How Poverty Taxes the Brain
I can speak to this. For a while in 2010 I was completely broke after leaving my first job out of college, which I hated, and having some other employment opportunities fall through. Having that little money changes your decision making process about absolutely everything. Obviously every financial decision is effected, even the tiniest purchases weigh into bigger questions like "will I have enough money in my bank account to pay rent on the first?" It can reach a point where you can barely purchase a soda without any stress over spending money. And at least for me who is fortunate enough that this was not a chronic way of life, one thing that weighed on my mind was how I was spending my time and whether I was doing enough to make sure I wasn't so broke all the time. I could imagine that at some point that sort of thinking goes away and you believe poverty is a way of life. But I can think of a variety of other meta concerns stemming from poverty that could plague your thoughts.<p>Mentally poverty can be an all consuming condition. I've come to think of it as comparable to programming in a high level language versus programming in a low level language. If you're financially stable you are like someone programming in a high level language who has tedious tasks like memory management taken care of for you. Whereas if you live in poverty before you can get to some of the really productive work you have some hurdles to overcome.<p>Another way of thinking of the difference between being financially stable and being poor is that if you are poor it is constantly a necessity to think about short term outcomes first so your mind gets clogged up with them. It is very difficult to get to think about your long term good because failing to properly address your short term outcomes could end in complete disaster. This is why I cannot take seriously comments like this on HN: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6301856" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6301856</a> although thankfully the commenter does acknowledge he is being cynical and disrespectful.