To Survive Poverty You Fight Until You Die

If you are poor then words are not used to celebrate. They are used to survive.

When you lack food and love, you are competitive. You eat competitively. You care competitively.

Your brain never quite leaves the reptilian mode. You cannot learn when the threat of casual violence looms in the classroom.

You will watch well-meaning middle-class teachers slowly degrade as their hopes are quashed. As an authority figure they represent all that led you to poverty. Even worse, they will structure the lessons around the most vociferous and violent, hoping that the attention will curb the excesses of those who already lack control. This does not work.

You gain good marks at school? Grades will not make a difference. Your lack of connections means you have access only to opportunities advertised openly. Unpaid internships remain aloof, their impossible cost guarded by filthy neoliberal dogs.

Success at work may only come in the form of entrepreneurial or corporate roles. They will demand your mind. The risk and effort will be magnificent.

You will support society magnificently because you will only spend. You will never have enough money to invest or save. Instead you will keep the economy growing. As your debt grows, you increase what someone else owns. Thanks for that someone above you should say.

Your extended family and early-friendship network will be everything, with all their limitations and foibles. Any challenge to insalubrious opinions will isolate you. You will see human nature at its rawest.

Your hobbies will consist of an outerlife: sport, shooting, just stuff. An innerlife is optional.

Your language will become limited to those around you. Jokes and quips etc will be understood by your peers alone. To others your points of reference are invisible and by implication pointless and weak.

A poverty of ambition will underscore your future. To make money and to survive is your only long-term investment. Living for the buzz of your weekend is the extent of an aesthetic life.

You will have no heritage. What existed in the past did not help you. It led you here, to this nothingness. To be connected to the thinkers of the past is beyond possibility. Your peers can only be those who live immediately in front of your face.

Certain Western forces will tell you this is your fault. Just work harder, sleep less, risk more. Life Coaches and ponzi schemes will sup on you, injecting the toxic needle of individualism to thin your blood.

Poverty never leaves you. You fight or you die until you die of the fight.