A future free from poverty

One day I asked a friend of mine to imagine what their life could be like if they didn’t have any problems, and they were a millionaire. He couldn’t imagine that, he didn’t even know where to start, for most if not all of his life things always went a predictable way filled with difficulties and hardships. To imagine what his life could be without difficulties was a nerve racking thought.

I know for most of us who have been on the internet for quite a while, who’ve seen what extreme wealth looks like, it’s obvious. You can easily imagine the things you’ll buy and all what you’ll do with that wealth. However, for this friend of mine, he isn’t really a big internet person. He spends most of his time doing a job which doesn’t put him in front of a screen, so imagining a life different from his current one was pretty difficult.

I say all this so you get a sense of why it's difficult to imagine a world free from poverty. I’m sure the closest you can think of is a world where everybody is wealthy, where we are all riding in Bugatti and Ferraris. If you’ve done some more exploration, you’ll see what countries like Finland, New Zealand, etc have done with their economies and why they thrive.

Imagine a future free from poverty

Its very hard to imagine a future free from poverty whether you are wealthy or not, I certainly have a hard time imagining what that would be like. I guess I can think to myself about how I won’t have any problems anymore, I could afford all the things I want, and I’ll be overall happier with the state of life. There would no longer be corrupt politicians or at least I won’t care about them anymore or there won’t be so many problems cloaking my mind anymore, I’ll be finally free to worry about nothing.

One reason why its so hard to imagine a world free from poverty is because poverty actually gives us purpose. It gives you something to work towards, so basically imagining a world without poverty is like imagining your life without purpose. It really doesn’t make much sense. Even though these difficulties hurt us and our whole purpose in this life is to get rid of them, they still remain quite important for us and we strive to maintain them.

Purpose in Poverty

You do realize that half of all your thoughts are about your problems, what would the children eat? how will you afford that trip? what will you do when things don’t work out? etc

We think more about our problems than we do for the things which are going well in our lives, so the reason why its hard for us to envision a world without poverty is because we would no longer have problems to solve. This doesn’t mean we aren’t trying to solve poverty, we certainly are but I think deep down we don’t even want to solve it, we’ve been able to build a fully functional society with millions of people working in unison to come up with amazing complex innovations, I think if we really wanted to, we could alleviate poverty. We don’t want to thats all.

A Necessary Evil

This really isn’t strange when you think about it, for all our existence we’ve always had something we were worried about, something to work towards, something to fight and so this skill has grown into our DNA to the point where I don’t think we can exist without problems.

Poverty is just a deep reflection of the issues we have in society. Sure there is a large plethora of other issues we possibly can have, but poverty is just that one which affects the most amount of persons and from which we derive a certain level of egotistical satisfaction. A world free from poverty would basically be a world where everybody gets to do what they want, no more ego, no more limits, mainly because our society is built on the foundations of wealth. The more you have, the more you can do.

Conclusion

Destroying one pillar of modern society is really something difficult to imagine, but I guess we’ll just transition to something else, there really isn’t much to it. I can’t imagine such a future because it has never been my experience even to the slightest, and I’ve really never seen anything which comes close to such a utopia.

Thanks for reading ☺️