I was poor, and now I'm moderately well off. You are really underselling how much it sucks to be poor.
> All the money in the world won't prevent you or a loved one from passing due to an untreatable illness.
Death of a family member is much more likely to happen if you are poor. Too bad you can't afford that unreasonably expensive surgery.
> All the money in the world won't buy you friends or genuine respect.
This is such a first world concern. Boo hoo. Also, yes, money does buy friends. When my family went bankrupt most of our friends turned their backs on us. This is a common occurrence. Ask a homeless person what happened to their "friends" when push came to shove.
> It can't buy you love (though it can buy you sex).
Not being poor is more important than finding love. If you want love, have some kids, and love them.
> Furthermore, you don't need to be rich to avoid the hardship of being poor, you just have to make a sufficient amount to afford quality housing, food, health insurance, and minor luxuries.
Please do not underestimate how hard it is for those who are actually poor to "make a sufficient amount."
This seems like a good enough time as any to point out that there are like six empty houses for every homeless person in America. Or, in techie terms, "you thought domain squatting was bad..."
You make some good points.Things you learn through hard life experience always have value. At least, I value them, because even if they don't have a lesson I can use, they are among the most interesting and true stories a person can tell you. Normally, life makes lousy stories, not least because we aren't able to tell the stories properly, because we're not fully paying attention. When you are living out your worst nightmare in reality, you are suddenly about twice as awake and twice as alive as you ordinarily are, and your awareness narrows and focuses on the here and now, and everything that happens is endowed with much greater importance than usual. Everything becomes serious, and you're probably going to have insights and make observations that beyond your usual capacity for such things, because all the BS is gone and you don't have to stop goofing around and get serious before you can clear your head, because you are serious.
These moments of clarity probably won't end up being worth enough to justify the misery of the ordeal that prompted them, and I'm not sure living through something terrible makes you stronger. It's probably more likely to do psychological damage that makes you weaker. But the experience itself is not something you can buy, and while the stories you gain are usually no compensation to you, they are the kinds of stories that can be of great value to other people.
Even with free healthcare there is a gap between lifespan for rich and poor people in the UK. Rich people tend to make better use of healthcare and know what questions to ask.
Here's some newspaper articles giving some confusingly different numbers.
Fair point - as the other commenter says, just because you have free healthcare doesn't mean you have the confidence to use it, the knowledge to know what to ask, the access to exercise facilities or (and this is probably the cause of a lot of these statistics) the funds to afford a good, well-balanced diet.
> All the money in the world won't prevent you or a loved one from passing due to an untreatable illness.
Death of a family member is much more likely to happen if you are poor. Too bad you can't afford that unreasonably expensive surgery.
> All the money in the world won't buy you friends or genuine respect.
This is such a first world concern. Boo hoo. Also, yes, money does buy friends. When my family went bankrupt most of our friends turned their backs on us. This is a common occurrence. Ask a homeless person what happened to their "friends" when push came to shove.
> It can't buy you love (though it can buy you sex).
Not being poor is more important than finding love. If you want love, have some kids, and love them.
> Furthermore, you don't need to be rich to avoid the hardship of being poor, you just have to make a sufficient amount to afford quality housing, food, health insurance, and minor luxuries.
Please do not underestimate how hard it is for those who are actually poor to "make a sufficient amount."
This seems like a good enough time as any to point out that there are like six empty houses for every homeless person in America. Or, in techie terms, "you thought domain squatting was bad..."