Being a poor person has a lot of draw backs. You’re kind of at the mercy of the universe. If there’s a recession, your business is probably the first to go. If there’s an economic downturn, you lose your job. If you get sick, it’s hard to afford treatment. If you get sick you probably still need to go to work. I read somewhere that the Dutch get unlimited sick days. I can’t imagine a life of such abundance.
If you’re young, work hard. Because being poor is boring.
I live in a country where a lot of people are poor. Prices are a lot lower than the United States, but people make even less money. If you want to have a good life, you need to be doing better than most. It’s as simple as that.
A good chunk of people where I live have nothing to do. They aren’t unhappy, but they don’t have anything to do. There aren’t a lot of jobs around, and so they end up just… hanging out. They drink. They smoke. They talk. They have a good time. But career and entertainment wise, things simply don’t progress for them. And to be honest, I’m not sure they would get ahead, even if they were able to find jobs.
About a ten percent to a quarter of the people where I live will suffer this fate. Some of these people messed up, but it’s hard not to fall through the cracks if you’re born in a poor country and fall on hard times. I would guess that there’s a similar number of idle people in wealthier countries, but they have safety nets like welfare and make-work jobs to protect them. Criminal activity for financial gain is also less harshly punished in wealthier countries. People where I live aren’t quite as lucky, and it’s hard for them to experience much of life.
A lot of the people I see outdoors live lives of relative boredom that Americans can’t even fathom. You think you’re bored scrolling on TikTok? Imagine sitting outside of a wooden shop, staring directly at a transportation center, with no phone in sight. Other people around you are living more normal lives, by the way. The existence of technology has also exacerbated differences in quality of life. People with some money are living far better than those with nothing, especially when there’s no welfare state.
It’s unfortunate, but capitalism has made it such that life costs money. You can bootstrap your way on a backpack trip across the world, but if you want to have any kind of quality of life at all, you’re going to be using money, whether it’s yours or someone else’s. Plane tickets cost money, hotel rooms do too. Food costs money, and even Netflix has a monthly fee. If you plan on being poor, you should plan on being bored and needing to create your own entertainment.
Not everybody needs to be rich. Not everybody can be rich. But if you’re planning on coasting through life and doing nothing, just understand that you’re going to be bored. Moving to a poor country overseas has overall been worthwhile, but it’s in large part due to the fact that I’ve learned this harsh reality. As I said previously, it can be quite difficult to create a life where I live. There’s more money and more to do in the United States, but I think the trend should hold true there too.
I read somewhere on Twitter that the cost to being a loser is that you live a boring, miserable, and pointless life. I never planned on being a loser, but living in a poor country has forced me to see and understand levels of poverty that are only experienced by “losers” in the United States. There’s no getting around it, it takes a decent bit of skill to have much of anything at my age where I live. I think the benefits of being wealthy in my country outweigh those of being wealthy in my home country, but the “scrounging” period has been very boring. Lots of YouTube. Lots of Twitter. Lots of time online. It’s been worthwhile. I’ve kept a decent finger on the pulse of American life, and that’s allowed me to create lots of content. I’ve also learned a lot about IT and computer programming, a skill I plan on employing in the future.
Work hard when you’re young, so you can live an interesting life in the future. I’m just starting to experience the true power of my blog. A little more work, and I’ll be in a position to have my own house and the live the life of my dreams. All as a man in his late 20s who started his career in a country where the average wage is under $700 per month. The life I’ll be able to live will be very interesting, but it also won’t be as interesting as those of wealthy Americans my age. Those people can afford faraway vacations, high class restaurants, and the best technology in the world. They just feel pressed by their exorbitant San Fransisco rents. Work hard, wherever you end up going in life. It’ll be the difference between a beautiful life and a wasted one.
Thanks for paying attention.
