Why Is Everyone Suddenly ‘So Poor Right Now?’

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A woman posts a righteous Tumblr selfie in 2018 with a caption detailing her plans that week: “I [sic] so poor right now. I’m going to the local fair tonight, then I’m going to see a perfect circle on Tuesday, and weekend after that I’m seeing my friends that are taking me to a shopping centre.”

A young college student tweets in May 2019 “college has me so poor right now.”

Days later, a gamer responds to a post announcing an upcoming release, asking “I have been waiting soooo long for this game! Can we get an idea on price, I’m poor right now, but I will find a way!”

“Poor right now” has subtly crept into our lexicon recently. But the phrase “poor right now” is an oxymoron, the “jumbo shrimp” of personal finance, and it’s helping to blur the line between chronic, systemic poverty and temporary discomfort. The expression, which seems to be particularly popular with young adults on social media, focuses on the idea of temporary poverty (which isn’t really a thing). You’ll be able to afford that game in a few weeks, just not right now! You spent a little more than you expected this paycheck, but you’ll be fine in time for hanging out with your friends at the mall next week! These things don’t fall under the traditional definition of “poor” at all. They’re aspects of “broke.” You’re not deciding which bill to let go past due so you can buy groceries. You’re just short on spending cash for a little bit.

Any linguist will tell you that language is a living thing that changes and grows to fit society’s needs to express itself. The mid-century “neato” became the 21st century’s “on fleek.” Filler phrases were dominated by “you know” in the 1980s, which has since been eclipsed by “like.” And “broke” has become “poor right now.” It’s a relatively new phrase—the earliest mention I found online is from a 2002 forum posting on Ford Mustangs—but it’s already international: it spans the globe in Spanish, French, Chinese, German – you get the idea.

So what exactly accounts for this current lexical love affair? I decided to contact Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics, because honestly I didn’t really know where to start so I figured I’d just start at the top. He pointed me in the direction of Deborah Tannen, one of the world’s most famous sociolinguists, university professor at Georgetown, and author of the bestselling book You Just Don’t Understand.

Dr. Tannen examined the phrase in terms of semantic inflation – how you might say “I’m starving” when you’re just hungry – and the harm such language could carry. “The danger is that it can erase the real meaning, the real problem, the real challenge of those for whom the word is literally true.” If you use poorness and poverty in place of broke or trying to save up for a big purchase, “you risk blinding yourself to what the world is really like for poor people.”

“People who were brought up middle class and confidently expected to always be middle class acquired a middle class sense of identity. Now a lot of people are having to readjust and question 'Who am I?'"

Many people who are or have lived in actual poverty have noticed the overuse of the phrase and hate it. That’s understandable—their lived hardship is being misused for a multitude of reasons: wealthy people attempting to normalize themselves, people who were raised outside of poverty struggling to adjust their current financial circumstances, young adults in the thick of Grind Culture who think there’s some sort of novelty in claiming poverty as emphasis. To top it all off, conflating poverty with being broke helps justify a lot of inaccurate, actively harmful talking points about how poor people deserve to be poor because they’re bad with money or how being poor is “just a state of mind.”

In March, Katie Smith wrote for The Guardian about friends who conflate “poor” with “broke” in a piece aptly titled “You’re not poor. You’re broke.” Smith deftly draws the line between poor and broke, noting that “real poverty is isolating. It’s living in fear of who will find out and how you will be judged. It’s worrying about whether social workers will take your kids.” Smith adds:

I often hear my friends say, “I’m too poor” when they’re frustrated about what they can’t have. Maybe it’s a trip they can’t afford, a renovation they want to start right now or a pretty pair of shoes they spotted in a shop window. I know they don’t mean to be hurtful. But when they talk about being “poor”, they’re not actually wondering where their next meal will come from, nor are they worried about the risk of homelessness, or about not being able to afford their child’s prescription medication.

Erynn Brook is a writer who last year talked about the moment she realized she had moved out of “poor” and into “broke” at the grocery store, an experience that resonated with a lot of people. I asked her what her response is when someone says “I’m poor right now.” Brook says this phrase is a particularly frustrating one to hear: “It’s a reminder that so many people have never experienced real poverty, real hunger, real insecurity, and at the same time, don’t ever think about those who do and how our language affects them.”

So if the phrase is so inaccurate, so blatantly oxymoronic, why are more of us using it – often without realizing it? Dr. Robin Lakoff, linguistic expert and professor emerita at University of California at Berkeley, notes that picking up “poor right now” indicates a growing question of identity: “People who were brought up middle class and confidently expected and were expected by their parents to always be middle class acquired a middle class sense of identity. Now a lot of people are having to readjust and question “Who am I?” a little differently. Are you a middle class person? A financially comfortable person? Or are you this other thing that you never expected to be?”

Senior woman's hands with coins
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That thing, of course, is poor. Not broke. Not poor right now. But straight up poor. The gig economy, flatlining wages and skyrocketing cost of living are putting more people in touch with what has typically been a generational, cyclical form of hardship. People who were raised outside of poverty are struggling to avoid falling into its grasp as they come into adulthood. “Poor right now” indicates a collective straddling of the line in a culture that fails to acknowledge the systemic forces that keep poor people below the line.

The actual term for this ebb and flow of income is transient poverty, where your income is dependent on a variety of factors. If you’re a farmer, you might experience transient poverty amid an unusually cold or dry season that produces fewer crops than you normally need to hit your baseline financial stability. Another apt descriptor might be a mall Santa’s income during the summer, or freelancers. But transient poverty is term that’s really only found among economists and analysts. You’re probably not going to tell someone “I can’t go to the movies this week, I’m living in transient poverty.” You’ll just tell them “I’m poor right now” because they’ll likely understand what poor means and note that “right now” signals “Don’t worry! It’s not that serious!”

The gig economy, flatlining wages and skyrocketing costs have shifted what's typically a generational form of hardship into a new arena altogether, where those who were raised outside of poverty are struggling to avoid falling into its grasp come adulthood.

Without adequate terminology to describe a situation that more of us are becoming familiar with, we reach for the words we already have and adjust them to suit our needs. That comes at the cost of people living in poverty having to fight an even bigger battle for their pain and struggle to be taken seriously. But, as Lakoff points out, “it's a sign that we've already started to think about being poor in a different kind of way, but we've already internalized those feelings.” It’s too late to stop people from thinking of poverty in the temporary. But if you're accustomed to feeling poor, maybe you’ll be more likely to identify and empathize with those who are actually poor. It’s a long shot, but becoming aware of the language we use and how we talk about things can have a big impact on our collective understanding of the varieties of lived experience.

“We minimize language,” Lakoff tells me. “But in fact, language really creates us, makes us who we are. When a new word starts moving over, acquiring new turf, it’s a signal that something is changing in society. Feelings and attributes come first and then the word conveniently arises.”

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