How Being Poor Affects Creativity and Decision Making

Mindful tools to help you rise above poverty

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At different points in my life, I have gone without material goods in my life. When people say that being poor does not mean that you are “poor” as a person. I know intrinsically what that means. After all, at different points in my life, I have lived the highs and the lows of being comfortable and being poor. For a large part of my childhood, I lived in poverty. Living in poverty when everyone around you is poor is actually not a big deal. During that time, I played with my friends without a care in the world. Except for the hungry feeling in my stomach on some days, as a child, I really didn’t internalize the concept of “poverty”. When I came to the U.S., for a time, I was happily oblivious of the rich people in my neighborhood. After some time though, I started to internalize differences. I came to the realization that even though my parents were well-educated, we were “poor”.

The one factor that allowed me to internalize being poor is comparison.

By contrast to the neighbors in my neighborhood, we didn’t own a house. After school, as my friends played, I worked. When my friends shopped at local malls, my parents gasped at the prices in stores. We only shopped at discount grocery stores.

In comparison, we were poor.

The truth is that being poor is only a condition. It’s the state of your bank account.

Perhaps, you are a student who is pursuing a career that requires you to study for years. You don’t have a trust fund. You have to work part-time and take on massive student loans.

No matter how much you studied and worked, you feel like you will be poor for a long time.

Perhaps, you are a white collar worker who is stuck in a job that is increasingly becoming outdated, you want to transition to a better career, but you have three kids to feed at home.

No matter how much you work at your current job, you feel like you are not making progress.

Perhaps, you are a housewife whose kids are finally in school. But, you took 10 years to raise them. Your skills are no longer in demand. During that time, your husband developed a wandering eye. Now, you are in the throes of an impending divorce.

No matter how you make light of your situation, you feel like you will be poor for a few years while you are looking for a new career.

Life happens! Many of us are strivers. We set goals for ourselves. These goals might seem realistic at times. But, sometimes, these goals take years to attain.

In the meantime, do we call ourselves “poor” simply because we are without a lot of material things?

The Problem of Being Poor

Being poor is not a problem. Internalizing that you are “poor” is the issue. In order to move out of poverty, you need strength, character and a lot of grit. You also need a positive mindset. All of these things come with the mentality of abundance. When you internalize that you are “poor”, or when you have the mentality of scarcity, you will attract more poverty and negativity.

How the Mentality of Scarcity Affects Our Decision Making

Have you ever seen a poor person with the latest edition of the iPhone? That person just spent most of his grocery money on a gadget. His or her decision was not rational at all. According to Psychology Today, these are the effects being poor have on our mental state.

Being poor makes us impulsive — We tend to focus on short term gains. We stop planning for the future. Instead, we focus on spending money on present needs and wants.

Being poor makes us obsessive — We tend to ruminate in our current state of being. Dwelling on our state of being poor becomes a hobby in itself. We get comfortable complaining about being poor. We sink into the comfort of living up to the image of “being poor”.

Being poor makes us procrastinate — Due to the comfort of being poor, it actually takes double the amount of work to start on our journeys of wealth again. We often look at the road as being extremely long. Faced with a difficult climb to the top, we often take the easier and winding road through poverty. We don’t realize that the steep climb may seem daunting, but when we start on the journey, the motivation will multiply exponentially.

How Being Poor affects Our Creativity

You might think that being poor decreases your creativity. On the contrary, being poor can actually boost our creativity in several ways.

Being poor makes us bored — Without a lot of entertainment, when a person is poor, that person likely has a lot of idle time. This is particularly true of children from poor families without a lot of toys to play with. These children tend to make up games to play or use whatever they can find to entertain themselves. According to A 2014 study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, bored people “are more likely to engage in sensation seeking”. These types of people are more prone to be “divergent thinkers”.

Being poor makes us hungry — In this country, we have food stamps that will provide basic food for people living in poverty. When we don’t need to spend time hunting for food, we become hungry for life. Living in a poor neighborhood, there’s a sense of deprivation of life in general. In order to make up for that, we seek more creative pursuits that don’t cost money to fill that intellectual gap. On top of that, the hunger for money often gives us the motivation to strive. In creative endeavors, striving for unrelenting perfection often unleashes creativity in abundance.

Where is the balance?

On the one hand, being poor affects our decision-making capabilities. On the other hand, being poor helps us unleash our creativity. How do we balance it all to snap ourselves out of the mentality of “being poor”?

Use Your Free Time Well — Even if you don’t have money in the bank, you have free time at your disposal. Use the time to level up your skills for a job in the future. Even if you are working two jobs to support your family, if there’s an hour in your day, use that hour to create something you can be proud of.

Don’t Ruminate — You can think of your current state of poverty as just the “current state”. With effort, you know that you are climbing the mountain that will move you out of poverty. Don’t get comfortable in your current state. Instead, get moving.

Plan For the Future — When bills are piling up and you can’t see the end, it’s easy to focus on short term goals. If you budget well, if it’s $5, it will pile up. If it’s $10, it will pile up. Any extra amount of money, with time, it can flourish and be invested in a creative activity that will pay you exponential amounts of money down the road.

Take Care of Business — Instead of procrastinating, know that you can’t move on if you stay still. Not taking care of immediate businesses (whether it’s caring for your children, paying your bills or caring for a family member) will catch up with you eventually. By taking care of all of your immediate businesses, you can move on to planning for the future.

See the Future, Live In Creativity — Develop a vision for your future. This will help you move past the immediate poverty. You can hold that vision every time you need to make a decision for your future. Then, try to hold that vision as you pursue different types of creative pursuits. Give yourself permission to fail over and over again while creating your own masterpiece. In failure, you will succeed to create a brighter future for yourself.