New Science of Having Less and How It Defines Our Lives (Sendhil Mullainathan & Eldar Shafir) The authors, through empirical research (awesome experiments) show that scarcity (poverty) makes people perform worse on IQ tests by ~17 points (which they regain as soon as scarcity disappears). Poverty makes day to day living an endless barrage of difficult decision making.

AareyBaba 7y ago
Andrew Yang mentions this in his U.S. Presidential campaign speeches as a benefit of UBI. I wish more people were listening to his message. From battered women to families where the sole earner has lost their job - all would benefit from a minimum income and make this a much better society.

thunderbong 7y ago

I had become poor like this once in my life. I had to ration my food so that it would last a week. I had to think many times before consuming anything as to how important it was for me. I had to think about transportation costs to interviews. I had to tell people that I couldn't pay them because I didn't have money. One important thing I noticed that I became more superstitious. Like you mentioned, I kept questioning the paths I had traveled in my life, kept wondering if what I was going to do next was going to help or harm. It was really crazy. I could, of course, see that happening in myself, but the rationalization was, "what's the harm?" I also think that's tied up with one's faith in oneself. And the eroding of that faith was quite surprising when poor. I guess some people have a strong faith in themselves. I didn't. I also noticed that we focus on too many petty things in our lives. Social structures, peer acceptance, comparing ourselves for a sense of worth. None of these really matter at the end of the day (or life!).

phaedrus 7y ago
Most of my four years of college were lived in this state. I never knew at the beginning of the week if I'd still have food by the end of the week. Instead of studying I'd lay awake all (ALL!) night running a loop over in my head trying to figure out if/how the money would last to next semester. It really takes a continuous cognitive toll.

malvosenior 7y ago

I had the opposite experience growing up poor (although knew plenty of people who feel as you did). For me, I constantly felt that my situation was "wrong" and didn't fit me. I didn't want to eat frozen food or wear K-Mart sneakers, I thought I deserved better. It pushed me to fight hard to achieve what I considered a reasonable standard of living. Had I taken the advice or followed in the footsteps of those around me, it never would have happened. Instead I focused on my love of computers (even if it existed more in my head than real life since we couldn't afford one for a long time). That focused carried me out of poverty and then some. I'm convinced some subset of poor people that are high achievers will always reject their environment and refuse to settle.

seoulbran 7y ago
I couldn't agree more. I fall squarely into this camp. I grew up with a father in prison and a school teacher mother that had to work 3 jobs to provide for myself and my three brothers. I always knew I could do better, and now I run a multi-billion dollar organization. I just knew I wanted more for myself. My bigger concern now is how to raise up my four kids so that they come out motivated, hungry, willing to work, etc. I believe struggled makes great people, my kids won't know that type of struggle - fingers crossed. I ran the crucible, they won't... what does that mean for them?
- cududa 7y ago
  I grew up similar - never thinking I’d have the same life forever. I’m certainly not as well off as I’d like to be yet, but I’m starting to get my life ready to have kids (4 or 5 years out I’d guess), and I’m already worried about spoiling them too much. I mean the entire motivation has been to start a family that didn’t have to have the same issues. Would love to read something from a similar background and how they navigate raising self-motivated, but well taken care of kids.
- sangnoir 7y ago
  > I believe struggled makes great people It also crushes the rest, who might not be gifted or lucky enough to catch a break, despite their continual efforts. Not to disregard your circumstances, but humans irrationally see patterns in randomness. As a counter point: wealth also makes great people (pick any noted 16-19th century scientist, and there's a good chance they were wealthy & could afford to dick around long enough to discover fundamental laws. Alternatively, look at political, startup and corporate leadership)