Rich: You should learn life skills.  Parents teach their children life skills.  Place value into that education and knowledge.

Poor: I can pay someone to solve my problems.  Why waste time learning the skills–dude, don’t you understand economics? Let someone else learn the life skills: If you can’t afford to pay someone else it just means you’re not rich enough to have that quality of life.

This perception is in ironic opposition to Specialization – Rich vs. Poor

Read more about articles in the Rich vs. Poor Series here.

To find out when more life education writing is released, subscribe on the side! Follow on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, on Tumblr.

Sickness

Rich: Sickness is a normal part of life, acceptable, tolerable.  Sickness is met with compassion, care, attention, and medicine–whatever is necessary for recovery.  You have health care, you have access to doctors, you have knowledge of health.  People want you to live.

Poor: You are not allowed to get sick.  You are paid per hour or per job, and every day you are sick, you are missing income.   This may cause you to become homeless because you are working paycheck to paycheck.  Sickness is met with punishment, cruelty, capitalism (bills don’t care, creditors don’t care, your boss doesn’t care, teachers will not stop the curriculum for you), you feel deep shame to burden your family with your sickness, if you’re even lucky enough to have family members who don’t tell you to shut up and deal with it like everyone else does.  With each passing day, your debt grows while your income remains zero. You’re digging a hole in what is already the deep hole of your life. Capitalism wants you to die–you are a plague upon society, as are all social welfare cases, a burden for the rich and powerful, for the system: a leech.  There are too many mouths to feed, not enough money to pay for your life.  [Ironic since we have enough food to feed everyone, but I’ll write a separate article for social commentary]

Health

Rich: Life is about being healthy.  Your quality of life is higher, your idea of health is better than that of a poor person.

Poor: Life is about survival.  If you’re not dead, you’re healthy.  Shut up and deal with it–whatever pain and suffering you have, you can adapt, you can endure it, you must, or you die.  You think because you survived it once, you can survive it again (starvation hunger dehydration exhaustion). If you haven’t died yet, you must be healthy.  It’s a question of survival, not of how healthy you are: the fact that you are alive, puts you ahead of those who are dead.  Because you have experienced a much wider range of health, you are less scared of variations in your health than a rich person whose health stays within a stable range.  Whatever sickness symptoms would sound off alarms to a person accustomed to good health, to a poor person means nothing: you’ve lived through it before and survived.  If it hasn’t killed you before, it is survivable: deal with it.  What matters is surviving at all: health is for when you’re successful and deserve it, for the rich people.

Read more about articles in the Rich vs. Poor Series here.

To find out when more life education writing is released, subscribe on the side! Follow on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, on Tumblr.

The poor mindset:

You do not have a stable income.  You do not have a stable job.  You have little control over your life so life is chaotic and inconsistent.  You do not have stable expenses: you can’t afford the risk associated with committing to memberships or healthcare due to inconsistent income, so you pay a-la-carte for everything.

Your income range has a consistent max, your expenses do not have a consistent max.  Consequently, every dollar in has a unique significance: you don’t know when the next dollar will come in, and you don’t know when this dollar will be forcefully taken.  The fear of being wiped out by an unexpected high expense keeps you deeply afraid to spend.  Money is life threatening to you.

Friends, Family? You either don’t have them, or they aren’t wealthy enough to help you anyway.

You are probably in debt, which means that you never feel like you have earned, or have ever possessed, money that is your own.  You never forget it is owed to a debtor.  This affects your sense of security, as you fear defaulting on your debt, and on friendships, because it’s hard to justify money spent on yourself, happiness, gifts, friendships, or anything at all really, when it needs to be paid to a debtor.

The rich mindset:

You have a stable income. You have a stable job. Your manager may dictate your work life, but you have the expendable income to manage some amount of your free time.  You probably can afford memberships or healthcare, meaning you benefit from both the lower price associated with membership (paying less and getting more value) and from the peace of mind of knowing that your expenses will have a known maximum stated within the contract.

Because you don’t spend a-la-carte, your mental and emotional health is not fatigued by repetitive decisions of spend or not spend: the automatic monthly bill makes that decision for you.  Furthermore, while you might stress about not having enough money to do what you want, you have less worry about not having enough money to live at all.  Money is not life threatening to you.

Friends, Family–you might have them, and they may be able to help you in times of trouble.

Read more about articles in the Rich vs. Poor Series here.

To find out when more life education writing is released, subscribe on the side! Follow on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google+, on Tumblr.