I read an interesting viewpoint on life in poverty in a Western country from my favorite magazine, Suomen Kuvalehti, and decided to share. It's a long read, but highly interesting, check it out.
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How do you know you’re poor? When you’re looking at the seals in the zoo with your children and you find yourself wondering just how much good and fresh meat is swimming around in the pool.
I was listening to a discussion on the radio about the economy of Finland and two highly academic economists were on the air. The only thing I learned about these people was that one of them was from Aalto University and the other was from the University of Helsinki. I think it was the learned man from Aalto who said that modern day poverty for families with children means that the child won’t get the fashionable new smartphone he wants so badly. How can a wise man be so detached from reality?
It’s exactly these economists detached from reality who our politicians are hearing out as experts in ministries and committees. Poverty is pondered, but it’s done by those who have never experienced anything like it. Discussions are held and decisions are made by people who see the poor only as numbers. Poverty is often seen as a problem of the others. “The others” are outcasts, sick and alcoholics – the people who an average person has a hard time identifying with. Their being poor is no more acceptable, but it’s easier to talk about as the poverty of “others” never really touches “us”. If the poor aren’t sick or otherwise miserable, they’ve lived irresponsibly, spent more than they’ve earned, bought expensive clothing and gone abroad on holiday even though they couldn’t really afford it. They’ve been reckless or just stupid. A lot of people believe the poverty is, in some way or another, self-inflicted. The public discussion is harsh and full of blame. They’re talking about wasting money, thoughtlessness, even about being anodyne. In modern Finland, however, poverty concerns regular families with children whose well-educated, active parents have been pushed out of the way of cheaper workforce. Many of the modern poor are normal people who have been struck with poverty due to global reasons. Poverty can strike suddenly and it can affect a former mechanic just as much as it could a former CEO.
Being poor is a matter of definition. The European Union has decreed that a person of low income has 60% lower annual income per consumption unit than the national average. In 2010, the poverty line for low income was 14 741e/consumption unit/year, so according to Statistics Finland, there are about 700 000 poor Finns. As children and spouses consume less than those living alone, consumption units (CU) are calculated by giving adults 1 unit, 14-year-olds and older 0,5 units and those younger than that 0,3 units. A family with two adults and two young children comes up at 2,1 units – their income divided by units, this family’s poverty line stands at 30 956e/year.
I am poor. My family’s income is less than half than what is decreed as low-income. We only have 6,5e (~8,5 dollars) to spend a day per person. From that amount we pay for cost of living, food, clothes, hobbies, insurance, school books, travel costs and everything else. We became poor in a flash. I had to make room for the friends and acquaintances of my company’s new boss as he brought them onboard during an acquisition. Having a long career behind me, I was suddenly not welcome anywhere else. My experience was from the wrong branch of the industry or I had too much experience. In job interviews, employers admitted that they believed I wouldn’t want to work for long for less salary in a less demanding position. They didn’t believe my assurances that I didn’t consider an upward career a necessity anymore at my age and that I was very willing to work for a lower salary. Sometimes the problem seemed to be that employers didn’t want to hire someone who had more experience than them as underlings. On top of that I had just turned 45 - people older than that are not wanted anywhere. My wife on the other hand works in an industry full of thousands of highly educated, yet unemployed people. She is also reaching the age where the chances of being employed are slim to none. Even with active attempts, she hasn’t found a job and has lost her income-related unemployment benefit long since.
In television interviews, the victims of mass firings are still taking the situation at hand with a sliver of hope. They are smiling at the camera and insist that surely they’ll find some other work and worst comes to worst, start their own business. In the next shot we see the prime minister with a sullen, serious look. He assures that the government supports entrepreneurship and hopes that it’s exactly this laid-off mob, the mental Finnish capital and locomotive of innovation, the hard-working and dedicated worker, who will still have hope for a better future and create a new success story that will raise Finland from the depths of the bog. Well, I did what our prime minister told me and started my own company – after all, I am a professional with a load of experience. At that exact moment the government punished me economically, and my unemployment benefit was cut off immediately.
If an unemployed person is working part-time for someone else, every Euro they make cuts off their benefit by half. Entrepreneurs don’t have even that kind of fail-safe. An entrepreneur gets 500e/month for six months, and after that the continued support depends on if any of that benefit is still left. There wasn’t. A new entrepreneur shouldn’t be expecting a salary for a few years. On the contrary, you will accrue inevitable debt as it’s practically impossible to start up a company without work space, needed equipment and a marketing budget. In addition, an entrepreneur has to pay pension payments that are many times larger to regular employees whether or not there is any actual income, as business owners’ pensions aren’t linked to their salaries. By listening to our prime minister, I’ve really messed up. If the government actually supported entrepreneurship, it would change the unemployment benefit regulations to be the same for us as everyone else. I’m sure that there would be much more new enterprises springing up and much less unemployed professionals if starting your own company wouldn’t mean jumping beyond every possible safety net. There is always hope for success, but nothing is obvious, there is always an inherent risk in entrepreneurship. However, if one thing’s for sure it’s that no one makes it past the first few years if they can’t afford to eat.
Our prime minister’s suggestion that I should employ myself by becoming my own boss gave me a hint of a smile. He could have basically told me to become an opera singer instead, as running your own business is not easy by any means. It’s not enough to be good at something; you also need a hook, something that’ll make other people give up their money to you. Even the idea can be good, if not great, but you’ll still have to sell it on somehow. If you can’t, you could be sitting on the new Nokia or keep your Angry Birds caged up and still grow hungry. Not all ex-Nokia top engineers know how to sell, and not all know how to sing opera.
The problems of entrepreneurship are not the things I want to write about, but poverty. How it feels to be poor. Firstly I have to say that sudden and surprising poverty differs greatly from long-time poverty. Even though suddenly striking poverty due to unemployment or illness could be a lot to handle mentally, someone like that still often has a house, a car and a closet full of clothes, even if the day-to-day money has vanished. An entrepreneur’s poverty is also very different from that of a long-time unemployed person’s. A business-owner’s poorness is more total, but there is always an imbued hope of a better tomorrow. But as good as it is to have hope, unfortunately it is not edible.
No matter the reason for being poor, an actual poor person definitely isn’t thinking about fashionable cell phone brands. Someone who is poor is thinking how to have enough money for food or how to hold out on paying any given bill for just a bit longer. The poor quickly learns to walk past several isles in the store: no yoghurts, no cheese, no herbs, no salads, no baguettes, no cookies, no fish, no meat, no ice cream – nothing that is utterly and completely necessary. No books, no music, no movie tickets, no bus fares and no trips to Six Flags. No doctor’s appointments, unless it’s about life and death – or the children.
Absolutely no alcohol. I am in dire need of a good glass of wine, but one bottle costs more than our food budget allows for one person a day. I’d never be able to tell my kids that they won’t be eating today because mommy and daddy wanted to drink some wine. Although, unfortunately this does happen in some families.
No clothes, either. If you can only afford the necessities, the discount sales during the summer are meaningless. New sandals and shorts are too pricey even with slashed prices, and it’s not like many of us actually need to buy a new shirt – socks are still necessary, though, as it does get a bit chilly in the winter. This coming fall I will have to scrounge up some money from somewhere to pay for high school books and get some gifts for my child’s confirmation. I have no idea how I’ll be able to do that. But one unnecessary thing did become a necessity this past summer – the kids wanted strawberries, even just once during the summer time. The reason of our poverty is partly due to our choices: we could sell our car and turn it into yoghurt and strawberries. That would be foolish, as I need the car for my work. After we’d eaten the price of the car we’d be broke again. We could sell our house and rent an apartment, but our home, where some of our children have been born in, is the last thing we’ll ever give up.
I have noticed that there are surprisingly few things that a human needs. This attitude also rubs onto your children – when there hasn’t been any money to spend for quite some time, the kids start having a hard time thinking of things they want or need. Personally, I know what would be fun. It would be fun to have a small break on all this saving; it would be fun to buy good food without feeling guilty; it would be fun to drive to the countryside without worrying about gas prices; it would be fun to take the kids to the movies and the wife to a restaurant once in a while; it would be excitingly fun to do something spontaneous for a change, but everything has a cost. By biggest regret is that may not be able to take my kids abroad before their halcyon days of youth have flown us by. I would want to offer them memories and mutual experiences.
I’d like to have some sex, too. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not paying my wife for her services nor do I roam the streets for offerings. In families with children, eroticism is difficult – especially if some of the kids have reached an age where they can’t get to sleep. We desperately need some time alone, but even that has a cost. When we still could afford it, we took off for a few days from time to time. We hired a babysitter and had romantic dinners, where we planned our future, exciting excursions. Poverty requires discipline, as even of you have money on your account you can’t use it for the fear of tomorrow’s situation. You can’t buy chocolate today without knowing if you have enough for a single potato next week. The one thing I hate the most about being poor is that I constantly have to think about money. Being poor is chronic declining – a constant tirade without days off, with nothing to look forward to. That’s the worst thing about being penniless. It’s absolutely tiring because you can’t rest on your laurels even for a second. That’s also what makes it so dangerous: people who have been driven to their utmost edge may lose their hope and the hopeless may end up committing stupid and horrible acts.
They say that the poor are outcasts. I am active in societal issues because it’s pretty much a free hobby. I’m social, analytic and conscious, I follow the world closely and I also discuss its events with my children. Even though I am an outcast of the consumer society, I don’t match the idea of an outcast I have embedded in my mind. I have however noticed that poverty has caused some kind of exclusion even in my own life, contrary to my expectations. I meet people less and less. I can’t afford to have nights-out with my friends, not to mention taking part in any hobbies or activities that aren’t free. We can’t invite any people over like we used to, as we would have to purchase food – guests eat like horses and they’re not content with any old discount minced meat from the bargain bucket. When we aren’t inviting anyone over, the invites stop coming our way as well. Social interaction is reduced when you’re poor.
At first I was excluded because of unemployment instead of poverty. I didn’t go to work, I didn’t meet any co-workers and I was cut off the employer’s health care program. Soon enough I didn’t want to even walk around in the city: I couldn’t stop watching the passers-by, always in a seeming hurry. Everyone else was headed somewhere, they had a purpose. I envied having a purpose more than being wealthy. Although the distraught feelings of early uselessness have passed, I still don’t enjoy hanging out on the town, it’s loud and oppressive. At home – secluded – it’s easier to breathe.
Being a societal outcast is much more than social passivity and staying at home: it’s the loss of motivation. It’s watching the rat race surrounding malls and jobs from the outside in and not understanding why they ever were so important in your life. The most dangerous thing for a society is that people are beginning to enjoy being excluded. A very deeply outcast person won’t do what is expected of him anymore – compete, drive company benefit on the expense of your own morals, give up your free time or the completion of useless or inane achievements. I’m on the fast track of becoming a true outcast in a worrisome way, as I have myself stopped worrying entirely. If I can only get enough money to feed my children and pay the utilities, nothing else would matter. The only slightly worrying fact about being pushed out of society is that it really is hereditary: my children have been looking at life through options other than having money and careers. They seem to have created some kind of defense mechanism to tell themselves that money and success are not important. From the government’s point of view they might never become upstanding citizens. They could even become humanists.
Luckily for us we live in this century. Twenty years ago we would have been living in shame of our poverty and unemployment. Now poverty is a societal issue and we have thousands of peers, who have become poor against their own volition. Unfortunately my old mother still lives in accordance to older values. She believes that a person who is honest, hard-working and well-reputable will always find work and be able to feed their family. “There’s always work out there.”
My mother has understood our dire situation and how we’ve somehow fallen into this unfair black hole of uncertainty, with a horned figure of my former employer laughing down at me with his compatriots from the edge of the darkness. But her friends wouldn’t understand, that is why I can’t write this article under my own name, as she is keeping up the façade for us and I don’t want to put her through any shame. I also want to protect my children. Schools and daycare are full of cruel cavemen fluttering about, tearing, slamming and abandoning others for the tiniest reasons. I’d also spare my kids from randomly reading a magazine and finding out their daddy is deeply depressed.
Although I’m not personally ashamed of being poor, I also can’t use my real name because entrepreneurship is built on trust. Even though every one of us knows that money is short and the times are tough, it’s kept under wraps for business reasons. If you’re not succeeding, you are no good, and if you’re no good, you aren’t trustworthy. No one wants to do business with someone they can’t rely on. And maybe in my weakest moments I have felt that I really am no good. I might still apply for work someday. Employers make their hiring decisions for very strange reasons and I’m not willing to hurt those chances any more – nor the chances of my spouse.
I don’t recognize shame in myself, but it seems I haven’t been released from it completely as its twin sister ‘pride’ is still tormenting me. It’s still difficult for me to accept any offered help and asking for help is completely unbearable. But it’s for the children that I have to push away my pride; stubbornness is not reason enough to keep them in hunger or deprive them of their home. We are up to our ears in debt of gratitude and that debt is a hard burden to carry, even though our debtors would not wish it upon us.
Poverty is not an absolutely sad thing, there are pros as well. For example, it’s easier to read about an environmental disaster when you know your carbon footprint is, utilities notwithstanding, on an African level. We live very ecologically, due to the circumstances. I can’t be too proud of that, though, as the exact moment money would start rolling in we’d be sinning away like everyone else. But today, today I can be happy of the fact that we do not buy unnecessary products, we do not produce waste nor do we exploit any children locked up in sweatshops, although we can’t afford Fair Trade products, sponsor children or buy local and renowned Finnish produce.
I’m also glad to see that products have lost their meaning to me. I’m very glad that the kids have learned to live without the constant presence and momentary joy brought on by shopping and consumerism. Without poverty I could have never raised them to be as rational as they are now.
I apologize in advance to all ministers and secretaries and their ilk for saying this, but being an outcast can also be pleasant. Being at work and visiting the constant carnivals in the holy shrines of consumerism feels so strange, frightening and empty now and I have no attraction to get back to that kind of world any more. I don’t have to try and be anything else than myself. To become valuable, I don’t have to prove my worth to anyone or fight for a place under the sun of my superiors. When I ran out of money to buy value from a store, I had to find it inside my own being. By the way, if you’re poor, you’ll stay thin, without any extra effort. Now that’s an actual benefit.
Even though being poor has its good sides, I confess that I can’t wait for Christmas: that’s when I will throw my self-control in the bin and buy a box of cowberry chocolate, then ones I always pass by when I go to the store. It costs nearly six euros, but it’s my Christmas present and I’m going to eat it all by myself. I would gladly send a piece to the economist from Aalto, so detached from reality, if I only knew his name.
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Sparknotes - C'mon now...
