Meaningful Returns

Look. I’m here because artificial poverty makes me sad and angry. And though I see and hear plenty of examples of it firsthand (and am at times guilty of it myself), there are of course these outrageous published accounts about how “We’re struggling to get by on £200,000 a year.”

This statement, uttered by an actual British woman–who, with her husband, has one four-year old daughter¹–is nothing short of absurd. Absurd.

¹And they all three live happily strugglingly ever after in a “£700,000 house in Croydon, south London.”

There are all sorts of reasons why that couple has arrived to the point where they legitimately think of themselves as “struggling” to “get by” on two hundred thousand British Pounds annually, and who am I to attempt delving into all of them? But if you read the article (which, despite being incredibly frustrating at times, ends up having some decent bits of advice from professionals), you’ll see over and over again references to the foundational cause of the “struggle” (emphasis mine):

“increased costs of maintaining the traditional middle class dream.”

“You can no longer categorically say that we are part of the elite high earners in the UK living a high life.”

“the cost of obtaining the traditional markers of status”

“The ‘game plan’ of moving to a larger property every seven years has largely been abandoned”

“Couples who choose to employ a nanny to look after their children have long complained about having to pay their salary and benefits out of their own taxed income, effectively being taxed twice.”

Did you catch that in bolded letters above? That’s the foundation. Artificial poverty revolves around one pregnant word: Choice.

The traditional middle class dream exists. Will you choose to pine after it, believing it will make you happy? If so, can you afford to afford it? The high life exists, though it is almost exclusively made up by advertisers. Will you choose to chase after it? If so, have you asked your four year old daughter whether she would rather you have a certain expensive car, or that you simply use whatever car you have to take her to dinner on a weeknight? Bigger homes exist. Will you continue choosing to buy a bigger one? If so, are you filling the home with people regularly, or are you filling it with stuff regularly?

The gnarly thing about these money questions is that if you aren’t fighting to answer them in a way that’s true to yourself and the others who will be impacted, they get answered by the forces that are fighting. And most of those forces are far from altruistic.