This author lays out the experience of being “poor” perfectly. It’s a case of doing all the right things, and still failing. It’s being constantly stuck in survival mode no matter how hard you work, because there’s always a new expense, a new hurdle, a new obstacle to reset your progress - because being poor means you can’t even afford the “save point” of insurance or redundancies or savings to fall back on.
It’s why even when I was scraping above the $200k mark at PriorCo in TC, I was championing more social services. More healthcare support, more housing assistance, more compensation. We could afford it, but shareholder returns came first. It was sickening knowing colleagues who lived in vans because despite pulling down six figure salaries, it simply wasn’t enough for rent when expenses continued to pile up for injuries or illnesses.
Those of means and privilege simply do not grasp how hard it is to exist in America without large sums of cash behind you. I was struggling on less when rent was still considered reasonable, in one of the cheapest states to live in. In the fifteen-odd years since, it’s just gotten exponentially worse, even as the stock market has exploded in value.
It’s why I never stop arguing for better, because I know how bad it can get.
I was just lucky enough to escape.