Being Poor vs. Feeling Poor

> 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.

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.

And until I was homeless I didn't even know what being homeless was like.

For instance -- people say "there are millions of shelters! why are people living in tents?!" -- and I wondered the same thing. But then you go to a shelter and honestly, it is horrible for most people in shelters. Not only are you absolutely surrounded by people who (sadly) suffer from a slew of addictions and mental illness and want to steal from you, or fight you, or drag you into their endless drama, but the rules and regulations at shelters are so onerous that it makes prison seem like a holiday camp.

I now understand why people set up in a tent. They can support themselves, and be by themselves, and that agency is not to be under-rated.

By that definition nobody is poor, which makes the word kind of useless, which means the definition changes. Which is definitely not how people think of themselves (as OP so helpfully told us).

I was wondering if this is just a case of a different definition for the word poor, and I find that the equivalent word in Dutch (arm) is defined as: “Not having a lot of something, especially money.” Which was definitely the case.

Whereas in English it’s: “of insufficient quantity to meet a need”, which was not.

There’s a different Dutch word (armoede) that indicates much more far reaching poverty, which has an almost equivalent definition to the English ‘poor’: “situation in which one does not have enough to live”

Poverty in English is: “the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions” which seems more equivalent to poor.

Yes, but he had safety nets upon safety nets to take risks. Of course, the more likely outcome is that he would have been ok but not a billionaire, but he had the luxury of aiming high because he would still be ok if he failed.