Why do the poorest people in China who work the hardest find it even harder to get back on their feet?

Zou Shiming, for his whole life, has he not been hardworking enough?
After boxing for half his life, he wasn’t knocked down by other people—he was bankrupted by his own wife to the tune of two hundred million.
He started training at six years old, boxed for more than twenty years—Olympic gold, the WBO world boxing champion title and a gold belt. On the ring, no one ever complains that he isn’t putting in the work.
After retirement he was even more hardworking—he opened a super-large, high-end boxing gym in Shanghai, with huge floor space and sky-high rent—fixed spending of several million per month.
The gym hadn’t even recouped yet, and he went on to open a hot pot restaurant, an e-sports company, and even bought high-risk wealth-management products with no risk controls at all.
So what happened?
After years of accumulation, the investment losses were far beyond the two hundred million.
He sold the houses in Beijing, Guiyang, and the United States (if you had money, you could still mess around), and in the end they moved into a rental.
Boxing champion Zou Shiming and his wife now spend every day in the livestream telling “family members,” slowly filling the hole through livestream commerce.
A person who fought his way on the ring to become a world champion—his intelligence, willpower, execution—any of those is in the top 1%.
But even for someone like him, after retirement, almost every investment decision he made was wrong.
It’s not that he wasn’t hardworking—he was hardworking in the wrong places. If you rewind this matter back two thousand years, the kind of person who could come out of it would absolutely teach you one lesson.
Sun Bin: after Pang Juan dug out his kneecap bones, he escaped to Qi and survived by begging.
You might think this is just helpless destitution, but think it through carefully: if someone has lost even a kneecap bone, can they still go do sweeping floors and hard labor to survive?
They can—but he didn’t.
Why? Because physical labor would consume all your time and attention.
If you carry bricks from morning to night, when you get back at night your brain is a mess of paste—forget about planning tactics; you even don’t want to think about what to eat tomorrow.
Sun Bin was very clear: the only thing valuable about him was his brain, and a brain needs bandwidth.
If he went to do physical work, he could trade it for a few meals in the short term, but in the long run he would ruin his only capital for getting back on his feet.
When Han Xin suffered the humiliation under someone’s belt, he didn’t go work a job either.
Zhuge Liang “cultivated the land” in Longzhong for ten years, but his main work was actually reading and socializing.
These people aren’t lazy—they know one thing: stopping labor and keeping food in your mouth by working nonstop is precisely the fastest way to lock yourself in place. But poor people have no choice. That’s the most brutal part.
Harvard professor Muralidharan tracked a group of sugarcane farmers in India.
For the same group of people, when they were still poor before the harvest, their measured IQ was 13 points lower than after the harvest, just one year into getting their first crop.
What does 13 points mean?
It’s like taking an exam after you’ve pulled back to back two full all-nighters. It’s not that you’ve gotten dumber—it’s that your brain has been filled up by other things. Muralidharan calls it “cognitive bandwidth.”
When a poor person wakes up every day, the tasks that run automatically in the background are: the rent is short by 800, the phone bill is about to lapse, the child’s school uniform money isn’t settled, is the boss in a bad mood today and might lay people off, and has the pork price in the market gone up by another two yuan.
These aren’t things he actively thinks about—his brain automatically runs them, like when your phone has 20 apps running in the background and when you open anything, it lags. It’s not that the phone is bad—it’s that the resources have been eaten up.
In his experiments, the number of mistakes people made on cognitive tests when they were in a state of poverty was almost the same as in the insomnia group.
Poverty equals chronic insomnia.
So the loop you see goes like this: first, evolutionary instinct—“survive today” always comes first.
Then when making decisions, it automatically chooses “the one that saves effort” instead of “the one that’s correct.” Convenience store instant noodles cost 3.5, potatoes in the market can be eaten for three days for just 4, but going to the market takes 20 more minutes. A poor person’s brain picks instant noodles.
Second, short-term decisions pile up and the economic situation deteriorates. Borrow money to patch the hole, buy the cheapest things that go bad in three days—because they can’t bear to get a checkup, which turns into a serious illness delayed until it can’t be ignored.
In the end, you become even poorer, your cognitive bandwidth gets narrower, and the quality of the next round of decisions drops even lower.
The terrifying thing about this loop is: the more hardworking you are to solve the problems in front of you, the less spare capacity you have to think about how to jump out of this loop.
In other words, being hardworking isn’t the cure—being hardworking is part of the loop itself.
#Zou Shiming