You misunderstand what it means to be poor

My parents grew up poor in manner that is more extreme than anything OP described in the post and they always remind me that its just hard work and grit.

There are some places in the US, that have that kind of poverty, but I have not seen them, with my own eyes.

Americans are very often blind to the poverty in their own backyards.

There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people in America who do not have electricity or even running water in their homes.

I'm always reminded of a photograph from a few years ago in the Navajo Times showing a handful of children sitting in a little clearing bordered by rocks at the top of a hill, surrounded by endless desert. That was their classroom.

No desks or chairs. Not even walls, a roof, or a floor. Just out in the open, sitting in the dirt. According to the photo caption, they had to have their classes there because it was the only place where they could get a cellular signal to do their lessons.

Edit: I can't believe I found it - October, 2020. (I took a picture of it, and it was still in iPhoto.)

Caption: Milton T. Carroll, left, and Wylean Burbank, center, help their daughter Eziellia H. Carroll, a kindergartener at Cottonwood Day School, with her school work on Monday in Fish Point, Ariz. Carroll said he built the circular rock wall to protect his children from the elements.

I was wrong about no desk. The three of them share something that looks like it was nailed together from a discarded wooden palette. There's also a plastic milk crate nearby.

These are American citizens. In America. It's hard not to go off about the gilded ballrooms and trillion-dollar bonus packages.

> But, I absolutely hated working in an office. I also hated what digital marketing has done to people’s privacy. I had to get out. So, after 10 years I left and went back to my roots. I founded a sprinkler contracting business with my brother and work outside all day, every day. And I love it.

I don't think this person should be putting themselves in the same category as people who are stuck in poverty with no options.

“How can you expect a man who’s warm to understand a man who’s cold?” - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

I feel like we generally compare ourselves relative to those around us. The US enjoys incredible amounts of comforts (for which I'm grateful for), but one need not travel far to understand how much potable water, breathable air, and electricity are very much not a ready given in other countries.

Too many people buy the American dream of "If you just work hard enough, you'll be successful.". If you believe this, then you'd have to believe the opposite: "If you're poor and unsucessful, that means you didn't work hard enough, you must be lazy.".

And too many trust-fund kids or kids from rich parents who could afford to send them to expensive schools (or rich enough to live in a district with a well-funded school) dismiss their luck and believe "I'm successful, that must mean I've been a diligent and smart worker.".

Also, beware of survival bias, most of people in here will have similar paths (born with smarts, good education, high-paying IT job, great success) and probably have similar beliefs about hard work and luck...

This 2+ hour documentary partly talks about it, in particular from ~28m: https://youtu.be/t1MqJPHxy6g?t=1584

> People thinking that "poor is a mindset" are lacking in that.

I have never even considered people thinking like that. Is that real? Early in life I realized that the biggest factor of how you end up seems to be luck, where you're born, what's in your genes, how did parents raise you. Later in life I realized that most of the rest is mental health which you also don't have the greatest influence over the first 2 decades of your life or so.

> But what I'm curious about is the causal difference between the two

A majority of personal bankruptcies in the US being caused by medical expenses might be a good place to start looking. You can be "broke" living paycheck to paycheck and "making it", but you're on even more of a razors edge than most. One medical emergency, one car accident, one removal of work hours etc and you start to fall behind, and that's when late fees and compounding interest work to make sure you never get out of the hole.

> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?

I don't want to sound dismissive but sometimes it's just luck.

> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?

External factors (aka luck), perhaps? Someone gets their resume into a job just after they made the last hire for that position. Or the car they can't afford to fix breaks down on the way to the interview.

Growing up with a single mother we've vacillated between being poor, broke and "getting by".

It was always a reverse slide down.

First, we'd go broke. The meager savings she'd put together would get wiped out. It was generally an impossible crisis that would do it. Something that shouldn't have broken, did. Something that shouldn't have happened, did. Something that should have only cost X cost Y.

If the crisis was a single instance event that year, we'd slowly return to "getting buy". Small savings would get restored. Some debt written off. A windfall from something or other that put our heads above water.

But sometimes, it was too many things at once. We'd go from being broke, to being poor. Every dollar was a trade-off. There was no "even" or "reduced". There was just "no". The water bill couldn't get paid. The mortgage had to be late. The credit card was going to default. There were no options to shave or save. The bare minimum was still too expensive.

The answer is just ... luck.

When you're broke, you're on borrowed time. For some people, at some point, that debt comes due and can never be repaid. For some people, the debt comes due but something balances it. For others, the debt just never gets called in.

I’m wealthy but I wasnt always. When I was 22 through 30 I didn’t take a single vacation that wasn’t driving to a long weekend. My wife and I both pulled 60 to 70 hour weeks for our entire 20s (I still do).

No one “deserves” free time. If you don’t want to work 70 hours a week and want to watch Netflix instead, go for it, but don’t bitch to me

Things that are pretty much out of those peoples' control can include health problems, dependents such as kids or needy older relatives, accidents, a long tail of other kinds of bad luck (fires, victim of fraud, etc)

think of this way, the less capital you have the more you depend on luck

> I wonder why folks who start with roughly the same skills, intelligence and opportunities (and bank account balance!) can nevertheless end up in very different places?

I actually think a lot of it comes down to self control.

Can you resist the allure of consumerism and keeping up with the Joneses? Are you buying liabilities that actually make your life harder? Are you living outside of your means?

IMO it matters little how much you earn if you don't know how to spend it.

I know it makes a nice clean narrative that's especially appealing to the kind of people who would be in these comments but it probably wasn't suburbs that did this. That sort of community existed and probably still exits the most in places where the population is the least dense.

I'm not gonna speculate on what other things could have been more responsible but I have my suspicions.

I was unconvinced he was writing about his current state, but a prior state / maybe his family background.

    - Cancel Netflix
    - Make food at home
    - Stop going to Starbucks
    - Fix it yourself
    - Don’t upgrade your phone

Not just that, they appear to have 6 kids.

I have a lot of empathy for people that are struggling financially, especially with how hard things are now. I grew up in a way that most would consider to be "poor", though I mostly never felt that way.

I do well for myself now, better than I ever thought I could, and yet still I had to think very hard about the financial implications and compromises that come with choosing to have kids. Making 6 babies then complaining that you're poor, come on man, wtf? If you're going to do that, you have to do absolutely whatever you can to bring resources in for your family. That means working the "boring desk job" if it pays more, even if you prefer to be outside wiring up sprinklers.

Where is the accountability, the locus of self control? Sorry, but I don't buy any of this.

I'm pretty sure the author's membership in the "poor" category is in the past tense.

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You did not read the article.

I think the ambiguity is leading to a better discussion. Many commenters are struggling mightily with the urge to dismiss the author as a lazy moral failure, which would allow them to ignore his arguments as originating from an unreliable source. Since there's not enough information to do that, we're getting a certain amount of discussion of the actual ideas.

I had a roommate who was taking payday loans to support his brother for a while. I saw how ridiculous the interest was, paid it off for him, then had him pay me back. It got him out of the constant cycle of debt.