The Dowry of Poverty
Can your marriage affect the economy of the country? How about your funeral? Can your death be somehow related to how poor your country is?
Is the dowry of poverty is even more poverty?
We are well accustomed to looking outside for reasons to answer the question; why are we poor and why are we suffering. It could be the current governments, past politicians, natural disasters, foreign countries thousands of miles away who might have colonized you decades ago, or the neighbor next door.
Although all these are definitely responsible to various degrees for poverty, and surely worthy of your blame, let’s look inwards and try to see some issues within ourselves that are affecting poverty levels in our society.
Poverty is defined in a country when the level of income falls below the level necessary to meet minimum subsistence, aka the poverty line.
Although many factors such as natural disasters, man-made disasters like war, health issues, addictions, educational level, caste, and race issues affect poverty to prevail in a reign, something that is truly surprising and yet a very obvious element is causing a significant contribution to poverty.
Those are our cultural norms and festivities like marriages, funerals, and dowries.
People, no matter their income level, have been found to spend thirty to fifty times their income on a single day, for an event they cannot afford, incurring a huge opportunity cost that otherwise could have been used for a better investment.
The same goes for the dowry too. These old age traditions are destined to make a person poor if he or she was unfortunate to have multiple daughters in the family. Again, all your capital is gone on one single so-called “happy day”.
Funerals are even more surprising. Your death day has to be lavishly decorated and funded by your relatives, whose capital will again be converted to a wasteful expense just within a few days.
These festivals have converted to highly commercialized events with a lot of innovative new ways design to eat your money up. We go all in putting all our money thinking this will boost our ego and somehow make us happy.
But how can this affect the country, someone might ask. These are our hard-earned money, we can spend our money on anything we want. Isn’t that the simple answer?
We keep saying to ourselves that we can spend the money we earned any way we want, forgetting all the free and low-cost benefits we benefited from to save and earn that kind of money. From free education, free health care, cheap electricity bills, and other expenses that all contributed significantly along with your efforts to earn you the money that you so willingly wasted in just one day.
So, no. The money you thought you earned was actually the hard work of many, especially when you are living in a country where you get your necessities for a cheap price or free.
Who could have thought that the most important day of your life could actually be making you and your country poor!
The saddest and the most eye-opening part of all this is that this unfortunate mass capital dumping happens mostly in religious countries that constantly practice minimalism and letting go of physical possessions.
With religions such as Buddhism and Hinduism teaching us to have less ego and to be low on consumerism, these extravagant festivals have somehow slipped through good religious attitudes to make poor countries even poorer.
People work hard for years and years, and sometimes foolishly apply for loans (and get into debt issues just for a wedding!), not to invest, save or give to a have not (like all these religions clearly teach), but to spend to create and sustain an ego of one’s own foolish self.
Folks sometimes get into local insurances (normally regional societies) that collect funds, so that the society would pay the expense for the funeral when the person dies. Well, how about spending the money when the person is alive, for that person’s happiness, and arranging a small, low-budget funeral instead. Wouldn’t that be a million times better?
So what can you do with this money instead of converting it to a marriage expense, funeral expense, or a precious dowry? You can help others, save money in the bank for an emergency. Or you can choose to invest your money.
If you are marrying, invest in your marriage, your future. If you are dying, invest in your final days to live happily or on your children. Invest in yourself, invest in human capital.
These decisions might feel very personal and individual to you. But, when enough of us make the attitude change, we can all look towards a society with prosperous people.
The United States of America was built on the idea of an American dream, where each dreams and works hard for success. Surely we also can change our personal attitudes, align ourselves to our own spiritual journey and religion, and develop both in mind and money.
