What is poverty?

As I've been digging into many aspects of life and have become awakened to so much I've realized l have so much more to learn. I would love to get many perspectives on words that I wrestle with, today is "poverty."

Before I started on this crypto journey I thought I knew what poverty was, I always envisioned people in a 3rd world country struggling to make ends meat or a homeless person asking for change at a stop light etc, you know the typical vision I would think most have when they think of the term poverty.

Over the course of the past few months my thoughts have expanded on the meaning, I have realized that its not just about the lack of resources, it is a mindset. So I dug up the definition of poverty to explore more:

pov·er·ty
ˈpävərdē/Submit
noun

1.) the state of being extremely poor.

"thousands of families are living in abject poverty"
synonyms: penury, destitution, pauperism, pauperdom, beggary, indigence, pennilessness, impoverishment, neediness, need, hardship, impecuniousness
"abject poverty"

2.) the state of being inferior in quality or insufficient in amount.

"the poverty of her imagination"
synonyms: scarcity, deficiency, dearth, shortage, paucity, insufficiency, absence, lack
"the poverty of choice"
inferiority, mediocrity, poorness, sterility
"the poverty of her imagination"

I would like to talk more about the second definition, this is an interesting way to put poverty if you think about. But then it all made so much sense to me as we were in NY a couple weeks ago. Some of the most "well off" people I've met are in poverty, its not about how much money or resources you have... its about having purpose, having hope and dignity in what we're doing in our life. We've all heard about the recent suicides of famous people who we thought "have everything", but something was missing in their lives and people start to talk about depression, etc which plays a role but we need to dive into the root cause of these issues, the 5 whys.

One of the synonyms sticks out to me as well, scarcity. We live in a world that is enslaving us into debt, sucking away hope and dignity with the perception of the scarcity of resources. We as a community need to change this perception and provide hope into the world as efficient and effective as we possibly can and blockchain technology is the tool to do this and change the perception from scarcity to ABUNDANCE!

So what does poverty mean to you?

What do you do when you start to feel impoverished?

Thanks for any feedback, love learning from you all!

http://juniorleagueofasheville.org/projects/poverty-awareness/