> Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t plan

Chronic stress (such as from financial stress and working multiple jobs) actually does severely impact your executive function and decision-making ability. It's hard to make dispassionate decisions when you're exhausted and scared. There's been studies about it.

Obviously it's possible to overcome that, and some people are better at it than others. But the burden is real. When you're coming off a double shift, it's really hard to make the decision to spend an extra 45 minutes walking round-trip, or two hours hopping on and off buses, when you could just hit the Walgreen's near your apartment and get home to your family.

> Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t plan and are helpless.

obviously not. But anecdotally what I see where I live is that it is a large enough inconvenience that it makes an impact. If you work 8 hours, then have to spend 2-3 hours getting groceries you already have a 10-11 hour day not counting any other commuting you need to do. What if you have kids you need to get off a bus from school?

trying to blanket say anyone not willing to make that trip just isn't trying isn't fair.

It is well documented that low-income areas have less access to good education, healthcare, and other facilities. blaming the residents doesn't help them improve their quality of life. Not everyone will make it out of that.

There’s a weird misconception about poor people here. I’m willing to bet the vast amount of people on SNAP have a car and a job. Being poor doesn’t require an abject state.

No it doesn't.

But being poor DOES mean lowered efficiency with respect to an astonishing number of steps involved to achieve the desired outcome.

And when you have enough of these lowered efficiencies at one time and they begin to compound like interest...

Not always a pretty picture.

> Being poor doesn’t mean you can’t

it kinda does though.

The effects of financial stress on your mental wellbeing are pretty well documented and can manifest in ways such as inability to focus/concentrate, chronic fatigue, spotty memory from stress etc.

You don't have to be wealthy to do that, but you do have to have the storage space and to shift your mindset in a more long-term direction. It's also a lot of work. I grew up relatively poor, but in a rural area, so we had enough land to put in a garden, and we slaved away all summer and fall picking and processing food that got stacked up in the basement cold-cellar and in the freezer. We also bought meat in bulk, either a half or a whole beef from a local farmer, so you had to plan for that lump sum expense and, again, have the freezer space ready to take hundreds of pounds of meat when it went to the slaughter house. We'd also try to shoot a deer or two each year to supplement that, and catch a mess of trout that we'd can up. Then there were the trips to the pick-your-own berry fields, where you'd pick a hundred pounds of strawberries, and then have to freeze them or turn them into jam, and the trips to the orchards where you could pick grain sacks full of the dropped apples for a dollar apiece; then you had to go home and sort out the bad ones. My aunt had a Sam's Club membership, so a couple times a year we'd go with her and load up on staples - again, you've got to save up for it, and then you have to have the storage.

You can do that kind of thing when you are relatively settled and have roots and connections in a community, and the know-how to do all that home-making. We didn't have any money, but we were rich in a lot of other ways. If you are isolated and precarious, living reactively day-to-day, it makes something that is already hard nigh on impossible.

You're also handsome, charming, and incredibly humble.