I sat there in the passenger seat of my buddy Don’s car. He was in the drivers seat but we weren’t going anywhere. We just sat, drunk off our asses in the parking lot of a strip club in Baltimore.

I was nineteen, and it was just another Saturday night. Don was my best friend at the time, and that summer we were inseparable. Then he did something unexpected. He pulled out a piece of cardboard and plopped a line of cocaine down on it.

“Want some?”

Poverty

Merriam Webster defines poverty as “the state of one who lacks a usual or socially acceptable amount of money or material possessions.”

Regular readers know I was born and raised in Baltimore City. I can’t say I grew up in poverty, my family was solidly lower-middle class. My Dad was a printing press mechanic, a decent blue collar job that earned enough to raise a small family, but not enough to get us out of the city.

But I was surrounded by lots of poverty, and grew accustomed to it. As an observant teenager I learned quickly about the “cycle of poverty”, because I witnessed examples of it every day.

The Wikipedia page for the cycle of poverty describes it as:

“the set of factors or events by which poverty, once started, is likely to continue unless there is outside intervention”.

The cycle feeds on itself. It builds momentum that’s incredibly hard to stop.

Fueled by the legacy of destructive habits and situational bad cards, the cycle is a force to be reckoned with.

Societal Bubbles

We hear a lot about ‘social media bubbles’ these days. Information across the board is more readily accessible than ever, yet many or perhaps most people seem to only consume information that adheres to their preconceived viewpoints, on whatever given topic.

But society as a whole is really just a set of bubbles. People form friendships and alliances based on any number of societal factors. And in the end the natural tendency of humans is to form similar peer groups.

The academic term for this is “homophily”. The research on behavior within homophilies is fascinating. Take this study for instance which finds:

A person’s chances of becoming obese increased by 57% (95% confidence interval) if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given interval. Among pairs of adult siblings, if one sibling became obese, the chance that the other would become obese increased by 40% (95% CI). If one spouse became obese, the likelihood that the other spouse would become obese increased by 37% (95% CI).

These phenomena are similar for smoking, or any number of behaviors.

And it’s true for poverty too.

Once a certain number of your friends develop destructive and dangerous habits that lead to poverty, you will likely too. The cycle of poverty is in the end a societal bubble than can’t break free of itself.

And if Hillbilly Elegy showed us anything, it’s that intergenerational poverty is something that’s colorblind.

The Line

I attribute the fact that I am where I am today to knowing where the line was. What is “the line”?

Grammarist describes the term, or more accurately crossing it, as:

To cross the line means to overstep a boundary, to go beyond socially accepted behavior. When one crosses the line, one goes from being acceptable to being unacceptable.

By that definition I crossed the line routinely in my youth, many of us did. Besides, depending on which bubble we spend most of our time the definition of “socially acceptable behavior” is likely quite different, with wildly divergent boundaries.

But that’s what bubbles are all about in the first place, right?

You may be a wealthy accountant with a cookie cutter house in the suburbs and a successful and innocuous life. But your carbon-copy neighbor who you curiously don’t talk to much might be all of those things too, and also president of a swingers club.

Could that be why you two don’t socialize? You may appear the same, but you’re really in different bubbles, with different views on socially acceptable behavior.

In my youth I was able to form an ultimately life saving understanding of the line from my parents and from people in other bubbles. Bubbles that were higher on the socio-economic scale than mine.

In other words, permeable bubbles were my saving grace.

I was able to let a few others inside my bubble, and others did the same for me. By seeing how just a few people from other bubbles – better bubbles – conducted themselves and their lives, it moved my understanding of the line.

Not by much, but just enough.

I wasn’t really aware of this at the time in a direct or practical way. If you would have asked me if any one misdeed was “over the line” at the time I probably wouldn’t have been able to tell you.

But if it came to a decision point to act out that deed or not, in the heat of the moment, I inherently knew. I called upon things I saw from those outside my bubble.

The Decision

I stared at the cocaine, flustered, head spinning. I instantly knew what it was, but this was the first time I had actually seen any up close.

A wave flushed through my body, as if I had an internal fire alarm and someone or something broke the glass and pulled the handle.

This was a key moment in my life. It was a line.

It was the line.

“No man, no thanks”

I tell this story because had I not made that wise decision, I doubt I’d be where I am today.

Don and I were both spiraling down rapidly, struggling with family demons and things in our past. Surrounded by a city full of vices to feed that spiral, our futures were dark.

We were walking on a ledge. A fall on one side assured a challenging life in a bubble of depravity, or maybe worse. A fall on the other was towards a bubble of hope, and a chance.

Don fell to the former. I wavered back and forth, unbalanced, but eventually fell the other way.

Part fall, part choice.

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