Comment by iamleppert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamleppert | Hacker News Reader

This is an explanation forwarded by my mother, who knows a thing or two about scraping by to make ends meet:

Being poor sucks.

Yes, that's right: being poor. I'm talking about the constant stresses placed upon a person that is working a minimum wage job, barely able to afford their rent. Constant stress about money.

Now imagine for a minute I could tell you that stress is a choice. The alternative, the very scary "homelessness", "on the streets" --- is it really much worse? Could it actually be less stressful?

I think what happens is some of these people become homeless and realize that it isn't all that bad. For a subset of the population who can already get by on not a lot, not having a home (and the stress that comes with it) must be welcome. They become homeless and realize "I can do this, this could be my life. Let's live in a tent."

And there you go, someone who has decided to become "chronically" homeless.

I'll have to say there is something to be said about releasing all the conventional trappings of modern society: you no longer have to worry about bills, responsibility. You get to be outdoors. Sure, there are other problems, like where to find food and keep clean, and avoiding the police, but for some that is better than competing in the rat race of life, at what is the very hardest and poorest levels of society.

I have family that work for homeless shelters in NYC. Usually the ones he works with are the fresh homeless. These are foster kids that age out of the system, abused kids turned adults, and male spouses. The first 72 hours are the most critical. After that they start to have a mental breakdown. Being homeless becomes the new normal and they go feral. These are the homeless most people think of. They can no longer function in society. They are antisocial, unemployable, and have poor hygiene.

These homeless aren't living a hobo dream. They traded one form of stress for another. Now instead of worrying about rent they have stress from lack of sleep. The ones that choose to live in a tent because it is less stressful is actually quite small group.

It's reasonable that just sinking into homelessness can seem like a relief from some things. But don't assume that it's some easy "return to the wild" - anyone living in tent is at risk at having that tent knocked down (since it's on land to which they have no right, they being homeless) and being arrested for trespassing. Then given a ticket (that they can't pay) and then watching their fines go up for non-payment until they face serious jail-time that doesn't remove the ticket. And so-forth.

And without the tent, you risk death by exposure, as happens regularly to homeless people in any place without perfect weather.

And the campaigns the police conduct, to make it impossible to sleep in any given location, result in chronic sleeplessness in the homeless, which results in a variety of psychiatric disorders, a process which feeds on itself until the result is utterly destroyed human being one occasionally sees by the side of our roads.

A few people do competently navigate these problem to be successful hobos/tramps but this is not paradise.

This post seems a little naive to me, and certainly couldn't apply to every single person who no longer has a home in California. We've developed technology and built homes so that we didn't have to deal with living in the outside world - to keep the outside from coming in, so to speak - and it gives us choice and stability, if we are able to maintain our possession of it without too much stress and trouble. That it is still hard to keep a home in a lot of places should be a real concern - things like that are not good for anybody. Homelessness can hurt people and hurt communities. I'd want to see some real investigation rather than conjecture about whether these specific people are doing it out of choice, or whether they are capably dealing with the extremely difficult and unpredictable circumstances that often accompany homelessness. The perspective you are arguing from kind of seems sheltered to me. There have been many more people protesting across the U.S. in the last few years than have been living the idyllic and romantic hobo life, free from stress and want.

Your mother does not seem like much of an unassailable source of wisdom when it comes to the realities of poverty - maybe you should argue from a more personal or sourced perspective about what it is like to be poor or homeless and what kind of conditions folks in such a position experience?

That sounds like a decision made long after becoming homeless. I seriously doubt may people who have homes decide to abandon the lifestyle and take to the streets.

This is a good point. Homelessness is often a lot less stressful and scary than the modern rat race. Having spent a year living in my car I can see how very few want to go back to working all day to live paycheck to paycheck.

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