@RickiTarr : from my experience, poverty shrinks everything it touches. My life is smaller, my dreams are smaller, I even feel smaller. Maybe because I wasn't always poor (I grew up lower middle class) ? The only way to be "happy" in poverty (aka not in a state of permanent despair) is to stop doing, wanting, being. Cut off every part of you that costs money to make happy, like a diseased limb, just because the world would rather you were a mere human trunk than to do better by you.