Ondrej Ko’s Reviews > I Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt: Everything I Wish I Never Had to Learn About Money > Status Update
Ondrej Ko
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We mythologize the idea of poverty, and it’s easy to do because there is always someone who has less than us. As long as there is someone with less, we imagine ourselves in the middle, doing just fine. “The Poor” in our cultural mythos are Dickensian paupers, wretches of the earth, one morsel of food away from complete starvation
— Aug 10, 2025 12:19AM
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Aug 10, 2025 12:20AM
—it’s the most extreme image we can conjure of a person in destitution, who certainly might exist, but who doesn’t reflect the way poverty tends to look in contemporary American society. It’s hard to imagine that we ourselves might be the poor—people from working-class backgrounds who are just one paycheck away from complete financial ruin. If we’re unhoused, we’re unhoused in a different way than the people who are actually homeless. If we’re hungry, we’re hungry in a different way than people who are actually starving. If we’re broke, we’re broke in a different way than people who are actually poor.
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In a world where people born into fortunes of over $100 million still get branded as “self-made” in the media, or business moguls start out with a “small loan” of $1 million from their parents and tell us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, asking questions about someone’s parents is really a way to ask one question: “Can I trust you?” Can I trust you to know where I come from? Can I trust you to give me realistic advice? Can I trust you to guide me from the point I’m starting at now? Can I trust that you’ve been here before too?
