Poverty’s plusses

Penury denies many of life’s pleasures,
But having plenty denies us penury’s pleasures too.

What would you do if you lost everything? What if the nuclear scenario actually occurred and you went bankrupt, lost your savings and maybe your home too, every material thing you’ve built and everything you’ve squirreled away, your life reset to zero?

Okay, the nuclear scenario is one most of us will never have to face and many people don’t have much in the way of wealth, possessions and property anyway, but people often do face milder if still traumatic instances of this situation at some point in their lives. A messy divorce can leave you turned out of your home with your assets savaged for example. Flooding can leave you with a near worthless home you can neither sell nor insure. Investments turned sour towards the end of your working life can destroy your retirement plans with no time left to repair them.

Everything we own in this life, everything we build, everything we amass, can potentially be robbed from us. So if it did happen to you, what would you do?

Hard choice

I don’t know anyone who’s been in this position and I hope I never will be, but I do know people who’ve faced shades of it; the messy divorce in many cases, a handful of destroyed retirements and the odd friend who lost a fortune bailing out family members who’d got into major financial trouble. Not a nuclear scenario then, but still one that turns life on its head.

And I’ve seen many shades of how it can be handled too, from shouldering it and soldiering on with a mood ranging from level-headed resignation, through festering resentment to permanent depression at the one extreme and near-immediate suicide at the other.

Each of us is different and each of our lives is different too. The options on the table vary in their ease and their consequence. If you’ve got kids you have responsibilities that are going to push you towards sticking it out and fighting on. If you’re a born fighter you’ll resign yourself to events and fight on as a matter of nature. If you’re a self-contained person who doesn’t define yourself by your things and your money you’ll find the alternative not too unpalatable. Perhaps you’re lucky enough to have family and friends who’d help out too. On the other hand if you’re alone and materialistic, throwing the towel in with or without a bit of fun first may appeal more, at least at the time. Suicide is, after all, an irrational act and few of us in a rational state of mind can meaningfully anticipate how we’d react in an irrational situation.

My choice

With no family or close friends who could or would bail me out in the nuclear scenario, with a reasonable nest-egg constructed over the last two decades of my career that I’ve got very used to having around and with no kids or other serious responsibilities on my shoulders the field is pretty clear for me and I have to admit the nuclear scenario feels like a pretty devastating one. To lose so much of the quality of life I’ve gotten so used to, to potentially end up in a fairly squalid home living pay-cheque to pay-cheque doesn’t initially strike me as a life I’d want to live. For sure I can see myself considering salvaging what money I can, having some fun and then hitting the snooze button.

Like a petulant child I would contemplate throwing my teddy out of the pram in this way but I’m sure it isn’t what I would end up doing. I believe I would plod on, put whatever had gone wrong right and start building myself up from scratch again with whatever time I had left.

I’d be less happy of course, but perhaps not as much as one might initially think. Yes my life would be unquestionably worse in many ways, but in some it might actually be better.

No choice

My Mum and Dad lived pay-packet to pay-packet, then pension-day to pension-day, for their entire lives. A working class family with five children they never amassed savings and seldom had spare money to spend on themselves at the end of the week. My Dad would work long hours, hand over his pay-packet to my Mum on a Friday lunchtime and she’d hand him back a few quid of spending money for the coming week. They never had much but they did seem to have a simple contentment with their lives. Thinking about it now, perhaps they had a greater contentment with their lives than that which I see amongst many of the middle-class, middle-income types around me now. Perhaps more than myself right now too.

Comparing people across generations isn’t fair because society changes and generational norms change too. Throughout society (at least throughout mine) people have on average much more disposable income now than they had in the fifties or in the seventies for example. Drawing conclusions from one or two cases isn’t exactly scientific either.

But I do wonder at times about that contentment my Mum and Dad seemed to have back then, a contentment that their similar neighbours, relatives and friends seemed to share. A contentment that dissimilar neighbours, relatives and friends, those with more “success” in their lives, more things and more money, didn’t seem to share.

Could there be a pleasure in poverty which is denied to the better off amongst us? Having next to nothing seems to work for monks, could it work out for the rest of us too?

Unnecessary choice

My Dad, like many of his peers, worked every hour he could and spent his free time resting, or watching TV, or with the kids and grandkids or down the pub playing snooker with his mates. Week in, week out, year in, year out, that was his life and his life really couldn’t be any other way. He had little or no choice in the matter. What money he earned was spent on necessities and near-necessities.

For many of us that’s unimaginable. We take holidays, we buy toys and trinkets for ourselves and we save and invest with the income left over after the necessities have been secured. I work far less than my father and earn far more than he did and there are many plusses to this; I have more security, more comfort and more choices. My possibilities are broader and richer, yet those possibilities are not necessities and therefore they have less real value.

I’m reminded of a favourite quote from Søren Kierkegaard, considered by many the daddy of existentialism:-

Possibility’s despair is to lack necessity,
Necessity’s despair is to lack possibility.
                                       (The sickness unto death)

I have more time and more money than my forbears and as a result I have far more choices for how I fill my time, yet they are less necessary ones. Therefore what I and so many of us today do with our spare time fulfils us on a less fundamental level, as at times does the work we do to earn ourselves those choices.

We’re more comfortable, more secure, we do more and yet we are fulfilled less.

Easy choice

So perhaps that back-to-zero nuclear scenario wouldn’t be so disastrous after all? For sure it would take some getting used to and for sure I would be less happy than I am now in many small ways if denied so many of the easy pleasures that I have become habitually used to.

But then I have many pleasures which are cheap and many which are even free. My necessities would still have possibility and my unnecessary possibilities would be much fewer. And for this reason, while I would be less happy to some extent, perhaps I would be similarly content, or even more so.

I just hope I never have to find out.