When we try to understand someone with different roots from our own, there is cultural dissonance. We cannot always imagine "what it's like" to live as the opposite sex, in another country, working another job, in another financial situation- the list goes on.
Expose yourself to as many different peoples as you can. Do not limit your travels economically or socially, and do not forget to talk to people. Here the emotion in their voice. Live their lives with them.
The one that I want to talk about today, something I have admittedly always been afraid of, growing up in a lower middle class family. Being poor.
Until you have had to choose which payment is going to be marked late because you can't pay two bills at once, you do not know what it is like to be poor. You may not have a car. You may have no job experience. Maybe you had an accident that has left you disabled. Many you were abandoned by your family, kicked out when you were 18 years old, without any guidance as to how to make it in the real world.
I had the pleasure of working with a small group of gentlemen who had suffered traumatic brain injuries. Most of them cannot move around as well as they used to be able to. They cannot work the same jobs. Others can stand, walk, eat just fine but when you talk to them, they sound drunk or mentally disabled. Make no mistake, these people are capable of accomplishing great things, and it is possible to heal from a brain injury. It is possible to get back to a semi-normal, productive life. Unfortunately that is not an option for many of these men.
Memory impairments keep them from working most sustainable jobs. Social functioning impairments isolate them from family and make it harder to gain lasting social connections. I remember my surprise at learning that, in the town where I was working with these folks through a rehabilitation program, about 80% of the poor population had suffered some sort of head injury and could no longer sustain a job for that reason.
Points to consider:
1.) We are social beings. You are where you are only because of the love, support and cooperation of your friends and family, plus all of your social connections. If you cannot connect socially, you are going to have a harder time finding a job.
2.) Lower paying, starter-jobs often involve strenuous physical labor. One who has sustained a permanent bodily injury will not be able to work these jobs. The young have a better chance at being able to handle the physical strain, while the old cannot do so.
3.) Your mental competence allows you to successfully navigate your social environment, pay your bills and take care of all of your basic necessities.
4.) There is a strong mental and physical battle against addictive substances. Quitting is not like throwing out a sweater you no longer need, but needing to remove a sweater that is interwoven into your deepest layer of skin, while any support system you may have had could be stitching it back on at the same time (enablers, fellow users) or lashing out at you for every failed stitch that sends you back into dependence.
Learn to think outside of your own experiences. Wealth, competence, independence is not always self-made, nor can it conceivably be so.
