Back at my normal level of finances, that is.

I had to go through three weeks in the wilderness after the convention, living on $60/week. That broughtback unpleasant memories of what life was like before I got onto full disability, and while I got through it, I had to worry about money again and hence it was a drag on my mood, specifically my feeling of security.

But now I am back on $100/week, and boy what a difference that $40 makes.

My sense of security is key to my personality. I can’t stop worrying about something until I know it’s taken care of, or otherwise will be okay. Till then, I fret.

So yeah. Mood equals money. Money equals mood. More money means better mood, and vice versa sorta.

It sounds crass. Part of me doesn’t like admitting that. It makes me sound shallow and materialistic to myself. But poverty is its own beast. Being poor forces you to concentrate on things like money, just like a starving man can’t stop thinking about food. When you lack something, you tend to think about it a lot.

To me, the definition of poverty is having to think about every single purchase, no matter how small. Every single time you open your starving wallet, you have to make absolutely sure that you can afford that pack of gum and there isn’t something a lot more important you could be spending that dollar and a half on.

The less you have to worry about money, the further out of poverty you become. This maxes out at around a middle class income level. If you are making $40K to $50K a year, you do not have to think before making everyday purchases at all. Going out to dinner, going shopping, going to a movie, even charging that big screen TV to your credit card… the world is open to you in a way a poor person can barely comprehend.

Obviously, you are not financially omnipotent. You can’t buy a yacht or a sports team. But all the little pleasures of modern life are open to you.

Poverty is especially draining and discouraging for those of us who grew up middle class. No matter how we scoff at middle class pretensions or throw around words like “bourgeois”, when you are raised middle class, that is your “normal” and anything below that feels very wrong to you. Part of you will always feel like a failure because you do not live like you did as a kid and all of society radiates the message that loss of status and privilege means you are now a lesser person.

Even if you have never had a mean thought about the poor in your whole life, you never lose the status judgments you were raised with. Sure, it’s okay for THEM to be poor…. they’re poor people! But for YOU…. it means something has gone terribly wrong and it is all your fault.

It’s not something you think about every day, but it’s always there, like it’s in the air you breathe. That pressure to return to your previous level of status as a middle class kid never goes away, and if for whatever reason you feel like you are unable to get to that status (which your social programming insists is the bare minimum), feelings of despair set in and make your life even worse.

I am fairly sure that a majority of my depression would go away if I simply had a higher income. Not all of it, but relieving that pressure would do me a lot of good.

I live on around $11.4K a year. And that, to me, is the good life, after living on a hell of a lot less.

Plus I would feel more secure. Like I may have said before, it is no mystery to me how someone like Scrooge ended up a miser. He was insecure and felt the bite of poverty, and gaining money made him feel better. It’s like he was building a wall against the world with that money in a desperate attempt to feel safe.

Of course, in his case, the real problem was inside his soul, and no amount of money can fix that.

But it is so easy to think that it will. For a while, every gain in wealth really does improve your life. Worry disappears, a sense of security sets in,. and the world seems like a much nicer place.

But as with all decadent addictions, you end up requiring a bigger dose to get the same effect, and even then, the effect diminishes over time. You desperately seek higher and higher doses of cash to get that feeling of security back, and as with all addicts, the addiction hollows you out and replaces any emotion that gets in its way.

Love, compassion, restraint, moral duty, even ties to family can and will be ruthlessly excised if they dare to even seem like they might get in the way of you getting more and more and more, and to hell with how.

There was a time when I thought I would be a business student and become an accountant. That might well have put me on the path to that kind of life. I know that, deep down, I have a terrible greed fueled be a terrible need, an all-devouring never-satiated monster that would eat the world if it meant I could feel safe and whole just for a few seconds.

As with all addictions, it promises to be a cure, but it is only a treatment, or at least a distraction. The problem remains, you have just masked the symptoms for a little while.

And yes, I am as guilty of that as anyone else. It’s just that for me, it’s carbs.

And as a fat person, I am a member of the least sympathetic group of addicts there is, accord to society.

With that happy thought, I bid you adieu.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.