Poverty is not always material. You can be poor in spirit, emotion, companionship, purpose, experience, etc. But how do you become experientially or emotionally poor?
Most people, I think, can relate to feeling worthless sometimes. Hopefully you only feel this way when frustrated or failing to meet a goal you’ve set. But I know I’ve met more than a few people who are stuck in this abstract kind of poorness, thinking themselves not good enough or somehow forever having less than others.
We all want a "rich" life, replete with grand experiences and exciting people and purpose and the admiration of others. A quick glance on social media will show you we’re all scrambling to portray these very features in our lives. The portrayal is almost more important than the life lived. No one wants to be seen as having a poor life.
So how do some people come to devalue themselves and what they’ve experienced so much? And how do others set their self-valuations so high?
It begins, I think, in childhood, with kids bickering at recess about who had the best summer vacation or who has the coolest older brother. The war for your self has already begun. It is a struggle of wills at this point; the child who presses his argument most wins the spoils. This boy’s brother is the coolest, because he insists it most loudly, so it becomes established fact and the boy now steps stolidly across the playground with the facticity of his possession of the coolest older brother in the school. It is a fact he will hold on to for a very, very long time. If this boy believes he has the coolest older brother, or the fastest bike, or is the best hockey player or smartest student, this belief will lodge itself in his mind and might even become the centre of his identity.
So a lot is at stake. The very valuation of your self is being determined.
People’s conceptions of themselves naturally arise from the total collective experiences that they – and only they – know they have faced. Only they have experienced the events (and non-events) of their life firsthand. So it’s vital to, first of all, value your experience, to draw as much currency from it as possible to contribute to the cache of your personal identity. Secondly, it’s important to assign an appropriate value to your experience. A high estimation will make you vulnerable and appear foolish. (There’s nothing more pathetic than the homegrown perennial who acts worldly and intrepid. Even a gaze to them can be withering.) As children we do all this unconsciously. It’s a natural process, as all are that require no thinking.
It’s a little more difficult when you’re of age. Until this point, you’re gathering your self together for its own sake. It’s a kind of game you’re playing, participating in the sports that happen to be offered to you and developing your sense of humour with the other kids who happen to be growing up in your neighbourhood. It’s almost a kind of mockery.
But the illusion that you are developing this identity for yourself is soon dispelled, to be replaced by the unsettling recognition that this development is actually necessary for the growing individual to take part in the human world. No longer is it the play-war during recess or comparison of owned objects. It is now the tool by which the individual sets himself apart from the other actors while simultaneously announcing himself on stage.
When you’re a child, the world is big. Unfathomably big. So big that there is more than enough room for everyone to carve out space and material for their identity. We don’t need to fight and scrap for our valuations. Resources seem unlimited. We don’t need to steal from one another.
As an adult, the world shrinks. You visit the alien places you were mystified by as a child, learn about Andromeda, the moons of Jupiter, the theory of relativity, question God’s existence, etc. Most importantly, the cultural landscape becomes comprehensible and, therefore, seems to condense to a small crowded city with its denizens scratching out materials to build themselves (maybe we never do leave that playground at recess). Resources suddenly become catastrophically limited. A young woman is a talented and promising gymnast, but so is her best friend, so that currency becomes inflated. The valuation is skewed. She’s no longer a gymnast but a gymnast fighting for her identity, struggling for the very right to call herself a gymnast. A rich man prides himself on his money, but his unambitious little brother wins the lottery and the rich man’s money suddenly feels hot and heavy in his hands like burning embers.
Of course, experiences and valuations are not always fought over; sharing an experience with someone can increase its value under certain conditions, namely in any healthy relationship among family or friends. The experience in that case will not only contribute to the formation of yourself but also to that of your relationship or friendship. It can act as a bonding agent between you and your friend so that the experience takes on double importance: while assuming its role in your own personal life, it also strengthens and specifies the dimensions of the identity of your friendship. And we all have multiple identities we slip in and out of, including those forged with other people.
The currency of experience fluctuates and changes in scope, is subject to inflation, can be converted to other currency, can generate itself or flatline and spend itself. Assigning "real" values to experience is precisely as impossible as determining prices on the stock market: both are entirely dependent on the activities of others for their valuation, and in both cases the perceived value is the real value, and the real value is the perceived value. One friend might be impressed with your adventures in Ireland and consider you well-travelled, while another will scoff and bring up the time he backpacked across Europe by himself. There are as many different evaluations of your experience as there are people to perceive them.
As for yourself, the valuation you set upon you and your experience is a choice. The evaluations of others certainly will influence your own evaluation, and are a good indication of how you will be perceived by other people in general, but it is up to the individual to decide how and in what direction he will set his valuation of himself.
This is why you see such bitter arguments over seemingly irrelevant topics like the merits of Greek life. Those who were a part of it insist on setting a high valuation on it, while those who were not want to devalue it because it is not currency they have. It has nothing at all to do with whether or not they believe it is a strong, philanthropic student organization or depraved party community. These are simply the terms of a debate that even the debaters cannot grasp the nature of.
Similarly, the music and art you adopt as your own can become so important to you that it becomes an ‘expensive’ commodity in your life that makes most of the others in your life, who lack it, poor. Or, observe two music lovers using different currency, and the internecine exchange of valuations that result.
Ever accuse anyone of living "under a rock" because they don’t know about Brad Pitt’s divorce? Or argue about politics while standing under a poster advertising the latest offering from Hollywood in a half-deserted subway station?
It’s a struggle, a back-and-forth, a kind of colossal tug-of-war with a multi-tailed rope that can suddenly elongate or shorten itself without warning. And this is what it is to be alive: unanchored, unsettled, undetermined. This is what formless potential looks like.
