A person has been at the bottom of society, mainly affected by the following four factors: the most difficult thing for the poor to break through is their parents, the shackles of consumption, the terrible homogeneous stratification, and learned helplessness.
1. The hardest thing for poor people to overcome is their parents
Parents are the starting point for everyone and also the ceiling for most people.
Most of the recent generations in China are doing better than their parents because their parents were delayed. In the next few generations, everyone will see the power of this sentence.
This is very obvious in the mature societies of the United States, Britain, and Germany, where the vast majority of children cannot surpass their parents.
We often see some parents who have accomplished nothing themselves, but know a lot when it comes to educating their children. However, the children seem to deliberately go against them, and no matter what their parents say, the children just don't listen.
This is a phenomenon that deserves reflection by many parents: most parents do not realize that their children are imitating themselves, and they will do what they do.
Of course, when he grows up, he will educate his children in the same way, and he will explain it clearly, but the children will still pretend not to hear him and continue to do what they are supposed to do.
That is to say, excluding low-probability gene mutations, children inherit two sets of genes from their parents:
One set is the genes in the physiological sense. Your child looks like you and has the same pupil color and earlobe shape as you. This is the physiological gene.
The other set is the sociological gene. Your children act like you and think like you. If there is no compulsory education, your children will most likely be a replica of you. This is called social gene.
Compulsory education has changed the social genes of many families. After all, they can learn some basic common sense from Newton, and learn from Lu Xun to understand society and human nature. It is no longer limited to all knowledge coming from parents, but the influence of parents on children is almost decisive.
In other words, the rich will pass on some of their experiences to their children, and the poor will pass on many of their methods and concepts to the next generation. Even though they know that many things are wrong, they are passed on unconsciously. The result is often that the children become like their parents. How pessimistic and disturbing.
For most people, they cannot learn many useful survival skills from their parents, because their parents do not know how to improve their survival skills, let alone how to pass on survival skills to the next generation, and this state will continue to be passed down through "social genes".
This was especially true in the agricultural era, because reading was a luxury at that time, and it was not as easy to learn as it is now. Most families did not think about studying at all, and almost all experience was gained from their parents.
Only in landlord families like Zeng Guofan's, the eldest son stays at home and farms the land honestly, while among the remaining children, one with a flexible mind is selected to study. If one generation passes the examination to become a scholar, the next generation can pass the examination to become a jinshi.
When one of them became successful, he would bring the other brothers out. For example, when Zeng Guofan became successful, he brought his two brothers Zeng Guohua and Zeng Guoquan out to fight in the wars with him.
Later, Zeng Guohua was killed in Sanhe Town, while his other brother Zeng Guoquan became very successful.
The ancients followed an "evolutionary algorithm" as a whole. Step by step, the best people were selected and cultivated in each generation. If one person became prosperous, everyone would become prosperous together.
One of the biggest breakthroughs in modern society compared to ancient times is compulsory education. Compulsory education originated in Germany and was considered the trump card for Germany and the United States to quickly surpass Britain.
After the first industrial revolution in Britain, the government focused on coal mining and textiles, which did not have high technical content. Britain treated workers like animals, replacing them as soon as one batch died. There was no concept of human resources at all.
Germany was the first country to popularize compulsory education. The electric age required a large number of skilled workers who had to have relevant knowledge. The British "animal education" model was outdated because illiterate people could not operate electric equipment.
Later, Germany and the United States, which focused on education and had a high level of national quality, came from behind. This tactic later became the trump card of developing countries such as Japan and China.
Compulsory education forces children to go to school, which can, on the one hand, provide patriotic education. In a melting pot country like the United States, children have to recite the pledge every morning, which is the well-known "Under God, indivisible." Over time, national consciousness emerges.
Another advantage of compulsory education is that it breaks the "social gene".
Parents only know so much, so it is difficult for children to learn from them. Schools have compulsory education, and children are sent to schools to be forcibly indoctrinated with the Big Bang, evolution, molecular biology, and so on.
In China, compulsory education has created many miracles over the years. Even a poor village can produce dozens of college students, who have changed their destiny and broken through the ceiling of their parents. It must be said that compulsory education has done immeasurable good deeds.
However, only a few people can be admitted to their ideal university. All over the world, a situation has emerged where people of all levels gather together.
Birds of a feather flock together. Outstanding people will gather together. This is not because they are deliberately exclusive, but a "homogeneous stratification" mechanism that can be mathematically proven.
This phenomenon exists everywhere, across species and across civilizations.
In other words, if you are a poor person, you leave your family and try not to be influenced by it, but your social class determines that the people around you are generally not particularly outstanding, and you cannot learn much from them. If you want to become powerful, you have to break through this circle.
2. The shackles of consumption
There is a passage in "Rich Dad, Poor Dad": Both the poor and the rich buy luxury goods, and the poor often buy them with their hard-earned money every month, which is wealth that should have been used for investment or left to their children.
The rich buy with the capital they generate.
The poor may look rich after buying luxury goods, but they will soon fall into debt crisis. Their monthly salary is used to repay the debt and continue to borrow money, which enters a vicious circle.
Ordinary people spend their wages, while some people with the vision of the rich will save their money and buy things that can bring in cash.
Things that can bring in cash flow are called assets, and then you spend the money that the assets bring, because that income is considered passive income.
Moreover, there is a huge gap between the consumption of the poor and the rich. A top German real estate developer once made a particularly interesting statement, saying that when wealth accumulates to a certain point, the money cannot be spent.
You buy a luxury car, the car appreciates in value; you buy a watch, the watch appreciates in value; you buy gold, the gold appreciates in value. You can't eliminate money through consumption, which may be the boring part of the life of rich people.
But there is a problem here. This type of asset consumption is easy to say, but difficult to do. The most basic point is that in the past few years, everyone realized how comfortable it would be to buy a few houses and then sit there as a landlord. Everyone understands the principle, but how to do it?
The first and most difficult thing about this problem is that it requires a large amount of start-up capital. If you save money slowly, it will probably take you forever to save up for the down payment of a house because you don’t earn enough money.
For most poor people, the most difficult thing is that they don’t have enough money to spend. How can they save money to buy assets?
Some people say that you can borrow money, but if you have little cash flow, borrowing money with a large leverage is almost like seeking death. What's even more depressing is that poor people have poor credit and cannot borrow money, or the cost of borrowing money is too high.
The credit mentioned here is not the credit in real life, but the credit rating of the bank. If the poor have a low rating, the bank will either not lend you money or charge a very high interest rate.
This is a very good inspiration for those who have the means but have a problem with their consumption concept. But for the truly poor, there is almost no solution. Knowing that the current lifestyle is getting narrower and narrower, but still having no choice but to go this way, this may be the most depressing thing in the world.
Of course, there are some people who "understand the principle, but are unable to put it into practice due to objective conditions", but there are still many people who are really out of their minds.
I have a friend who became a village official after graduating from graduate school. He said that the state has allocated funds to poor households, but many poor households did not make good use of the money, and many people just spent it recklessly after receiving the money.
He lamented that some people are poor because they lack opportunities, while some others really lack knowledge and have problems with their concepts, making them difficult to help.
3. Terrible homogeneity stratification
In the early stages of society, people are generally equal, a bit like shaking water and oil vigorously, which will mix together for a while. But after a while, they will slowly return to the state of separation, and each class will form a clear boundary.
Don’t think it’s unreasonable. It’s like this all over the world, both in ancient times and modern times.
Several years ago, people from small cities went to big cities and found that the people in big cities dressed not much differently from them, and it could not be considered fashionable.
At that time, my parents went to see the company dormitories where their friends in the city lived and felt that they were not as comfortable as the small bungalows in small county towns.
I think around 2008 was a watershed year, with urban and rural areas rapidly polarizing. Young people in big cities became more and more fashionable, and looked quite different from those in rural areas.
For example, a former college classmate who teaches at a university once told me a few years ago that when he stood on the podium, he could tell at a glance which students were from big cities and which were from the countryside like him.
He also discovered one thing, which has become increasingly obvious in recent years: there are fewer and fewer rural students in universities. The scene when he was in university when the whole school was full of "local students" has never appeared again.
In fact, if we observe Europe and the United States, we can find that they have been developing peacefully for hundreds of years, while China has developed from poverty to the present, and compared with them, it has only been a short time. Now everyone starts to discuss the middle class. The middle class can spend hundreds of thousands of yuan on their children every year, and education has evolved into an arms race.
In the future, this situation will only become more and more serious, and will become "circle-based", with various circles living and cooperating together.
People in some circles only need to maintain the status quo and not fall, while people in other circles need to constantly break through.
It’s a bit like some people live on a high floor and just have to keep from falling down, while others need to climb up breathlessly.
The problem is that people at higher levels maintain a high advantage in competition, and the lower the level, the worse the resources and conditions, and the harder it is to climb up. This phenomenon exists all over the world, and the more mature the society, the more it is like this.
In Germany, 5% of the population owns nearly half of the country's houses, and the rest of the population mostly rents. In Leipzig, only 5% of the population owns houses, and the rest of the population rents their houses.
There was a saying on the Internet before that Germans are not in a hurry to buy houses, so housing prices are not high.
I remember once asking a friend who had just returned from Germany if Germans really had such an open-minded view of real estate consumption. He said that only fools don’t like houses, as most Germans can’t save money and generally can’t afford to buy houses.
In Europe and the United States, wealthy families buy housing in school districts near good schools from the very beginning, and then go to good primary schools to good junior high schools, then to key middle schools and key universities, and so on.
Of course, this does not mean that if you go to a good primary school, you will definitely be able to go to a prestigious school. Top private schools in Europe and the United States do not have this effect, but the probability will increase a lot.
Relatively speaking, the probability of ordinary people attending prestigious schools will be greatly reduced, and the right to education will move upward little by little.
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the imperial court discovered a phenomenon that the South was much better than the North in the imperial examinations.
Of course, there are many reasons for this phenomenon. For example, the South was less affected by war, and many wealthy and educated families had a solid foundation. These families often had collections of tens of thousands of books, and even had libraries. Throughout the dynasties, there were people who served as officials in the court and were familiar with the imperial examination routines, so their children would naturally benefit from tutoring.
More importantly, starting from the Song Dynasty, the economy of the South began to surpass that of the North. The South could invest more resources in educating children, and the proportion and number of children in the South who went to school far exceeded that of the North.
The combined number of academies in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces is greater than that in the entire country. The advantages of economic strength will be reflected in all aspects, including education.
Since the Ming Dynasty, China has adopted an admission model that is somewhat similar to the current one, where each province is given care rather than simply admitting students from all over the country. However, within each province, there are still some places that occupy the vast majority of the province's quotas.
As the economy continues to develop and society evolves over the years, everything will evolve into circles. If you can't enter this circle, you won't be able to do certain specific things.
For example, if children cannot enter certain good schools, they will not be able to get into "211" and "985", or it will be difficult to get in. If they cannot enter these universities, they will not be able to enter better companies in the future.
I am not saying this to sell anxiety, but it is an objective reality that is about to come, or has already arrived.
4. Learned helplessness
From Barry Schwartz’s Paradox of Choice:
If a person is in a state of lack of choice for a long time, the subconscious brain will gradually think that nothing can change the status quo or one's own destiny, so the person will enter a state of so-called learned helplessness and become more negative.
Even if the situation changes and there is an opportunity, don't act.
When this situation is serious, it can lead to decreased immunity and even depression.
When there are many choices, the sense of self-control is very strong, which allows people to maintain a positive and enterprising attitude for a long time, which is very beneficial to physical and mental health.
Of course, there are three problems when there are too many choices: decision-making requires more energy; the possibility of making mistakes after making a choice is greater; and the psychological frustration caused by making mistakes is stronger.
If you don't make a choice for a long time, your brain will become very negative.
Many people say that they feel like they are about to suffer from depression. In fact, you can reflect on whether you have almost nothing to choose on your own in your daily life, and it is life that forces you to move forward?
In this state, over time, it will indeed lead to an increasingly serious negative state.
This is also the biggest difference between the strong and the poor that I have witnessed over the years. Most normal people seem to have a sense of resignation to life, thinking that it is just like this, just make do with it, it is not impossible to survive.
Of course, the more powerful a person is, the more things he can do, and the poorer a person is, the less he can do. Without resources, their ability to act is naturally poor, and nothing goes smoothly, which will have a particularly big impact on their confidence.
I think young people can run something of their own, it can be Weibo, Twitter, or even editing some simple short videos every day, of course it can also be more complex projects.
A fan of mine sent me a private message two months ago, saying that he had no obvious strengths, and that he usually just surfed Twitter and was a bystander, and had never invested in cryptocurrencies. My suggestion to him was that he could try to be a Twitter blogger. After he accepted the suggestion, I gave him a step-by-step tutorial, and now the number of fans of this blogger has begun to take shape and is growing steadily.
He finally knew what he should do in his spare time, and this would most likely become the second curve of his life!
This is what I must emphasize, a person must change from a consumer to a producer in order to change the predicament, because the producers are the big brothers, and the consumers are the poor.
If a person always acts as a consumer, plays other people's games, and eats other people's food, instead of moving to the production end, he will always be in a pit and will never be able to turn over.
You have to get other people to consume your stuff.
The consumption mentioned here does not necessarily mean spending money. Now spending time is also consumption.
If you spend a lot of time on other people's products, such as a game or an app that gives you short-term happiness but wastes your time, you are also contributing value to others.
A decision you make now may not be of much use to a poor person with few resources and no hands-on ability, but this decision may completely change your life in five years.
If you have tried something but it didn't work out, there are many reasons, maybe you are not cut out for it, or you are just unlucky. But if you don't do anything and you feel like you can't do it well or succeed, this could really be a psychological problem.
5. Start with small decisions
After analyzing it for a long time, I suddenly realized that if a particularly poor person reads this article, it may not be of much use to him, but may make him more depressed.
Society is not friendly to the poor, and this is far more than a flawed way of thinking. More importantly, the lower the social class, the fewer resources available, and the higher the cost of trial and error.
Everything we do in this world requires trial and error, and trial and error costs money.
Especially in the eyes of the whole world, it is even more embarrassing. From the current perspective, the best way is still our way: let the villagers go to the city first, integrate into the social division of labor, and give those who are enterprising and flexible a chance. Maybe they can find a way to bring their fellow villagers out.
This is not a random statement. After a village in Jiangxi received poverty alleviation funds, under the leadership of a very capable farmer, the entire village became rural internet celebrities. Their earthy short videos became popular all over the country, and now the village has become rich.
Of course, this is an operation at the macro level. When it comes to each individual, we need to think more and act more, and try more things that require low-cost trial and error and have long-term dividends.
So, if you have time, do something. It doesn't have to be very profitable, very unique, or overnight. Just do it seriously. Maybe in three or five years, you will feel that the small decision you made at the beginning actually changed your life. #一起来跟单 #注意资金安全 #美联储是否加息？ #带你看看币安Launchpad