Poverty is exhausting.

You don’t realize this until you’re in it. No one tells you this, but when you’re in it, you’re tired.

I didn’t know this as a child, but now I can only imagine how that fatigue haunted my parents every day. It’s not just financial strain; it’s an all-encompassing burden that drains you mentally and physically.

Poverty clings to you much like addiction—it becomes a constant distraction, both purposeful and devastating.

This is the weight of debt. Every day that you owe or need money, it’s all you can think about. It mirrors addiction in a startling way, except there’s no reward. The difference is subtle at first glance.

Every breath you take is spent thinking about the one thing eluding you, the way an addict thinks about drugs.

Unlike addiction, though, there’s no fleeting moment of relief, no break from the relentless chase. Instead, the pursuit of money, like a drug, is all-consuming.

I can’t help but wonder, if we can inherit addictions to alcohol, can we also inherit the “broke addiction”? A passed-down, untraceable trait that makes not having money the default setting we don’t even know we have.

Both poverty and addiction trap you, forcing you into a cycle of survival where desperation drives your decisions, not choice. Every day in poverty, like with addiction, is a hustle.

Whether it’s scrambling to cover rent, feed yourself, or afford the basics, you’re always chasing something just out of reach. You grind. You wake up thinking about how you’ll get what you need, and you go to sleep just to wake up and do it again.

The difference however, is that poverty gives you nothing in return. There is no reward. At least addiction offers a fleeting high—poverty offers nothing.

Debt adds yet another crushing layer.

Each dollar owed becomes a weight pressing down on your chest. It stalks you into every decision—what do you do with the little that you do have?

The mental toll is brutal. You begin to wonder if maybe, just maybe, retracing your steps could reveal the moment when everything went wrong—the exact point where you made the wrong turn.

You think, if only you could identify that moment, you could go back and fix it. But poverty doesn’t work that way. I think about a pyramid. Most people are at the bottom, holding society up in community.

We all move through the rungs of the pyramid until we find a place that’s comfortable. Unfortunately, comfortable doesn’t mean good for us. We can make even the most unnatural situations feel ‘comfortable.’

Even the day-to-day stress of living without money begins to feel too comfortable. But like an addiction, it’s all you can think about. It’s like handcuffs you can’t remove.

Remember the movie Saw? The first scene of the original movie opens in the bathroom. The main character is chained to a pipe and told the key is somewhere in the room. That’s it. They key to wealth is somewhere in the room, with you always, Your job is to find the key and free yourself. That’s it.

You have to free you.

In the real world when you’re broke the first question you ask yourself is always: How did I get here?

But why does that matter?

Why is it important?

Perhaps if the details of how you arrived were revealed, there might be evidence of where the key is hiding. Maybe you’ve blocked it out, but it’s possible—just maybe—that your memory holds the location of the key.

Somewhere in the past, there is a key that can unlock your future. If you get lost on the highway, you turn around and eventually come upon the point where you went the wrong way. That’s what we think memory can do for us.

It’s easy to believe, “ I just need to go back to where I chose left and choose right. I simply have to switch gears”. But with poverty, that doesn’t always work. Going back to where you went wrong doesn’t guarantee you’ll get a chance to make it right.

There Is A Traditional Blueprint For Success

First, you find a tribe, then you earn money by selling something—your time, ideas, services, or solutions.

There Is An Untraditional Blueprint For Success

This is when you start thinking outside the box, convincing yourself that maybe, just maybe, money will appear as if by magic—that somehow, the universe will hear your prayers and grant you a lifeline?

That’s what desperation does. Similar to an addict, you exist in hopeful delusion. It makes you believe in things you can’t see because reality has disappointed you too many times.

Addiction, destructive as it is, still feeds something inside you. The hunt is for a fix which offers brief moments of escape. Poverty? The fix is money and that’s always coming and going but never in the volume that make a difference.

No hit, no high, no relief.

The isolation is the same.

Poverty isolates you in the same suffocating way as addiction. It pulls you away from everything and everyone. And ironically, the one thing that could help—community—is often the hardest thing to reach.

Shame envelops you in poverty, just as it does with addiction.

You feel embarrassed, frustrated, like a failure. Addiction has a built-in escape valve, even if only temporary. Poverty offers no such mercy. You remain trapped, day after day, hoping for a reprieve that never comes.

So, the real question becomes: how do we dismantle the walls when we’ve been taught that the key is something we should have found by now? That’s the illusion—the belief that if you work hard enough, pray hard enough, or think the right way you’ll make your way out.

Am I Stuck In A Pattern?

• What if being broke starts with a genetic transfer?
• What if once you let yourself become broke, you’re officially an addict?
• What if this addiction becomes a recurring story of relapse in your life with no real recovery in sight?

Addiction no matter what you’re addicted to, has the same job; isolation. Being broke is no different. The solution isn’t money, it’s community.