When the Ground Fails Us

Rethinking poverty, worth, and why so many people stop reaching for the light.

They say hard work pays off.

That if you’re struggling, you just need to try harder. Wake up earlier. Grind longer. Push through. And if that doesn’t work, then maybe you’re the problem. Maybe you’re lazy. Undisciplined. Entitled. Broken.

I believed all of that once.

I believed it the first time someone handed me a dollar a hole to dig fence posts in the Colorado summer heat. I believed it when I poured sweat into the dirt, blistered my hands, and told myself this is what it means to become a man. I believed it when I watched people with power shrug off the effort I poured in, certain I just hadn’t earned their respect yet.

But somewhere deep down, something didn’t add up. And I couldn’t name it yet, but I could feel it.

Something was wrong with the ground beneath my feet.

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The Whole Story

A couple weeks ago, in a piece about the abnormal things we’ve come to accept as normal, I shared a short clip on TikTok that talked about poverty.

I argued that poverty has more to do with systems and structures than individual failings. I pointed out how, at least in the United States, people can work full-time, or even multiple jobs, and still not get ahead. That poverty is not the result of laziness, but of systems designed to exploit labor while hoarding wealth.

And right on cue, the comments rolled in.

Some were just the really simple, “You’re wrong.”

Others offered some kind of reasoning, “People just need to work harder.” or “Stop making excuses.”

Then there were those who appointed blame, “It’s your choices that determine your outcomes.” or, “Success is a direct measure of IQ.”

There’s a certain comfort for people who say those things. The world they describe feels predictable. Linear. If I work hard, I’ll be okay. If someone else isn’t okay, they must not be working hard. And if I’m doing well, it gives me a sense of superiority over those who aren’t.

The logic is clean. Reassuring. It’s also cruel. Because the world doesn’t always work that way, and this edition of We Can Stay Human explores what’s actually going on.

My “Lazy” Trees

Out on the west side of my property is a row of trees. They offer a bit of backyard privacy in a neighborhood where the fences are all split rail. It’s open by design. They also form a windbreak from the potent gusts that rip off the foothills of the Rocky Mountains just a few miles away.

I dug the holes for those trees as a teenager, about 35 years ago. And when I took over the property earlier this summer, my brother commented that he thought they might need to come down. That they didn’t look healthy.

And there’s some truth to that. I cut off dozens of dead lower branches, limbs that hadn’t felt life-giving nutrients flow through them in who knows how long. When I look up the trunk, it’s clear: these trees are still standing tall, but they’re struggling.

Still, something in me resists the idea of taking them down.

Maybe it’s the memory of getting paid a dollar a hole that summer. Six inches of easy digging and then grinding through layers of thick Colorado clay. And those pine trees needed deeper holes than many of the smaller trees and shrubs we planted. It took hours and gallons of sweat to earn each and every one of those dollars. And honestly, I don’t feel like I’ve gotten my money’s worth. But somehow, if the trees stay standing and I benefit from them, maybe, in a couple years, the enjoyment will provide the value.

But whether I can make that digging worth it or not, I’ve got to wonder: what happened? After all, these trees are over 30 feet tall. Some of them top out closer to 40 feet. They didn’t always struggle. What’s choking them now?

As I cleared away the dead branches, the answer revealed itself. Hidden underneath the canopy, beneath where the needles are still green, was a foot of fallen pine litter. A full foot of carbon buildup, sealing off the soil, denying it the nitrogen that all plants need to survive.

Instead of receiving fresh nutrients through plant life or rabbit droppings or other natural processes, these trees are slowly starving. They have to reach wider and deeper to find the nourishment they need. But like a field that’s harvested every year with nothing sown back in, the nitrogen supply gets thinner and thinner. Until there’s nothing left.

The issue isn’t the trees. It’s the ground they’re planted in. Or more accurately, what’s happened to the ground over the decades. And with that in mind, I can’t help but wonder: How many people do we dismiss as lazy or broken when really, they’re doing everything they can to grow in soil that’s been stripped bare?

What Cultivates “Lazy” People?

When I think back to that summer digging holes in thick Colorado clay, it is not just the effort I remember. It is the wage. My dad paid me a dollar a hole. Thirty-three holes. Thirty-three dollars. Some of them took two hours. Some took five. I was fourteen, sure. But even then, something about the exchange didn’t sit right.

It wasn’t just about how hard I worked. It was about the return on the work. The value of the labor. The fairness of the soil I was planted in.

And that’s part of what we miss when we say people just need to work harder. Because most people are already working hard. They are grinding. They are raising kids, holding two jobs, caring for aging parents, navigating chronic pain, pushing through grief and trauma and burnout just to make it through the week.

A child born into generational poverty isn’t lazy. They are growing in a field stripped bare by redlining, disinvestment, and stolen opportunity.

A survivor of abuse who freezes in conflict isn’t weak. They are growing in the aftershock of a world that once told them danger was everywhere.

A worker who clocks sixty hours a week but still can’t afford healthcare isn’t undisciplined. They are growing in a system that hoards reward at the top and leaves everyone else overextended and underpaid.

Michael W. Green recently put numbers to what many already know in their bones. Using a basic needs framework, he calculated that a family of four would need around $140,000 a year to cover essential living costs in today’s economy. Not luxury. Not indulgence. Just food, shelter, transportation, childcare, and healthcare. Nothing extra. That’s nearly five times the federal poverty line, a line based on food alone, ignoring all of the other expenses necessary to successfully navigate today’s world.

But the median family income, that’s just over $105,000. What that reveals is staggering: our systems are not just failing to nourish human thriving, they’re actively structured to undernourish. We are cultivating struggle. Not because people don’t work hard, but because the soil they’re working from is barren by design. That barrenness isn’t accidental. It’s the byproduct of an extractive economy that rewards those who hoard while asking everyone else to make do with less. This isn’t a crisis of discipline. It’s a crisis of design.

And here’s the kicker: the average family income is actually around $155,000. That number gets pulled higher by billionaires and hedge fund managers and celebrity CEOs. And that’s just the numbers that get counted as income. But income isn’t the whole picture.

When you add in corporate profits not distributed as wages, stock buybacks, deferred compensation, tax loopholes, executive perks, and off-the-books wealth accumulation, the gap grows even wider. One recent analysis from the Economic Policy Institute estimated that corporate profits alone reached over $2.8 trillion in 2023, while stock buybacks topped $1 trillion.

Combined, those dollars are almost a third of wages, nearly four trillion dollars, that doesn’t even show up in income stats. Money generated by labor, but siphoned off before it ever touches the ground where most people live. It doesn’t feed families. It doesn’t pay for housing, healthcare, or childcare. It just concentrates in the portfolios of the already rich. If even a portion of that money were redistributed, the average family income wouldn’t just be $155,000, it could be far higher.

This isn’t a scarcity crisis. It’s a distribution crisis. A values crisis. The system isn’t broke. It’s rigged. Not because there’s not enough to go around, but because so much gets siphoned off before it ever touches the ground where most people are trying to grow.

When the average sits so far above the median, and the average doesn’t do the real disparity justice, it means we’re not suffering from economic drought. We’re suffering from deliberate misallocation, from a system where nourishment flows uphill, leaving everyone else to scrap for what’s left in the dust.

The problem isn’t that people are lazy. It’s that they are being asked to grow in depleted soil. To survive on wages that no longer cover even the basics. To raise families without childcare. To stay healthy without healthcare. To pay rent while housing costs spiral and real earnings stagnate. The issue isn’t the work ethic of the seed. It’s the scarcity built into the soil.

The Dignity of Quitting

And maybe this is the part we’re not supposed to say out loud: I understand why some people give up. If you’ve been trying to grow for years in soil that doesn’t nourish you, if the sun never quite reaches your corner, if every time you stretch upward something cuts you back, there comes a point where surrender stops feeling like weakness and starts to feel like the only sane option. It’s not that you don’t want to thrive. It’s that your roots are exhausted. And the energy it takes to keep pretending it’ll all work out is more than you can give.

There’s a grief in that. And a quiet dignity too. Because giving up isn’t always about apathy. Sometimes it’s the body’s wisdom. A refusal to keep offering yourself to systems that consume and discard. A protest, even if it looks like silence. And instead of labeling people as broken, we could ask what it would mean to create a world where giving up isn’t the most honest option left.

I think about my own kid, who recently walked away from a job at a grocery store. Not because they were lazy, but because they were the hardest worker there. Everyone knew it. Management knew it. They picked up shifts, trained new employees, went above and beyond every job description. And still, no raise, no promotion, no pathway forward. Just more expectation and the same stagnant return. Eventually, they had the clarity and the courage to say, if you won’t recognize my effort, if you won’t treat me with dignity, then you don’t deserve my labor. That’s not laziness. That’s self-respect. That’s knowing your worth, even when the system tries to deny it.

In all of these examples, the issue isn’t the tree. Nor is it the seed. It is the ground it is planted in. This is why we need to talk about soil. Because the soil shapes the outcome. And when the soil is depleted, no amount of effort can make the harvest come.

Lessons from the Summer Sun

And yes, these ideas first took root in my psyche as a teenager working all day in the summer heat for a dollar a hole. The ground beneath my feet wasn’t neutral. It was shaped by cultural ideas about the value of labor, about what a boy should learn, about what it meant to earn your way. But those ideas didn’t just shape a summer job. They shaped my sense of worth, my idea of justice, my understanding of what a fair return looks like.

The older I get, the more I see what that summer actually taught me. It taught me that hard work is not always valued, and often is not rewarded. It taught me that you can pour everything you have into a task and end the day with almost nothing to show for it. It taught me that the world’s definition of dignity is often conditional, that the hands that blister and bleed are rarely the hands that are honored. There was no fair return for the work I did, no correlation between effort and outcome. And beneath that lesson was something even more corrosive: the realization that the people who control the soil decide the worth of the work. They claim it’s the market establishing the wage, even as they rig the market.

Now, my dad was a mining engineer who earned his MBA during the 70’s as lessons from the Chicago School of Economics took root. His job was to oversee a mine, to oversee miners, to maximize output from the labor of others. In his world, extracting the most value for the lowest cost was efficiency. It was how things worked. And he allowed that worldview to shape how he engaged with me that summer, not maliciously, but because he believed that was simply how the ground was structured.

It was normal to him. It was expected. It was the way the world rewarded those in charge. But what it taught me, even if I couldn’t name it at the time, was that the system he operated in was built on taking more than it ever returned. It was a worldview that treated labor as expendable and people as tools, and it shaped me long before I ever questioned it.

Looking back, I can see how easily we accept that logic as normal. How quickly we absorb the idea that this is just how things are. But none of it is normal in a world that seeks to honor the dignity of human beings. None of it is natural for people who are meant to thrive. It is a distortion we have learned to live with, a poisoned soil we have mistaken for the real thing. And once you see it for what it is, you cannot unsee it. You begin to wonder how many other parts of your life, your story, your worth, were shaped by ground you never thought to examine.

What Can Faith Teach About Economics?

One of those unexamined places, for me, was faith. The spiritual soil I grew in was rich with discipline, devotion, and scripture. But it was also laced with fear. With the manipulation of shame. With a persistent voice that told me I was nothing more than a beggar. That asked for more of me as a human while simultaneously telling me I’d never be anything more than a poor miserable sinner. That tension, the one where the text called me to become more than the theology said I could be, came to a head when I began writing my dissertation.

The topic was supposed to be spiritual formation, an exploration of how people grow. But the deeper I went, the more I realized I had nothing honest to say. I could sketch out frameworks and quote scholars, but none of it rang true. Because beneath every one of my theories sat an understanding of myself that said I was fundamentally and irreparably broken.

Theology taught me that I was the problem. That there was something defective in my seed. And that no matter how sincerely I believed, how diligently I prayed, how hard I tried, I would always fall short. My job, then, was to accept this fallen state, to trudge along in shame, to hope that someday God might choose to save a wretch like me.

And when you believe your seed is defective, you start living like it. You play the part people want to see. You hide the parts they shouldn’t. You build a life on the outside that looks one way, while the inside quietly rots.

That was me.

I was duplicitous. I said the right things in public and did the opposite in private. I wore the mask of a good man, a godly man, while covering up anything that might prove otherwise. I needed approval like oxygen, but couldn’t receive love without suspicion. I was emotionally volatile: sometimes charming, sometimes cruel. I would lash out, then shrink back. I didn’t know how to be known without being condemned, so I stayed in hiding, even in plain sight.

And when I failed, which was often, I didn’t confess. I deflected. I lied. I found someone to blame. Not because I lacked a conscience, but because shame had convinced me that if people saw the real me, they’d walk away. I didn’t need to be told I was a sinner. I knew. I lived with the weight of it every day. But no amount of knowing made me whole. It only taught me how to survive.

I wasn’t growing. I was coping. That’s what bad soil does to the soul. It doesn’t just stunt your growth. It warps your roots. It trains you to twist yourself toward whatever source of light will keep you going, even if that light is artificial. Even if it burns.

But what if the seed wasn’t the problem? What if the problem was the soil? That question cracked something open in me. It didn’t come all at once. But as I wrestled through that dissertation, I began to encounter a different story. A different soil.

I discovered a theology that didn’t begin with sin, but with love. That didn’t call me fundamentally depraved, but fundamentally beloved. That didn’t demand shame as proof of my sincerity, but invited joy as a fruit of my belonging. And that changed everything.

Because once the soil shifted, I could finally breathe. I could begin to imagine growth that wasn’t rooted in groveling. I could begin to trust that there was something sacred in me that didn’t need to be erased, but revealed. I wasn’t trying to earn divine approval anymore. I was learning to live from divine embrace.

That change was more than theological. It was ontological. My entire sense of being, of what is most true, most real, was rewired. And from that rewiring came freedom. Not the freedom of moral laxity or spiritual apathy, but the freedom to grow. The freedom to stretch toward the light. It taught me something that has stayed with me ever since: the seed matters, but the soil shapes the possibilities.

Fixing Our Economic Ontology

Now that shift in my own soil didn’t fix the economic world I walked back into. It didn’t erase the economic pressures, the burnout culture, or the grind. But if a change in the soil of faith brought about such a radical transformation in how faith is embodied, can’t it also be true in life?

That’s why I can’t bring myself to join the chorus that blames people for struggling. That insists they just need to work harder, push farther, do better. Because I’ve seen what happens when someone starts from belovedness instead of shame. I’ve seen what becomes possible when the soil stops poisoning the seed and starts nourishing it instead. And I’ve come to believe that if we want to see people thrive, we can’t just lecture the seed. We have to tend the soil.

The question, then, is what kind of cultural soil are we growing in? What if the problem isn’t that people are lazy or broken or undeserving? What if the problem is that our economic soil is toxic? That it demands more than it gives, that it hollows out meaning, that it feeds some while starving others, and then dares to call that normal?

Maybe it’s time we stop blaming the seed and start asking what kind of ground we’ve been planting in. Because the soil we share shapes more than we know. And if changing my spiritual soil changed my life, what might it mean to change the soil we share? What would it look like to cultivate a cultural ecosystem where people are not only allowed to thrive, but actively nourished in their thriving? Where exhaustion isn’t the price of survival, and giving up doesn’t feel like the most honest choice left?

It would mean rewriting the rules that shape the ground. Because soil, whether in a field or in a society, is not neutral. It reflects the decisions we make, the priorities we uphold, and the stories we tell about who matters and what they deserve.

First, we have to address exploitation. Because right now, too many people are living in a system where their labor fuels someone else’s wealth, and the more they give, the more depleted they become. Changing this means unrigging the system at its most foundational level. That starts with removing private money from our political processes. If lawmakers are accountable to donors instead of constituents, the soil will always be poisoned. We need clean elections, free from the influence of corporate lobbying and campaign checks written by the very people who benefit from extraction. And we need antitrust enforcement that breaks up monopolies, dismantles the strangleholds that allow a handful of companies to dominate entire industries, suppress wages, and eliminate meaningful alternatives. That’s not just policy. It’s a call to restore dignity to the worker and integrity to the economy.

Second, we need to incentivize investment in people. In employees. In research. In the kind of long-term growth that builds something beyond short-term profits. That could look like a corporate windfall tax. Something that doesn’t just let companies sit on record-breaking gains while their workers struggle to afford groceries. It means rewriting the tax code so that it’s not cheaper to buy back your own stock than to raise wages or invest in innovation. It means showing corporations that the best return isn’t in speculative plays or quarterly manipulation, but in the development of human potential and sustainable growth.

Third, we have to discourage speculation and the financialization of everything. Because when the economy becomes a casino, people become chips. Homes become investments. Schools become profit centers. And people, real people with rent to pay, bodies to care for, and families to love, are left in the dust. We can shift that. Reinstating something like Glass-Steagall would separate investment banks from everyday consumer banking, reducing systemic risk and keeping predatory behavior out of the places where people deposit their paychecks. A restored set of progressive taxes on income, capital gains, and inheritance would help redistribute wealth that’s been hoarded for generations and curb the runaway accumulation that fuels inequality. These changes wouldn’t solve everything. But they’d till the soil. They’d create space for nourishment to reach more than just the roots at the top.

Fourth, we need to encourage entrepreneurship. Not the hollowed-out version sold by hustle culture, where you’re told to bootstrap your way to freedom while drowning in debt and health insurance premiums. But a system that actually supports people in creating what the world needs. That includes single-payer healthcare, not just as a moral imperative, but as a backbone for small businesses. When healthcare is no longer tied to employment, people can take risks. They can start companies, build cooperatives, chase ideas without gambling their lives or their children’s future. It also means creating access to capital for those who’ve been shut out of traditional funding routes, especially communities of color and historically marginalized groups. Entrepreneurship thrives not when people are desperate, but when they are supported.

Finally, we have to increase competition. Not as a race to the bottom, but as a field where innovation, quality, and service can flourish. One way to do that is by introducing public options in critical markets. Think of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which didn’t just provide electricity, it provided a model. A standard. A benchmark that forced private companies to improve or lose relevance. Public competition creates accountability. It puts people over profit. And it reminds us that markets should serve the public, not the other way around.

Each of these changes is more than a line item in a policy brief. They are efforts to cultivate a new kind of soil. Soil that is rich with dignity, moist with possibility, full of nutrients for human flourishing. Soil where the seed of a person’s life doesn’t have to fight so hard just to survive. Where growing tall isn’t a miracle, but a reasonable expectation.

None of it is easy. All of it takes work. But the work is different when the soil gives something back. When systems are built to nourish, not deplete. When agency is honored, and thriving is possible, not rare.

Because in the end, the real question is not simply how hard someone works. It’s whether the soil returns anything for their labor. Whether the ground we share allows for growth, or just demands it until there’s nothing left.

The Lazy vs. “The Lazy”

Now, none of this is to say that laziness doesn’t exist. I’m sure there are people who’ve checked out, who’ve chosen not to try. But that’s not the real question. The real question is why we’re so quick to label people that way.

Because when you start looking closely, you realize how many people we call lazy are actually something else entirely. They’re discouraged. Disillusioned. Exhausted from trying so hard for so long with so little to show for it. They’ve been underpaid, overlooked, and overworked. They’ve stretched themselves thin, made impossible choices, and still can’t get ahead. And eventually, something inside just stops reaching.

But what if that doesn’t mean their seed is broken? What if it just means the soil has failed them? What if the problem isn’t their work ethic, but the ground they’re planted in? Because when the soil is rich with possibility, when it offers dignity, return, support, and room to grow, something changes. Hope takes root. Effort feels worth it. The light becomes more than a distant dream.

And people stretch again. Not because they were lazy before, but because now, finally, the soil gives something back. And when we’re planted in soil that nourishes us, we’re far more likely to stay human.

Embodiment Practices

Whether your day only allows for a 60-second reclamation, your week a one-hour resistance ritual, or you find yourself ready for a full on rebellion against a world that assaults your humanity, behind the paywall I offer you three practices that will help you bring this post to life in your everyday.