How we can view and redefine poverty from a different perspective
Even though I sometimes believed it as a child, I was never really financially poor. This meant I had the privilege of enjoying a comprehensive education. However, for a long time, I didn’t realize that I was impoverished in other areas. Only now am I slowly recognizing the different faces and forms of poverty and what effects they have. And that the lack of something and the possession of something else does not automatically trigger the feeling of being poor or rich.
Out of financial poverty
All my grandparents started out in rather poor circumstances, as I know from stories. Through a lot of initiative, good decisions, and certainly some help from others and a pinch of luck, they managed to build up a certain middle-class prosperity. The economic boom of the 60s, 70s, and 80s did the rest.
As a result, I grew up without any fear of losing the roof over my head or having too little to eat or too few clothes. And yet, as a child, I sometimes thought my family was poor. My brother and I received less pocket money than most of our friends, and my parents didn’t just buy me everything I wanted. My childish logic concluded that they didn’t have enough. It was only as an adult that I realized they were simply teaching me the value of money. The opposite can happen for children growing up in rather poor circumstances, but never really feeling poor themselves.
Much later, I experienced a brief period of financial hardship, I realized that financial wealth primarily provides greater freedom of choice. However, having money also brings additional burdens and can quickly take away that apparent freedom.
Educational poverty and educational wealth
Financial security gave me the opportunity to go to university and spend many years of my youth and young adulthood focused solely on acquiring knowledge. After completing my master’s degree, I had a wealth of knowledge but almost no experience.
Here, too, I realized that there is more than one perspective. On the one hand, it was an incredible gift and also very valuable to have so much time and space to gather knowledge about how things work and how they relate to other things. On the other hand, however, I lacked the practical experience in so many areas to make sense of all this knowledge and put it to good use.
Some of that experience came later, of course, but by then I had long forgotten much of what I had learned. As a result, it sometimes feels as if I wasted valuable time building up all that knowledge instead of gaining profoundly important life experiences.
Experience poverty
The word “experience” is usually neutral, sometimes even positive. But of course, there are experiences that we consider positive and others that we consider negative. What all experiences have in common, however, is that we think less and act more. Our whole body experiences something, and we learn (consciously or unconsciously) to make decisions in real, actual situations.
Basically, as long as we are in our human bodies, we cannot avoid gaining experience. Even sitting in a chair all day listening or typing on a keyboard are experiences. Even when we immerse ourselves in virtual reality with glasses, it is a form of physical experience (albeit somewhat distorted).
However, if we always experience something very similar, with hardly any changes in our environment, where we always make the same movements and gestures with our bodies and always make the same decisions, we end up with a poverty of experience. Then the years come and go, and everything somehow merges in our memory.
I know this poverty well, but I have also worked hard to break out of the vicious cycle of poverty of experience and the accompanying, ever-increasing fear of new experiences. I personally managed to break out especially through all my experiences in Nature. Even if it wasn’t always easy.
Emotional poverty and neglect
The loss of connection to our feelings and emotions is a form of poverty that took a long time to become apparent to me. It was only through books that explain emotional neglect, such as “Running on Empty” by Jonice Webb, that I gained insight into everything I lacked in my childhood and even later in life.
In my case, this form of poverty goes back several generations, and it took a lot of time, patience, and energy to regain awareness of my feelings and emotions from this separation and the false connections I had made, and to link them appropriately to my bodily sensations.
I often catch myself thinking that this form of poverty is not so bad. After all, I functioned well even without this connection to my feelings and emotions, and from an outside perspective I was successful and everything seemed fine.
But these thoughts are just a defense mechanism for me, so that I don’t have to feel the emptiness that comes with emotional poverty as well as connection poverty.
connection poverty
As humans, we are always part of something bigger than ourselves. We are part of our family, our community/neighborhood, and possibly our friendships, workplaces, and wherever else we interact with other people. We are also part of the ecosystem in which we live, which in turn is part of a larger system.
Nevertheless, there are many of us who feel lonely, unwanted, unneeded, or rejected at different times in our lives. It was only when I was able to experience, even if only to a small extent, what it feels like to be deeply connected to everything and everyone around me (regardless of whether I liked some parts of it or not) that I realized how disconnected I had been living before.
Through this conscious experience of connection, a level of richness came into my life that I could never have dreamed of before.
Poverty of the soul
Poverty of the soul is closely linked to emotional poverty and connection poverty. And yet it is still something slightly different. When we do things that bring us joy, that fulfill us, or that allow us to build connections to someone, something, or an activity, we nourish our soul.
But if we don’t take the time to do this, our soul starves, and with it our zest for life and the energy we need to live our lives in a vibrant way. We may exist, but we lack the inner radiance and fire that warms us and those around us.
Time poverty
Basically, we all have the same amount of time and therefore should not have anything like time poverty. Objectively speaking, each of us has 24 hours, or other units of time, which represent one cycle of the Earth’s rotation around its own axis. And for each of us, as long as we live on this Earth, there is one year, or the period of time it takes for the Earth to complete one orbit around the Sun.
And yet we often feel time poverty.
It can be associated with wanting to escape financial poverty or not wanting to fall into it in the first place or back again. Or we invest a lot of time in building relationships with our children, and then there is not much left for anything else.
However, time and what we do with our time on this earth is above all a sign of our priorities, and what type of poverty we might want to get out of or not fall into.
What does poverty mean?
Using the example of time poverty, it is perhaps easiest to see that basically every form of poverty has at least two levels:
- The perception of “too little” and “too much” in comparison with others
- The effects when we focus too much on one or the other
Poverty is therefore always a sign of a lack of balance. Both within ourselves, as well as in society and the world at large. It does not mean that we need exactly the same amount of all these aspects, but that it must be adapted to the respective situations.
Someone who has children of their own may have less time and less money to spare, but they have a wealth of connection and are well nourished emotionally. Someone with a lot of money may experience a poverty of experience and connection and be happy to give up some of their financial wealth in order to be part of a family. And someone who has dedicated their life to connection and emotional and spiritual wealth can also contribute this in this “family” system in order to receive in the areas where they have less.
The antidote to poverty
What this example shows is that we are only truly poor when we do not come together in families and communities to give to each other where we have a lot and to receive where we might have little. This can also be viewed across cultures and countries. For we need to recognize that no one in this world is poor on all levels or rich on all levels.
And as soon as we truly recognize that we are connected to one another and can only be truly strong together, and that we must learn both to give and to receive, we can see that it is only through this interdependence, this mutual “dependence” on an equal footing (compared to unhealthy co-dependence) that we are truly fulfilled, whole, and connected.
