Four or five years ago, before the economy grew as harsh as it is today, structural poverty rarely found its way into the content we scrolled past every day. Social media preached a different gospel back then, the gospel of hustle culture. Hard work pays off. Wake up early, grind while others sleep, and success will eventually find you. Meritocracy, we were told, was alive and well, ready to reward anyone willing to put in the hours.

Blaming the Poor

Under that belief, misfortune was treated as a personal failing. Whenever someone admitted they were living in poverty or had been struck by some unexpected blow of fate, the comment section turned into a courtroom, and the verdict was almost always the same. They didn’t work hard enough. They didn’t network enough. They weren’t smart enough. Very few people paused to ask what had happened to them, what they had been up against from the start, or where the government was when they needed help.

Those posts disappointed me so much. It hurt to watch a whole society fail to recognize when a person was standing in a vulnerable place, and then pile blame onto their shoulders while they stood there. Reading those comments, I often felt as though I were living in a heartless world.

When the Crisis Hit Home

Then the economy began to crack, and the crisis no longer kept a polite distance. It crept into more homes, more wallets, more late-night conversations about rent and groceries. The vulnerability that once belonged to a few became the daily reality of the many.

Suddenly, structural poverty is everywhere in our feeds. Suddenly, people understand that a university degree guarantees nothing. Suddenly, we see how fragile most of us are, and how little stands between us and a life of serving the rich on their terms. Suddenly, we are all living a wild and uncertain life, where luck and timing play a far larger part in a person’s fate than we ever cared to admit.

Why Empathy Came Too Late

I am glad this wake-up call has finally come. A crisis has a way of stripping off comfortable illusions, and if this one teaches us to recognize how vulnerable life truly is, then at least something worthwhile has grown out of so much hardship.

Still, a sadness sits underneath that gladness, and I can’t shake it. Does the fire have to reach our own kitchen before we understand the tragedy in someone else’s life? Must we lose something ourselves before we believe that loss is hard? I keep wondering where all that empathy was when our own lives were comfortable and we watched other people’s lives fall apart from a safe distance. Where was our acknowledgment of luck and timing back then, when someone else was the one who drew the short straw?

Keeping Compassion Alive

I truly hope that we hold on to this hard-won understanding long after the economy recovers, so the next person who admits they are struggling meets compassion instead of a verdict.