Shit life syndrome
Hi, speaking from small-town India.<p>Poverty is extremely harsh on people. And when I was much younger (&lt;15), like many adults now think, I used to think that poverty is the lack of power of buying expensive things. But as I have grown up, I realized that poverty is extremely harsh.<p>For example, relevant to the submission, is healthcare. Healthcare in India is theoretically free in government hospitals. But in most places the state of these hospitals is horrific, and getting treatment is very hard due to corruption.<p>But the bigger issue is opportunity cost. People who live based on daily earnings, cannot afford to go to hospitals abandoning their work as they cannot ensure next day&#x27;s food. So, unless it happens to be someone young, people don&#x27;t seek treatment at all. And visiting a proper doctor and buying meds take away ~10 days&#x27; income. Really unaffordable for poor people.<p>So, even people in their forties and fifties decide to wait it out, and easily curable ailments get chronic and beyond cure. Women fare worse than men.<p>Real victims are old people, and nobody bothers to spend money and weeks of their time to get them to treatment. They wither, and die without treatment. I have seen at least a dozen people die like this.<p>I think, the cause of SLS is opportunity cost. People often die, and more often suffer for decades from easily curable diseases because they cannot really afford either the time or money to get treatment.<p>I also know at least a dozen people who have something chronic, but get no treatment at all because they cannot afford it.