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A Twist on the Spoon Theory

on March 24, 2019

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Independently Poor: A Twist on FU Money -- a.k.a. "FU, Money"

While I was homeless, I had a descriptor in my profile on some forum that I was "Independently Poor." That was more than just tongue-in-cheek humor. Although I was homeless, I had alimony and I was doing freelance work and I had a degree of agency that you rarely see among poor people. I was able to arrange my life to prioritize taking care of my health in part by doing gig work (and this post is being written expressly for r/GigWorks , a forum I run). In other words, I had a degree of independence and agency that you normally only see in the Jet Set -- people who get called independently wealthy -- or comfortably well-off retirees. I had more control over my time and my life than your typical working stiff. I was able to get to that point in part because I'm pretty financially savvy. I think anyone can get to that same place mentally and logistically, even if you don't currently have much money. A lot of it has to do with feeding your mind the right stuff in

This is Real. That's Not.

We all grow up in our own little bubble. Getting perspective on ourselves and/or our own lives is one of the harder things to do in life. I've always liked the following scene from the movie Overboard (1987), but it took on new meaning for me after I was homeless: Most of us go through life...knowing only that one little station to which we were born... you...have had the rare privilege of escaping your bonds for just a spell... I was on the street about a year before it dawned on me how upper class my mother's expectations were. It took even longer for me to begin to comprehend how well off my parents had actually been at one time. While I was growing up, my parents always conveyed this narrative of "We are just plain folks with blue collar jobs." I was a child, so I believed what I was told and it took a stint "on skid row" to get a clue that this wasn't the whole story. I actively and intentionally used my time on the street as a me

Climate and Unsheltered Homeless in the Continental United States

I got news for all the chronically housed people in the US, who have apparently never even gone camping, yet are making policy and trying to understand factors that influence where you find unsheltered homeless people: Daytime January Temperature isn't remotely synonymous with Climate . There are many other factors involved in actual weather, not just daytime temps (much less daytime January temps ). When you spend most of your time outside -- instead of just visiting it for five minutes on your way to your car -- these other factors are huge issues in terms of tolerableness of the climate. I am in the process of reading The State of Homelessness in America (PDF) . This is a report from The Council of Economic Advisers dated September 2019. From page 17: ...rates of unsheltered homelessness are uniformly low in cold places. In other words, the difficulty of sleeping on the streets is so high during the winter in places like Minneapolis that unsheltered homelessness is

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