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Comment by jlawson | Hacker News Reader

>you're going to die homeless next month

Help me understand how someone could believe something along these lines for more-or-less their entire life. The fact is that poor people live long lives of many decades; they observe others around them just like them living many decades. There's nothing close to a rational reason to discount the future that hard.

How does one end up believing that every month is their last when it clearly isn't? I know people who are persistently poor act like they believe it, but I didn't think they literally consciously thought it was true.

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People don't believe they'll literally drop dead next month. But they believe they'll get kicked out of their apartment if they can't pay rent. If that happens, they might end up losing their job after not being able to show up for a few days in order to find a new place if that's even possible. Being poor is miserable. You know how you might lament that due to your full time job you have so little time to spend on your interests and hobbies? Likewise, poor people have very little time or the mental bandwidth to think about doing things that only pay off in the long term. They're focused on surviving to next month. So they spend money on groceries instead of on coding lessons or something which won't get them a better job any time soon. They're probably right anyway. What's the point of learning to code when companies wouldn't hire them in a million years instead of a college graduate or someone with previous experience in the field. So you can imagine how many people are condemned to forever working food service jobs or other such work.

I guess it just doesn't check out with me. I've been around poor people. I've lived with them. I'm sure some of them are working constantly (probably more the ones with kids, which they shouldn't have had in the first place), but generally they don't seem to be particularly busy. Most of them, if they wanted to sit down and start learning web tech from online tutorials (or improve their future in any other way), had the time and resources. They were just not interested. Even things that would save time like 'stop smoking pot 7 days a week' - just nope.

Humans are not immune to inertia.

Well said.

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