John Scalzi: Being Poor (2005)

Many of the psychological issues can be overcome by not giving a flying fuck about what others think about you.

My father died when I was 17 years old and my brother was 18 years old. My mother became an alcoholic and for the next 5 or 6 years I saw her sober less than 10 times. There were days in a row when we didn't had what to eat. She prioritized alcohol, cigarettes and coffee over food.

We were so poor that my brother got ill of tuberculosis from the lack of food. I was luckier because I used to eat at my ex girlfriend (present wife). The clothes I got were usually gifts received from my girlfriend. I was wearing the same pants months in a row, daily, until they got holes in them.

But I don't remember being stressed about what others thought about me and that made my whole adolescence beautiful. I wasn't even aware that somebody would notice that I wore the same clothes every day. Until one day a girl in my high school told me "these are some nice pants that you have, too bad that you're wearing only those". It hurt me, but I got over it fast thinking "how does this concerns you anyway?" and kept wearing them, because I didn't had others. And my main teacher once told me "you look good wearing other colors than black". While the black shirts were the only ones I got, until I received that light colored one. And I took that as a compliment - she just told me that I was looking good after all.

The positive part of being extremely poor for about 7 years is that I got really fed up with poorness and I do my best to never going back.

Fast forward 15 years after finishing high school, I am a software developer with 11 years experience, working remotely for a US company and I think my earnings put me somewhere in the top 1% earners in Romania. Since I started to work for this company, I didn't took a single vacation (with a few exceptions of 1-2 days off), because I feel it's the opportunity of my life time and I want to make as much as possible out of it. While I got 9-to-5 jobs I always tried to learn new things and had side projects and I was somehow baffled why the majority of my programmer colleagues weren't interested in something similar.

So, there are positive things in anything if we really try to find them. And a positive attitude makes the difference between feeling miserable and feeling ... normal, or even being happy. I think that my years of poorness increased my motivation and desire to succeed in life drastically, but it's definitely not an experience I would encourage someone to try.

You do have white privilege. White privilege isn't being treated better because of your race, it's not being treated worse.

White privilege is not remembering the last time you were pulled over for nothing.

White privilege is not being afraid of the police.

White privilege is getting let off with a warning.

White privilege is expecting to be judged on your merits.

White privilege is getting the benefit of the doubt.

White privilege is having a family that got to use the GI bill.

White privilege is having a family that was able to build a little bit of generational wealth from government housing policy.

White privilege is thinking racism is over.

White privilege is starting at 0 when the rich kids start at 50 and black kids start at -15.

Yes, there's degrees of poor ... poor all the way down.

This struck a chord with me:

Being poor is stopping the car to take a lamp from a stranger’s trash.

I've been poor enough in my life that dumpster diving was appealing and I'm glad I'm not now, but at least in my scenario there was a dumpster to dive into.

I spent some time by Lake Malawi there a couple of years ago and they don't even have dumpsters. Bottle-caps, and waste-paper from the (foreign aid funded) health clinic are valuable raw materials for whatever local craft industries there are. Being poor means these dodgy strangers showing up and splashing money around and who then start making inappropriate advances on the children.

But even along the lake they are privileged by having access to water and whatever tourism industry there is.

Away from the lake, being poor means not having clothes. Being poor means a minor injury is a death sentence.

Some of our philanthropist billionaires get some flack for the manner and means by which they distribute their aid, but a friend of mine working as a pharmacist there would just say "thank god for Bill Gates".

>> Being rich is considering having children at all.

This is it. I lost track on how many of my friends/peers/colleagues don't have children, because they live from paycheck to paycheck and simply cannot afford it, even if they wanted to. And this is in germany mind you, where you have a relativeley robust social security net...

Do you really think single-payer healthcare (versus the individual mandate in ObamaCare) was ever going to pass in the US? Obama literally adopted a Republican proposal for how to improve healthcare coverage, and the Republicans have spent every year since railing against it.

As someone who's pretty far to the left, I don't see how a (fiscally) far-left candidate/party would make any progress in the US. The centre is just so damn skewed towards "individual responsibility" and other bullshit that voters apparently love.