7 ms·

> the amount of sheer will, determination and delayed gratification needed to stay on the path for long enough to leave penury is beyond the realm of most peopl

> the amount of sheer will, determination and delayed gratification needed to stay on the path for long enough to leave penury is beyond the realm of most peoples ability. I don't think it is just delayed gratification that is a challenge, I think it is how a little bit of saved or scrounged up money can't change your circumstances. When you're behind on rent two months, about to get an eviction court mark on your record, have collections hounding you or an impending bankruptcy proceeding, doing things like buying a pleasurable consumer electronic or pricy clothes doesn't change that, it doesn't make a dent in that. Your money either goes in a black hole of interest payments and mounting obligations, or it goes into a nice escape that even the bankruptcy judge can't take from you. They probably won't even bother with your consumer goods. So until the utility of the money amounts changes, along with the speed the money amounts come in, there is no point in pretending that the circumstance will change due to your own discipline. People are going to be just as apathetic and critical of your circumstance either way if you have blemishes on your credit or have trouble keeping a lease for a home. It doesn't matter whether you saved marvelously or spent frivolously.

tibbar 5y ago
Yes. It is true that some people just need to live within their means. But for people who are poor in the traditional sense, the cash flow is just too low. There’s no way to live well on that income. Finding ways to save cash isn’t really an endgame, other than perhaps tactically preventing going bankrupt from an extra medical expense, etc. What you need is more income. The most reliable vehicle to this is to go to college and make plans to go into a healthcare/engineering/accounting etc career, but that’s a really hard plan to pivot to at a certain point in life.
- MaximumYComb 5y ago
  I started my pivot from a trade background into tech by going to university when I was 30. I'm 36 now and about to graduate while I've also been working in the field now for over two years. I've done this while being a single father to two young children (they were 1 and 3 when I started night univeristy). It was certainly not easy. I nearly burnt out hard multiple times.
- vmception 5y ago
  > but that’s a really hard plan to pivot to at a certain point in life. or while the cash flow is just too low at any point in life
- whatshisface 5y ago
  There's something seriously wrong with a society where nobody can live comfortably without a white-collar job while at the same time there's no way we would survive if we were all accountants.
  - tibbar 5y ago
    I agree. How do you see us fixing this? Maybe universal basic income? Over the last century we've eliminated many of the positions in agriculture and manufacturing that were traditionally considered good blue collar jobs. Automation on that front is only going to increase. Obviously the gig jobs - Uber, Lyft, DoorDash - are a really poor substitute...
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      Here are some solutions I can think of. No telling if any would work, these are just conversation starters. 1. Socialism. I don't need to describe this because you've already heard of it. :) 2. Extremely general insurance. You don't know how successful you're going to be before you're born, so you have insurance policies for lifetime income. If we can insure against the treatment costs of cystic fibrosis (parent's insurance covers dependents, then they get their own insurance when they grow up) then we can insure against the costs incurred by being born with an IQ less than 160 in an economy that's out to get you if you so much as blink. Is having 159 IQ a pathological deficiency? Well, pathology is relative to your environment. ;) 3. By fixing our existing system. Maybe all of these pointless wars, intelligence agency black budgets and the dead weight overhead incurred by structuring government projects to allocate funding according to the influence of representative districts, adds up and costs us in a way that puts the lower income 50% underwater first. Maybe there's enough to go around, but we're wasting it.
      - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
        #1
  - treis 5y ago
    Plenty of blue collar jobs pay enough to live comfortably
- brightball 5y ago
  I was helping a hard working kid with some financial education and told him essentially the same thing. He simply needed to make more money. He was making $13 / hour at the time and I helped him line up an interview with a guy who was ready to hire him doing the same thing for $25 / hour + professional training. He ghosted me and the interviewer. I’d been working with him for MONTHS to help get his life straightened out. I still have no idea why he did it.
  - monkeydreams 5y ago
    I've been that guy. There are any numbers of reasons for this. Shame, low confidence in meeting yours (and everyone else's) expectations, inability to imagine a better future (which leads to unimaginable cognitive load as you act in ways your brain finds torturous without any sense that it will ever improve), etc, etc. Typical people are all, pretty much, the same. Non-typical folk are different in their own ways. There is no single path to getting someone back up on their feet. This is one reason why anti-poverty campaigns - particularly the "mutual obligation" style of welfare - fail.
    - brightball 5y ago
      That makes some sense to me.
  - djokkataja 5y ago
    Is it possible it was a cultural thing? This is reading a ton into small details and generalizing a lot but... You mentioned you were helping him "get his life straightened out"; maybe he felt like it was going to pull him away from the friends that he'd grown up with? Kind of a difference of subcultures: one subculture that's poor and that values loyalty to friends over most other things (money comes and goes) vs a subculture that values career and money over most other things. (Not that these values are necessarily always mutually exclusive... but sometimes it can be uncomfortable to straddle the gap.) The other thing that makes me wonder if it's a cultural gap is that you mentioned he was going to be able to make twice as much as he was making before for doing the same thing. If it's the same work as before, what's the difference if not cultural? Learning to talk a certain way about the things you do, use more professional language, present yourself a certain way, and ditch the people you work with if you can earn more money doing the same thing. Then he's eroding his value for loyalty by learning to bullshit the people he work with on a regular basis, because he's acting in a way that's not how he normally acts, and he's established a precedent that he's willing to ditch his new coworkers for an entirely different batch if he can make more money by doing so. He might look at that and look at the friends and/or community he already has and decide he doesn't like where that path might lead him. That could also explain why he ghosted you. He might feel ashamed because he feels that he owes you for genuinely trying to help him. But how can he repay you except by accepting your help? And explaining where he's coming from would only lead to an ugly conflict or you convincing him that he's irrational and should just take the job -- but he's already decided he doesn't want to go that route. If he cuts all conflict, nukes it from orbit, then he can get on with his life however he wants to.
snarf21 5y ago
I think people miss how expensive it is to be poor.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  All the free lunches are served to those with a high ROI.
  - mym1990 5y ago
    There is no free lunch.
- thatsamonad 5y ago
  I would add that it’s not only expensive financially but also in terms of time. I grew up very poor and was fairly poor as an adult until about 6-7 years ago. I constantly had to make time trade offs. Do I exercise or evaluate and cut coupons to make my meager grocery budget last longer? Do I meal plan to make my money stretch further or spend that time investing in a skill? Not to mention things like not having reliable transportation, which meant taking the bus to and from work which tends to be a 2-3x longer commute. And if the bus was ever late, minimum wage retail jobs don’t really care so you get a “mark” on your record and potentially written up/fired if it happens too many times. I consider myself very fortunate that I was lucky enough to find myself a tech job and pull myself out of my previous financial situation. But I get the sense that a lot of people here haven’t been through that so they underestimate just how much more difficult it is to be poor, at least in the US.
  - vmception 5y ago
    I’ve had to juggle that in periods of my life too, on the polar opposite side I love how fast things can be. Buying a car with a cashier’s check after negotiating lower means no financing charges, interest, credit pulls and just having stored value for a little while. So much cheaper both financially and in time. Right now my used car is worth more than when I bought it.
- brightball 5y ago
hamiltonians 5y ago
the poverty tax is real
gonehome 5y ago
There's something I remember being told (or maybe read about too) related to the gift culture of extreme poverty as an adaptive behavior for survival, but that paradoxically keeps people in poverty poor. The basic idea is that you and all your friends are poor and someone comes into some amount of money, all of that money is pretty much immediately spent on helping friends or just material purchases rather than saving or planning. Partly this is because there's some feedback loop to expecting money not to last long, but also because then everyone in the community is spending money on everyone else. When you need to rely on the help of friends to survive at that level, being generous when you come into money makes it more likely your friends will help you in the same way. This gets taken to an extreme where there's pressure to not save. If you're found out to have money and have not immediately spent it you'll get shamed by your peers for being greedy or for acting better than them. Then if you end up needing financial help later maybe they won't want to help you (which at poverty level could be existential). These kind of social local maxima are really hard to break out of.
- gruez 5y ago
  > There's something I remember being told (or maybe read about too) I heard it from a youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AchISJUKfH4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AchISJUKfH4
- rdtwo 5y ago
  That’s why saving clubs are an awesome solution. Every month you and 12 of your neighbors put in money and take turns taking it out. You can make big life changing purchases without the stigma of holding on you cash. Also it eliminates the need for banking

tibbar 5y ago

Yes. It is true that some people just need to live within their means. But for people who are poor in the traditional sense, the cash flow is just too low. There’s no way to live well on that income. Finding ways to save cash isn’t really an endgame, other than perhaps tactically preventing going bankrupt from an extra medical expense, etc. What you need is more income. The most reliable vehicle to this is to go to college and make plans to go into a healthcare/engineering/accounting etc career, but that’s a really hard plan to pivot to at a certain point in life.

MaximumYComb 5y ago
I started my pivot from a trade background into tech by going to university when I was 30. I'm 36 now and about to graduate while I've also been working in the field now for over two years. I've done this while being a single father to two young children (they were 1 and 3 when I started night univeristy). It was certainly not easy. I nearly burnt out hard multiple times.
vmception 5y ago
> but that’s a really hard plan to pivot to at a certain point in life. or while the cash flow is just too low at any point in life
whatshisface 5y ago
There's something seriously wrong with a society where nobody can live comfortably without a white-collar job while at the same time there's no way we would survive if we were all accountants.
- tibbar 5y ago
  I agree. How do you see us fixing this? Maybe universal basic income? Over the last century we've eliminated many of the positions in agriculture and manufacturing that were traditionally considered good blue collar jobs. Automation on that front is only going to increase. Obviously the gig jobs - Uber, Lyft, DoorDash - are a really poor substitute...
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    Here are some solutions I can think of. No telling if any would work, these are just conversation starters. 1. Socialism. I don't need to describe this because you've already heard of it. :) 2. Extremely general insurance. You don't know how successful you're going to be before you're born, so you have insurance policies for lifetime income. If we can insure against the treatment costs of cystic fibrosis (parent's insurance covers dependents, then they get their own insurance when they grow up) then we can insure against the costs incurred by being born with an IQ less than 160 in an economy that's out to get you if you so much as blink. Is having 159 IQ a pathological deficiency? Well, pathology is relative to your environment. ;) 3. By fixing our existing system. Maybe all of these pointless wars, intelligence agency black budgets and the dead weight overhead incurred by structuring government projects to allocate funding according to the influence of representative districts, adds up and costs us in a way that puts the lower income 50% underwater first. Maybe there's enough to go around, but we're wasting it.
    - nopenopenopeno 5y ago
      #1
- treis 5y ago
  Plenty of blue collar jobs pay enough to live comfortably
brightball 5y ago
I was helping a hard working kid with some financial education and told him essentially the same thing. He simply needed to make more money. He was making $13 / hour at the time and I helped him line up an interview with a guy who was ready to hire him doing the same thing for $25 / hour + professional training. He ghosted me and the interviewer. I’d been working with him for MONTHS to help get his life straightened out. I still have no idea why he did it.
- monkeydreams 5y ago
  I've been that guy. There are any numbers of reasons for this. Shame, low confidence in meeting yours (and everyone else's) expectations, inability to imagine a better future (which leads to unimaginable cognitive load as you act in ways your brain finds torturous without any sense that it will ever improve), etc, etc. Typical people are all, pretty much, the same. Non-typical folk are different in their own ways. There is no single path to getting someone back up on their feet. This is one reason why anti-poverty campaigns - particularly the "mutual obligation" style of welfare - fail.
  - brightball 5y ago
    That makes some sense to me.
- djokkataja 5y ago
  Is it possible it was a cultural thing? This is reading a ton into small details and generalizing a lot but... You mentioned you were helping him "get his life straightened out"; maybe he felt like it was going to pull him away from the friends that he'd grown up with? Kind of a difference of subcultures: one subculture that's poor and that values loyalty to friends over most other things (money comes and goes) vs a subculture that values career and money over most other things. (Not that these values are necessarily always mutually exclusive... but sometimes it can be uncomfortable to straddle the gap.) The other thing that makes me wonder if it's a cultural gap is that you mentioned he was going to be able to make twice as much as he was making before for doing the same thing. If it's the same work as before, what's the difference if not cultural? Learning to talk a certain way about the things you do, use more professional language, present yourself a certain way, and ditch the people you work with if you can earn more money doing the same thing. Then he's eroding his value for loyalty by learning to bullshit the people he work with on a regular basis, because he's acting in a way that's not how he normally acts, and he's established a precedent that he's willing to ditch his new coworkers for an entirely different batch if he can make more money by doing so. He might look at that and look at the friends and/or community he already has and decide he doesn't like where that path might lead him. That could also explain why he ghosted you. He might feel ashamed because he feels that he owes you for genuinely trying to help him. But how can he repay you except by accepting your help? And explaining where he's coming from would only lead to an ugly conflict or you convincing him that he's irrational and should just take the job -- but he's already decided he doesn't want to go that route. If he cuts all conflict, nukes it from orbit, then he can get on with his life however he wants to.

snarf21 5y ago

I think people miss how expensive it is to be poor.

eurasiantiger 5y ago
All the free lunches are served to those with a high ROI.
- mym1990 5y ago
  There is no free lunch.
thatsamonad 5y ago
I would add that it’s not only expensive financially but also in terms of time. I grew up very poor and was fairly poor as an adult until about 6-7 years ago. I constantly had to make time trade offs. Do I exercise or evaluate and cut coupons to make my meager grocery budget last longer? Do I meal plan to make my money stretch further or spend that time investing in a skill? Not to mention things like not having reliable transportation, which meant taking the bus to and from work which tends to be a 2-3x longer commute. And if the bus was ever late, minimum wage retail jobs don’t really care so you get a “mark” on your record and potentially written up/fired if it happens too many times. I consider myself very fortunate that I was lucky enough to find myself a tech job and pull myself out of my previous financial situation. But I get the sense that a lot of people here haven’t been through that so they underestimate just how much more difficult it is to be poor, at least in the US.
- vmception 5y ago
  I’ve had to juggle that in periods of my life too, on the polar opposite side I love how fast things can be. Buying a car with a cashier’s check after negotiating lower means no financing charges, interest, credit pulls and just having stored value for a little while. So much cheaper both financially and in time. Right now my used car is worth more than when I bought it.
brightball 5y ago

hamiltonians 5y ago

the poverty tax is real

gonehome 5y ago

There's something I remember being told (or maybe read about too) related to the gift culture of extreme poverty as an adaptive behavior for survival, but that paradoxically keeps people in poverty poor. The basic idea is that you and all your friends are poor and someone comes into some amount of money, all of that money is pretty much immediately spent on helping friends or just material purchases rather than saving or planning. Partly this is because there's some feedback loop to expecting money not to last long, but also because then everyone in the community is spending money on everyone else. When you need to rely on the help of friends to survive at that level, being generous when you come into money makes it more likely your friends will help you in the same way. This gets taken to an extreme where there's pressure to not save. If you're found out to have money and have not immediately spent it you'll get shamed by your peers for being greedy or for acting better than them. Then if you end up needing financial help later maybe they won't want to help you (which at poverty level could be existential). These kind of social local maxima are really hard to break out of.

gruez 5y ago
> There's something I remember being told (or maybe read about too) I heard it from a youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AchISJUKfH4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AchISJUKfH4
rdtwo 5y ago
That’s why saving clubs are an awesome solution. Every month you and 12 of your neighbors put in money and take turns taking it out. You can make big life changing purchases without the stigma of holding on you cash. Also it eliminates the need for banking