Coping With Money Problems

As I ran down the path between apartment buildings I waited to be assaulted with the usual smell of marijuana smoke.  Sure enough it appeared, as strong and dense as ever.  Even at 6:15 in the morning. 

I was on one of my early morning runs last year that I only do on the hottest days of summer.  I’d generally rather not run at 6:00am but the oppressive heat and humidity of a D.C. summer often makes it the only sane option. 

The sidewalk I had just run down goes through a low income housing development, and the air is always full of pot and cigarette smoke, even at 6:00am.

 

Poor In A Wealthy Area

The counties and jurisdictions in the Washington D.C. area have the highest median household incomes in America, higher than Silicon Valley and the wealthiest places in New York and Manhatten.  In the past the D.C. region had 9 of the top 20 earning counties in America.  The latest data shows it still has five of the highest eight as measured by median household income.  

So one might think there are no poor people here.  Well, of course there are.  “Poor” is relative to where one lives of course. 

The D.C. area has a very high cost of living, so what might not qualify as poor in Jackson, Mississippi might be very poor in the Washington D.C. region from a relative perspective.  There are quite a few low income housing developments near my house, what we used to more commonly refer to as Section 8.  And some of them are on running and cycling routes that I use. 

No matter what time of day I pass these developments they’re enveloped in pot and cigarette smoke.  Empty liquor bottles and sometimes drug paraphernalia can be seen littering the grounds.  It makes me sad. 

And it makes me reflect.

 

Coping

Why do the people who can least afford it tend to be the ones wasting their money on toxic, expensive and unhealthy vices that cost a lot?  They’re coping.

This simple explanation in no way is intended to blanketly condone those activities.  But, as a former functional alcoholic and someone who’s been dealing with childhood trauma my whole life, I understand. 

And I have empathy.

After I cleaned up my act from my heavy drinking days I used to look at those engaging in self-destructive behaviors as, well, stupid. 

Pretty weird huh, considering I had just moved on from that behavior.  But some sort of cognitive dissonance didn’t see it like that, and I frequently judged people. 

People just want to be happy.  But when they’re living on the edge of life, financially or otherwise, they turn to substances and other vices to try to find some happiness.  Those things are coping mechanisms, ways to escape reality for a while, plain and simple.

Would more money make these folks happier and less likely to turn to unhealthy vices and addictions to cope?

 

The Gap To Happiness

By now I think most folks have heard of the famous Princeton study that claimed more money makes people happier but that it stops at around $75,000 income per year.  It’s mentioned often on financial and self-help podcasts and one of those things that has entrenched itself into the zeitgeist like the famous marshmallow study about delayed gratification. 

Well that Princeton study was done in 2010, right at the beginning of one of the longest and most lucrative bull markets in history that lasted over a decade.  A new Wharton Business School study found there is no real limit to the effects of having more money, but it’s not necessarily just happiness. 

As this Penn Today article about the study says:

To answer this question, Killingsworth collected 1.7 million data points from more than 33,000 participants who provided in-the-moment snapshots of their feelings during daily life. In a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Killingsworth confirms that money does influence happiness and, contrary to previous influential research on the subject suggesting that this plateaus above $75,000, there was no dollar value at which it stopped mattering to an individual’s well-being.

This new study makes way more sense to me.  Let’s face it, these social science studies aren’t exactly in the same league as physics or chemistry. 

Measuring happiness as related to money is infinitely more difficult and inexact than measuring the amount of infrared light being emanated from Venus.  I consider the former a “best guess”, and the latter very close to exact. 

So while I still take this new study with a grain of salt simply because it’s a “soft science” study, it makes more sense to me from my life experience.  I remember when my income passed $75,000 and I’m pretty sure that next raise made me at least a bit happier. 

But for so many out there, the gap to happiness from where they are is a chasm.  So they’re coping any way they can.  Just like I did.

 

I Barely Escaped That Fate

I tried coping with a train-wreck of a childhood by drowning it in alcohol, for decades.  Every one of those folks getting high or drunk at 6:00 in the morning at the low income apartments could have been me. 

Some might be coping with debt and money issues, some trauma, many surely are coping with all of these things and more.  Money is no doubt a huge issue for them because they are in federally subsidized housing after all. 

But the bottom line is, they’re coping.

My escape from a similar fate was not a sure thing, and Vegas would have likely bet against me.  Now when I smell that pot smoke in the morning, I count my blessings.