Should you practice being poor?

A brief reference in Seneca's Letters from a Stoic caught my attention. Seneca mentioned the practice of some rich men—Epicureans—who fitted out their houses with a “poor man’s room,” so that once a month they could practice being poor.

They did this, apparently, not to deepen their gratitude for the comforts they enjoyed, or from any nostalgie de la boue, but rather to train themselves, through familiarity, not to dread the poverty that might one day befall them.

To me, there’s something offensive about rich people playing poor, whether for spiritual enrichment or not.

But it’s not a bad idea to force yourself to confront your fears, to remind yourself that, as much as you might dread a certain fate, you’d deal with it.

Studies show that people generally overestimate how upset they’d be by some bad future event; people cope better than they expect. (They also overestimate how happy a good event will make them.)

I have absolute confidence that the Big Man and I will never get divorced, but other kinds of calamity might strike at any time. Maybe the huge pile of memoirs-of-catastrophe memoirs I’ve been reading this month are a kind of “poor man’s room”—a way to acquaint myself with the stations of disaster, and prepare.

Comments

[Jude]

Speaking as an officially poor person, I can tell you that there are interesting side benefits to poverty. As I've moved down the income ladder from a decent job to my current ever-varying $850 to $1300 a month (with $423 in child support for my two sons), I've learned a great deal about how little money one can actually live on. Of course, the fact that I have $2.20 in the bank at the moment (I'm crossing my fingers that the child support arrived today) doesn't make me happy--but I also have a lifestyle that an impoverished person in another country couldn't imagine for its richness. For example, I have this computer and an internet connection. I have a home, because my brother arranged with my mother to give it to me while she is still alive. We don't have a lot of extra stuff, but we do have too much stuff, much of it left from the days of money, but some of it acquired since, largely from tax refunds. Being this poor has some advantages, but most of those disappeared when the price of gas increased so dramatically. For example, the cheap entertainment of driving into the mountains and tent camping is gone.

I was poor for much of my childhood, so I never feared poverty. The fear now is mostly that I have some undiagnosed medical ailment because I can't afford to visit someone to find out. It's also not fun to be unable to get new glasses frames for the last six months since the bow broke off of these.

I think the idea of the poor man's room is more in line with solo at Outward Bound. I went on solo, where I was stuck for three days along a stream in the mountains, sans sleeping bag, food, and company, but with a journal and pens. I did my own solo the next year in a mountain near my home for a week. Enforced solitude, especially when you have a job, a home, and a busy life, is a sort of "luxury of poverty," if that makes sense.

[Ken]

It's when I try to act rich that kills me. Those interest rates are murder!

[Fenglyph]

It seems a little superficial to go into a poor man's room once a month with the knowledge that a life of luxury is just around the corner. I think it's just a sneaky way of reversing the hedonic treadmill slightly.

Reading catastrophe memoirs, on the other hand, is more authentic because it tackles "higher" areas - fear of death, fear of losing loved ones etc. as opposed to only material loss. Plus, there's no pretending involved. :P

[Gretchen Rubin]

That's an interesting question. Why DO I find it offensive for people to play poor? After all, it might increase your empathy for the problems other people face, and as Fenglyph points out, it would increase appreciation for what you have. I suppose to me, it seems presumptuous -- to think that you can understand poverty by dipping into it, safe with the knowledge that you can return to your own life. But perhaps that effort is better than living rich continuously...And often, I think, rich people are limited by their money: don't know how to hop on the bus or to iron or don't think they could get into a school if they weren't major donors (these are all examples I've seen for myself). Facing poverty might offset this. But the poor man's room is a pretense, and it is only aimed at material loss..this is even more interesting than I thought. I tried to find out more information about this practice, but haven't found anything so far.

[Christopher Dowling]

I used to be poor. While I'm not now really "rich" by the standards of Barron's Magazine,
I have financial assets that the vast majority of Americans, let alone the world populace, would qualify as relatively rich. Nevertheless, I have found these gains are little comfort when your personal life seems to self-destruct.

Not to dwell on the details, but I wouldn't necessarily count on the absolute certainty of anything in life. Stability and certainty are illusions the mind creates, and things will happen that one can not anticipate.

[Allison]

I don't see the purpose in a rich person trying to live for a period as a poor person in an attempt to empathize with them. As stated in other comments, the rich person will go right back to being rich and will most likely do little to help out those less fortunate. Being poor isn't like going to space camp where you can play make-believe for a month and then go home. By playing out a "poor" fantasy, it takes away from the severity of the situation of real poverty striken people.
In addition, there are different interpretations of "poor". It is not as simple as taking away material possessions and then declaring oneself poor. I have known "rich" people who I have felt sorry for, because they are not truely happy and all the money in the world will not bring them happiness.