To be poor is more than lacking money — it is to be excluded from security, dignity, and recognition. Yet poverty feels different across the world: in the U.S., it brings shame; in Vietnam, it may carry quiet pride. This essay explores how cultural expectations, digital comparison, and economic systems shape the emotional and structural experience of poverty — and how global inequality is not only endured but felt.
Global trade presents itself as a neutral system—rewarding efficiency, fostering competition, and delivering the best products at the lowest prices. But this is an illusion. Beneath the rhetoric of free markets lies a structure of systemic concealment: companies do not seek productivity, but docility; not innovation, but exploitation. The shift from China to Vietnam in manufacturing exemplifies this logic—not as a pursuit of quality, but of cheaper labor and weaker resistance. What appears as economic progress is often a redirection of suffering—hidden behind supply chains, masked by price tags. Eidoism exposes this façade by demanding visibility of form over performance, and justice over growth.
