What poverty does to your head

Orwell is famous for his dystopian classics, but one of his most brutal works is his memoir of being devastatingly poor. I picked up his collection of books recently. Down and Out in Paris and London was a deep dive into poverty as he washed dishes in Paris hotel kitchens and slept in London's spike houses for tramps, sometimes going for days without food. 

What you realise here is that poverty lives in our heads almost as much as it lives in our pockets. Orwell wrote about the difference between how comfortable people were around him when he wore a nice jacket versus how they kept away when he had to pawn it for a worn out piece. Even when he sat, they were disgusted by him. It’s Interactions like this that wear people down. They lose hope and over time they tie their identity to a ‘Poverty mindset’, one that no longer see a need for knowledge or exposure to abundance. 

You see this in towns that lost their factories to globalization, in immigrant communities kept on a tight leash instead of a path to assimilation, in places where the system was never built for them to succeed. The external limitations become internal. They stop believing there is a way out because the world has shown them over and over that there is none. 

At one point Orwell had only two pounds to survive for that month as he waited for the start date of a new job. He made friends with homeless people and street artists, and stayed in shelter homes. His description of shelter homes where he was treated like the lowest of scum was heartbreaking. This is where his love-hate relationship with socialism likely first started. He believed the government could play a stronger role in curbing poverty, but because they kept people on a leash, poverty never went away. His homeless friends, one too many of them, no longer bothered finding a job or a home or to fall in love. They accepted that that was their life. 

Many of us have hit a stumbling block, be it money, relationships, career or anything else. Sometimes we justify staying stuck. Sometimes we don't know how to get unstuck. Eventually, we normalise a poverty mindset - that we don't deserve better, and turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

The other part of the story was on how poorer people are stuck in a loop - they wake up, do the same work, pay off debts on repeat, and eventually forget the purpose of life. For Orwell, it took extreme misery and pain to break away from that ‘day to day’ survival addiction. He was sleeping next to crawling rats and washing dishes from 7am to 1am the next day repeatedly without getting a break and sometimes not even getting paid. Out of sheer desperation he forced himself to reach out to a friend for a job in London, who found him a decent job with decent lodging, food and salary. Most people do not break away and that is what I call the ‘Scarcity mindset’. 

Scarcity mindset is a mental state that can happen to anyone, rich or poor, when they do not have enough of something, right now. And it is not caused by money alone, it could be because of food, social connection, some form of resource. When you are desperate for money to pay a bill today, your cognitive bandwidth narrows, almost like a temporary drop in IQ. You experience tunnelling. You can only see the immediate emergency and cannot plan for the future. 

While the poverty mindset is a persistent condition until it is actively unlearned, the scarcity mindset is a temporary one. If the resource they seek is fulfilled, then their cognitive bandwidth frees up. That is why debt settlements, basic living income, or homes for the homeless can be so effective. They address the scarcity directly and give people the breathing room to think again. But it is also very easy to fall back into the addiction of a scarcity mindset. For example, if you came out of a bad relationship, it is so much easier to fall back into the routine of another bad relationship than it is to heal and learn from it, simply because you are familiar with it.

Rewiring the nervous system is no easy task. You need some kind of interruption to the automatic loop and practice new habits and patterns. One way is through metacognition, which is just a fancy word for thinking about your own thinking. It is the ability to step back and ask yourself, why am I doing this? Am I choosing this or just falling into it? Is this familiar or is this good for me?

Many struggle with this. They are trapped inside the tunnel, stuck in constant emergency mode, reacting to everything and planning for nothing. That is why poverty and scarcity are so hard to escape. You cannot fix a problem you cannot see clearly. But when you start asking those questions, something shifts. You stop being a passenger in your own life and start being the driver.

Poverty and Scarcity mindset are also a catch-22. When you are stuck in a scarcity mindset and live paycheck to paycheck for long enough, the chronic stress rewires your brain. Eventually, you develop a poverty mindset. You stop believing you can ever escape, so you stop trying. Conversely, if you have a poverty mindset, you might make bad financial decisions because you never believed you needed the knowledge for it. And that creates actual scarcity in your life. 

In my own life I was completely jammed when I experienced government oppression intimately. It led me to a scarcity mindset as I would not take a break. I worked multiple jobs and would not spend a dime on myself. I stopped hanging out with friends. Eventually at some point I realised it wasn't getting me out of poverty. I was stuck.

But looking back, that relentless survival mode unexpectedly built up a kind of courage and confidence I did not have before. When you have nothing left to lose, you stop being afraid of failing. You just try things. But learning new things when stress and desperation are high is a different ball game. The stakes are heavier and every mistake costs more. You do not have the luxury of taking your time or failing gracefully. You learn fast or you sink. And that kind of learning leaves a mark. It makes you sharper but it also makes you tired in a way that does not go away.

For me it took immense reading and learning from people I admire to break away from both scarcity and poverty mindset. Detachment from outcomes reframes hustle from getting stuck on a singular path. You stop treating every setback as a dead end and start treating it as information. You jiu-jitsu your way through, pivoting when you need to, and sometimes the path looks nothing like what you imagined. But you grow anyway. You adapt. And that is the point. My goals are still ahead of me but at least now I can see a future I want. They are way different from where I started but I love where I am heading now. In this chapter of my journey, coming out of poverty started with my mind and eventually everything else follows.

Of course, mindset is not everything. Orwell knew the system was broken and I knew state oppression firsthand. Changing your thinking does not change your rent. But changing your thinking does change whether you see a way out or whether you stop looking entirely. It helps you realise that the life you have been surviving is not the only life available to you. 

Most of us have been there. Often when something blindsides us there is immense rage at everything else. Then at ourselves. But this is not the end. The goal is not to be mad at ourselves. The goal is to learn and be better. Fall down seven, stand up eight. Because somewhere in that mess, a small shift happens. We stop asking why this happened and start asking what we can do about it, and how we can be better for it. That is the moment we stop letting our challenges be our life story.