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‘Some things never leave you’: Poverty’s indelible marks

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Re: ‘Some things never leave you’: Poverty’s indelible marks

#181

Post by cauefcr »

akie wrote: post #170
blackgirldev wrote: post #160

As someone who grew up solidly middle class and went to a near Ivy private university and dropped out, I thought I was under educated about "life" and felt the need to enlist in the military. There, I found out that people who grow up poor looked at me like I was a total idiot. There were daily reminders that I grew up privileged. That my brief stint as an enlisted scrub were not enough to understand what it meant wh…

Am I correct in understanding that you concluded that poverty is primarily a mindset issue?

How can someone read the post's article and write GP's comment, I wonder.

Re: ‘Some things never leave you’: Poverty’s indelible marks

#183

Post by Existenceblinks »

JanisErdmanis wrote: post #157
Existenceblinks wrote: post #117

Being poor is that everything on daily basis is draining time resource. And that everything is likely to be needed. For example, watching stupid TV shows for entertainment, because after work it's already painful, don't have energy to study anything. Some of developers don't code on weekend and free time .. because they need to be chilled!

Sometimes I wonder if decision to work such high-skill draining jobs is caused by an upbringing in poverty. Like they are bending on peer pressure to get the biggest wages to fit in with their spending habits because investment in yourself is not valued. It's as if poor people only see a community based on money. It's the thinking that still haunts them.

I have a thought model that fits your explanation. That is a size of choices. Once they see peers have more choices to be happy, they know they have too small ways to be happy, and then trying to expand that choices. Ignorance is bliss is kinda stuck in local maximum is bliss.

Re: ‘Some things never leave you’: Poverty’s indelible marks

#184

Post by Karrot_Kream »

blackgirldev wrote: post #160

As someone who grew up solidly middle class and went to a near Ivy private university and dropped out, I thought I was under educated about "life" and felt the need to enlist in the military. There, I found out that people who grow up poor looked at me like I was a total idiot. There were daily reminders that I grew up privileged. That my brief stint as an enlisted scrub were not enough to understand what it meant wh…

Yeah when I left where I grew up and finally had the space to synthesize my experiences in poverty, I began to call the attitude I saw when growing up "learned helplessness." When everything that can go wrong does, you learn to stop striving, as high expectations just lead to failure and shame (like the article's volcano anecdote.)

I was lucky. I was able to leverage the US education system to rise far above where I grew up, so I left at 18 when I was still young and hadn't been permanently ground down. Even though I've had a very successful career (beyond anything I could dream of as a kid, truly) I still struggle socially a bit in tech. So many American tech people grew up in the same milieu of upper-middle class American suburbia that their attitudes, (not voting but simply interpersonal) politics, and experiences are both homogeneous and yet extremely different from mine. So many smart people I work with and am friends with talk about their exhausting childhood being pushed from activity to activity that I can never connect with. And yes, sometimes I'm insensitive that friends of mine complain about parental pressure because my parents never had the resources to even send me to any of those activities. That I had parents in a stable marriage itself was a virtue where I grew up.

It's still crazy to me that I work with engineers who are second, sometimes third generation programmers. I had friends who couldn't even afford a computer until adulthood.

Re: ‘Some things never leave you’: Poverty’s indelible marks

#185

Post by robocat »

dionidium wrote: post #62
monero-xmr wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a historical thing? In the US you get a SNAP card and can buy fresh produce at the store. I shop at a low-income focused grocery store (because it’s the same stuff but cheaper) and most people are using SNAP benefits and carts are always a mix of healthy stuff to unhealthy frozen junk.

You're going to get pushback on this commonsense understanding of the world, but I've been on food stamps and of course you're right. "It's more complicated than that." No it isn't. Poor people shop at the same stores as everybody else. The food is all there. "They don't know the difference between healthy and unhealthy meals." How stupid do you think poor people are? They know how to prepare a healthy meal. The noti…

> They have time > work more hours

Work hours are not usually the issue. It is the wasted hours on all the things where a high earner can trade $ for time, versus the poor person that need to use an hour to save a dollar of cost.

Upper-income earners have different choices than the poor. Travel choices - Uber versus the bus, a car that works versus an clunker that costs maintenance and heavy breakdown side-effects. Appliances save time: dishwashers, your own washing machine, and a clothes dryer. A comfortable bed in a quiet and safe neighbourhood with helpful neighbours. Upper-income earners can buy services that give them time: cleaning, takeaways instead of cooking, supermarket delivery, childcare, massages or other re-energisers, good healthcare, yada yada yada.

When you get $40 dollars disposable in your pocket after household expenses for 40 hours work (ignoring travel), spending an hour to save a dollar is sensible.

Ideally if they worked an extra marginal hour, they would get a large marginal increase in disposable income. Somehow that doesn’t seem to work in reality (for many reasons, sometimes perverse government incentives).

One commonality amongst the less-well-off people I know, is that they are all tired. They can’t decide to spend another hour at their job because they are physically and mentally drained after a days physical work, and dealing with stressful people/children all day. Doing an hour on something different can make perfect sense to “earn” their $1.

I am not disagreeing with your main point - I do also see my friends spend their time and money poorly (in my opinion from an outside viewpoint).

Re: ‘Some things never leave you’: Poverty’s indelible marks

#187

Post by Fezzik »

akie wrote: post #170
blackgirldev wrote: post #160

As someone who grew up solidly middle class and went to a near Ivy private university and dropped out, I thought I was under educated about "life" and felt the need to enlist in the military. There, I found out that people who grow up poor looked at me like I was a total idiot. There were daily reminders that I grew up privileged. That my brief stint as an enlisted scrub were not enough to understand what it meant wh…

Am I correct in understanding that you concluded that poverty is primarily a mindset issue?

Having grown up relatively poor (single-mother, section 8 housing) I read it as the commenter saying there is a mindset that accompanies poverty that you can only experience and appreciate having been poor. Not that the mindset causes poverty. This is true, in my experience.

Re: ‘Some things never leave you’: Poverty’s indelible marks

#188

Post by b59831 »

CobaltFire wrote: post #87
pflenker wrote: post #12

One of the things that suck most about being poor is that you need to have money in order to save money. You need to have enough money to buy a certain level of quality, and if you don't have it, you're forced to buy cheap stuff that breaks more easily (thus spending more money in total). I found this aspect hard to understand for others, the attitude often seems to be: "you don't have to be poor, you simply need to…

See “The Sam Vimes “Boots” Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness”: The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboar…

Another thing about being poor is that, even if you buy the 50$ boots, there's then a good chance someone will steal them from you.

Re: ‘Some things never leave you’: Poverty’s indelible marks

#189

Post by [deleted] »

opportune wrote: post #130
retrac wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of reward for planning (by virtue of not having the resources since they're always insufficient and tied up in more immediate concerns) similarly promotes a very detached and immediate lifestyle. I have $50. $50 can mean I have fun tonight. $50 does nothing for me next week except maybe let me buy some food, which I can probably scrape together another way. So I'm going to have some fun tonight. The notion t…

I can see the reasoning but I still don’t see it as sensible per se. Having a buffer of just $1-3k at the end of the year instead of blowing $50 here and there could make a huge difference as far as anxiety and ability to weather unforeseen issues. Yes, unforeseen things will still arise but you’d rather have the $1k you need to deal with it than not. I’m more partial to the argument that splurges allow people to tem…

[deleted]

Re: ‘Some things never leave you’: Poverty’s indelible marks

#190

Post by paganel »

dionidium wrote: post #55
hilom wrote: post #3

That was a long read, but very much worth reading. This part really stuck out to me: > A few years ago, a friend of mine, in a well-meaning attempt to understand the impoverished diets of poor people, ate a Food Stamp diet for a week. On the last day of the diet, he talked about what he had learned and spoke philosophically about his renewed appreciation of healthy food as he prepared to end his restricted diet with…

What sticks out to me is that it sticks out to you (and the author and so many others besides). I have actually been on food stamps . I never ate so well. Before I had food stamps I was just a typical working poor person. I had never spent as much on groceries as I was able to on food stamps. Food stamps are accepted at regular grocery stores -- the same ones you shop at. You can get anything you want, more or less.…

My family became suddenly very poor when I was in highschool and then in the first years of me going to uni. Like living in a half-finished house in the countryside with no electrical power for a couple of months-poor (when things had really become bad).

That was happening 20 to 25 years ago, and in the meantime I have managed to attain a middle-class status, sort of (I still don't own an apartment, never mind an actual house), enough to say that I can't complain about my present financial situation.

Even so, I'm fully and acutely aware that my choices alone wouldn't have made all that possible. I also needed luck, lots of it, and the presence of people whom had no obligation to me whatsoever, at least on paper, but who nevertheless helped me at some crucial points in my past. Yes, it was my choice to make good on that help and to take advantage of some of the luck I had, but, again, my choices alone, without said luck and without those people that have helped me would have meant nothing.

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