Bum Mentality and How to Spot It

I was born to a family of farm workers in rural India.

After I was born, my mom and dad decided to move to the city so that I would have more opportunities in life.

I grew up in a chawl, which is better than a slum but worse than a ghetto.

I spent the first 16 years of my life living in chawls, and most of the people who lived there were on the borderline poor or lower middle class.

There was a lot of normal families like us staying there, but also a lot of drug users, prostitution houses, and other negative elements that you can expect.

In fact some of my childhood friends were children of prostitutes, although I did not realize this at the time. They came from houses that had only women, and one female matriarch that led them all (the matriarch was always fat as fuck for some reason and you could always tell who the leader was by her weight).

I never realized that these children I was playing with were children of prostitutes until much later in my life when my mother told me.

Suddenly it clicked for me that all of them thought that their dads had “died” when they were little and to this day I am a bit annoyed at myself for not being able to figure it out on my own (my mom and dad said they never told me because I would have used it to insult them if I had a fight with them, and that could potentially get me violently beaten by their groups or worse, killed to make an example).

Anyway, I digress.

What I want to talk about is the reason why many of these people (even the normal families) very rarely make it out of their lower class existence.

Bum Mentality

You would think that the actual reason why these people never improve their lives (at least financially) is because they lack high paying skills and education, but that’s not actually the full story.

The true problem is not a lack of skills and education. You can acquire skills and education.

In fact, ALL of these people have smartphones and internet (they are both very cheap in India) and can learn whatever they want with some effort and dedication.

Now I’m not saying that they can all open online businesses like with The Art of X and make internet money, but they CAN learn enough of something to get out of poverty.

For example, a guy I know who used to live in the chawl is a gym trainer. He used the internet to become a legitimate expert on training and was able to get himself a much higher paying job at a much better gym by increasing his skills using the internet.

He went from making ₹10,000 ($100) a month to making ₹60,000 ($600) a month in a few years. It sounds small to you and me but it was life changing for him and his family (imagine being able to afford decent food and housing).

So while it would be unreasonable for them to build online businesses from their current starting points, it is entirely reasonable for them to learn some kind of new skill that can improve their life situation.

But why do so few of them ever do it?

The reason is BUM MENTALITY.

What is Bum Mentality?

Bum mentality is when people accept their shitty existence and stop making real effort to improve their life situation.

They just go with the flow and cope with their shitty reality as much as possible.

To put it in simpler terms, bum mentality is a combination of high apathy and low ambition. You get “stuck” and never make non-linear progress.

It is VERY VERY common with middle class people because they become comfortable with what they have but lack the balls and commercial instinct to take risks.

In these chawls I grew up in, it was so common that 999 out of 1000 people could be described as having bum mentality.

Why Am I Even Talking About This

Of course the meta point of this article is to help you spot what bum mentality looks like, for 2 reasons:

1) If you spot it in yourself, you know that you need to eradicate it. Bum mentality can easily steal 10, 20, and even 30 or 40 years from your life.

You will just keep getting older and make 0 progress in life (except the linear progress that everyone makes). You will miss all the step functions that your life could have taken.

2) If you spot it in others, you know that investing time to build that relationship further is a waste of your time. The person will get nowhere in life and will take more from you than he will ever have to offer you.

In other words, this will turn out to be a host-parasite relationship in the future, where you are the host and they are the parasite. The faster you can get out of this, the better off you will be.

How to Spot Bum Mentality

Here are the commonalities in all of these people who never made it out of the chawl:

1) They watch A LOT of television.

They ALWAYS buy the best and biggest TV they can. Having a big TV is almost a status symbol.

People compete on who has the biggest TV, and most of these people could easily watch an upwards of 4-5 hours of TV every single day (TV includes YouTube and Netflix by the way).

They know what happened in the latest episodes of all the popular shows, and will get together with their friends to talk about the characters.

Instead of investing their spare time to learn things (e.g. by reading books), they invest it in watching entertainment.

2) They know all about actors and sportsmen.

They follow celebrity gossip and can tell you what every actor is up to.

They know the performance of cricketers and can tell you how they play from memory.

They are very invested in these cricketers and any insult or praise of their favorites will be interpreted as insults and praise for them.

Instead of living and succeeding in the real world, they live vicariously through celebrities and sportsmen and think that their favorite cricket or football team winning is equivalent to them winning.

3) Alcohol and substance abuse.

There is a lot of substance abuse, and many people spend a lot of their off work hours drinking cheap alcohol to make themselves feel better.

Alcohol is often more than 20% of their disposable expenditure.

Instead of spending their money on acquiring new skills, they spend it on escaping reality by using alcohol and drugs.

By the way, if you are addicted to smoking or drinking or pornography, and want to quit for good, get yourself a copy of Live Intentionally: 90 Day Self-Improvement Program. This will be the most important small investment of money that you will make in your entire life.

4) They cope with reality by using politics.

They blame their lack of success on external factors, usually politicians and the government.

If only their favorite politician was elected, everything would be fixed and they would become instantly successful.

They are poor because the rich are stealing from them. Or because the government isn’t doing enough to employ them. Or because the politician in power is not doing enough to “promote the locals and keep the outsiders in line”.

Instead of being accountable for their own life, they hold other people responsible for the state of their life.

5) They have a general hatred of ambition and success.

If someone around them displays ambition to improve their life and is becoming better than them, he will suddenly become a pariah.

People will talk badly about him behind his back and try to sabotage him wherever possible to “bring him back into his place”.

They are not Machiavellian enough to hide their envy, so they will show their displeasure with sarcasm.

For example, if you are doing well, they may start calling you “Richie Rich” and use it as insult/shaming phase. If you are good in studies, they will sarcastically call you a “Scholar”. (Almost as if you are supposed to feel insulted by this.)

Instead of being inspired by other people’s success and copying and learning from it, they are generally envious and resentful of it.

6) They REALLY care about their birthday.

This was always weird to me but these guys often really care about birthdays. Their own, their wife’s, and their children’s.

They will spend quite a bit of cash to celebrate birthdays… I have never understood why. And you see this in all loser populations, not just broke chawl people.

For example, women who come from money and don’t ever have to improve themselves or work for something (i.e. they can live a comfortable and unproductive life) are also obsessed with celebrating their birthdays.

Instead of celebrating achievements, they celebrate the fact that they were born.

Again, these are general trends and do not apply to every single person.

That said, bum mentality is the culprit that keeps people from rising up in life.

Eradicate it.

– Harsh Strongman