Many people wonder how to escape poverty. To do that, we first need to understand what poverty actually is and where it comes from. Poverty is not only a shortage of money and means of living – it is also a set of false beliefs about life, usually instilled by parents and the surrounding environment, about how to effectively create a better life. As a result, poverty often arises from imitating ineffective patterns and doing what we were told we should do and that would ensure abundance and growth – when in reality it does not. It is extremely common for people who feel a sense of lack and poverty in their lives to sincerely try to escape it by doing the very things that will never get them out – because those things simply no longer work.

In this article, I want to focus on the problem of how life lessons get transmitted from parents – the most important models shaping a new person, determining how they handle the tasks and challenges life puts in front of them.

How the Boomer Generation Created a World Against the Next One

Boomers, having attained their positions and power, took care – for as long as they live – to block as much access to wealth as possible for subsequent generations. They built an economy and a world that makes things significantly harder for those who came after them. There is no other generation so firmly attached to the trough of large-scale wealth as the Boomers.

Those who seized the wealth are, of course, only a small percentage of the Boomer generation – because following the law of the jungle, most of their peers were pushed into the role of the working class, though with certain benefits that their generation could still afford. At the expense of the future – which is our present.

The majority of the Boomer generation are today slowly-retiring parents: workers. Often – especially among men – people who spent their entire working lives in a single factory. The Boomer generation, because of the era in which they grew up and built whatever stability they achieved, inhabited a world where you could calmly predict and plan your career many years ahead – often for an entire lifetime. If there was demand for a profession at a given wage, it would likely remain that way for the rest of one’s life.

Boomers who still work in places that are crumbling relics of the past enjoy a position and status that new, younger workers at those same places cannot count on. For the new generation, the offer of work, earnings, and development – coming largely from Boomers themselves – is completely different. Decidedly less generous than the benefits they enjoyed for decades.

Poverty Is a State of Mind Given to Us by Our Parents

Regardless of the narrow group of Boomer decision-makers, the majority of Boomers – especially from the working and middle classes – had a particular set of values and prescriptions for the next generation: get a stable job at a decent factory or company, just like they once did. They don’t understand that the new generation cannot build a house on that wage, usually cannot buy an apartment either, and many people today struggle just to rent one – despite working full time and putting in more than the standard eight hours a day.

Following Boomer advice, we are essentially guaranteed to fail. We cannot succeed by playing by rules that have long since expired. Today the game has completely different rules – and it is not nearly as generous to those who play it.

How to Escape Poverty

To escape poverty today, the first thing you must do is let go of the values the Boomer generation transmits and promotes. Most of those giving this advice are not doing well in life themselves – they are simply drawing on what they accumulated earlier. And a small, narrow portion of them are still playing the game of grabbing everything and giving nothing back to the next generation until the grave.

What you need today, above all, is flexibility – a willingness to constantly learn new things, and a release of the expectation of guaranteed stability. Instead, you need to learn to feel comfortable in different, new places and situations – because that is what contemporary reality demands. It also demands creativity. The upside of the new era is that while chaos appears to reign, within that chaos there are opportunities for those who show quick adaptability and learn to seize the new opportunities that are constantly emerging.

No specific niche is guaranteed to last – because no one knows how changes in the world will impact any given field. It pays to be a person of the new Renaissance: fluent across many domains, genuinely interested in continuously expanding your competencies.

Today, more than paper credentials from universities, what counts is what you can actually do – and how much courage you have not only to begin acting for your own development, but to keep going when challenges and setbacks appear. There are already more people with paper qualifications than positions for them. That is another myth that Boomers sold to a large portion of my generation – and they did so while attributing to themselves merits that, in reality, came from the era they were born into and the favorable labor market they entered at exactly the right time.

They consider themselves hard-working heroes – yet typically they neglected their own children in favor of the work they were doing, and today they are full of bitterness over weak relationships with those same children. This fuels their eagerness to deliver their outdated advice – wanting to remind their own children, often, of what exactly? That they are better than them? It is simply sad.

The truth is that Boomers made a mess of the world – because they are the ones who held power when the critical decisions were made, and they made those decisions in their own interest, not for the future. To escape physical and mental poverty, we must become better: more creative, more flexible, more self-aware, and determined to be positively generative – without looking back at old rules whose consequences we are now living with. It is time to actually change the world. And we will not do it by repeating old patterns. Only by thinking outside the box.

Jakub Qba Niegowski – Extrasensory Awareness Development Specialist