I think a lack of consumption is the least of the worries of poor people - imho, the most debilitating aspect of poverty is the constant mental pressure - this feeling that your back is permanently to the wall, that you have no buffer to absorb anything going wrong. If you're poor, you always have to dread your car needing a repair, your washing machine needing to be replaced, your kids breaking a crucial piece of clothing, etc.

It's also self-reinforcing in a lot of ways, for example that you have to put up with a lot more bullshit and abuse by your boss if you cannot afford to go without income for even a couple of weeks.

in college the dumb ass at the book store made me swipe my debit card a 2nd time because "it didnt go through" on like a 700$ purchase, i had 1k$ in my account. it did go through, twice....

i was double charged, charge 20$ per day for having a negative balance, and had overdraft charges. it took the book store months to finally fix it with the bank.

over those months i got a terrible OCD habit of checking my bank account 10+ times per day to see if it was fixed. a habit that stayed with me for years until my wife noticed and asked whats up. i wasnt even consciously doing it. and even tho we had tens of thousands in savings i was compulsively checking our money in some illogical worry it would all go away.

shit can fuck you up beyond what u even expect is possible.

Damn, that's rough and... kinda excessive?!

But I'm not in position to judge you, having had the luck of growing up in a family that, while not rich or able to throw money around, was middle class enough for money to not be a pressing, everyday worry.
But I've seen enough poverty in my life to know that a even just a decent, lower- to middle-middle class upbringing is a privilege.

incredibly excessive, illogical, and something i was able to recover from rather quickly once i realized it was silly.

the only echo is that ive at times hoarded money rather than investing it or more aggressively paying down debt. there's not much benefit in having near 6 figures in cash and also having well over 6 figures in debt. but ive made adjustments to rectify that too.

if you are a somewhat healthy adult in a first world country, there is no excuse to be poor, it is a choice

there has never been more available opportunity, help and knowledge in the history of the fucking world

there a total dumbasses out there making good money, because they took action

I thought I was middle class growing up, then I did my student aid paperwork for college and realized we were solidly lower class. We'd maybe scrape into the lower part of middle class for the poor as dirt area I grew up in. My mom made $12 an hour when I left for college and only recently went up to $15 an hour. Even where our cost of living is super low that's barely enough to get by. People say "Not everywhere can support a $15 minimum wage", but the fact is that even in dirt poor rural areas $15 an hour isn't that much, and a lot of those "small businesses" are owned by local family dynasties that have the only 5 gas stations within 100 miles and can absolutely afford to pay their workers more, or the only diner within 30 miles, etc. etc. At least that's how it was where I lived. There were a few notable rich people who owned every real business. Any "small family run business" that wasn't part of it failed after a year.



That's silly. In the 50's if you were a breathing adult with an IQ over 60 you would get a factory job making enough to support a family of 4 no questions asked.

Now your step up job is a gas station that pays $12 an hour.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Dec 2 2021 12:21pm

i will agree that life was simpler back then and i remember myself that my own family could afford more with only my dads wage in the late 90s compared to now with both parents working + the children being out of the house

however opportunity has exponentially increased compared to the "work one job at one corporation until you retire days"

one of my childhood buddies comes from a dirt poor family and now makes 50+ bucks an hour in the solar panel industry in america

he learned a trade and applied himself = win

That actually works against your argument. He had to get a specific skill set.

Id also imagine that 50 an hour is in an incredibly high cost of living area

sigh, really need to ban guns, why does the average citizen need a GUN its 2021... sigh how many kids gotta die at school before guns get taken away