6 ms·

Being Poor vs. Feeling Poor

38 points by herbertl 3y ago

michaelmrose 3y ago
> Our apartment was small, my mom prepared food for a tiny catering company, and my dad was abroad trying to get his small business off the ground. By all financial measures, we were poor. A family with dual income that can afford for one member to live abroad while starting their small business isn't what most people would call poor. At best they were lower middle class en route to upper middle class. Fuck "feeling poor". This is what poverty is like. Poverty is going to work every day knowing that you are getting further behind not ahead and still sticking it out and busting your ass because if you lose your job your life is going to crater. Poverty is losing the home you bought because even though their is a government loan to catch you up you can't afford a lawyer to fight them to make them give you a pile of essentially free money to get your loan straight. Poverty is keeping your family together anyway and moving across the country to stay with family members. Poverty is having your car break down and instead of going to the mechanic walking home 6 miles at 1AM for months. Poverty is starting that walk at 2AM because you spent an hour drinking coffee in the break room working up the motivation to walk after spending 8-10 hours doing physical labor. Poverty is borrowing a shopping cart from the grocery store a mile away so you can take your groceries home and letting your kid ride in it both laughing as you cruise through puddles in the rain then walking your purloined cart all the way back. Poverty is getting harassed by the cops solely because you are out late at night and stopped for the 3rd time until you start thinking like a criminal and planning routes around them as if trying to get home was a crime. Poverty is getting arrested for using a bad world while walking away and not being able to afford a lawyer and having to write your own appeal. Poverty is renting a cabin in the woods barely 200sq ft for 4 people with no running water and enjoying the scenery instead of bitching about whose turn it is to bring a bucket of water in. Poverty is going on a fishing with your father after you came back home still waiting for the free asthma medication from the manufacturers patient assistance program to come through and laughing at his description of his clip on sunglasses as the "dorkmaster 2000s" instead of thinking about the fact that without medication you can't walk up a hill without feeling like you are going to asphyxiate and dreaming you are suffocating because you in fact are. Poverty is not asking for the money to cover them out of pocket because it costs $400 and nobody has that. Poverty is living in a moldy apartment building with druggies because its cheap. Poverty is waiting years for your building to fix the mold issue in the walls that is leaking into the apartment because the building claims its not "that kind of mold" because the contractor call smell the bad kind of black mold until you actually get a sample so you can have it tested by a lab to prove it is in fact the kind of black mold that makes you sick. Poverty is living in a building which a local drug dealer or some other unknown malefactor has tried to burn down twice in a row and instead of moving organizing patrols of the hallways at night to sweep for scumbags and helping set up a buddy system to get the disabled folks out if the alarm goes off and ultimately dealing physically with the probable culprit in the courtyard when he attacked a neighbor. Poverty is the cops accusing YOU of a crime for defending your neighbor. Attitude is important. How you tell yourself your own personal narrative is important. Positively is important. But life doesn't give two shits if you "feel" poor. Poverty leads to factual privation and struggle and for a lot of folks its not a transitory heroes journey where our protagonist must pay his dues. Instead its a trap that many folks spend their entire life fighting and never quite leaving. For myself I'm still fighting the tar and have no intention on being interred here but I also have no illusion that its a matter of not "feeling poor" It's a cold question of resources and effort not an emotional one.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  I feel everything you said here. hug
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    Thanks
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Quinzel 3y ago
>”By all financial measures, we were poor.” >”But here’s the thing: I never felt poor.” >”I had everything I needed and wanted. I had all the resources I required to do well at school too, so I never felt underprivileged there either.” This is written by someone who doesn’t understand that they were not poor. Poor is only eating 3/7 days a week. Poor is not owning pyjama’s, underwear or socks. Poor is not having school books, and stationary. Poor is being excluded from community events and activities because you cannot afford to participate. Shit it irks me when people who haven’t lived poor try to explain how it’s just a matter of perspective. Even people who decide they’re going to be homeless for a while by choice to you know, have that lived experience so they can say they know what it’s like make me grr, like if it’s ever a choice on any level you just don’t know what it’s like.
- wizerdrobe 3y ago
  Here’s a question I’ve lived: what if you live in comically impoverished conditions such that the elements you’ve described are mitigated? Squatting in a half collapsed 1970 single wife trailer with raccoons sleeping on your futon couch. The schooling is there, the meals are there, but you’re living a life so embarrassing you don’t mention it. Is that poor?
  - Quinzel 3y ago
    Yeah man, that’s poverty. The thing about poor/poverty is that it completely shapes your frame of reference. Sometimes you don’t even know how impoverished you really are, just like how privileged people often don’t understand how privileged they are. But I think, if you’re so embarrassed by your living conditions you don’t mention it, I’d say you’re poor, and you know you’re poor too, by virtue of the fact that you feel embarrassed - not that I think people should be embarrassed about being poor, it’s not a signal of some moral failing as a human being (in my opinion).
  - Moto7451 3y ago
    There are a few definitions of being homeless depending on the frame of reference. For a number of years I lived in a busted up unrentable storefront and it was certainly not by choice. It certainly fit a few of the government definitions of poverty and/or homelessness that are out there. Being poor, being homeless, etc is a fuzzy thing in its nature. It’s not just being without everything. My personal definition of being poor is having to make trade offs between food, shelter, and safety where you’re going without one or more on a regular basis. I didn’t sleep in a bed, the place I slept in would pour buckets of water when it rained, it was cold in the winter, and the neighborhood could be unsafe at times. I didn’t go hungry since I always had the money for a $1 package of pasta and a $1.50 can of tomato sauce. I was able to go to school because my specific version of homelessness matched one that California recognized in order to waive tuition. Ultimately life worked out for me. 15 years later I feel stressed for money due to all the asks my family makes of me, but I never feel poor.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
austinl 3y ago
There was a popular submission to HN a few years ago that really opened my eyes to how having a low income can cause problems to compound, making things exponentially worse. An example the author gives of this is car problems: people with low incomes often have older cars that are more likely to have issues. If their car breaks down, there's a chance they can't afford repairs, which means they're unable to commute to work. Perhaps because of this, they choose to stop making water bill payments or buying as much food while saving for repairs. Everything is very precarious—you're essentially one or two unlucky incidents away from ruin. That, to me, is what it means to "be poor" in the US. https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-the-experience-of-being-poor-ish https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-the-experience-of-be...
- randallsquared 3y ago
  Also, people in these situations use loans to pay for things like repairs, or for other things they need to buy if the paycheck has to go to repairs. If you've ever wondered why anyone would use a point-of-sale loan for groceries, this is one reason: to free up cash for something urgent that they can't use a loan for, like car repair from a shade tree mechanic in the neighborhood. Since there are often multiple things stacked up that are slightly less urgent that you might expect they'd use savings for, there's no way in this life to get ahead enough to have savings. Something will always come along (if not for you, for your family or a close friend) that you must use those savings for, should you have them, but which you could scrape by without or using a loan if you didn't have savings. This results in a lot of poor people having no habit of savings or aggressively paying down debt, which imparts difficulty in climbing out of this cyclic trap once they do get a better job.
Deprogrammer9 3y ago
I have a warm, dry nice place to live. I have food & security but I don't have the newest fad car or newest fad fashion. SO WHAT, I'm sure i'll get over it lol. I keep up with nobody but myself thanks.
- qingcharles 3y ago
  Amen. I have a cold, dry place to live. But someone was kind enough to buy me a sleeping bag yesterday, so now I am warm. I have enough food to feed myself and not go hungry, which is a big improvement from being in jail lol.
carlotasoto 3y ago
This is a good article, but to me, it illustrates well how the concept of a “middle class” has practically dissapeared in our culture. Is being “not rich” the same as being poor? The article doesn’t describe the childhood of a rich kid, but it doesn’t describe the childhood of somebody poor either. Perhaps this is an interesting consequence of the inequality we’re living in, we forget there’s actually an in-between that could be (perhaps?) a nice thing to also aspire for.
mikesabat 3y ago
Rich and poor are relative terms. Anyone reading this comment can feel rich in certain rooms and poor in others. There is only 1 person in the entire world that is the richest person they know. My takeaway from this post is that how someone feels about being rich or poor is something they can control and it might be better to not feel poor most of the time. Being poor (or not) has some objective level, but is mostly about the surroundings that a person finds themselves in. Feeling poor also needs to account for an individual's past. I've had times where I was flush with cash and those situations raised the bar for feeling rich vs poor for my present & future self.
jccalhoun 3y ago
This reminds me of the University of Chicago Law professor who wrote a post about how he wasn't rich because after paying for three kids to go to private school, a gardener, a house cleaner, and retirement he only has a few hundred dollars of discretionary spending left each month... https://web.archive.org/web/20100920033403/truthonthemarket.com/2010/09/15/we-are-the-super-rich/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100920033403/truthonthemarket....
wwarner 3y ago
Wealth disparity seems more tangible to me. If you grow up in a city that was transformed by tech but weren’t able to make the switch to computing, you can’t afford to live there any more, you have move. If your job was lost to automation, you’ve objectively lost your healthcare.
Glyptodon 3y ago
One thing to note is that sounds like writer's family was not time poor, IE, family had enough time to ensure structure for the kids. Many families from low to moderate income levels seem to lack the time and wherewithal to manage this, often in ways that seem externally inscrutable.
29athrowaway 3y ago
On paper, being poor is living close to the poverty line. But that line is calibrated for political reasons to be much lower, to lower the amount of people considered poor and to make governments look better.
zuminator 3y ago
Part of the issue is that there are drastically different types of experiences, with different causes and different solutions, that are put under the umbrella of poverty. For example, the author states: > when it was time to go home, it was simply a return to the warm space that I shared with my family. It's good that he could do that. But that opportunity doesn't exist for people who not only don't have a warm space to return to, but may not have any permanent space to return to, and may not even have a family. > Many of my neighbors also worked in the same catering company as my mom, which meant that there was an aura of familiarity that connected us all. Again, it's wonderful that he has such memories. Even those of us who were never poor might find something enviable about that. But in some areas of concentrated poverty, the idea of many neighbors working at all is a non-starter, much less many neighbors working together. Or if there are jobs, they aren't catering jobs, they're dangerous work like mining and meatpacking, which leave wounded casualties in their wake who then become additional burdens on meager familial resources. So one thing that rubs me the wrong way a bit is the way the author is basically saying "adjust your thinking and you won't feel poor." And while that might be good advice for people who can't afford luxuries, it's not so helpful for people who can't afford basic necessities like food and a roof over their heads.
diamondfist25 3y ago
Like what Dave chapelle said — poor is a state of mind, so I’m not poor. What I am is broke
qingcharles 3y ago
I never even knew I was poor when I was a kid. I didn't have a bathroom in the house, just a toilet outside and a tin bath to wash in outside too. It didn't even register that other people had bathrooms. I had everything I needed. I had some computer books (no computer) and a pile of Lego, and I was GOOD. I've been a millionaire twice. Now I'm even poorer. I get all my food from the food pantries, and I own literally nothing. I've been reduced to zero. But I'm not unhappy! Someone was kind enough to put a roof over my head and I have an Internet connection and an IDE and I can crank out code all day until one day when I return to middle-class and can buy some decent coffee again.

38 points by herbertl 3y ago

> Our apartment was small, my mom prepared food for a tiny catering company, and my dad was abroad trying to get his small business off the ground. By all financial measures, we were poor. A family with dual income that can afford for one member to live abroad while starting their small business isn't what most people would call poor. At best they were lower middle class en route to upper middle class. Fuck "feeling poor". This is what poverty is like. Poverty is going to work every day knowing that you are getting further behind not ahead and still sticking it out and busting your ass because if you lose your job your life is going to crater. Poverty is losing the home you bought because even though their is a government loan to catch you up you can't afford a lawyer to fight them to make them give you a pile of essentially free money to get your loan straight. Poverty is keeping your family together anyway and moving across the country to stay with family members. Poverty is having your car break down and instead of going to the mechanic walking home 6 miles at 1AM for months. Poverty is starting that walk at 2AM because you spent an hour drinking coffee in the break room working up the motivation to walk after spending 8-10 hours doing physical labor. Poverty is borrowing a shopping cart from the grocery store a mile away so you can take your groceries home and letting your kid ride in it both laughing as you cruise through puddles in the rain then walking your purloined cart all the way back. Poverty is getting harassed by the cops solely because you are out late at night and stopped for the 3rd time until you start thinking like a criminal and planning routes around them as if trying to get home was a crime. Poverty is getting arrested for using a bad world while walking away and not being able to afford a lawyer and having to write your own appeal. Poverty is renting a cabin in the woods barely 200sq ft for 4 people with no running water and enjoying the scenery instead of bitching about whose turn it is to bring a bucket of water in. Poverty is going on a fishing with your father after you came back home still waiting for the free asthma medication from the manufacturers patient assistance program to come through and laughing at his description of his clip on sunglasses as the "dorkmaster 2000s" instead of thinking about the fact that without medication you can't walk up a hill without feeling like you are going to asphyxiate and dreaming you are suffocating because you in fact are. Poverty is not asking for the money to cover them out of pocket because it costs $400 and nobody has that. Poverty is living in a moldy apartment building with druggies because its cheap. Poverty is waiting years for your building to fix the mold issue in the walls that is leaking into the apartment because the building claims its not "that kind of mold" because the contractor call smell the bad kind of black mold until you actually get a sample so you can have it tested by a lab to prove it is in fact the kind of black mold that makes you sick. Poverty is living in a building which a local drug dealer or some other unknown malefactor has tried to burn down twice in a row and instead of moving organizing patrols of the hallways at night to sweep for scumbags and helping set up a buddy system to get the disabled folks out if the alarm goes off and ultimately dealing physically with the probable culprit in the courtyard when he attacked a neighbor. Poverty is the cops accusing YOU of a crime for defending your neighbor. Attitude is important. How you tell yourself your own personal narrative is important. Positively is important. But life doesn't give two shits if you "feel" poor. Poverty leads to factual privation and struggle and for a lot of folks its not a transitory heroes journey where our protagonist must pay his dues. Instead its a trap that many folks spend their entire life fighting and never quite leaving. For myself I'm still fighting the tar and have no intention on being interred here but I also have no illusion that its a matter of not "feeling poor" It's a cold question of resources and effort not an emotional one.

qingcharles 3y ago
I feel everything you said here. hug
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  Thanks
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

Quinzel 3y ago

>”By all financial measures, we were poor.” >”But here’s the thing: I never felt poor.” >”I had everything I needed and wanted. I had all the resources I required to do well at school too, so I never felt underprivileged there either.” This is written by someone who doesn’t understand that they were not poor. Poor is only eating 3/7 days a week. Poor is not owning pyjama’s, underwear or socks. Poor is not having school books, and stationary. Poor is being excluded from community events and activities because you cannot afford to participate. Shit it irks me when people who haven’t lived poor try to explain how it’s just a matter of perspective. Even people who decide they’re going to be homeless for a while by choice to you know, have that lived experience so they can say they know what it’s like make me grr, like if it’s ever a choice on any level you just don’t know what it’s like.

wizerdrobe 3y ago
Here’s a question I’ve lived: what if you live in comically impoverished conditions such that the elements you’ve described are mitigated? Squatting in a half collapsed 1970 single wife trailer with raccoons sleeping on your futon couch. The schooling is there, the meals are there, but you’re living a life so embarrassing you don’t mention it. Is that poor?
- Quinzel 3y ago
  Yeah man, that’s poverty. The thing about poor/poverty is that it completely shapes your frame of reference. Sometimes you don’t even know how impoverished you really are, just like how privileged people often don’t understand how privileged they are. But I think, if you’re so embarrassed by your living conditions you don’t mention it, I’d say you’re poor, and you know you’re poor too, by virtue of the fact that you feel embarrassed - not that I think people should be embarrassed about being poor, it’s not a signal of some moral failing as a human being (in my opinion).
- Moto7451 3y ago
  There are a few definitions of being homeless depending on the frame of reference. For a number of years I lived in a busted up unrentable storefront and it was certainly not by choice. It certainly fit a few of the government definitions of poverty and/or homelessness that are out there. Being poor, being homeless, etc is a fuzzy thing in its nature. It’s not just being without everything. My personal definition of being poor is having to make trade offs between food, shelter, and safety where you’re going without one or more on a regular basis. I didn’t sleep in a bed, the place I slept in would pour buckets of water when it rained, it was cold in the winter, and the neighborhood could be unsafe at times. I didn’t go hungry since I always had the money for a $1 package of pasta and a $1.50 can of tomato sauce. I was able to go to school because my specific version of homelessness matched one that California recognized in order to waive tuition. Ultimately life worked out for me. 15 years later I feel stressed for money due to all the asks my family makes of me, but I never feel poor.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

austinl 3y ago

There was a popular submission to HN a few years ago that really opened my eyes to how having a low income can cause problems to compound, making things exponentially worse. An example the author gives of this is car problems: people with low incomes often have older cars that are more likely to have issues. If their car breaks down, there's a chance they can't afford repairs, which means they're unable to commute to work. Perhaps because of this, they choose to stop making water bill payments or buying as much food while saving for repairs. Everything is very precarious—you're essentially one or two unlucky incidents away from ruin. That, to me, is what it means to "be poor" in the US. https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-the-experience-of-being-poor-ish https://www.residentcontrarian.com/p/on-the-experience-of-be...

randallsquared 3y ago
Also, people in these situations use loans to pay for things like repairs, or for other things they need to buy if the paycheck has to go to repairs. If you've ever wondered why anyone would use a point-of-sale loan for groceries, this is one reason: to free up cash for something urgent that they can't use a loan for, like car repair from a shade tree mechanic in the neighborhood. Since there are often multiple things stacked up that are slightly less urgent that you might expect they'd use savings for, there's no way in this life to get ahead enough to have savings. Something will always come along (if not for you, for your family or a close friend) that you must use those savings for, should you have them, but which you could scrape by without or using a loan if you didn't have savings. This results in a lot of poor people having no habit of savings or aggressively paying down debt, which imparts difficulty in climbing out of this cyclic trap once they do get a better job.

Deprogrammer9 3y ago

I have a warm, dry nice place to live. I have food & security but I don't have the newest fad car or newest fad fashion. SO WHAT, I'm sure i'll get over it lol. I keep up with nobody but myself thanks.

qingcharles 3y ago
Amen. I have a cold, dry place to live. But someone was kind enough to buy me a sleeping bag yesterday, so now I am warm. I have enough food to feed myself and not go hungry, which is a big improvement from being in jail lol.

carlotasoto 3y ago

This is a good article, but to me, it illustrates well how the concept of a “middle class” has practically dissapeared in our culture. Is being “not rich” the same as being poor? The article doesn’t describe the childhood of a rich kid, but it doesn’t describe the childhood of somebody poor either. Perhaps this is an interesting consequence of the inequality we’re living in, we forget there’s actually an in-between that could be (perhaps?) a nice thing to also aspire for.

mikesabat 3y ago

Rich and poor are relative terms. Anyone reading this comment can feel rich in certain rooms and poor in others. There is only 1 person in the entire world that is the richest person they know. My takeaway from this post is that how someone feels about being rich or poor is something they can control and it might be better to not feel poor most of the time. Being poor (or not) has some objective level, but is mostly about the surroundings that a person finds themselves in. Feeling poor also needs to account for an individual's past. I've had times where I was flush with cash and those situations raised the bar for feeling rich vs poor for my present & future self.

jccalhoun 3y ago

This reminds me of the University of Chicago Law professor who wrote a post about how he wasn't rich because after paying for three kids to go to private school, a gardener, a house cleaner, and retirement he only has a few hundred dollars of discretionary spending left each month... https://web.archive.org/web/20100920033403/truthonthemarket.com/2010/09/15/we-are-the-super-rich/ https://web.archive.org/web/20100920033403/truthonthemarket....

wwarner 3y ago

Wealth disparity seems more tangible to me. If you grow up in a city that was transformed by tech but weren’t able to make the switch to computing, you can’t afford to live there any more, you have move. If your job was lost to automation, you’ve objectively lost your healthcare.

Glyptodon 3y ago

One thing to note is that sounds like writer's family was not time poor, IE, family had enough time to ensure structure for the kids. Many families from low to moderate income levels seem to lack the time and wherewithal to manage this, often in ways that seem externally inscrutable.

29athrowaway 3y ago

On paper, being poor is living close to the poverty line. But that line is calibrated for political reasons to be much lower, to lower the amount of people considered poor and to make governments look better.

zuminator 3y ago

Part of the issue is that there are drastically different types of experiences, with different causes and different solutions, that are put under the umbrella of poverty. For example, the author states: > when it was time to go home, it was simply a return to the warm space that I shared with my family. It's good that he could do that. But that opportunity doesn't exist for people who not only don't have a warm space to return to, but may not have any permanent space to return to, and may not even have a family. > Many of my neighbors also worked in the same catering company as my mom, which meant that there was an aura of familiarity that connected us all. Again, it's wonderful that he has such memories. Even those of us who were never poor might find something enviable about that. But in some areas of concentrated poverty, the idea of many neighbors working at all is a non-starter, much less many neighbors working together. Or if there are jobs, they aren't catering jobs, they're dangerous work like mining and meatpacking, which leave wounded casualties in their wake who then become additional burdens on meager familial resources. So one thing that rubs me the wrong way a bit is the way the author is basically saying "adjust your thinking and you won't feel poor." And while that might be good advice for people who can't afford luxuries, it's not so helpful for people who can't afford basic necessities like food and a roof over their heads.

diamondfist25 3y ago

Like what Dave chapelle said — poor is a state of mind, so I’m not poor. What I am is broke

qingcharles 3y ago

I never even knew I was poor when I was a kid. I didn't have a bathroom in the house, just a toilet outside and a tin bath to wash in outside too. It didn't even register that other people had bathrooms. I had everything I needed. I had some computer books (no computer) and a pile of Lego, and I was GOOD. I've been a millionaire twice. Now I'm even poorer. I get all my food from the food pantries, and I own literally nothing. I've been reduced to zero. But I'm not unhappy! Someone was kind enough to put a roof over my head and I have an Internet connection and an IDE and I can crank out code all day until one day when I return to middle-class and can buy some decent coffee again.