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Having worked with the poor my entire adult life, I can tell you that a lot of them don't see or aren't willing to participate in a reality where they work their butts off, delay gratification, and take advantage of educational opportunities.
Some of it is very cultural - if you don't know you can do better, you generally aren't going to put forth the effort. When I worked on the border, I also noticed that education was not really pushed by families or communities. Reproduction, however, was very highly stressed - even amongst teens.
Life is a business and the point is to create the dividend of leisure time by doing only what is necessary. Striving to do better for an indifferent boss is a great way to die of stress related illness. Remember the boss is working the system and will claim that your work should result in his bonus. Ambition is a highly overrated curse. I suggest a person figure out what sort of life they want to live and just do what is necessary to achieve that goal. Work as hard a necessary but only as hard as necessary.
Life is a business and the point is to create the dividend of leisure time by doing only what is necessary. Striving to do better for an indifferent boss is a great way to die of stress related illness. Remember the boss is working the system and will claim that your work should result in his bonus. Ambition is a highly overrated curse. I suggest a person figure out what sort of life they want to live and just do what is necessary to achieve that goal. Work as hard a necessary but only as hard as necessary.
Interesting. I guess that I don't totally disagree, but I certainly don't totally agree.
Doing "the minimum amount required" is not really a good way to do things. While I understand the lack of motivation to do more, I also think that that attitude leads to people actually doing far less than the minimum required to get by.
Anywhoo... There really is a lot to be said for determining the level you're willing to live at, and not busting your neck trying to keep up with the Joneses.
In addition, there are a lot of people who have low incomes who are not poor! They're simply content with what they have.
I would have thought that "educated" and "hardworking" people such as the OP's friend's, might have some other concerns regarding those less fortunate than themselves. I think it's become a kind of sport to speculate on the reasons for poverty, American's are watching an inordinate amount of TV these days, that and the radio bluster kings, might account for this newfound body of social science professionals who got their degree from Jerry Springer University.
It is this type of conversation topic that allows these folks the dubious distinction of being able to speak through their trousers, what in the world makes people so full of opinions that are so ill informed? In the myriad of university texts dealing with the social constructs that support poverty, none seem inclined to stoop to pure speculation as a valid contribution to the body of work already standing.
A mountain of studies suggest that we have a permanent underclass due to the type of economic system that has prevailed since colonial times. We know that poverty has been a very old and pervasive condition, it has become a standard of measurement, utilized as an employment provider, the government maintains the status quo as a self serving enterprise, ostensibly helping the poor.
The best studies show the level of inteligence to be fairly equal between those very young children of the lowest and highest classes, it's after the effects of poverty have done their damage that the disparity shows up in testing. So, it looks as though poverty is a cause of lower testing scores, contrary to what some may believe.
While we can make our own observations as to the fact that lower IQ scores are a dominant factor in the lowest strata of our society, we can't ignore the cause, that is the beginning of any economic salvation for the least of our brethern. Sitting around with a group of people hell bent on revising the important conclusions reached by truly educated folk's, shows a lack of education at the very least, and a serious lack of compassion at most.
The that is mostly being lazy if tehy rely on others to survive. You can be unassuming and still earn your way thru life. Unambitious at a point become lazy. Don't care for possessions only means you want food.heal;thcare and a roff over your head but if you don't work at getting them then your lazy to start with.Many thni tehy should earn a living doing something they can earn a living at because they are not good at it or there is ni demnand. Survival means you often do what you won't pick to do. If you say want to take a chnce to be a movie satr and are one of the huge percentage that doesn't make it ;you can esxpect to be poor because of choice very likely.Many say the don't care about possessions but they want to walkdown nice streets;have parks;sewer systemsand runing water but tehy never remmeber that someone pays for these possessions they enjoy.
Are making a commentary about being poor? Or are you entering your post from a phone?
There is never a fixed rule for any social class of anything, even in relation to money, nothing in human relations is that easy.
You can also be several kinds of poor, the simplest is people who just spend too much regardless of their income coming in (and then more on credit). Eventually the tight balance people have topples...job loss, illness, recession and they end up in bankruptcy or worse. I've seen it a good bit in the last 2 years with the credit crisis.
There are those with poor attitudes such as blaming everyone else for their problems, not showing up for work, insulting/demeaning those around them, being lazy, lack of situational awareness, and lack of ending awareness. I have a number of old friends who fall in this category, they got into programs and took the path of least resistance through college, or work, or whatever. People now have degrees in things they just settled for, which now they realized don't qualify them for anything...or have degrees in things they liked, and can't do much more in then go for a Ph.D. and teach other undergrads (and not what they wanted to do). Even those who decided to get a job at the retail/grocery stores and stay there, always putting off decisions to change their life till later till it's too late. The funny thing is because those who are not where they want to be in life blame the people who are where they want to be, not their own bad decisions.
The point is that if you are where you want to be and happy, that's the best richness. If you are not then you must change things to make it the way you want it, not expect some one to hand your happiness to you. You need to look at where you will end 10, 20, even 30 years down the line when you start a career or education path and see if it's where you want to be...if it's not, or if it's changed, you need to change your conclusions and find a way around the problem and not just do the same things and expect a different result.
I was talking about 30 years ago many people who would be struggling today were able to get high paid low skill factory jobs that took care of their family but only needed a high school diploma and you were trained on the job. My own Father had such a job, he was paid a good union wage of about $25 an hour (in today's money) and only had a high school diploma. He worked on an assembly line and was trained on the job. I understand that many factory jobs NOW DAYS do require a skill and ones that involve quick on the job training pay about one half of what they use to inflation adjusted.
There's nothing wrong with on the job training--at least you know the training will be germane to the job at hand. Do you have to know Shakespeare to make a great steak or souffle? Those in the culinary arts might go to school, but they are certainly those who learned as they went. And it's a SKILL. I always wonder about people who complain about "unskilled" work. Someone with even six months' experience is generally going to out-produce someone who just came off the street.
Life is a business and the point is to create the dividend of leisure time by doing only what is necessary. Striving to do better for an indifferent boss is a great way to die of stress related illness. Remember the boss is working the system and will claim that your work should result in his bonus. Ambition is a highly overrated curse. I suggest a person figure out what sort of life they want to live and just do what is necessary to achieve that goal. Work as hard a necessary but only as hard as necessary.
I disagree with this strongly, and believe attitudes like this are the reason for most of the flaws in society today. There is a name for someone who only works as hard as necessary - lazy. People need to take pride in their work. I work with far too many people who leave the office after exactly eight hours, regardless of what work needs to be done. I am happiest when I am effective and contributing to my company. Sometimes that requires working longer hours (without overtime pay). Since when did work become something you can't enjoy? I like my job. I enjoy coming to work every day. If I hit the lottery, I wouldn't quit working, I enjoy being productive. I would suggest the exact opposite of GregW. Always do more than you are asked, always take the extra step. Doing the minimum to get by sounds like a sad way to live.
I think one of the greatest illnesses in society is a lack of personal responsibility. I think one of the reasons people are poor/unemployed/whatever (ONE OF, not the ONLY reason) is they expect someone else to solve their problems (the government usually). Your life will not get better unless you put the effort in to make it better. If your job requires 8 hours a day, work 9 and don't complain. People will notice. Buy books on new technologies/techniques for your job and read them in your free time. If you are poor/stuck at a dead end job, it is no one's fault but your own.
I know this might sound a little harsh, but no one helped me get to where I am now, and I know from personal experience that you can make something from nothing.
NO! Some of the smartest and most "productive" people I have ever known have been "poor", by societal, financial standards. Most of these are people who had little if any opportunity for formal education, but we were either well read, or well educated by observation of human behavior.
We recently had a "department meeting" at my place of business, where my boss asked if any of us were personal friends with people who have Phd's. . . . it was obvious, from his comments that he is highly prejudiced against those who have "higher education". Many of my best friends have advance degrees, a substansial number of them have Phd's, and some of them have less than a high school education. . . . all stereotypes about "intelligence" and "wealth" are ridiculous, in my experience! I know of NO highly educated individuals who measure human worth by monetary standards!
Some friends were over at the house the other day and we were talking about the underclass (poor people). One of them works for social services and has got harsher in her tone about the disadvantaged as she has experienced more of the so called real people. She says, "it almost makes you want to vote republican"
The general feeling of our group was that 90% of the underclass (poor people) are a combination of lazy, stupid or unskilled. It was mostly their fault not society or business (employers). 20-30 years ago one could be a lazy uneducated person and do alright because there were plenty of jobs for everyone in manufacturing and strong unions, today, if you have no skills you will be poor forever. Agree?
I kind of think that as a whole people have gotten more stupid, lazy and unskilled. instead of really trying to learn something, we are supposed to pick a narrow field and know everything there is to know about it, or as they call it: to "specialize". But realy this hinders people from knowing a wide scope of anything which is not a step in a good direction. And as far as skilled goes, I am starting to notice that there are more adults in school in persuit of degrees and certificates. Problem with this is that the college degree is about to become the new GED. As in it's about to be the norm for any kind of work that Americans would be willing to do. This trend is starting to show, everyone has to have some kind of furthered education of certificate to do anything worthwhile. And as far as lazy goes, compared to how things were done back in the day, even many of the hardest of today's workers have it easy. People think they work hard because they go to their call center job, or their thimble factory job all day every day; but could anyone here imagone plowing 100 acres by driving the plow behind a horse? Or building a house from raw lumber and material, having to make each cut with a hand saw? Even the hard workers of today are relitively lazy compared to what those before us had to do, so I'm not really all that sympathetic to all of today's "hard workers".
I will agree that many of the people on the dole probably are dumb, uneducated and lazy, but I think they are just the reflection of the trend. But I think that a lot of people are throwing in the towel on work because it's not even hardly worth it any more. Work used to stand for something and mean something, now it's just a streamlined system of how to get more crap. Jobs are a joke anymore; it's not even worth starting to climb the ladder. And finally, I think that there are those who see it as "why invest in a sinking ship?"
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