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

153 点作者 Pamar超过 2 年前

25 条评论

pflenker超过 2 年前
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 invest wisely!" This is true if you are free to choose to buy a new shirt now or save a bit and buy it later. But if you are running out of shirts now, you don't have that choice.
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lcuff超过 2 年前
A really good book I read was &quot;Bridges out of Poverty&quot;, aimed at social workers etc, but very informative to the lay reader. One of the several things I learned: If a poor person &#x27;comes in&#x27; to some money, they are likely to give a decent portion away, because other people know about it and hit them up (&quot;I need glasses and you just got some money&quot;), and in order to be helped themselves by their community when they are in need down the road, they need to be responsive when they have &#x27;extra&#x27;.<p>A poverty mentality is about &#x27;today&#x27;. Food, rent, clothes. So education and planning for the future get pushed down in the stack of what&#x27;s important.<p>Also had interesting stuff about humor among the impoverished, the middle class and the rich.<p>A personal observation: The poor in my community don&#x27;t know how to &#x27;work&#x27; the system. There are free (used) computers available to school kids, but the parents don&#x27;t make use of them. Super-low cost internet access is available, but I saw one family succumb to an &#x27;up-sell&#x27; to TV and Cable access, which they couldn&#x27;t afford (oh yeah, installation cost too, we didn&#x27;t remember to tell you about that) and in the end, default on the payment, which disqualified them from the low-cost program for a year. Living with three families&#x2F;12 people in a two bedroom apartment means the child qualifies for benefits for the homeless, but no-one knows, the benefits don&#x27;t get used.
hilom超过 2 年前
That was a long read, but very much worth reading.<p>This part really stuck out to me:<p>&gt; <i>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 his first good meal of the week: homemade vegetable pizza. He thought about what he had learned as he kneaded the pizza dough. He had already sliced the vegetables, and they sat piled high on the cutting board. While he had the best of intentions, what he said made me sad. He had misunderstood.</i><p>&gt; <i>In his week of eating like poor people, he had missed two crucial ingredients: fear and shame. While he was looking forward to breaking his fast that night, poor people don’t get to do that. They don’t get to look forward to the end of impoverishment, to a good meal. My friend would eat a healthy meal that night, and he had known throughout the week that he could stop whenever he wanted, that all he had to do if he missed healthy food was open his refrigerator. Poor people never know when their next good meal will come. They look in the refrigerator on the 25th and maybe they only have enough food for a couple more meals but they don’t get paid for a week. And vegetables are expensive. Most poor people can’t afford them. All of this causes great shame. Shame that they don’t make enough money, shame that they can’t give their kids decent food, shame that they must rely on government assistance, shame that they can’t afford the restaurant their friends want to go to on Saturday night. That shame never goes away. It is not my friend’s fault that he does not know this. He doesn’t know it because society does not talk about such things, does not want them talked about. The result is that my friend would never understand how poor people feel—never understand me—and I felt sad and alone.</i><p>It&#x27;s a doublet of suffering: not just the material burden of living in poverty and being unable to provide for yourself and family, but the ideological burden of being shamed into believing it was caused by your own personal failure.
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llaolleh超过 2 年前
People who have not grown up poor can&#x27;t really understand it. It&#x27;s not only about the money. It&#x27;s about the constant stress and fear whether or not you&#x27;re going to make it.<p>Just work hard in school to get out is actually pretty hard. Learning is like swimming through molasses because of the constant stress. It gives you a lifetime of trauma and damage.
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blackgirldev超过 2 年前
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 &quot;life&quot; and felt the need to enlist in the military.<p>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 when the military was your only option.<p>That said, I benefited greatly by not having an actual war during my tenure, having access to distance learning education, and finishing a degree there. I learned that I could get a super low rate VA mortgage as well. These things made a lot of difference and saved me at least a decade of working shit jobs to catch up with my peers after getting out of the military.<p>In contrast, my fellow enlisted from poverty never aspired to anything more than Chief (US Navy) (edit - nothing wrong with Chief Petty Officer - enlisted vs officer was a real class thing as I recall and it stays with me, sorry). That is, if they made it past the DUIs, economic&#x2F;financial shame of buying expensive cars and crashing them, bad relationships with rampant abuse, etc.<p>As someone who could &quot;see hope&quot; because I wasn&#x27;t mired in poverty&#x27;s terrible view, I could actually take advantage of what military life offered.<p>I cannot adequately describe what it is like to be surrounded by people from poverty: to live with them, experience their pain vicariously, and not understand WHY they couldn&#x27;t do what I was able to do.<p>The mindset is a real handicap. Changing your mindset is the core of moving from one place in life to another. I will never forget that lesson. Come to think of it, I know wealthy people stuck in detrimental mindsets. But that is another discussion.
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teddyh超过 2 年前
I often link to these articles:<p>• 5 Things Nobody Tells You About Being Poor, May 27, 2011: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20221021114455&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cracked.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;5-things-nobody-tells-you-about-being-poor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20221021114455&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crack...</a><p>• The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Up Poor, January 19, 2012: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220607063905&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cracked.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;the-5-stupidest-habits-you-develop-growing-up-poor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220607063905&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crack...</a><p>• 4 Things Politicians Will Never Understand About Poor People, February 21, 2013: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220904014612&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cracked.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;4-things-politicians-will-never-understand-about-poor-people" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220904014612&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crack...</a>
azalemeth超过 2 年前
I was brought up primarily by a single parent on state benefits and her mother. At times, with both my parents unemployed and one of them not around much, I recall getting things like a pen for Christmas -- to be used at school in a few weeks time -- and being such a regular at the library that all the staff knew me by name. The first birthday party I had was when I was 21, on a relatively generous scholarship at Oxford. Meeting other students made me painting aware that many of their private schools had better facilities than the county where I grew up, and their parents didn&#x27;t have long and painful arguments about shopping. This article, although American, really resonated more than I thought it would initially -- my mum was on benefits and we just made it through, a situation I think is rather rare in the states.<p>I&#x27;m now much older, and my partner&#x27;s family are lovely but, to my mind, rich. She spends so much money on frivolities that I continually have to bite my tongue and accept this is normal. Going shopping is a totally different experience with any of them. I love them all dearly and give my mother money per month to live on, but this feeling that I shouldn&#x27;t spend money on myself, should be sure to always maximize value per unit in the strictest possible sense (including longevity) and repair rather than replace things lives on. I often wear clothes until they break, and then continue to wear them until they become literally unusable. My partner has two double wardrobes filled with clothes and many shoes and handbags.<p>It&#x27;s a very different path through the world.
photochemsyn超过 2 年前
The architects of the economic system in the United States don&#x27;t want to eliminate poverty - it&#x27;s kept around as a threat, something to point to - see, grunts, that&#x27;s where you&#x27;ll end up if you&#x27;re not an obedient drone. This is also a main reason why there&#x27;s no reliable public health care system, instead it&#x27;s tied to employment. The general concept is &quot;discipline of the labor force.&quot;
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notacoward超过 2 年前
Having grown up poor myself and now moving in more affluent circles, I see these differences almost every day. Food is a big one. Most people remain forever attached to the kinds of foods they grew up with. A once-poor person might no longer like boxed macaroni and cheese or Taco Bell burritos, preferring more upscale versions of both, but a never-poor person will <i>curl their lip in disgust</i> at the very idea. How do you decorate (or not)? What kinds of vacations do you take (or not)? Are there any things that you hoard, even though there&#x27;s no longer a point? How are your teeth? These little markers are everywhere, if you know what to look at. Even the fact that people <i>don&#x27;t talk</i> about their childhood, especially what kind of schools they went to or what sports&#x2F;activities (if any) they were involved in, can be a big tip-off. I can usually tell within ten minutes or so whether someone I&#x27;m talking to is once-poor or never-poor, even if they&#x27;re both in the same economic stratum now. And I definitely feel more affinity for the first group.<p>BTW, a lot of these markers - especially food and hoarding - are pretty well known for people who survived the Great Depression, too. Those habits die <i>hard</i>.
synu超过 2 年前
I wish there were more founders and investors who came from a background of intense poverty. I know why there aren’t many, and I know why the ones who are don’t speak about it, but because nobody talks about it everyone has to figure out how to “pass” and how not to fall into certain traps on our own, and there isn’t any systemic support out there. Or if there is&#x2F;there are people talking about it, I’m just not aware.
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tpmoney超过 2 年前
Overall a good read, but I would propose that if the author truly doesn&#x27;t &quot;know any poor person who is a Republican.&quot; then she might need to spend some time traveling outside of the north east.
automatic6131超过 2 年前
A small rant about being poor* and food.<p>Healthy, tasty food is cheap. It really, truly is. If you have a smartphone, you can learn how to make cheap, tasty and filling food. And you can afford it.<p>Here&#x27;s what you can&#x27;t afford: the time, the equipment, the space. Can&#x27;t buy frozen meats because the freezer is broken. Or it&#x27;s small. Or it&#x27;s already full of your flatmates shite that they&#x27;ve had in there for 15 months and never going to eat. Same with the fridge, you can&#x27;t shop for a week (but you wouldn&#x27;t anyway because you don&#x27;t have a car) because it&#x27;s already full of your f**ing flatmates rotting, half eaten yogurts, rancid meats and leftovers. So you buy what you have to eat for a day, today.<p>Also you&#x27;re tired because your commute was 80 minutes on two buses, each way. And your feet hurt anyway because you stand or walk for 7 hours every day. And your back hurts.<p>But even if you weren&#x27;t tired and in pain, you don&#x27;t have a chopping board, or a knife that isn&#x27;t blunt as a spoon, or pan that isn&#x27;t rusty, or a large cast iron cooking pot. You have whatever random collection of burnt, greasy, mouse dropping covered (Yay London!) weird iron pots were in the cupboard when you moved in. And why buy anything nice? Your flatmates will use it, not wash it, scrape off sauces with metal cutlery on a non stick pan (really!) and generally mistreat anything there. And you have exactly one working hot plate left and even that&#x27;s got dodgy heat.<p>Rant over.<p>The Capex (equipment, use of a large, working kitchen) for cooking healthy is expensive. The time Opex for cooking healthy is expensive. The human willpower for cooking healthy is expensive. The ingredients, however, are not. Neither, actually, are the skills and knowledge of how to do it.<p>* minimum wage UK in London, no ability to get credit.
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bluedino超过 2 年前
The holidays are always a good time to reflect on this. My father is one of ten children. They all grew up in a 900sq ft house. Most of them dropped out of high school, none of them went to college.<p>Now that they are all grown up (the youngest is 48?) it&#x27;s interesting to see how they all ended up.<p>Some worked a factory job for years, and ended up with a nice house, retirement, etc. some worked the exact same job and are still paycheck to paycheck.<p>None of them were really skilled workers, professionals, etc. My one aunt has never had much more than a minimum wage job, had five children with three different fathers, and she&#x27;s probably in the worst position of them all. She&#x27;s been given cars etc by the others but always screws up. Her children (and grandchildren) have carried on the tradition.<p>Looking in from the outside, it seems like the big factors are your work ethic, who your friends are, and what you with your spare time.<p>My dad has a great work ethic but he&#x27;s an example of work smarter not harder.<p>You seem to be an average of your friends, and my aunt for example, hangs out with some real winners.<p>Spare time is related to your friends a bit, but spending all of your time and money at the casino doesn&#x27;t get you anywhere, and neither does hanging out drinking until 2am.
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rcarr超过 2 年前
This passage:<p>&gt; In his week of eating like poor people, he had missed two crucial ingredients: fear and shame. While he was looking forward to breaking his fast that night, poor people don’t get to do that. They don’t get to look forward to the end of impoverishment, to a good meal. My friend would eat a healthy meal that night, and he had known throughout the week that he could stop whenever he wanted, that all he had to do if he missed healthy food was open his refrigerator.<p>Reminded me of Common People by Pulp:<p>Rent a flat above a shop<p>Cut your hair and get a job<p>Smoke some fags and play some pool<p>Pretend you never went to school<p>But still you&#x27;ll never get it right<p>&#x27;Cause when you&#x27;re laid in bed at night<p>Watching roaches climb the wall<p>If you called your dad he could stop it all, yeah<p>The entire song has some of the best lyrics I&#x27;ve ever heard. It pictures life in England&#x27;s left behind towns perfectly and also the disconnect you experience when you have a rare encounter with one the bourgeoisie. Fun fact: Jarvis Cocker supposedly wrote that song about the wife of Yannis Varoufakis, the left wing Greek finance minister who was in charge during the EU bailouts.
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nobodyandproud超过 2 年前
Non-white and urban here (NYC raised).<p>This essay resonates with me as well: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30043719#30047716" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=30043719#30047716</a><p>Today, I never feel like I fit in with my colleagues or direct reports.<p>The mindset itself is limiting and I fear I’ve passed along this same mindset to my children.
woodruffw超过 2 年前
It’s a bummer to see many people on here not respond to the two phenomena that the author explicitly identifies: fear and shame.<p>Nothing good comes from shaming struggling people for making short-term financial decisions. It only breeds more shame, makes people afraid to express their needs, and pushes the poor even further out of the public’s eye.
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drekipus超过 2 年前
My sister and I both grew up poor. The stories in the OP resonates a lot with what we experience.<p>The annoying thing for me, is that I got out and I can&#x27;t seem to help get my sister out. I was using a shitty &quot;hustle&quot; &#x2F; &quot;self-improvement&quot; mindset that eventually taught me about delayed gratification, skilling, fake-it-until-you-make it, eating and cleaning-up well (part of self-improvement was also tied with &quot;I&#x27;m very lonely how do I attract girls&quot; -- dealing with shame and self-value.) -- now I have a very good job, wife, kid, and working on savings myself.<p>But what worked for me is polar opposite to what my sister needs. She already has a partner and 3 kids, and they&#x27;re effectively re-living the story (after a long slog, partner does work now, so there&#x27;s improvement there.) things can go sour quickly, and it&#x27;ll be disruptive to her kids.<p>I was thinking of sending her some of my paycheque automatically each week&#x2F;month (ala UBI) mainly as I&#x27;m skeptical of the UBI model myself, so I would look at it like a sort of experiment in to how does it improve things.<p>I&#x27;ve sent her &quot;once-off&quot; lump sums, which just get spent on &quot;paying back [partner&#x27;s] family members&quot; or buying a mini quad-bike &#x2F; latest xbox &#x2F; massive TV, etc, for the good times.<p>We live in Australia, so healthcare, education, etc, are all provided for us as long as she actually goes to it. There is a large mental barrier to everything, and sometimes even going to the doctor is just &quot;a huge drama&quot; that is not worth it. The kids have changed school maybe 3 times in the past 2 years.
sh-zam超过 2 年前
Starting out from a lower point is always a struggle and most attempts to get out of it leaves you with internal scars (like Frodo had in LOTR). And the internal scars always hurt and I don&#x27;t know how long they continue to hurt.<p>Sometimes I wonder if it is even worth to do anything about it on an individual level. As an atheist I can only say, may the unknown save us from the world of known.
Existenceblinks超过 2 年前
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&#x27;s already painful, don&#x27;t have energy to study anything. Some of developers don&#x27;t code on weekend and free time .. because they <i>need</i> to be chilled!
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Tade0超过 2 年前
This brought back some painful memories.<p>The shame and fear is real, but the &quot;passing&quot; bit is no less important.<p>Even if you get out of this, you can&#x27;t relate to e.g. your current co-workers, because you didn&#x27;t have the same upbringing.<p>It&#x27;s much like being an immigrant - I&#x27;ve been one too and it was a similar feeling.
s3000超过 2 年前
What does it take to leave such a mindset behind? There was this submission 3 days ago:<p>We are sorry to inform you that you are in a cult [1,2]<p>If this were a honest approach, and depending on interpretation, not a way to lure somebody into another cult, what could such a rehabilitation program do to make somebody successful?<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;labskausleben.bearblog.dev&#x2F;youre-in-a-cult&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;labskausleben.bearblog.dev&#x2F;youre-in-a-cult&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33688913" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=33688913</a>
CobaltFire超过 2 年前
Reading this hit home for me.<p>Today I’m thankful I’m not poor, and my family doesn’t know what it’s like. But I struggle every day with exactly the long term effects she talked about.
another_devy超过 2 年前
The experience I had while growing up and still today is very similar. I moved from India to Europe, my father was sole provider of the house. He earned just par what you would call minimum wage as there was no such concept in India, still not today. By no means you could term us under poverty but I never felt my situation better than that, in-fact I remember many times I wished we were poor so I will at least have close friends who will stand for me or understand how I felt. The school was government subsidised but we had lot of middle class or higher middle class kids. I cycled 6km in morning and after school, initially it felt more fun but eventually I realised with 2nd hand bicycle I was saving school bus money. I remember the day when I was 11 years old and 1st time went for 3 days school trip, my father gave me ₹100 ($1.20). It was not that small amount 2-3 kids also had around same but many of other brought ₹500 in fact there was a kid with ₹2000 and teachers were worried if he will lose it or someone might steal it. I only spent half of it cause I was saving for Nintendo Super Game Boy for both me and my 5 years younger brother. I got the Nintendo! but I was 15 then and wanted a PC. All my childhood was eventual despair of longing for anything. For my brother it was a bit better but he never got anything new or shiny, always whatever I had used. We never went out for food except for my, my brother’s and mother’s birthday, father never wanted to go out on his birthday citing he loves few select meals that mother makes which always infuriated me but after 12 or 14 I realised why he never wanted. Being older I got exposed to our situation very early and there was always this impatience and frustration I felt building in me, I use to express it on mother and brother but I never truly learned why it was there until I got my first job. I was grateful for my parents that I was able to graduate and can now live better financially, but my childhood shame never left me. Till today I secretly go to McDonalds, KFC without telling my wife or kids just to have that feeling that I can eat at those places whenever I want, not because these are fine dining or my wife will be upset but for me those are golf course sessions. Whenever I want to buy any electronics I first look for what is most expensive then reviews and finally decide what I should buy so I won’t look tech junky.<p>Limited financial resources in my childhood limits me now in my life, work. So many time I truly can’t connect to lunch or coffee conversations between colleagues because those feels like two persons in car fighting or waiving to each other while I look through bus window on the roadside.<p>I was financial limited then and because of that I’m cognitively restrained now.
virtualwhys超过 2 年前
Phenomenal, visceral lived experience -- great piece, well worth the read
nathias超过 2 年前
poverty is visceral it is the stench of mold and an unsatiable appetite for risk