Why The Poor Deserve To Be Poor

The world we live in is designed to reward neither intellectual pretensions nor energetic busywork.

Clickbait!

At the very outset, let's clarify that the title is intended as clickbait. No creature on God's earth deserves to suffer.

But the aim of this article is to demonstrate that most healthy independent adults usually face the consequences of their own choices.

There's nothing actually wrong with the system. It's just completely apathetic.

The Poor Get Poorer

Most of us are aware that doing something wrong often brings instant satisfaction or gratification, but problems later along the road.

The habit of lying is possibly the best example of this, where one gets a short-term benefit for a long-term cost; usually in the form of valuable relationships being lost forever.

The financial equivalent of this instant gratification would be the use of loans and credit cards.

And The Rich Richer

But what almost no one ever talks about is that doing the right things almost always causes pain in the short-term.

Telling the truth in a difficult situation is the most obvious example of this. But the most important example is investing.

All investing involves foregoing a short-term reward for a long term one.

And whatever comes in the long-term tends to come with interest, whether it's the cost of a wrong choice or a reward for the right one.

The world we live in is designed to reward neither intellectuality nor activity, but the ability to delay gratification.

Sacrifice

Note that there is no direct antonym for the word Invest.

The ones that come closest are possibly borrow, fritter or squander; all of which come with other connotations.

There is no single direct word for the act of destroying valuable long-term possibilities, in the pursuit of short-term gratification; and yet that's almost the defining characteristic of human existence today.

Perhaps that is precisely the reason there is no word for the phenomenon, because it's so ubiquitous that it's taken for granted.

But there are plenty of ordinary people who start out with very modest incomes, and build growing estates simply by avoiding loans and investing religiously.

Note that the operative word here is religiously.

This is a story as old as the fable of the ant and the grasshopper.

Faith

Osho once said that good and evil are two sides of the same coin. We don't know if he intended the statement as a pun, but it appears finance is one manifestation of that very coin.

On the one side you have the super-smart traders with their charts and derivatives, and on the other you have patient value investors willing to slowly add to their holdings over a period of decades.

One side looks for immediate gratification and the other for long-term results, some even believing they're doing the one while actually doing the other.

The Psychology of Wealth

Jordan Peterson explains the unique ability of successful people to delay gratification.

Man vs Instinct

In Frank Herbert's book Dune, there is a memorable scene where the protagonist is tested for being deemed worthy; and the deciding factor is whether he can overcome his instinctive reaction to intense short-term pain.

While the movie suffered from poor editing due to production issues, the original 1984 adaptation of Dune was far more faithful to the book.