I am not about to romanticise poverty. Poverty is not picturesque. Poverty constrains, diminishes and kills, and anyone who says otherwise has either never been near it or was near it long enough ago to have forgotten the taste.
Hold that. Now hold this next to it, because both are true and the discomfort is the point.
Material poverty does not reliably produce spiritual poverty. Material wealth does not reliably produce spiritual wealth. If anything the relationship runs the other way, and the wealthy world has organised itself so thoroughly around not noticing this that it has started appointing government ministers to deal with the consequences.
Think about two places, both of which exist, both of which you could visit next month.
A village. Rural Pakistan, West Africa, the Guatemalan highlands, a fishing community on the Bangladeshi coast, it does not matter which. Poor on every index anyone has devised.
A suburb. London, Sydney, Toronto, a gated compound outside Dubai. Rich on every index.
Now the question. Not which has better outcomes on paper, that is already settled. Which one contains more people who, putting their head down at night, feel that they matter to somebody and are not going through this alone?
In the village, things get shared. Not out of saintliness. Out of necessity. The neighbour with flour lends to the neighbour without it, and next month it runs the other way, and nobody is keeping a ledger because the ledger is the relationship.
In the suburb, every one of those is structurally impossible, and I mean structurally. The fence, the hedge, the drive, the garage, the setback from the road. You can live beside someone for twenty years without learning their name, and this is not experienced as a failure. It is the product being delivered as specified.
The suburb was built by people fleeing the village.
Not by villains. By people who wanted more, and who were right that the village could not give it to them. They did every single thing the framework told them to do. Get your own. Owe nobody. Stand on your own feet.
And it worked. That is what nobody says. It worked.
And they are lonely, and medicated, and sitting in beautiful rooms surrounded by things they chose, wondering why none of it registers.
Strip the branding off. What does independence actually describe? It describes a state in which you need no one.
There is a plainer sentence for that arrangement. I am alone, I chose it, I earn enough to keep the arrangement running, and I will call it freedom.
You cannot be close to a person you do not depend on. Dependence is the mechanism, not an unfortunate side effect of it.
The village is not owed your nostalgia. It is owed the observation that it knew something: that you need each other, that the capital is melting, and that spending it on each other is the only return anyone has ever actually collected.