The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.

Willem de Kooning, the great painter of abstraction, once spoke with disarming truth: “The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.” In this single line he revealed not only the hardship of poverty, but its cruelest theft: the theft of hours, the devouring of energy, the chains it lays upon the spirit. Poverty does not only empty the stomach; it consumes the days themselves, leaving little space for dreams, for creation, or for rest.

The meaning of this quote lies in the hidden cost of poverty. When one is poor, each day is consumed by survival: by the search for food, by the worry of rent, by endless labor for little pay. There is no abundance of leisure, no time for contemplation or art, no room to stretch one’s imagination. The poor are not idle; they are overworked, yet their toil yields little. Thus, their lives are bound by necessity, while the wealthy, freed from such burdens, possess the luxury of time to create, to learn, to travel, to build futures. Poverty, then, is not only a lack of money—it is a tyranny over the hours of a human life.

The origin of de Kooning’s reflection may be found in his own early years. Before fame as a painter, he lived as an immigrant from the Netherlands in New York, working as a house painter and commercial artist. He knew firsthand the exhaustion of laboring merely to survive. Later, when he achieved success, he looked back and recognized that poverty had swallowed years of his life—years that could have been devoted to his art, but instead were given to survival. His words carry both the bitterness of memory and the clarity of wisdom.

History shows us vivid examples of this truth. Consider the lives of sharecroppers in the American South, who worked from dawn to dusk for a pittance, trapped in cycles of debt. Their days were consumed with labor, leaving little time for education or advancement. Or look to the factory workers of the Industrial Revolution, who toiled in dim halls for fourteen hours a day, their lives reduced to mere endurance. In both, we see poverty not only as financial hardship, but as a devourer of human potential, stealing the hours needed for growth and self-expression.

The lesson is sobering: time is the true wealth of life, and poverty robs it most cruelly. To lose money is one thing; to lose years is another. Those who struggle at the margins are not lazy, as the unwise might claim, but bound by the relentless demands of survival. Their strength is spent not on dreams, but on necessities. And so we are called to compassion: to understand that poverty is not simply lack, but bondage, and to labor for a world where no person’s time is consumed entirely by survival.

Practical wisdom flows from this. If you live with more than enough, do not squander your time, for it is the treasure that the poor are denied. Use it wisely for learning, for creation, for service. And if you have known poverty, know that your endurance is itself a form of strength, forged in fire, even if the world did not grant you the leisure it gave others. At the same time, we must strive collectively to build systems that do not trap the poor in endless cycles of wasted time—fair wages, just opportunities, and communities of care.

Thus de Kooning’s words, though simple, strike with the weight of prophecy. “The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time.” Let them remind us that poverty is not merely an economic condition, but a theft of life’s most precious gift. To fight against it is not only to fill empty hands, but to restore to every human the dignity of hours freely chosen. And when that dignity is restored, art, wisdom, and love will flourish, no longer chained by the tyranny of survival.