Why We Must Not Be Poor

“In this world, dreaming is a luxury—and the invoice must be paid in cash.”

I used to be a child with sky-high ambitions. I believed that hard work was the only currency needed to purchase a future. But reality arrived like a mid-day slap to the face, whispering a cruel truth: without money, your dream isn’t walking; it is scaling a vertical cliff with bare hands, on “hard mode.”

We often hear the cliché that “everyone has the same twenty-four hours,” but that is a blatant lie. People with privilege can use their time to learn, fail, and restart indefinitely. For us, a single failure can mean a total collapse. While they fly in private jets toward their aspirations, we are forced to crawl through gravel paths. Being poor in Indonesia means your dreams are constantly being eroded—by neighbors, by circumstances, and even by your own family. “Don’t aim too high, do you even have the money?” or “A woman’s journey always ends in the kitchen anyway.” These sentences aren’t just unsolicited advice; they are iron bars designed to cage our potential before it even has the chance to bloom.

This poverty has a very specific way of stripping a person of their dignity, especially within the extended family. Have you ever noticed who gets to sit on the living room sofa during family gatherings, and whose back is drenched in sweat in the kitchen, washing the leftovers of the feast? There is a cruel, unwritten law: if you cannot contribute to the envelope, you must contribute your labor. We are condemned to be “permanent help”—the cooks, the cleaners, the silent extras whose voices are never heard in family discussions. We are subtly dehumanized through the labor squeezed out of us, because in their eyes, your dignity is strictly proportional to your bank balance.

To make matters worse, the system seems to turn a blind eye to those in the “middle”—not poor enough for government aid, but too poor to move forward without a burden. How can we talk about higher education when tuition costs hundreds of millions, while the minimum wage barely touches the millions? Even the word “scholarship” often feels like a staged performance. Many with privilege feign poverty to snatch those funds, while those truly struggling are crushed by a bureaucracy that is both convoluted and misplaced.

Dreams of studying abroad? That is an illusion for those without seed capital. You need money just to prove that you are “worthy” of being helped. Millions for language proficiency tests and administrative documents might be “pocket change” for some, but for us, it is a gamble involving years of family savings. This is the primary reason why we must not be poor: we do not have the right to fail.

Those with privilege have a safety net; they can fall, get up, and try again. But for us, failing once means losing momentum forever. There is no emergency fund; there are no family assets to liquidate. Once we fall, we hit the ground—hard. We need money not for luxury, but to buy the right to stop asking for “permission” to dream. We need money so that our voices are not drowned out by the smoke of someone else’s kitchen.

Being poor is exhausting. It is the exhaustion of constantly choosing between today’s meal or tomorrow’s brain investment. It is the exhaustion of swallowing your pride every time reality reminds you of your place in the social food chain. I write this not to simply complain, but to acknowledge a bitter truth: we truly must not be poor. Not because we are greedy, but because this world is too cruel for those without financial protection. We need money so our dreams are not mocked, and so we do not have to spend a lifetime “understanding” a world that has never once tried to understand us.

Big dreams need a solid foundation. And unfortunately, in the world we live in today, that foundation is named money.