If you were living in the Netherlands anywhere in the past 50-60 years, none of the things you’ve described would be ‘wants’, they would all be described as needs. And needs provided for by the state regardless of income at that (housing is a bit iffy at the moment).

Given that regardless of how much money you have you’d have access to all of those, how would you define poor?

What the OP describes is what my definition of poor was while growing up. There were simply no people around that had less than we had.

Of course by comparison with any country in Africa we were all filthy rich, but that’s not really a useful comparison to make. In the context we were living we were poor.

From your description, you literally weren't poor even by the context of the netherlands, at least using the dictionary definition of the word.

[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/poor]

You might have been at the lowest income level, but society ensured you met no reasonable definitions of the word, correct?

You had what you needed, even by the high standards of the society you were in.

That is a good thing.

Very few societies (now or historically) are able to do that, let alone willing.

So I'd just say you were doing ok. Or comfortable.

Just because you didn't have anyone handy at any given moment to point at and say 'hey look, they have even less than we do!' doesn't mean you were poor. It just means you were less rich. There is a difference.

By that definition nobody is poor, which makes the word kind of useless, which means the definition changes. Which is definitely not how people think of themselves (as OP so helpfully told us).

I was wondering if this is just a case of a different definition for the word poor, and I find that the equivalent word in Dutch (arm) is defined as: “Not having a lot of something, especially money.” Which was definitely the case.

Whereas in English it’s: “of insufficient quantity to meet a need”, which was not.

There’s a different Dutch word (armoede) that indicates much more far reaching poverty, which has an almost equivalent definition to the English ‘poor’: “situation in which one does not have enough to live”

Poverty in English is: “the state of having little or no money and few or no material possessions” which seems more equivalent to poor.

Haha, yeah no.

You said - you did not lack for the necessities. Not even housing! Nor schooling. Nor food. Not healthcare. Nor basic entertainment. Nor safety. Not even by the standards of the area, which were high. And it wasn’t at risk - it was a stable and reliable thing.

Poor people do lack these things. It’s part of the definition. I know, I’ve been there.

And I wasn’t very poor (but poor - issues with clothing, food, healthcare, housing sometimes), but I had friends who were very poor. Some didn’t end up growing up because of it. Some ended up growing up in a way they’re still in jail.

You were just in a very well protected bubble, which is awesome. But almost no one else is.

If you go to any society that isn’t in that kind of bubble (China, India, most of the US, Eastern Europe, Russia, 95% of Africa and South America), the difference is obvious. You were in a place that that ‘cliff’ just didn’t exist. Society pulled out all the stops and filled it in with cement.

Which is awesome for you!

Some of us grew up staring over that Cliff every day though, and that is where this discussion is coming from. Most people (even/especially rich people) in those societies are acutely aware of its existence, even if they work hard to stay very far away from it.

There is a line where needs aren’t possible to get met. Where it’s a hard, sometimes fast downward spiral to actual death, imprisonment, etc.

Where it’s a constant desperate scramble to have the basics necessary to survive, and often some of them just aren’t there sometimes, but they show up somehow just enough you somehow make it through. But man does it suck.

And that’s not even talking about actual poverty. Or what happens when a primary caregiver gets cancer. Or ODs.