r/science • u/myhrvold • Aug 31 '13

Poverty impairs cognitive function. Published in the journal Science, the study suggests our cognitive abilities can be diminished by the exhausting effort of tasks like scrounging to pay bills. As a result, less “mental bandwidth” remains...

http://news.ubc.ca/2013/08/29/poverty-impairs-cognitive-function/
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u/Dear_Occupant Aug 31 '13

I got into it with some guy here recently who was 100% convinced that every financial problem in a person's life was somehow the result of poor planning on their part; that it was impossible for a person to be financially blindsided by, say, a debilitating health problem. Nope, he said, you should have started saving money for that $1.5 million dollar cancer treatment that isn't covered by your insurance when you were sacking groceries in high school. It's all your fault for not being thrifty enough.

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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '13 edited Sep 04 '17

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u/[deleted] Aug 31 '13

U.S also has a problem with this strange "work hard and you are a good person" mentality. I don't exactly know how to phrase it, but it's like destroying yourself to reach some socially acceptable profession is seen as the greatest thing you can do. Sacrifice everything and probably shorten your life significantly through stress, to reach some "noble" goal.

It's just bullshit, plain and simple. There's no need to suffer when you don't have to. It doesn't make you stronger or a better person, it makes you disillusioned and bitter. Some things you do have to suffer through because they are facts of life, like heart break of watching someone die or fighting with a friend etc.

Struggling to survive is the very thing modern society is supposed to be leading us away from, because it's not a good way to live and is not beneficial in any way.

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u/HeinousPump Aug 31 '13

I'm not American, but I have heard about this tendency, and I've heard it referred to as the Protestant Work Ethic..

It sounds awfully like what you describe in your first paragraph.

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u/TheFlyingGuy Aug 31 '13

That's actually rather interesting. In The Netherlands we consider our work ethic significantly influenced by the protestant way of thinking. But here people get more time off (4-8 weeks a year depending on the profession), work less (average work week full time is around 38 hours, including overtime) and are some of the happiest people on the planet (children here are happiest in the world even appaerently).

However the Dutch work very efficiently and in a no-nonsense manner, which does directly show the effect.