When you grow up poor, the mentality you grow up with is that everyone is out to get you.
As a child you may not realize it, but life is hard, and your parents are always afraid. They see somebody else have means, but they don’t see a way by which they too can have things.
An illusion is formed that the rich have somehow got to where they got by some shady means. There is envy, maybe resentment towards the wealthier folks. The path to success isn’t viewed through hard work, creativity, connections and cleverness and some luck, no, it is seeing as something impossible, out of reach, out of consideration.
That’s certainly how I grew up. No one in my family ever hated on the rich, but in hindsight, I can tell there was a layer of largely self-imposed believe that the rich were unreachable. Sadly, this was a self-fulfilling prophecy.
“Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t—you’re right” - Henry Ford.
It took a long while to understand this, and I am still unlearning the bad habits that come as a result of this thinking. There’s no alcoholics anonymous for learning to think clearly, for figuring out how to unchain thyself, for remodeling your brain to take on the impossible.
It’s still a work in progress for me.
Sadly, while I am still working on making the switch, I see others fall right into the same trap. So many folks think they are stuck in their space, feeling entitled but unable to get what they want, channeling their energy into hate rather than forward momentum.
You can see this quite well in the regular folks that hate Elon Musk. They hate him for being a billionaire, for meddling into politics, for having the will, the strength, and the power to see things through. It’s not hate based on facts and logic, it’s entirely based on feelings, on their inability to see how they too could one day make a difference. They think they make a difference by shouting, producing nothing but noise.
You can look at Elon and see a billionaire who has more than you, or you can see a guy that made driverless cars, autonomous rockets, everyday robots, who saved free speech, pioneered a brain interface to computers, and in the process enabled hundreds of thousands of people to live better lives.
The situation that has formed your reality to date may have been entirely out of your control.
How you see the world around you, and how you envision your future, that’s is always entirely up to you.
It’s 2025, and we can watch satellites being launch, from the point of view of the satellite. How amazing is that?!
Per Aspera Ad Astra. Through hardship to the stars.