Food Stamps

In the second post of what’s a four-part series, we examined how pursuing hobbies is related to “money can’t buy happiness”, and how this affects food stamps users. In this post, we’ll see how money, food stamps, and happiness are all connected to the future.

Future: Most of us look to the future as an entity that’s moving forward and up. Progress may sometimes happen in tiny increments or it can leap forward hugely, but improvement is something that’s usually expected.

If you ask a typical person where they see themselves in 5 or 10 years, the answer usually circles around family, a larger paycheck, and a bigger home. Nobody dreams that they’ll have the good fortune to end up one missed paycheck away from homelessness, but that’s an unfortunate reality for too many people. The anxiety that comes with thinking someone’s going to repossess your entire life any day now can be so great, not thinking about it is a welcome respite.

It’s also hard to imagine the future as anything better because when the current situation is so bleak, you get used to it being the norm. For you, “making it” comes in the form of not having your electricity shut off for 12 months in a row, not getting a promotion to Senior Vice President. The latter is something that happens to either “lucky” folks, or people born into money.

You also don’t let yourself dream about the future, because that inevitably results in crushed hopes and after a while, it just sucks to keep feeling that way. Sure, it’d be nice to have a house, but how on earth are you ever supposed to scrape together enough money for a 20% down payment when that represents your rent for 5 years?

Further complicating the situation is the small matter of paying your bills—a task you want to get ahead on, but feel constantly stuck in juggling. Do you pay the cable bill this month because you were really late the last three and you don’t want it to get cut off? Or do you sacrifice the minimum payment on your credit card bill because hydro can’t be dodged this month and winter’s coming up? The future, in this case, means looking ahead to only the next week or month, not the next generation.

Because the future doesn’t hold the same meaning as it would for, say, a couple planning on buying their first house, you approach things like debt differently. Telephone and Internet are luxuries for you, not necessities, and you invest all your energy into making sure there’s food on the table. And to make sure you can meet one of humanity’s most basic needs, you’ll do just about anything to ensure that: using your checking account overdraft, screening your calls for bill collectors, and ignoring bits of mold and fuzz on your food as you cut it away to salvage a meal. Such concepts like loading up on food specials are ludicrous for a couple of reasons: there’s no place to store it, and buying 5lbs of roast beef because it’s half off means you’re using up next week’s food stamps.

So, for food stamps users, the idea of the future—when not bleak and unchanging—is wholly different from someone not on them. It’s almost like putting blinders on an average person and telling them, “The world before you is as it exists entirely, and there is nothing else around you.” With such a limited scope of sight, it can become almost impossible to reach a different future, let alone see it.

In Part IV of this four-part series, we’ll look at how being on food stamps affects children of families on food stamps, and what kind of role money has to play in that.