Our Car Got Stolen: A Video Essay

Our car was stolen! Well, it's more complicated than that. But, yes, our car was stolen. And anyway, this isn't the first time that that's happened to me. It's just that last time was a lot more traumatizing. Well, we'll be careful about that. It's actually more complicated, basically. Have you ever wondered how there's a big difference in how we're affected by life altering events? Dare I say, traumatizing events, when living in poverty? Well, this Christmas, our car was stolen while we were a

way on holiday together. And it's a wild story which we thought we would use as an opportunity to talk about what happens to your mind and heart when you experience difficult, life altering events. Specifically when you're poor. I promise it's a very funny story. And also, it's horrible. Although actually, it's more complicated than that. Content warning: suicidal ideation, squeamish medical symptoms. And, well, poverty, trauma. We're going to tell you this story because we can't quite believe

the things that happened to us. It's hard to make sense of them, especially given the levels of comical absurdity of just how many things went wrong. Coming up: a trip across the planet, jetlag, food poisoning, lost luggage, stolen car, no way home, hold music, lies from customer care, freezing cold, plock twist, diarrhea, all cops are bastards, and more! But it is important to understand that in terms of our car, this little car that got taken away, it was just a cheap and cheerful third-hand

little manual transmission commuter gal. Nothing special or expensive. But we loved her and we were deeply, deeply dependent on her living as we do in the west of Ireland, where public transport doesn't. What if something is taken away that you can't replace? What if you can't even afford insurance? In short, how do you exist costing money if you don't have the money that you cost to exist? And the most important question to ponder of all of them, while you're watching however many minutes of th

is video, what is poverty anyway? (Ringing sound) Your call will be answered as quickly as possible to enable us to deal with your claim promptly. Please have your policy or claim number ready (Hold music plays: the sound so badly mixed that the volume keeps fluctuating and it loops in a strange place. It is piercing and unpleasant) (Neil improvising guitar along with the hold music) (Singing): Menninga, ma ning ning ga Please continue to hold and the next available agent will take your call. (S

arcastically): No problem. (Ringing) About 20 hours, I'd say. That's my estimate for how much time we spent on customer care trying to get all of the horrible things sorted out. 20 hours of our lives. And, if that's like an average of about half an hour of hold time per call with about 30 calls, then But who's counting!? And anyway, that's just a measly complaint in the greater context of suffering in this horrible, horrible world waiting on hold while insipid, meaningless chord movements play

on a piano that's been bit crushed in all the wrong ways is but petite petty potatos in comparison to homelessness or death, right? Fantastic. Now we can all feel really guilty about ever being annoyed by anything! Thanks Neill! (sound of keyboard clicking “pause”) Do you though? Do you ever feel guilty or anxious for existing specifically when your life is going well? Just by virtue of times being good and safe and happy and you existing. You start to feel really negative things. I know I do. A

nd it's important for the story, this is a story about our car being stolen, we went on holiday on an airplane and our car got stolen, that's what this is. But it's important to set the stage for my mindset at the time, because this is also a story about anxiety and guilt. Sarah: Yeah, so, so Neil and I both had this sense, but we didn't we hadn't talked about this, I didn't know this until things went wrong and we were like parsing it afterwards, but I had kind of had this sense the whole trip

of like someone like me shouldn't be able to take a vacation like this. Someone like me should not be able to fly the whole family to California. But then we did it and it had gone okay. We had, like, ended the trip and the kids were happy and my family was happy and Neil was happy and I was happy. S: And it was like N: Sort of surreal that way. S: It was like: did we just pull this off? N: Yeah S: Did we just pull this off? Owen: So it felt like kind of like a successful heist as you guys like

-- (Neil laughs) S: Yeah! So if, like me, you've lived a life with a lot of poverty and disaster, then, when there are periods of less poverty and less disaster, it can leave you feeling sort of odd as if you're ignoring something big and dangerous back here, which would not be unlike me. I've ignored all sorts of dangerous things. Real things like debts, overdue bills, letters to appear in court, things to do with my health, even just keeping in touch with people. Maybe you recognize yourself

in some of that? If you do comment below a week from now with an apology for the delay. Anyway, it all adds up to this sort of general, future averse, fear filled mindset. Something bad is going to happen and it's all my fault. Do you know that feeling.? Let's call it. Let’s call it..... DREAD Because that's how I felt when Sarah and I packed up our enormous purple suitcases, to go on holiday together with the kids. And we got up bright and early on a crisp St Stephen's Day morning and we drov

e our little car to BLEEP car park, caught our bus to the airport and got on a plane to Hollywood! (Upbeat Hollywood Music) Neil and Sarah in sunny California! Vegan nachos! Celebrities! This picture of Tony Hawk Los Angeles! Bubba Gumps! We didn't actually go to Bubba Gumps. The La Brea Tar Pits! A real, no-fooling, actual comic book store Captain America signed by Ta-Nehisi Coates. But really the actual valuable stuff: Christmas with Sarah, Ringing in the New Year making fun of Ryan Seacrest

with Sarah's sharp witted dad and mum, the kids adopting Sarah's sister as their new favorite, most iconic person. Just family stuff, you know? Love Watching Dharr Man together and laughing until we couldn't breathe (Probably underpaid youtube actor): So you see (Straight faced): I love Dhar mann. It was a proper family holiday, visiting Sarah's folks where they live for the first time ever, actually. And so when it came time to leave, we didn't want to. Of course we didn't. But what are you go

ing to do, Just live in the moment? Never. So we had to go home. And as before, we packed up our enormous purple suitcases (music chimes) and made our way to the airport. We checked in our bags, went through security. I was in high spirits, actually. S: So literally we get to the airport and I made us go there early because I'm like: this could be the place it all falls apart. But no, like, security was fine, but we weren't there too early. And so I was like, well, I want to I want a drink befor

e the flight. N: Yeah. Huckleberry (off camera): Meow! And I got a cocktail and it was great and Neilly got a drink that they liked. And the kids looked at the menu and they're like: There's stuff here we like, which normally doesn't happen. And so the youngest ordered something and wasn't vegan and Neilly doesn't like to waste food so... Brief aside to add to my guilt, the meal I finished for my youngest was not vegan. Unfortunately, it was also really not safe for human consumption. But the fl

ight started out great. I had my little bag of comic books to read. I read signed things, I don’t give a fuck. Comics are for reading. But I fell asleep before I could actually read anything. And when I woke up, there was only an hour left in the flight, which was a miracle. Like that never happens. And Sarah woke up next to me, apparently having also fast travel the same way. Yeah, like we were tired and I was maybe a little airsick, but the prospect of home was palpable and oh it had never bee

n more inviting. The air sickness got worse. I tried to sleep through it, but my head was spinning, my stomach was churning with increasing inevitability. I realized that it was coming. I was going to be living through one of those nightmares I'd only ever witnessed from afar before I was going to throw up on an airplane Sarah started to collect air sickness bags from the people around us. And the fasten seatbelt sign meant that I had to stay in my seat because we were already in that 40 minute

landing procedure. And that also meant that as we were descending, we were buffeted by turbulence. So I was pitched up and pitched down and tossed around. So my stomach started to churn more and to contract and my cheeks got warmer GLUG SOUND Now I'm back here warm and safe. Don't worry, things did turn out fine. Eventually. But bear in mind, our youngest had also eaten the same thing, so they were about to get just as sick, worse actually, than me. Thankfully, at this point they were still asle

ep, but they would be joining me in my misery very soon. The plane landed, by which time I couldn't even see straight and I ended up with a collection of about five or six air sickness bags, all quite full. I don’t know why they make air sickness bags so small? And in the airline industry, the regulations are now that the passenger has to leave the bags around the seat and they have to be collected and disposed of properly because they're biohazard. But unfortunately, my comic books in their lit

tle bag was buried underneath all that biohazard. I didn't even get to read them. And then we got to the airport and things got worse. But before we get to that, let's talk about antici---- So there's a psychologist and economist whose work is very relevant to anticipation, and he's actually Sigmund Freud's great grandson. But we won't hold that against him. Oh, no: continuity!? Because he really lays down the groundwork for how we're going to conceptualize dread. And his name is Lowenstein. Low

enstein. Marge: Lowenstein Lowenstein: My name is Zweig. Marge: Lowenstein. Lowenstein --pation Lowenstein tried to answer an apparent anomaly in our data. There's a general rule, and that's that people, that's us, we’re people, prefer positive stuff in the present to positive stuff in the future. And we prefer to delay negative stuff, preferably forever. The rule is actually that we are willing to pay more for a sooner experience and pay more to delay for longer a negative experience. This is

an economic concept called time discounting, where the value we ascribe something tends to diminish into the future, just as it tends to grow in value closer to now. Which also means that if I offered you $100 today, but $120 in a month, you might choose less money now because it's simply more valuable to you in your subjective experience. If that sum in a month was actually $1,000, maybe you would change your mind. But if that thousand dollars was in five years instead of a month, maybe you mi

ght change your mind back again. There's what's called a point of indifference, in fact, at which time the value of more and the value of now flip. And while it tends to follow some statistical rules, it's also different for different individuals based on their experience of class level, poverty, trust and other factors. What Lowenstein attempted to address was all the cases where this positive discounting of time are not true. In the examples he used, gaining and losing money in the future and

present were contrasted with other positive and negative experiences, namely a kiss from a celebrity you're crushing on, and an electric shock to the hand. Because, of course, would it even be science if we weren't electrocuting people? And the thing is, he found that what people were willing to pay was actually not consistent, not with some universal rule of valuing present gratification and forestalling pain. From Loweinstein’s 1987 paper: (Read by Ponderful): It can be seen that the two non-m

onitary items the kiss and the shock, both exhibit unusual patterns of devaluation. Subjects on average were willing to pay more to experience a kiss delayed by three days than an immediate kiss or one delayed by 3 hours or one day. Likewise, discounted utility theory asserts that people prefer to delay undesirable outcomes whenever possible. The shock contrasts sharply with this prediction. Subjects were, on average, willing to pay slightly more to avoid a shock that was delayed for three hours

to three days than to avoid an immediate shock. They were willing to pay substantially more to avoid a shock delayed by one or ten years. So in some cases we will pay more for the experience of anticipation itself and in other cases, we’ll pay more not to have to experience anticipation to get something over with. We will pay more to avoid dread. Yes, the broader framework of time discounting still holds in a lot of cases, particularly with money. People are strongly motivated by the immediate

experience of pleasure or pain, and this can make our decisions irrational, or at least not very arithmetically calculated. This is why people struggle to save for retirement. Momentary pleasure means that we can spend funds that we had planned to save. But dread is complicated. Sometimes, as a result of anxiety, we hold ourselves back from spending even if spending was the long term plan. On that example of retirement, Loewenstein proposes that dread might have a role to play in the tendency of

retirees to ramp up their savings rather than indulge themselves in the joy of retirement. (Read by That Dang Dad) Retirement for the young is a non vivid event, perhaps partly because thinking about old age is aversive and tends to be avoided. Young middle aged couples and individuals, possibly for this reason, often live like there's no tomorrow. As retirement approaches, however the prospect of having inadequate funds for retirement becomes increasingly vivid and causes anxiety, anxiety that

can be allayed in part by stepping up savings. Tthe onset of retirement itself and the sudden loss of wage income, of course, greatly increases this anxiety for the future. This anxiety raises the returns, in terms of anxiety reduction, of saving and counteracts the savings discouraging effect of the loss of income upon retirement. Underscoring all of this is the anticipation of future events and how that anticipation is in itself an experience that we might want to mitigate or savor. This is c

onsistent with other older conceptions of pleasure and suffering. Like, for example, Jeremy Bentham's Utilitarianism Bentham stressed the role of proximity, what he called propinquity, to pain and to pleasure as a factor to be taken into account in idealized moral action. If you're trying to figure out the right and wrong thing to do, you can't just think of future pain and future pleasure. You have to think about the anticipation of pleasure as its own mode of pleasure and the anticipation of s

uffering, namely dread, as its own mode of pain. Well, that might have been revolutionary in 1800, but it's some other year now and maybe to you it's not particularly groundbreaking analysis. But please bear in mind that I'm concerned here with idealizing my relationship with dread. I'm trying to figure out how to stop worrying and love worrying in the context of poverty and in the context of other intersections of identity and how they interact with dread or trauma. Although we should be carefu

l about how we use that word trauma, as you will see later. But again, using myself as an example, I'm autistic and nonbinary, and an Aries, so there's a lot of complicated anticipation of suffering by virtue of existing as a social being with these particular intersections. One's future is statistically shaped by their class, by their sexuality, gender, race, immigrant status, and so on. And of course there are worse forms of long term anticipatory suffering, especially for people living under

occupation, or generally for people in adverse conditions who have no representation, no agency, are victims of violence, or abuse, and so on. So if I were, which I am, hello, Making a good faith effort to separate the idea of irrational dread from rational decision making outside of the context of normativity, a good place to start would be getting a handle on those concepts. Slight spoiler. Part of the point of this video is that when the terrible things happen to me, like the car being stolen

and so forth, I surprised myself with how well I coped. And this is in stark contrast to past experiences of not coping when the bad things happened and me ending up in some very dark places indeed. I am interested in the psychological differences there because one of the prevailing wisdoms I think, is that I have grown or matured or learned something and now I'm better, which: No! No I'm not. I'm not better. I think other things have happened and I think it would be a mistake to ascribe those

coping resources to my character. I have a theory that actually the predominant difference is a material one, that I'm in a better financial place, and I want to see that theory through with you. So Lowenstein and collaborators develop this concept which delves more into behavioral psychology called affective forecasting. Basically the study of people's ability to predict their emotional affect in the future. It's an attempt to tackle how people think they will feel about things, given certain f

uture events, how long they think those feelings will last, and how intense they think those feelings will be. Crucially, affective forecasting is about how wrong people are about all of those things and the sorts of decisions they make based on those future emotions that they predict and are very wrong about. One of the most consistent findings is that we tend to be better at predicting positive future feelings and worse at predicting negative future feelings. The experimental data shows that w

e tend to overestimate how impacted we’ll be by negative events, and we tend to overestimate the duration of that impact. The term of art for that phenomenon is impact bias. We also tend to be qualitatively off the mark. For example, women who were asked how they might expect to feel following sexual harassment in the workplace will more reliably predict feelings of anger. But they'll less reliably predict feelings of fear. All of which is very interesting. But the thing that stood out for me fo

r our purposes is how all of this relates to our psychological immune system. Now, the psychological immune system is basically a set of psychological responses that help to mitigate the pain and stress of our experiences in a way that's analogous to the actual immune system. It came up in our last video because it seemed to play a part in people moving on from committing harm prematurely in a process termed pseudo self forgiveness. That might give you an indication of the sorts of cognitive mec

hanisms we're talking about here. It seems to be the case that psychological immunity is a process of sense making to ameliorate negative emotional affect. And the interesting thing about sense making is that it doesn't always make sense! Hang on, you coming? Is it Manchego snuggle time? This is a very big decision. Sit awkwardly on my foot Bomp. Nope, no bomp! Semi-bomp. So in the case of pseudo self forgiveness, we might tell ourselves these rationalising and minimising stories after we've don

e harm. Like: ‘it wasn't that bad’ and ‘I didn't mean it,’ and ‘what's done is done’ that can be maladaptive that can be a real problem when we actually should learn and change as a consequence of our actions. But in terms of making sense of the events of our lives in general, things that have happened to us for no good reason, where there isn't really a Darmann moral, ‘So you see,’ to internalize, then sense making can essentially just dull the positive and negative feelings that come from lif

e events. And that dulling effect is generally something that we don't take into account when predicting how impacted we’ll be by those things in the future. We dread the negative more than is realistic because we don't have an accurate measure of our own immunity to adversity and we expect things to feel more beautifully ecstatic than they are because we don't have an accurate measure of our immunity to ecstasy. From their paper on affective forecasting in 2003, authors Gilbert and Wilson use t

he example of getting a raise which people expect to make them ecstatic for years, and it doesn't. (Read by Swolsome) Immediately after having the request approved, the employee may be thrilled, but with time the employees make sense of the situation. For example, I'm a very hard worker and my boss must have noticed this, thus dampening the emotional reaction. This is bolstered by studies of uncertainty. For example, we know that receiving a gift for no reason is consistently found to be more e

motionally impactful and the impact more long lasting than when the gift is for an occasion or an accomplishment or some other making sense reason. So the psychological impact of our experiences, both positive and negative, is dampened by narrative. And it is not unreasonable to surmise that when dread is uncoupled from narrative, when dread doesn't make sense, dread becomes a different beast. And if we hold that concept for a moment, can we ask what are the factors that make the world make sens

e? For whom does effect more consistently and predictably follow cause? Aren’t things like law and order, the social contract, amenities, communities, places to go, things to do, national identity, pride in your work, a sense of belonging, all things that can be disrupted by disadvantage and gate kept by privilege? The experience of existing in modern life, making sense or not, is a class issue, is it not? So could dread of oblivion, of the unpredictable, the unjustifiable, the injustice, the un

fair, and the non-narrativisable be more the experience of the poor than of the privileged? And with all of the terrible things that I'm about to experience in the story and my surprise at myself at how well I cope, in fact, all of the family’s surprise at how well we coped, could that be, in part, because the world we've constructed for ourselves is generally more ordered now and generally makes more sense day to day? Well, let's just leave those questions in the background for a second because

we just managed to get off the plane and we're stumbling towards baggage reclaim and everything got even worse when our youngest started to throw up. So we're getting off the plane and our youngest is mumbling with increasing distress about pain in tummy and needing to throw up. S: And so I'm like: well, let's just get through the baggage claim and Neil’s like ‘I'm not going to make it to baggage claim.’ And then the littlest one’s, like, I need a bathroom right now. And we stop at the first se

t of toilets at the gate, rush inside, horrible evacuation of inwards in all directions. And between the two of us, we spend about 40 minutes there. I go in with the littlest one who is like even at 13, expressing their own dread and guilt and anxiety, saying things like, I feel like I'm going to die. I feel like the world is ending. Or most heartbreakingly on theme of all, I feel like I'm being punished, but I don't know what I did wrong. And then Neil’s in the other toilet, very sick, and the

older one’s just kind of sitting there, not sure what to do with herself, like (impression): uhhh Neil: With the, with the on flight bags, almost humorously texting her mother. You're not going to believe what happened at the airport. Wait until fucking later. Now remember their mother, my ex has just spent two weeks around Christmas time separated from her babies, her teenage, almost adult precious little babies. And this is the first she's hearing from us since we left for the airport in Los A

ngeles about 14 hours earlier. And while mother and daughter are doing very well to exchange comically exasperated voice notes, they're already both holding back tears. And another point of note, which my eldest would inform me of later, is that she had been experiencing dread too. She had expected bad things to happen on the trip or as a result of the trip or both, and she had played out in her mind all of the things that might have gone wrong. Surprisingly of all of us, my eldest was the only

one who accurately predicted a particular disaster because, because we spent 40 minutes in the toilets at the gate before the passport checks, in the baggage claim and all that stuff. Everyone else from the plane was already way ahead of us, including a lady with a big purple suitcase with a green ribbon on it. You remember how we had a big, enormous purple suitcase with a red ribbon on it? (Electronically) Dun dun DUN She took our fucking suitcase. Owen: Oh, my God. And so I'm looking at it bei

ng like, alright, well, whose bag did we lose? And it's the oldest one's suitcase. S: Who, like- N: The only one nothing really that bad had happened to. O: Yeah So while the youngest and I are puking in the facilities in the baggage hall, Sarah is registering missing luggage with the airline, who, they know who has our bag, but they can't contact her. Probably because she still has her phone off or whatever. And also Sarah now has to comfort the eldest kid whose whole wardrobe and world, and

a bunch of gifts, are in that suitcase. And we still thought we had a car S: I go back over, I tell the oldest one like, look, you don't have your stuff now, but you will in the next day or two. And she's like, I just want my mom to come pick me up. And I'm like: ‘no, we're just going to drive home.’ N: So it's dark, it's cold. We're still in our California clothes and now we're in Ireland. And I can't see the two sick people doing particularly well on the bus journey. So we use the very last o

f our budget in special circumstances to get a taxi from the airport to the BLEEP carpark. It's going to be really expensive, but we're going to go straight to the car. We're just going to get right into the car and then I'm just going to drive us straight home. This is this is going to be so easy. Spoiler warning (garbled and terrifying): IT WASN’T EASY I'm sure you've been sick before in a situation where you couldn't actually throw up, but have you ever been stuck in traffic on the M50 with o

verwhelming nausea and gut twisting food poisoning, trying desperately not to puke while the friendliest Ukrainian man in the universe wants to talk to you about literally all things. Because I have! He just wanted to know everything about the economics of Los Angeles, and like He was winding us through on ramps and off ramps and changing lanes. And all the while he was unflappable. Never have I seen one man carry so much of a conversation so effortlessly and with such cheerful determination. I

wanted to kill him. But eventually our taxi journey drew to an end. Alexander fucking Alexander, really lovely guy. Circled BEEP car park still so cheerfully determined, but now determined to find our car for us. And in the end, I had to tell him: Stop talking and driving the car! Let us out! And presumably we were just going to find the car. I'm at one corner of the car park, like just N: just dry retching into the air, O: Holy shit N: Just like openly, like AHHHHHHGH Sarah was dashing about in

random parts of the car park searching for the car. And our eldest was clutching luggage, not hers, as she wept quietly but audibly in the darkness and sent voice notes with her mum that were considerably less funny. Now, I will say Sarah is not good at finding things. The cluster of ADHD symptoms and a poor mind's eye and whatever else makes up her wonderful, strange, idiosyncratic mind means that frequently, if I'm picking her up from somewhere, I have to stand in front of her and wave and sh

out, Remember me? I'm Neil. We're married. And she'll go: Oh! Did you change your hair? S: I just thought I couldn't find it. N: Yeah I'm like, I was being useless. O: I would say you should tie a ribbon on it, O: but I guess that doesn’t even work. S: That doesn’t even fucking work! So I noticed her anxiously walking in circles around the car park and not, you know, producing a car. So I steeled myself to push through the nausea and join her in the search. And I couldn't find the car either. An

d we did two, maybe three laps. Sarah started checking the registration plates of the cars because she knows our reg and the carpark was virtually empty, possibly not a good sign that it was such an unpopular car park in hindsight, and eventually it seemed like the worst thing yet was just true. S: And I almost said it like not thinking was true because I tend to catastrophize. So I say to Neil in my way of trying to make myself feel better as I'm catastrophizing, the car might have gotten stol

en. And Neil goes, ‘yeah, I think it was.’ The car had been stolen. The car was gone. The bad thing had happened. We gathered together to make the best plan that we could. The eldest kid, teary and overwhelmed, yes, but not so easily twarted, was onto her mum without even being prompted, and she'd actually stopped herself from sending a voice note because we were still sure we could figure out something. And then when she finally did, it wasn't the like cheerful like, Oh, you're not going to bel

ieve this has gone wrong and this has gone wrong. It was just indecipherable, weeping and going like: The car is gone and everyone is vomiting and they, I’m really cold, and I don't know what to do. And so her mum is just on the other end of the phone going like, okay, I can't quite make out. Did you say the car was stolen? To the inestimable credit of her mother, she immediately swung into action and jumped in her car. But she's all the way over in Doxtown County Lib on the other side of the co

untry. So we've got to make some kind of the best of it in the meantime. So we painfully drag ourselves, which makes it sound more comfortable than it was, with our incomplete but very much overwhelming baggage to the nearest hotel. And the little one is still carrying a black plastic bin bag from Dublin Airport, theoretically for throwing up into, but there was nothing left to come out of them. So just AHHGH, just more alpaca sounds S: shaking, shivering N: in the fuzzy oodie and just with the

like, trashbag It just is such a sad image. Unfortunately, the nearest hotel was closed to house refugees. S: They're sick. I just want to let them use the bathroom. He's like, You can't stay here. This isn't this isn't a hotel. And I'm like, but it is, it looks like, it is a hotel! And he's like, no, Which Google didn't tell us and Sarah and our youngest just stand outside with disbelief. And we have to find some resilience somewhere. So we turned around and went in the opposite direction brie

fly, getting lost, cold, dark, sick, slowly, arduously, tearfully vomitously, hobbling on the footpath by the roaring M7 motorway, just the most pristine, beautiful part of Dublin, with the promise of Joel's bar and restaurant at the end. I've the memory burned into me of the four of us spread out on that narrow footpath, words gone only one foot in front of the other, the luggage continuously flipping over on its wheels and catching the eldest Sarah, struggling with more bags than the rest of u

s, and the youngest way off ahead, stopping periodically to just convulse with their little face in the black bag. But eventually we stumbled through the gleaming and suddenly resplendent entrance of Joel's restaurant, a real vibe change, greeted by a very well-groomed and justifiably baffled barman and I felt like Beetlejuice, just like running my hands over my hair and lips, just in case charm and presentation might have been the cost of entry. And I was like, Hello, We would like some drinks,

please. And then there's a horrible moment of hesitation. Oh yeah, of course. Go sit down. And we have a seat. A warm, cozy little corner just for us. Some little fizzy drinks, more toilet trips, some Pepto-Bismol from America. You can't get it here. And we all think: why the fuck didn't we think of this earlier? And it really helps. 2 hours later, the kids mother and stepfather arrive. They are legendary in leaping into action and taking care of everyone. They brought the big car, they stack u

p the luggage. They volunteer to take Sarah and I back. They even brought blankets. And by that point we've warmed and cheered and recovered a little. So the journey, most of which I spent asleep, frankly, was filled with the youngest, miraculously healed by Pepto and keen to bring the joy and have the joy and be the joy telling everyone stories from the trip and just being a fuckin trooper. And their mother, my ex, turns around to me and says: So how many cars is that now, Neil, that you've had

stolen on you? And I go, Oh, sure, I've had an interesting life. This is just one of those things, isn't it? It's just a regular amount of misfortune, isn't it? And everyone's looking at me like (whispered): is it? No, it's just a normal amount of disaster. An acceptable level of misfortune, isn't it? S: Before we started this channel, Neil was a comedian and I was a researcher. When we met and were falling in love, Neil was able to tell me about the years they spent in their band, about their

one person show, about the book they were writing, and I told them about the studies I had run. So it makes sense that after everything that happened to us with the car, Neil wanted to write it all down and turn it into something funny to share with you and make you all laugh. But while their coping skill is to make art, mine is to do research. I haven't studied poverty, but I was lucky that I got to jump around a lot in my research. So if you want to talk about implicit racial bias or early chi

ldhood educational methods or PTSD, then I can talk off the cuff at length. But while that intersects with poverty, while I always had to account for income in my statistical analysis, the field itself is way too big for me to summarize in one essay. Take, for example, the definition of poverty. We could go with what is called objective absolute poverty. That's when you fall under some specific income threshold. Or we can look at poverty as a class marker, generational poverty, factoring in thin

gs like neighborhood conditions, or parental educational achievement. But I'm particularly interested in subjective poverty, which is the perception that one does not have enough to meet their needs and take that in good faith. I'm not referring to a paranoid rich person, but this could, for example, include somebody who on paper has a decent income but may also have high rent, crippling student loan payments, a large family on that single income or crushing medical debt. Subjective poverty also

gets referred to as scarcity. I don't know, finding out that there's a term for that did me some good, frankly. I grew up in an upper middle class household and there's an aspect of feeling like a pretender when I use the word poverty for myself, even though I do fall under that definition using the objective absolute threshold set by the Irish government, recognizing that I am dealing with scarcity somehow fits better and it helps me understand why my situation now being under the poverty line

doesn't feel so different from periods where I've had jobs that have paid me a lot more. But I've had pretty much all of that income earmarked to go straight to exploitative landlords and high student loan payments. So how do people act when they perceive themselves as having less than they need to make ends meet? There seem to be some cognitive factors that kick into gear when people are experiencing scarcity. Tunneling, for example, is a psychological state we enter in stressful conditions wh

ere we're incredibly focused on one thing, but that focus can lead us to neglect tons of other things in the periphery. In the scarcity context, this might mean that you are really good about allocating the resources you have for food and rent and heat, but then you completely neglect aspects of money management like irregular bills, or you overfocus on current financial situations while completely neglecting your long term planning. A lot of the experimental studies for tunneling use different

things as a proxy for money. People with fewer possible turns in a video game versus people with more. The people with fewer turns tend to play more efficiently, but they seem to neglect planning for their future turns relative to the group that has more turns, that sort of thing. But some exist in the real world too. Poor people who rarely or never take taxes are more likely to know the cost of a taxi ride than the wealthy people who routinely use them. For example, low income people often find

that the cost of everyday living arises spontaneously in their minds, and it's hard to suppress even when it's stressful. There's also some evidence of the things that people in poverty neglect. In a study of restaurant menus using eye tracking devices, participants under scarcity spent more time looking at item prices than the controls. But they seemed to neglect other aspects of the menu, such as descriptions of the food, something controls focus more on, and they also were more likely to mis

s a discount listed on the bottom of the menu, which the controls were more likely to spot. This is the sort of trap that people can fall into when they’re tunneling. Cognitive load is impacted too. Essentially, this refers to the capacity we have to undertake a task to engage our cognitive processes, to use things like our working memory or our executive control. No matter how clever we may be, our human brains have limited capacity. The more strain we put ourselves under, the less capable we a

re at any given time. And it turns out that scarcity is one such strain, an unrelenting drain on our capacity. So while people living under scarce conditions have to make high decisions about allocating their resources, they are using their cognitive resources up, meaning they have a decreased capacity in other areas. Consequently, according to one paper, poor people like us (Read by Talis the Introvert): use less preventative health care, fail to adhere to drug regimens, are tardier and less li

kely to keep appointments, are less productive workers, less attentive parents, and worse managers of their finances. Pair that with tunneling, and some researchers think we're in a self-perpetuating cycle where increased risk aversion and temporal discounting mean that we're more likely to take out loans with really high interest rates or neglect to save for retirement. Or we're likelier or to ignore health concerns until they're at crisis point. Essentially, the constant stress of being in pov

erty might mean we're more likely to make stupid financial decisions. And, yeah, there seems to be good research, both experimental and observational, that robustly supports that claim. But if you're like me, you'll get a little bit of a sick feeling in your stomach reading some of these studies, because it seems like what they're saying is that being poor is kind of our fault. Just a matter of stressors and poor coping skills rather than, I don't know, the fault of a system that requires a cert

ain number of people to be losers in order for others to win. So much as I find the scarcity literature interesting, it's a mistake to examine scarcity without context because poverty exists within cultural context. And while these thought processes do seem to exist, the papers on the topic feel really incomplete. Without integrating a sociological examination of poverty. We put the term poverty trauma in our content warning. I want to stop and make clear that I'm using that colloquially and not

referring to a term of art. I may not be so familiar with the scientific study of poverty, but I do have a lot of familiarity with PTSD and without completely info dumping on you about the thing that used to be a focal point of my research, I'll just say that the way the general public talks about trauma really diverges from the psychological definition. That definition requires that a traumatic event be an event that has a beginning and ending point and requires it to have a real risk to someo

ne's life or bodily integrity. Think about specific time bound phenomena like a bomb explodes or a person goes into labor or someone is sexually assaulted. A lot of the things people in the discourse talk about as traumatic don't actually fit that definition. So there's this big debate about whether our definition is too narrow and things like generational trauma should be understood as trauma, the way a bomb exploding is trauma, or whether that kind of trauma is a completely different phenomena

. So I’ll be careful about my language. I won't say that poverty is potentially traumatizing because that wouldn't fit the term as it's currently defined. But I will say that there seems to be genuine evidence that people who have experienced resource scarcity seem to be changed by that scarcity in a negative and pervasive way. In a 2020 economics paper, researchers found that people who had previously experienced scarcity felt themselves significantly more financially fragile than the general p

opulation. They saw themselves as having a greater financial burden and being less safe, even though the period of scarcity was time bound and had passed. The same paper found that this effect could be moderated by the strength of a country's welfare system, meaning the effect was stronger in countries with weaker welfare systems. Though as an immigrant, I always want to add a caveat to that data because I've lived in many countries which are considered to have generous welfare systems and I've

been barred from accessing any of them by the terms of my visas. Someday I will make a video debunking all of the absurd lies fearmongers spread about immigrants taking public services. Because even now, if Neil and I’s income falls below a certain level, I'm going to lose the right to live where I do. But anyway, exceptions like immigrants aside, the paper doesn't examine the psychological profile of those people who have experienced scarcity. It just provides strong evidence that something cha

nges once you have. But if we swing to the psychological literature, we can see other implications of the long term effects of scarcity. One in particular I found interesting is disordered eating behavior in those who have experienced famine. When people begin to starve, they become lethargic, depressed and obsessed with thoughts of food. But when they recover, they don't seem to go back to their pre starvation consumption habits. People interred in prisoner of war camps where they had limited f

ood have been shown to engage in binge eating when they return home at significant levels, relative to controls. Some people seem to go the other way practicing food restrictions even after returning to non famine states in order to maintain a large store of food. Having one's cake rather than eating it. Holocaust survivors long into old age reported stockpiling food or purposefully buying and keeping food that they didn't like and wouldn’t voluntarily eat so that it was available in the future

should they need it. And two neurotransmitters, galanin and serotonin, seem permanently altered in people have recovered from periods of starvation in what one researcher called a neurological scar. The literature I was able to find seems to be limited to either animal studies or severe events like forced imprisonment. But honestly, I wonder if we'd find this on a smaller scale in people who have lived through less sensational periods of food scarcity. Some evolutionary psychologists speculate s

o, that having experienced periods of reduced food sets off an evolutionary switch within us. Once we've experienced deprivation, we go the rest of our lives doing everything possible to avoid it again, even if that means saving food for later when we're hungry right now. (Sigh) And this is just me speaking now, but when the rent is non-negotiable and you've already started sleeping in a winter hat and your sleeping bag to avoid turning on the heat and you can't access help through government su

pports, then the only thing within your control, the only thing left to cut is food. And I've been there Skipping meals or praising myself for eating half of what I should have because it means that I can stretch what I had to last longer and go longer without spending money. And while I've been lucky enough for it not to turn disordered eating, I personally feel like I've completely fucked up my sense of when I’m full or hungry. And I have to remind myself that I'm not doing myself any good by

putting off eating or by hoarding my little tins of beans for later if I'm hungry right now. Because right now thank God I'm able to afford food. But I do feel permanently changed by the periods of scarcity, maybe what laypeople would call traumatized. And one of my biggest fears is being in that position again. And I can't be alone in that That sense that it's lurking around the corner, that if I'm feeling too comfortable, it means I'm neglecting something serious and important and it's going

to happen again. That I'm one shaky step away from disaster. But all that aside, my main gripe with the psychological literature on scarcity is that it ignores the context of the system. These findings, or flashier ones like Sudden Wealth Syndrome, they may encourage liberal thinkers to believe that the issue isn't money, it's mindset. That we need educational interventions in order to raise people from poverty. That we need to increase self esteem. And while I'll grant that self esteem is good

and financial literacy is crucial to enable people to make actual informed financial decisions, the fact remains that our system is not in fact broken, but working as intended That it relies on there being a group of people to exploit. And even if people living in poverty don't share my political beliefs, they know this because they have lived in relation to a system actively keeping them down. You might have heard of this famous study, the Stanford Marshmallow experiment or the marshmallow tes

t. The premise is simple A kid gets sat in a room with a treat they like. Like a pretzel or animal cracker or a marshmallow. This one's vegan Placed in front of them. They are told that this marshmallow is theirs to have, they can eat it straight away, but if they wait some amount of time before they eat it, say 15 minutes, they'll get a second marshmallow too. Basic enough study. Some kids can wait, others can't. The thing is, in follow up studies, the kids who were able to wait seemed to be do

ing better in life. They had higher S.A.T. scores, showed less aggression, had fewer mental health concerns, and reached higher levels of education than those kids who couldn't wait In paper after paper by the same authors with the order of their names rotated, the study seemed to make the case that the ability to delay gratification is responsible for much of life's successes. Almost as if being mentally ill or undereducated or poor is related to a character flaw the inability to practice self-

control. There was a highly cited article published recently called Revisiting the Marshmallow Test, which was followed by another titled Re Revisiting the Marshmallow Test. But they mostly quibbled about effect sizes and the threshold for how long the kid needs to wait before breaking down and eating their marshmallow in order to qualify as having shown self-control. So many studies become hallmark studies without replication, but this one seems to be pretty robust. So let me be clear. I'm not

saying that there isn't at least something to the idea that cognitive skills involved in making a decision to wait don't benefit someone later in life. They probably do. Still, let's imagine what it's like for a kid given the marshmallow test. The kid is told that she'll get her second marshmallow if she waits out the 15 minutes before or she eats the first. So now she's sitting in this room staring down this marshmallow, which, by the way, that's more than just delaying gratification, right? Sh

e's not able to just say, okay, I'll go play a game for 15 minutes and then come back and eat my two marshmallows. No, she's sat in a chair in an empty room, told to sit still in fact, with no one to talk to, nothing to play with, nothing to do but stare at the things she wants and hear her stomach grumble. That’s not just waiting for pleasure that's enduring an amount of pain in other studies, people will choose to painfully shock themselves when they're sitting in a room alone with nothing to

do because being bored is more painful than actual pain. But would it even be science if we weren't electrocuting people? Anyway, there she is looking at the marshmallow. Now let's imagine this kid's background. Maybe this kid is from a nice family and is used to being treated well. Used to having the promises made to her be kept. Or maybe this kid is from a shitty home life where her caregivers are not reliable or trustworthy and she has to do a lot of taking care of herself. Which of these s

cenarios do you think is going to lead to a kid who trusts the experimenter and endures the pain of waiting to get the second marshmallow? Because some versions of the marshmallow test have chosen to manipulate just this variable in one half of the children were taught that the adult was unreliable by previously making and breaking a promise to them, while the other half had their promise honored before the marshmallow test began. In the study, the kids in the Reliable Adult Group waited 12 minu

tes before eating the marshmallow, while those in the unreliable adult group waited only three. The difference between the groups was both large and statistically significant. In another study, the children observed an adult breaking another adult's possessions, and when confronted, this first adult either admitted fault or lied about having damaged it. The children, given the marshmallow tests from the liar, waited just under 5 minutes, whereas the children given it from the trustworthy person

averaged the full 15. And again these results were statistically significant. And just so that we're clear, this effect doesn't seem to be something only related to children. Adults may not be motivated by marshmallows, but tweak the study design maybe by making the wait time days rather than minutes, and the price an Amazon gift card worth variable amounts of money and they replicate the same results as children. Willingness to wait depends on trust. So let's go back to this kid and imagine she

's from a bad background. The people that promise her things don't deliver suddenly it's not irrational for her to pop the marshmallow into her mouth as soon as she has it. In fact, I'd argue it's more rational than having to sit and stare at it for minutes, because not only might that experimenter come back without a second marshmallow, but at any point in time he could just decide to take the first one away too Smarter, in that case, to eat the thing you want rather than gamble on the thing t

hat you might not even get. People in poverty are like that kid they have experienced a heartless system letting them down over and over. They've heard that getting health insurance is smart, but they've been burned by an out-of-network doctor. They've been told that the police are there to protect victims, only to be treated like criminals when they go for help. They have numerous firsthand experiences of being let down, lied to and socially failed. So, yeah, we come along to people in poverty

and study their behaviors and say, gosh, these people are short term thinkers. Something must be going wrong. When in fact, if we step back, there is another explanation for the presumably irrational actions of the poor. When tomorrow is uncertain, you can only really count on today. So just eat the marshmallow. I don't want a second marshmallow. I really do like marshmallows. N: So you couldn’t do the experiment? S: No, I couldn't do the experiment. Telling someone to sit still!? In reading som

e of the sociological literature I did find researchers making a similar point. I particularly liked the example I got from a paper which talked about rent to own schemes for a refrigerator. Just as a side note, rent to own schemes are scams. You think of them as an investment on a future product, but what they are is a payment plan with tons of payments and an extraordinarily high interest rate for a good that all the while is depreciating in value. They are deeply unethical and often used in e

conomics literature as an illustration of flawed consumer thinking. But anyway The paper had us imagine a person who has bought a refrigerator under a rent to own scheme. We could analyze them economically and see their decision as foolish. We can analyze them psychologically and see forces like cognitive load impacting their rational decision making. Or we can look at them sociologically, in the context under which they make this decision. In this case, (Read by LegalKimchi) scholars might expl

ain that desire to have a refrigerator, a need that is so widely satisfied in the broader material culture could reflect needs for symbolic dignity, for example, ice cream after a late shift, thrift, as in saving leftovers, social interactions, like ability to host a gathering, and thus lead them to financing promotions that would be considered unacceptable elsewhere in society due to restricted access to other forms of financing. Remember the kids in the marshmallow test? They weren't just ask

ed to be in a neutral state. Waiting for an indeterminate amount of time with nothing to do is uncomfortable. Likewise, living without a refrigerator is uncomfortable. You can't batch cook a big meal and save it for different days. You either have to cook every meal for yourself from scratch, which takes a lot of time, which is a lost opportunity cost. Or you can rely on shelf stable meals, which are usually pretty bad for you, which is a health cost. You're unable to keep fresh vegetables more

than a day or two in advance. So you're either going to the store every day to buy small quantities, another opportunity cost, or you're cutting them from your diet, another health cost. And yeah, you don't get ice cream or a cold beer. You don't have frozen food for days when you've got the flu and feel too sick to cook, your kids might wonder why they don't get this standard thing that everyone else has. And you might feel shame, which is also a cost. If money were the only factor in obtaining

a refrigerator, then it would be smarter to put that same amount of money aside every month. The amount that you would be paying for a rent to own fridge and you'll be able to fully purchase one sooner and for less money than going on a rent to own scheme. But someone without a fridge isn't existing in stasis. They have to deal with the cost of not having one every day that they don't. So while rent to own continues to be predatory, I don't know that the victim in that scheme is being irrationa

l because rationality must exist in context and the state of being poor is a fundamentally different context with different rules than not. We live in a system where a certain percentage of people must be kept poor, desperate, and exploitable in order for that system to function. A poor person has a lifetime of experience to know that some crisis is going to demand the money they've saved for that refrigerator long before they'd ever get to buy it. If rationality is about maximizing benefits or

utility, then a rent to own scheme is rational in the context of poverty, just like it's rational, smart, and an act of self-preservation for an abused kid to immediately eat the marshmallow, one cannot bootstrap their way out of poverty through the benefit of long term decision making. We need to accept that a poor person is not poor as a result of their psychological resources or their self-control. So what does this all mean when someone living in poverty has things go really wrong? So we spe

nt a little while recovering. I think that's fair. And then I started making phone calls. And in this continued vain of surprising myself, I found I was quite capable of making these phone calls. Sarah, to her credit, spent about 10 hours on the phone over a couple of weeks talking with the airline to get the lost luggage whole other nightmare. Yes, we understand you’re upset, but we will find the bag. And I'm like, sorry, I thought you did find the bag? I thought you found the bag and it was in

your possession in Dublin Airport? That's what I've been told previously. And it's like: Yes, yes. I mean, we have the bag and it is in Dublin airport It's like: right, well, then when can you get it to me? It's like, well, we will get it to you as soon as we have the bag. And I'm like: do you have the bag or do you not have the bag? I chased up the insurance company, the car park, and well do you want to guess what happened? Do you want to, you can pause the video now, and put your guesses bel

ow as to who actually took the car. I bet some of you are going to guess correctly (Song: Who can it be noww) It was the police. Surprise! It was the Garda Síochána and no, not because we didn't have insurance or because we were parked illegally, although that is kind of interesting. But that's not what happened. They took the car away because on the night of the 28th of December, two men were smashing the windows of vehicles and getting up to all sorts of hijinx and no good. So the Gardai conf

iscated five, count ‘em, five cars and they didn't tell the owners and they didn't tell anyone at the car park and the people at the car park didn't notice. Okay, so first of all I call the car park and they're like, Oh, that's awful. Just like useless, you know, just like Really? The whole car? you know, like. And I'm like, Yeah, the whole car. They said, Oh, oh, no, how unfortunate. And I said, Yes. Now it is rather a bummer, isn't it? And they said, Total shock to us. And I said, How? And the

y said, what? And I said, How is it a shock to you? And they said, Well, because we didn't know. And I said, But there are cameras. There are cameras at the car park. I've seen them. And they said, Oh, yes, yes, there are cameras. And I said, But no one was looking at the footage. And they said, Oh, we can't look at the footage. And I said, What? And they said, GDPR, GDPR? GDPR General Data Protection Regulation. Yes, I know what GDPR stands for. I'm just not sure which one of us is speaking? An

d they said, you'll have to call the police because we can't look at CCTV footage without them requesting it. Right? They're not allowed. They can like record whatever they want, but they're not allowed to look at it until somebody with a uniform tells them to. Right? So anyway, I did call the police and the local Garda station. Of course, it's just like, Ugh, what?! And I'm like, well, there's been a crime. Ugh, it's always the same thing! Give me, give me your license plate. And they're like,

Oh, mmm, yeah. And I'm like, What? And they're like, Yeah, look, you need to call a different Garda station. And they just like, literally like like giving me all these hints. O: What the hell? Be like, Oh, that car. Yeah, and I’m like, tell me! They’re like, We can't tell you. You have to call a different Garda station. And then they're like, they tell me this other Garda station to call. And I call them and they're like, Oh no, not us, the other one. And they took my registration plate and fou

nd out for me that my car had indeed been confiscated by a crack team of expert law cops and was currently part of a vital investigation into sweet fanny adams! S: Sweet fanny adams? N: You never heard that before. S: No! What? It means nothing. And they told me that there was one specific police officer who was the only person who could help me because it was his investigation. He was the only person who could help me. And he wasn't in at the moment. He was out. He was off duty. He'd be back

later, the next day. After. And they couldn't tell me anything, ever, probably. Probably we know that five cars were taken from the car park by the police. And you didn't tell anyone? You didn't tell the owners of the vehicles. You didn't attempt to contact the owners of the vehicles and you didn't tell the car park that you took them from and you didn't attempt to contact the car park that you took them from. And that's all you can tell me, because there's one magical guard who is the only per

son with more information than that. And they're like, Yes, exactly. So then I did call them back when he was supposed to be on duty and he wasn't. Or maybe he was, but anyway, they didn't put him on to the phone. They just told me, then, that I had to come and get it at a specific impound lot. Or they were going to start charging me €90 a day. This is my favorite bit. It's like, okay, so a crime has been committed. So you took our cars as evidence for the crime. What is the crime? Well, the cri

me is that the car was vandalized. Okay. Who who was hurt by this crime? Well you were. Okay, so what are you going to do about it? Oh, we're not. O: Yeah, what the fuck? S: Well, we took the car, and we're doing an investigation. N: Yeah. O: Oh my god. N: We're checking, we're making very sure that they're not inside the car somewhere. So I went to go and get our car back. I got on very limited public transport Very early, going to go get a bus. It was all set to go to Dublin, except I forgot

my car key. So instead I got very carsick on a bus and then left my laptop in a cafe writing this script. And I went home and cried O: Holy shit. O: Did it have a ribbon on it? S: (incomprehensible laughing) N: But the next day I got on a very limited public transport bus to get a different bus to another bus that's off one bus and onto another. Just a quick stop at the coffee shop where I accidentally left my laptop and I checked to make sure that I had the car key and then the second bus was c

anceled. O: Oh, what? N: Yes. So now I was running late because of the canceled bus in the middle of the day, in fact, almost so late that the impound lot was going to be closed for the day by the time I got there, I have about a 15 minute window, so I called a taxi, another phone call. Look at me go! To make sure that the taxi would be there exactly on time to when I got off the bus and they would drive me 20 minutes down the road to the impound lot. Which is a real privilege to be able to do

that. And I made sure that I had the car key. So yeah, that, um. That taxi never came. This is all very Ireland right now. I rang the impound people and they said they could stay on for an extra few minutes so I could collect the car. And they're like, actually that. That's totally fine. We do tend to be here until that time anyway. So just come in and even have the door is shut, just knock. And I'm like, Okay, great. N: Okay, great. Sound! S: Somebody really sound. O: Yeah, ok! N: Oh my God, t

hey are this. I need this, you know? And then I call a different taxi service and they’re sound, the guy comes and he’s sound I've got like, just enough time in the taxi journey to tell him all this story. He's like, fuckin hell, well, good luck with that. I get out of the car, knock on the door of the impound lot So they told me that it's not at this breakdown services. It was the wrong impound lot. It's not their sister breakdown services in a different part of the city. It was the wrong fu

cking impound lot! O: Whaaat? Nobody on the phone told me that. S: It had been at this impound lot, but they had moved it at some point and just nobody had told us. O: What the fuck!? N: (laughing hysterically) So, it's too late. It's closed now. I have to, I have to get the car tomorrow, So I'm just going to try and figure out how to get over to my Dad now. So I’m a bit I’m a bit upset. Ah, sure, you have to laugh, though, don't you? So I walked to the LUAS and I got a LUAS to get a train. Hav

e I mentioned how much I hate Dublin? And I met my dad and my stepmom and they gave me a hug and somewhere to sleep for the night. And I went back to Dublin the next day I handed over my letter from the fucking Gardai to the fucking impound lot and the fucking car key, which I most certainly had not forgotten. And this is the car that awaited me (melancholy music) Sound rolling. One, two. I'm in the car. It's not, it's not terrible, but it's not so good. Smashy, smashy You hear that glass? Tis n

asty. The insurance company will cover all of the glass, which is really good. But I had to decide whether or not I was going to get that done in Dublin or drive across the country back to Country Lib and to Doxxtown, which is a bit of a drive with, with, essentially, the window down in winter in Ireland. This is fucking stupid. I don't know what I was, with this. I’ve got to pull this down. (Car door shuts) (Audible sound of glass jingling) So I prepared myself for a very cold and loud journey

home, swimming in broken glass and trying to stay out of trouble. And I drove 40 yards down the road and this happened. We got a (sound of hissing air) We’ve got a nail A big old, big old nail. Big old screw sticking right out of that tire there. So then I’m rapidly losing air and the last thing I want to do is actually have to change the wheel. But luckily, I'm in the middle of an industrial estate because I'm at an impound lot. So I tell Google Maps to bring me to the next nearest tyre center

and it brings me there. And then this happens. Out of business And this is still all very Ireland for there just to be a place that's still on Google Maps that’s entirely gone out of business, probably in the 5 minutes it’s taken me to get there. And then because I'm in an industrial estate and I'm telling Google Maps to take me to the nearest tyre center, it just keeps telling me your destination is on the left, your destination is on the left, and I just don't know what to do because all of th

e air is escaping from my tyre and then it turns out that the destination was actually on my right, the other left. But I got the tyre changed. I drove home. I was very cold. The insurance company sent a man to fix our windows and it's all finally fine. Except for some reason, the back window randomly keeps opening when you're driving. We did not receive an apology from the Gardai. We settled with the car park out of court and no admission of fault. And that's why we've been keeping them anonym

ous In this video. Yeah. Just making sure you've taken in that information. We're going to be discussing suicidal ideation and go. I thought about killing myself a few times. There. Did I do it respectfully? With enough caution? Did we do a careful? Yeah, I thought about killing myself. The fascists all want me dead anyway. And I'm like, Yeah, well, form an orderly queue bitBLEEPches. Talking about suicide is dangerous. It’s kind of like a dark magic, like bringing up violent extremism for a pol

itical aim. If you bring it up, you run the risk of planting little seeds in the minds of the people around you and they may act upon your purely theoretical words. And we actually have vocabulary to describe the risks of this discussion. We refer to the whole thing nebulously as suicide contagion. And probably you can understand what that means on the face of it. Suicide from the Swedish suicide, meaning suicide. That's a lie. That's not true. And contagion, a combination of the prefix con mean

ing with and the root word, Tangier meaning to touch. That's actually true. Commonly used now to refer to disease spread by close contact or the proliferation of a harmful or dangerous idea or practice which all make sense. Whether we think of suicide as a disease in the mental illness kind of way, or as a dangerous or harmful idea or practice. It's sort of all of those things. And again, on the face of it, most of us have an idea of the of irresponsible handling of the subject of suicide we're

actually talking about. And if you don't know, just pop on over to Google Scholar and look up 13 Reasons Why. I'm recommending that instead of actually watching the show, 13 Reasons Why, because with the express aim of moving on as quickly as possible, I want to recognize that it is entirely possible to talk about suicide in such a profoundly irresponsible and glorifying way that you actually can create a significant increase in the number of suicides in ten year olds through to 19 year olds in

the months following the release of your shitty show. And I thought I was a bad writer. That's my Letterboxd review. Fuck you Netflix. Having said all of that, I refer to the term suicide contagion as nebulous for good reason. Because like with a lot of the things that we have a general idea of suicide contagion is a convenient shorthand, verging on a slight mishapprevention. In this systematic review, for example, Chang and collaborators point out a remarkable lack of clarity in the literature

on what suicide contagion actually means, a problem which they go on to point out can lead authors to cite one another without defining or understanding the difference between the phenomena that they're all referring to as contagion. There's contagion as clustering, the tendency for suicide to spread in groups, contagion as transmission, which is a bit of a tautology, but is at least slightly distinct from clustering, because in the transmission interpretation, suicide is imbued with its own tra

nsmissibility, outside of social factors, and more like an actual disease. There's contagion as imitation, which is more in the vein of the fallout from 13 Reasons Why. And there are other and perhaps better framework still. But the point is that they all require slightly different tools of study. And this the important part for us, slightly different modes of caution, because we also have to talk about this stuff. We can't just put it in a box to put it in a box is also dangerous. I want to be

empowered to talk about this stuff, including my own experiences, and we're supposed to talk about this stuff to help ourselves, to stay healthy, to help prevent suicide, to prevent self-harm, and to unburden us from this idea that suicidal ideation is something other than common or, dare I say it, normal. Always Talk: a message from the health people of government bureaucracy. Please help cut costs and socialize health care by talking to your mechanic. Look, I'm clearly frightened of talking ab

out this, aren't you? You're frightened of me talking. You might be talking. Don't answer, but. Good, good. We should be frightened. We should. We’ll take it seriously that way. Because while there are excuses not to talk about it, like the YouTube algorithm and this nebulous idea of contagion, like if you say suicide Mary in the mirror three times, she'll appear, It's still worse to not talk about it. And isn't that funny? I'm not going to glorify suicide. I'm actually going to glorify not kill

ing yourself, otherwise known as living. Highly recommend. The vast majority of people who've survived suicide are glad to have survived, no matter how desperate they felt. They don't try again the majority. But I am going to try to be frank and balls out honest and kind of chill and matter of fact and genuinely curious and a bit morbid, a bit silly because when I've had conversations about suicide and people have spoken to me that way, I felt really relieved and seen and like, Oh thank fuck, I'

m not the only one. Okay. Anyway, funny story. The guards took my away another time too. Prequel! Plot twist! But this time, hehe! Naughty naughty! Cheeky Neilly. I didn't have insurance. Yeah. I should have had insurance. Well, then, why drive the uninsured car, you ask? I'd been trying to use the car to get in and out of college. I lived in a very small rural area and I had to drive to take care of my kids. There was even worse public transport back then. It wasn't like I had a good plan. I ha

d been on a social welfare scheme which allowed me to attend university as a mature student. I was learning to be a filmmaker, which as we know, is a very smart career move. But I had a series of serious life disasters, and a series of panic attacks and all sorts of things. And even though I ended up actually receiving my qualification from my school, I wasn't attending and the social welfare payments got cut off, partly, if not mostly due to my absolute panic about bureaucracy and forms and pho

ne calls. So yeah, they cut me off because I'm not good at adult things. By the time it amounted to this misadventure with those funky cops taking my car away, my mother had just died and my wife had just left me and my income had been cut off. And I had a period of living in that car, not all at the same time, but like a Rube Goldberg machine of destruction and regret. Well, if you were going to do all of that, I hear you ask, then why did you go and get caught? Well, like a big eejit. I drove

to Dublin to play a well-paid music gig on St Patrick's Day weekend. And I don't know if you're familiar, but there can be quite a police presence in Dublin around St Patrick's weekend (roaringly loud crowd and street sounds) and having your only conceivable source of income be playing the fucking bass for drunks says a lot about how bad I was at planning. You might like this theater kid energy now With all this singing and the dancing and the puppets and the praxis but like, it's nearly gotten

me killed a number of times. And it was absolutely terrifying and humiliating. And the cops were horrible. They were, as you would expect, intense and patronizing and uncompromising and tall. And oh, my God, these trials of humiliation and pain had hardly begun. I had no car. I was about to go through months of court proceedings, which might have amounted to huge fines. I couldn't pay. I was financially destitute, with no savings, no plan, no real job, no actual income, undiagnosed autism and de

pression. And remember, I'm a deeply closeted, filthy tranny in rural Ireland during all of this, having just been homeless with my mother having just died. Jesus, this is adding up And probably some other things, oh, other things. And if I didn't pay these potentially huge fines from this fuck up, I'd possibly be spending anywhere between four days and two months in a prison. And it seemed like everybody not just my ex, but everyone in my life was just kind of sick of me and my shit and me bein

g this much of a liability. So I had this idea and at first it was like, Neil, that'll never work. But then I was like, Hmm, unless? I’m so sorry. It's so flippant. I'm laughing at my own suicidal ideation. It's so crass Suicidally id- idediliation like Flanders. Nothing at all. Nothing at all. Nothing. (Flanders impression): Oh, it's just my suicidally ididdilieation. But like, I was so alone. I was. I was making myself laugh about the whole thing. I mean, whose business is it when you're that

isolated? I'm with you, gallows humor people! Disorder before death. That's my motto. If you're going to say to me, Can't you have a little dignity in referring to your own suicide? I say, death isn't a very dignified thing, actually. Ask King Charles in a few months time. Now, Now, having said all of that, I don't actually want to go into what my thoughts exactly were, but basically I developed a rough plan for how to end my life around this time. And I was at various points kind of into the id

ea in terms of my relationship to living. You could think of me as a switch leaning towards submissive. The literature could categorize me variously as someone experiencing suicidal ideation, something many of us will experience in our lifetimes. And actually, isn't that worrying in and of itself? Or perhaps because I had an actual plan, it was an aborted suicide. Ho boy, aborted suicide? The YouTube algorithm is going to love that bit. Perhaps you could say I was engaged in a non impulsive suic

ide. That didn't happen for whatever reason, as distinct from an impulsive suicide two terms, which, by the way, share the same problem of being ill defined with this study from India, which will come up again in a moment using 2 hours as the threshold for impulsivity. Whereas something like this study from Houston, which will also come up in a moment, used 5 minutes as the threshold for impulsivity. Speaking to those of you who have had suicidal thoughts and those of you who've been to children

's Christmas plays, there is a big difference between five minutes and 2 hours. Anyway it doesn't really matter which category I fit in, not for the purposes of our discussion of my lived immiseration. The point is that almost every night I sat across the table from death and thoughts of my own nonexistence as the solution to everything. One big reason I'm still here is luck, because the literature also supports the idea that suicide attempts are often a mix of long term factors and then an acut

e stressor. So maybe for someone else that is a breakup or their car being confiscated by the cops. But for me, that crucial final crunch of stressor with underlying factors never quite happened, not suddenly enough. And the biggest misconception about suicide is our failure to contend with how in most cases the decision is very sudden. In the study we mentioned earlier on hospitalized survivors of suicide in India. The suicide process from thought to attempt was surprisingly short For 30% of pe

ople it was 5 minutes or less. Only 23% of people took more than 2 hours. In fact, in study after study, it's the same story. In the Houston study, 24% of survivors had less than 5 minutes between thought and attempt in this study out of Australia, the suicide process for 40% of people, almost half of all survivors, took less than 5 minutes. The decision to commit suicide may be sudden, but by the way, death isn't. Dying and almost dying alike is a messy, nasty business. But with that informatio

n from the almost died in mind, at least some of the ways we might intervene in suicide can seem obvious. Mainly give people the opportunity to talk in that moment of crisis, buy them some time for their neurochemistry, their thinking and their breathing to balance out a little and keep them away from fucking guns. And keep them away from fucking guns. If only it was as simple as having this conversation and removing the stigma and all of us realizing and recognizing that it's really common to h

ave suicidal thoughts, like really common. But it's not just that simple because recognizing where those thoughts tip over into an idea or a plan is the point at which you need to seek help, which sucks. Do you think I wanted to seek help? It felt like seeking help was the only thing I was doing. Believe me, I felt pathetic already. But that's the part where one, the commonness of suicidal ideation is in your corner. You are not alone. And two, there is a responsibility on those of us who have f

elt this way or even tried to end our lives, to use that insight to help others. We need to make it clear that none of us are alone because I'm glad I'm alive. I'm now out as non-binary. I am a full time artist. I'm overflowing with a network of friends and mutuals and a thriving community around me. The kids are teenagers now. I've got Sarah, Sarah has got me and, well, some other things. I'll tell you when you're older and I've helped other people to survive their poverty. Imagine that. And I

can even make phone calls now just about. Which is why as much as it's a cliche, we are going to put up some numbers here on the screen right now and in the description below for suicide hotlines and resources for the various geographies that we're speaking to. Maybe you need them, maybe you don't. Maybe you're ready and maybe you're not, but you could try if you need to, because they do work. And dishonor before death, right? I think for me, I got stuck in the ambiguity of my circumstances, the

messiness of the means by which I intended to do it, and just taking too long to think about things. Eventually, more help was my only option. I was lucky looking back on it while cringing and trying to remember to breathe. I can see a number of ways that I was exceptionally lucky and that my story actually exemplifies some of the things that the data says keeps people alive. Because it's arbitrary friends. We like to think that we're bad at life and other people are good at life, but it doesn'

t work like that. We all personify different interacting systems of injustice in various ways and within varying degrees of predictability. So first, let's pretend to give me the credit for coming up with this revolutionary neato idea of not killing myself. Where I lived, where I was in fact lucky to have accommodation as an unemployed tenant. I used to lay awake, staring at the curtains, listening to the cars pass on the permanently rain soaked bepuddled ground. Sounds kind romantic when I put

it like that, but I assure you it was nasty. I hated those cars. I knew the small minded people driving them and how they hated me and how they were only too happy to abandon me now that there was no point left and even trying to exploit me. And I got so sick of the sound of the fucking car splashing past in the night and the look of those curtains with the only street light in the whole town piss yellow, blasting through cheap, shitty pieces of material. And I felt so utterly without agency and

again, comically upset with the world. Until one night I kind of realized how stupid it was that the best idea I could come up with as an unemployed tenant with no real right to interfere with the accommodation and no money and very limited resources all told. That the best I could come up with to avoid the annoying light and the noisy cars was to kill myself. At a certain point thinking about it, I realized not that I was stupid or broken or bad or even mentally ill, but that more fundamentall

y I was wrong. I was wrong about those things. I was wrong about suicide. I was wrong about the intractability of it all. I was wrong about what could be done and what couldn't be done. I was wrong about the cars, I was wrong about the curtains. And I needed to admit that I was wrong. I needed to stop being so stubborn. I realized that suicidal ideation is like stubbornness that has a gun to its own head and much more important than my own navel gazing. I had to think about things that way becau

se I have children. And friends, my kids were so gorgeous and funny then. They were eight and five. So very cheeky, very cute, very fun. Starting to put together some interesting ideas and lyrics and drawings and things. Just great kids. And every weekend, in spite of all this dark stuff going on in my own head and in my life, we would just have the absolute craic anyway. There was light always. And again, that makes me lucky. That speaks to the statistical likelihood of my survival. I had very

good reason to make the intractable, tractable again and to make the darkness light. And most importantly, because let's not let fucking poetry stop us from being honest. I had reason to stop being stubborn. And yeah, I was still living in absolute disaster. I had to check the lights every day to see if the electricity had been cut off. I will forever be ashamed of how I was living. But we had each other, the kids and I, and we had many episodes of The Simpsons on an old hard drive that we could

just watch ad nauseum on an old PC I had, which even the PC was second hand from a friend. Marge: Neat. Somehow I managed to keep them fed. I didn't feed myself sometimes, but I always fed them and I stayed the course and things got better. I was extraordinarily lucky. People, mainly my family, went to great lengths to help me to fix it. All of it, eventually. This now is the boring, functional end of the story. But basically I got free legal aid because Ireland. Remember the whole bit with the

car? And because I come across as not being from a working class inner city background because I'm white and not a Traveller. I suppose I got off lightly in this otherwise horrible legal system that we have. I actually had a very sound legal representative who was a young guy who was less judgy of me than he could have been. And I remember shaking his hand and saying, I'm so glad I met you. I never want to see you again. I never got that car back by the way, if you were curious. I couldn't aff

ord the impound fees. So they crushed it into a little cube with, like, a couple of the kids toys still in there. But I got a job and with a lot of help I crawled out of the pit. Blah, blah, blah. Pandemic happened. Leftist Cooks! See? it's fine. I slowly developed a basic survival template and worked shitty jobs and I got lucky. Eventually I even met Sarah and let her lull me into maybe trying to be creative for a living again, even though at stages of my life, the very idea of doing that would

have literally sent shivers down my spine. It's probably not surprising that there are significant associations between poverty and suicidal ideation attempts and death by suicide. Unemployment is a factor in suicide consistently across multiple studies. There are significant high associations between suicide and debt owing money, and particularly unsecured debt with higher interest rates. Remember all that stuff about the fridges earlier on? In fact, there was this South Korean study, a huge o

ne with 10,000 participants that found that people with late bill payments had significantly increased odds of suicide attempts, which rose with the number of late payments. Throughout that dark period, for me, I never paid bills on time. I couldn't! Even when I had little bit of money I, of course, just spent on getting the kids Chinese takeaway or maybe buying a pair of shoes that didn't have holes in them or something. I never answered the phone ever. At any given time, there were courts and

cops and finance companies and landlords, social welfare and the Revenue Commission all ringing me up, all seemingly wanting to kill Neil even more than Neil wanted to kill Neil. So I was just like, boop. Like a genius. Like, I've got your fucking figured out, man. I don't have to answer you. Next level, galaxy brained. And again, looking back, as hard as it is to look back, it does seem to be the intractability of it all that almost got me. It was the messiness and how all the problems compound

ed one another, more so than the list of material costs or problems that push me to see no solution. As you have seen in this video, I can handle a series of unfortunate events I can really handle with a bit of determination and a laugh, a laundry list of disasters. Big old screw sticking right out of that tyre. Because I have reason to be cheerful and crucially now some material resources. Probably the most crucial of all is the security of knowing that the material resources aren't probably go

ing to go anywhere. I was reliving parts of this darkest chapter of my past when the car was gone and I had to call the guardi. I was reliving the darkest chapter of my past when we were stranded in Dublin in the cold and the kids were crying and I was powerless to do anything but hug them. And I was certainly reliving the darkest parts of my past, a past that has scarred me, while I waited on hold to indifferent services, or they called me. And I actually answered. They gave me a form to fill o

ut. I actually filled it out. Poverty is not just a lack of resources or a lack of opportunities. Poverty is a form of psychological torture and psychological conditioning that is self-reinforcing and convenient for hierarchical systems of power and, well, evil. And you're never fully, fully, really, truly safe from it. Not until and I mean this quite sincerely, quite naively, we get everyone out and everyone free. Imagine how cheerful and resourceful and powerful and accomplished and fun we cou

ld all be for ourselves and for one another in that world. (contemplative music) (warm comforting music) We've painted the image of a stubborn, sad, little impoverished class that if you tell them to wait patiently and be very, very good, they won't trust you to come back with a shiny marshmallow. They'll worry you're going to smash their window and steal their car. We've illustrated the available data that this image of a beaten down, distrustful and often suicidally depressed working class is

an accurate one. Despite the tests and experiments also often blindly reinforcing prejudices that we might have about disgusting poor people. Still, poverty is far from just a matter of having and have not-ing To be poor the thing that most people are, and most people always will be, is to have your lived reality contradict the stories you are told. It is to have meaning itself disrupted by foundational injustice and the consequences, even just in that psychological sense, are very, very real. F

or you, maybe you might feel like your personal hopelessness or your stubbornness or your inability to imagine a more creative solution to the curtains and the piss yellow light is your fault, but it is not. Or you might feel like the ratcheting towards the right that you're seeing in your neighbors and your family, their readiness to embrace xenophobia and hate and lies is their fault. But it's not. Because the status quo is one in which the imagination of the proletariat is curtailed by the se

lf-reinforcing psychological torture of poverty itself. What then? Friends who are sad and stubborn and a bit pissed off by no fault of your own is the radical antithesis? Hope. Hope and community. I mean, if the marshmallow test was a movie in the nineties with Macaulay Culkin and Mara Wilson as the marshmallow kids and Daniel Stern, N: You know who Daniel Stern is? S: No You don't know who anyone is. as one of the evil testers. Then, uh, anyway, what I'd want to see is the street smart kid wh

o brought his own marshmallows. That's that's what we've got to be. See, we've we that makes sense. We've got to be as organized as possible, as collectively as possible, independently of the systems that reify poverty itself. And that includes the overwhelming hopelessness that makes us unable to act. That's systemic and the forces that cause us to blame ourselves. And also the overwhelming, overwhelmingness that makes us unable to answer the phone or function sufficiently for self-protection.

S: I really I love you very much. S: Hup. N: Oh. S: The literature tells us that those marginalized by poverty are best supported through depression by three things. A) Becoming aware of sources of oppression in their environment. B) Gaining a sense of control over the basic facets of their lives, And C) Working to create positive change not only for themselves but for others in their community. Obviously I'm not trying to say you should do these three things to the exclusion of others. The ter

m self-care may have been co-opted by capitalistic forces of conspicuous consumption, but self-care in its original sense is a radical concept pioneered by people like Audre Lorde famously wrote Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation. And that is an act of political warfare. So, yes, as individuals, that means you need to care for your body and mind in whatever capacity you're able. Go on a daily walk, keep a journal, do a five mindfulness exercise All of that boring,

pedantic but effective stuff. It doesn't do yourself or anyone else any good to neglect your mental health. We need you here. It's not your fault if you're struggling emotionally because you're struggling financially. And these three things make depression better: education, agency, and creating change for yourself and community. It's only through that last step that we have any chance of escaping impoverishment through schemes like dual power and mutual aid and hope and care and education. N: L

ike we’re, we're educators. Kind of S: kind of? N: you're like you're an educator, S: kind of Whatever we are it's a privilege to share this information with you and I just hope it helps someone. It's true that we're here now supported by community, because we got the car back, we got the luggage back. We even got justice in. I'm not allowed to talk about that, but we got through it and we can laugh about it now. And I guess we did more than just survive. And that's all thanks to you. Thanks to

our community and thanks to Patreon Now we are still not at the level of income we need to be at. But we didn't want this to be like an extended ad for Patreon or like a guilt trip. And we also didn't want it to be like a victory lap for two people who've escaped poverty. S: because we're not out of poverty and we might never be. N: Yeah, this was just a little story about how our car got taken by the police because a crime had been committed, and even though it had been committed against us, th

ey still needed to hurt us by taking our car away because we're poor, because all the bastards. And it was also a story about how even after you have gotten out of the dark place and you have the resources to take on the police and the man and the airline, it's still normal to feel dread and sadness. It's just a dread and sadness make you bad at figuring out what to do about anything They are, generally speaking, wrong. This is a story about how poverty makes you wrong about things. It makes you

want to not exist. And that is both morally and functionally wrong. It is a weapon of the class war that we don't contend with often enough. Because existing, the thing that you have every right to do and to be proud of, is beautiful. And we should encourage each other in the pursuit of our beautiful and proud existences. If we do that and we dare to hope do that, then we are spitting in the faces of our oppressors. (to tune of Giant Woman by Funkel) 🎵 Walking around with a car. It’s eight fee

t long and it's a car. Mmm drivey drivey The car is a car Doo doo doo doo doo doo doodoo doodoo doodoo Walkin -er- driving the car driving. This is the car and the car is here Me and Sarah and the car (high pitched) doodoodoodoododododo and the car Yeah What you do when the car gets all smashy The cars just a car. (faded high pitch): The cars just a car. With, uh, the car. Oh, it's fine now. I got the car. Oh, please subscribe to blebleble, we’ll be your best friend. And we all learned and lear

ning together ‘bout poverty, and justice and all of the different intersections.. We've got a car Duh doo doo doo doo doodoo doodoo Having so much fun with the car Dododo dodo Splashing around with the car. Doo doo doo di doo di doo doo doo doo di doo doo di doo doo.