Reply #20: I survived welfare for about six months due to severe illness [View All]

[Warpy]

The one thing you can say about living on welfare is that it's boring. You barely have enough for your housing and maybe two meals a day, no snacks. You can't afford even public transit, if it's available, and you can't go anywhere, especially if you're ill or you have infants and toddlers. It's bare subsistence living, with no extras, and that means things like newspapers or even an occasional bag of chips.

I went back to work against medical advice after six months.

Living on welfare is such a hideous experience that anyone with the skills to get off it will do so as quickly as possible. It's a punitive system that destroys your spirit, even, as in my case, you're there through no fault of your own. Illness is still not a consumer decision.

The dishonesty surrounding all the theorizing about families on multigenerational welfare is that nobody has ever bothered to evaluate these people fully. From the ones I got to know I would suggest that borderline mental retardation and clinical depression play far greater roles than laziness does.