[A Personal Essay on Poverty and the Insidiousness of “Mindset Coaching”]
There is a particular kind of advice that shows up in conversations about work, money, and exhaustion. It usually arrives gently, sometimes even with care behind it. “You’re tired because you have too many open loops.” “You should shift your mindset around money.” “You’re missing opportunities because of how you’re thinking about them.”
On the surface, it can sound reasonable. Even kind. As if someone is offering a key you just haven’t tried yet.
But I never quite know where to put it when I hear it, because it feels like it is speaking to a different version of reality than the one many people are actually living in.
Exhaustion is not just a mental pattern. It is physical. It is logistical. It is what it feels like to move through a day where every decision is shaped by cost before it is shaped by preference.
If rent takes most of a paycheck, if food is expensive enough that you plan meals like strategy, if education requires debt rather than access, then “opportunity” stops being something evenly distributed in the background. It becomes something filtered through survival first.
In that context, it is not that people “don’t see” opportunities. It is that many opportunities require conditions that simply are not available. Time. Money. Stability. Childcare. Energy that hasn’t already been spent before the day begins.
And I say this not as an outside observer.
I know poverty.
I grew up lower class. We lived in a middle-class neighborhood, but my parents and our family often struggled. I think the only reason we had that house was because my parents were able to save in the early years of their marriage—years that were not easy—and buy it outright. When harder times came, that mattered. It meant the bank couldn’t simply take it. There was at least one anchor in the middle of instability.
And even with that, there were seasons where everything felt tight. Where “security” was something held together, not something guaranteed.
Later, when I moved out at 25, I picked a cheaper area because it was what I could afford. It was not safe. It was not stable in the way people often assume life becomes once you are “grown.”
And I remember thinking, very plainly: if I thought harder, would that change the fact that my wage was $7.50 an hour as a preschool teacher?
If I reframed my mindset, would it change the fact that I was sometimes eating from food pantries while educating other people’s children?
There is something almost surreal about how easily those realities get flattened into motivational language. As if the missing piece was perspective rather than resources. As if exhaustion in that context is a thinking error rather than a predictable response to constraint.
I also remember something very specific: when I eventually started making ten dollars an hour, I lost my food assistance because I “made too much.” There was no gradual slope where stability replaced support. Just a cutoff line.
Later, when I tried to move forward and applied for grants through Tri-C for medical coding, I was told those grants were reserved for students who were struggling with very low income. At the time I was working reception at a dealership, making $13.50 an hour. Still not stable. Still not secure. Still making decisions with constant financial calculation in the background.
And I remember saying, very honestly, that when I was making around sixteen thousand a year as a preschool teacher, I was not thinking about “going back to school.” I was not in a place of planning or expanding. I was exhausted. Bone tired. Trying to survive the week in front of me.
That part often gets left out of how opportunity is discussed. It assumes that people in the hardest financial positions have the time, energy, and clarity to strategically plan their way out of them. But in reality, many people are simply trying to get through the day without everything collapsing at once.
I understand why “mindset” language is appealing. It offers control. It suggests that change is always internally available, even when external conditions are not.
But I have also seen what it feels like to be inside those conditions, and to be told—directly or indirectly—that the problem is not the cost of living, the wage, the workload, or the safety of the environment, but the way you are interpreting it.
And that is where it starts to feel misaligned with reality.
Because stress changes how people think. Not as a flaw, but as adaptation. When life is stretched thin, thinking becomes shorter-term because survival is immediate. That is not a mindset problem—it is a nervous system doing what it has to do to keep moving.
Add addiction into that picture, and it becomes even more layered. Substance use often grows in places where stress is chronic and support is limited. It is not separate from environment; it is shaped within it. And once it exists, it interacts with housing, work, health, and safety in ways that can deepen instability rather than simplify it.
Then there is the layer of enforcement and visibility—how some communities are supported, and others are monitored more heavily, where instability is met less with care and more with consequence. That difference matters in shaping outcomes, often far more than personal outlook ever could.
So when I hear “just change your mindset,” I understand the intention behind it. I really do. I understand wanting to believe that things are always internally adjustable, that there is always a lever within reach.
But I also think there is something important in not using that belief to erase what people are actually carrying.
Sometimes what looks like a mindset problem is a resource problem. Sometimes it is a safety problem. Sometimes it is simply the accumulated weight of trying to stay afloat in conditions that require more than they return.
And I think honesty about that does not remove hope—it makes it more accurate. More grounded. Less about pretending things are easier than they are, and more about seeing people clearly inside the realities they are already surviving.
There is a kind of compassion in that kind of seeing.
