About

I am plotting my escape from the middle class. I was born here and have mostly always lived here. There were a few times I slipped into poverty, but was quickly restored to middle class status.

Looking at this blog, one might assume that I am planning on becoming wealthy. I mean, why would someone plan on being poor? That is just un-American! No, I have no desire to be wealthy. OK, maybe a small desire, but only if I can get there in the laziest way possible, like winning the lottery or getting a gigantic inheritance from a rich relative I didn’t know had. Mostly, becoming wealthy takes a kind of drive and focus that destroys one’s ability to think clearly. If I could get rich doing something awesome, like going on vacation or snuggling puppies, while other driven people managed my affairs, I’d definitely consider it. But for now, I’m tired of the rat race and wish to escape from the middle class by, yup-you guessed it, by limiting my income into the poverty range.

Why on earth would I want to do that? Who, when other options are available, chooses to be poor?

I’m done. I’ve had it with middle class living. The real quality of life is at the ends of the spectrum, not in the middle. Today, middle class living means taking on all the risks of being an entrepreneur without any of the reward. Today’s American middle class is full of stress: long commutes to unsatisfying jobs, maintaining too-large houses in overpriced neighborhoods, divorce and alcoholism and obesity and hypertension and canceled health insurance and lazy and (sometimes) violent offspring. For what? What are we accomplishing with all this middle class living/ lifestyle?

Most people in the middle class are looking forward to the weekend, when they then can work around their over-sized, over-priced houses. We don’t want to anger the homeowners association after all. Then we need to catch up on personal chores like visiting family, doing the shopping, setting up play dates with the kids, doing laundry and answering personal email. After all that, most of us rush off to our houses of worship where we are told to make time for God and to donate a portion of our income to the organized religion we subscribe to. Then comes the guilt of not volunteering enough, or not donating enough money.

We, the middle class, do this 50 weeks a year. There is, of course, the 2 week vacation we like to indulge in, where we pack our bags and are off to some commercialized place that is engineered to help us have “fun” and to “relax”. Anyone traveling with children knows that vacations are neither fun nor relaxing. But I digress.

This is the life of a middle class person. I’m sure some people just love being so stressed and exhausted that sleep deprivation is a point of pride. Don’t count me amongst their ranks. I have learned to loathe this lifestyle, and hence am plotting my escape. This year, 2010, I want to be able to disentangle myself from the middle class lifestyle and move into a position of comfortable poverty. Sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it?

Surprisingly, becoming poor isn’t as easy as one might assume. One would think that slipping into poverty would be as easy as falling off a log. As I’ve recently discovered, this isn’t the case. People all around me are pushing me back into the middle class. And not just friends and family, but also the system itself pushes the middle class lifestyle. But there are ways to expel yourself from it all. This blog is about my day-to-day struggle to achieve comfortable poverty.

Because if it wasn’t comfortable, then I wouldn’t want to be there anyway.