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Your Favorite Place, Your Actual Budget
(self.asklemmy)
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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2026
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I've been to rural India. The culture shock is wild. The emotional toll of seeing some of that poverty is truly upsetting. It's hard to gauge what's distinct poverty, what's just a culture norm, and what's a norm due to the poverty. I know some people home that act like safety is for pussies, yet they're still way safer day to day than the things I saw in India with traffic, crossings, vehicle repair, construction, farming, cooking, smoking, and just the air quality alone. Social media may have keyed me into expectations for Delhi, but the rural areas were well outside what I expected to see. Now I recognize it all the time in various manufacturing or tool hack videos on socials.
Anything involving a queue is downright infuriating. Apparently that's a general Asian thing, or at least the places where western countries exploit low manufacturing cost. I don't know the rules and don't want to start a fight by accident so I just do my best to maintain progress through the "line"
The wealth disparity is extreme. When I was there back in 99 I landed in Bombay as a green youth from Europe. The cab ride to my hostel took an hour through the most bitter slums I have ever experienced before and since. It was jarring.
I didn't dare leaving the hostel for days at first. It was such a valuable experience and really made me question my beliefs about the world and reassess the ridiculous privilege I was born into, even though my family was for sure struggling working class.
I talk to people frequently who say Bombay is one of their favorite cities, some people I know even relocated there. It's all about how much money you have. If you have it you can live like a sultan. If not you live on the streets, and it ain't fucking pretty.
Even so, I got the impression that the poor people lived more fulfilling lives than people do on the streets of Europe, something I have first hand experience with.
That's a great point. You and I didn't just see how little they had, we saw how much they did with so little. Similar situation for me back home, parents were struggling working class. It re-lensed how little we did (do) with so much. So much more space, so much more money, so many more comforts, so much more entertainment, so much more healthcare, so many more protective regulations.
For what? What do we have to show for it?
It knocked me a tick towards nihilism or something for some time. It made me wonder how I can be so miserable when my life should be verifiably better than what I saw there. But I came back from that eventually, because having better baseline conditions doesn't mean life isn't a struggle. It scales to where you sit in the wealth rankings of your local society. The bottom is the bottom, no matter how you compare to other societies. But I've done better at appreciating what I have and maximizing what I do. I have the option to travel, to be entertained, to build, to create, to care, to relax, to be comfortable, to experience, to observe, to theorize. And that's what I'll continue doing because it's a privilege wasted otherwise.