FWIW, and as someone who's been through it, that's a really disempowering belief for people who have already experienced it or who are currently living through it.
Life involves many profound challenges, most of which are unfairly distributed. Learning to overcome the challenges that one faces and turn them into novel opportunities and perspectives is the constructive way of looking at it.
There are enough of these challenges that we as a society don't need to encourage them and can work to eradicate or minimize many, but this fatalist view (as indeed gets said countless times) doesn't help the people who already faced it or who will in the coming decades.
And of course, this is not just limited to poverty.
> There are enough of these challenges that we as a society don't need to encourage them and can work to eradicate or minimize many, but this fatalist view (as indeed gets said countless times) doesn't help the people who already faced it or who will in the coming decades.
At an individual level, a fatalist view is definitely incredibly harmful. But at that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to counter it at a systemic level.
That's exactly what's said in what you quoted, even so far as putting the emphasis on societal effort by mentioning it first, so clearly I don't disagree :)
I've been through it as well, not as in severe poverty, but definitely to the degree where what you can do in life is very limited and ...
>that's a really disempowering belief
... for me at least, it had the complete opposite effect. When you're young and particularly a teenager, you want to do as much cool things as possible (not just fun, but also things like profiling yourself to end up in a good career, make money, etc), plenty of times this does not happen if you're not privileged enough, and then most of the time people blame this on themselves, maybe I wasn't that smart, maybe I wasn't that disciplined, blah blah.
Sometimes "you just didn't have enough money" is an acceptable answer, it takes the blame out of yourself and it gives you an objective to pursue. Note: this last phrase could definitely be misinterpreted and strawman-ed to death, so I'll clarify on both points:
* It takes the blame out of yourself ... in a healthy way; most likely you are just good enough or are as good as all the other people that are already doing what you want to do. Money could well be the only limiting factor and, if this happens to be the case, you're actually lucky in the sense that is much easier to "just get some money" than to actually nurture and develop an ability that you don't have.
* It gives you a (clear and focused) objective to pursue. Money is not everything but once you identify this as the limiting factor in your life, you can become laser-focused on acquiring said wealth and things just get easier down the road. Anecdote from me: I was once a plane trip short (out of money) from enrolling on a nice PhD in a different country than mine; that, of course, got me very frustrated and sad, but after that my only purpose for a short while was to make money, I went on to work and live frugally (by choice!) and after a year I had saved up a significant wad of cash, this put me in a position where I could not only afford the plane ticket towards any PhD program I wanted, but also afford at least 6-8 months of life anywhere I wanted in the world, so I could just go to places and explore and make a decision about that when I was comfortable about it. Also that small cycle of "set up goal", "work towards it", "execute", gave a lot of meaning to my life at the time and it's a framework that is very useful to master going forward in life.
I appreciate your perspective! But learning to recognize that not all lives can find a path to the same place and that you should stay focused on your own opportunities and wellness, seems a far cry from internalizing that "poverty fucks you up".
In fact, I'd say it's almost the opposite. You don't sound fucked by poverty, honestly. You seem more grounded and capable than many people who had far more privileges, and it sounds like your experiences ended up playing a positive contribution to that even if you wouldn't want to inflict those experiences on anyone else.
Life involves many profound challenges, most of which are unfairly distributed. Learning to overcome the challenges that one faces and turn them into novel opportunities and perspectives is the constructive way of looking at it.
There are enough of these challenges that we as a society don't need to encourage them and can work to eradicate or minimize many, but this fatalist view (as indeed gets said countless times) doesn't help the people who already faced it or who will in the coming decades.
And of course, this is not just limited to poverty.