Buridan’s Ass: Precarity is So Much More Than Just Scarcity
A Comprehensive Look At Community Stability Programs
There’s an old philosophical thought experiment called Buridan’s Ass. Basically, there’s a donkey standing between food and water. He’s hungry and he’s thirsty. If he walks toward the food, he’s walking farther away from the water. If he walks toward the water, he’s walking farther away from the food. So he stands there, paralyzed by indecision (lack of capacity). And eventually dies. The point of the story is usually to illustrate the problem of rational choice. If two competing choices are equally compelling, and there’s no rational way to determine which one should take priority, you can become stuck between them.
I think about this alot because I see a version of Buridan’s ass every day at the community resource center. Except instead of food and water, it’s rent and electricity. Or food and gasoline. Or medicine and groceries. Or going to work and staying home with a sick child. And, unlike the donkey, people usually have considerably more than two buckets sitting around them. There might be six. The rent is due Friday. The electric company has sent a disconnect notice. The refrigerator is empty. The car needs a repair. One of the kids needs new shoes for school. And the job that supposedly makes it possible to pay for all of this requires the car that is no longer functioning.
So, pick one.
This is one of the things about precarity that people outside of it all don’t really understand. We tend to think of poverty in terms of scarcity. Someone doesn’t have enough money. Which is obviously true. But scarcity creates something else…
It creates impossible choices.
If you have $3,000 in the bank and the electric bill is $200, there isn’t much of a philosophical dilemma involved. You pay the electric bill. If you have $220 and the electric bill is $200, things get considerably more interesting. Because that $200 is also groceries. And gasoline. And the copay for your daughter’s prescription. Suddenly paying the electric bill isn’t simply paying the electric bill. It’s choosing electricity over everything else that the same $200 could have prevented from going wrong. Every solution becomes another problem. So people hesitate. They put things off. They make decisions that don’t seem rational from the outside. Sometimes they don’t make decisions at all. And from our comfortable side of the equation, this can look like irresponsibility. Why didn’t you pay the bill earlier? Why didn’t you call before the disconnect notice? Why didn’t you save some money? Why didn’t you apply for assistance? Why didn’t you get another job? Why didn’t you…
There’s always a “why didn’t you.”
The problem is that every “why didn’t you” assumes there was some point at which the person was standing comfortably outside the problem, looking at all the available options and choosing poorly.
Often there wasn’t.
They were already standing between the food and the water.And every step toward one took them farther away from something else they also desperately needed. This creates another problem that becomes especially important when we start talking about helping people escape precarity: making all of these decisions requires capacity. You have to think. You have to plan. You have to make phone calls. Fill out applications. Find documents. Remember appointments. Navigate websites. Sit on hold. Arrange transportation. Find childcare. Explain your situation to a stranger. Then explain it to another stranger. Then explain it to a third stranger because apparently the first two strangers entered it into the wrong computer system. All while trying to keep your job. And feed your family. And figure out whether paying the water bill today means getting evicted next week.
We frequently describe people in these circumstances as lacking agency. Which is interesting.Because agency requires enough room to act. Freedom requires options, obviously, but it also requires the ability to choose among those options without every choice creating another emergency. Technically, the donkey is free. Nobody tied him up. Nobody built a fence around him. The food is right there. The water is right there. He can walk in either direction whenever he wants. That’s freedom, right? Except he can’t choose one necessity without moving away from the other. And this is where precarity starts becoming something larger than an economic condition.
Because we generally think about freedom as the absence of someone stopping us from doing something.
But there’s another kind of freedom that depends upon having enough capacity, enough security, enough breathing room to actually make meaningful choices. A person can be completely free on paper and functionally trapped in life. Free to move. Free to work. Free to choose. Free to apply. Free to improve their situation. Free to walk toward the food. And free to walk toward the water.
We then build social programs around this idea of freedom. Here are the resources. Here are the websites. Here are the phone numbers. Here are the applications. Here are twelve organizations that might be able to help.
Good luck.
We’ve given people options. What we haven’t necessarily given them is the capacity to navigate those options. And then we become frustrated when they don’t. This is why I increasingly think that one of the most important functions of community infrastructure isn’t simply providing resources. It’s reducing the number of impossible decisions people have to make long enough for them to regain the capacity to make decisions at all.
Sometimes you don’t need to teach the donkey better decision-making skills. Sometimes you need to move the food next to the water. Because a person who spends every day deciding which essential need they’re willing to sacrifice isn’t really exercising agency. They’re managing loss.
And eventually, if we make someone choose between enough necessities for long enough, we shouldn’t be surprised when they stop choosing. We call it a failure of personal responsibility.
The donkey probably has another name for it.
When a Few Hundred Dollars Stands Between a Family and Stability: A Community Stability Case
A family came to the resource center facing eviction. They were behind on rent and holding a Notice to Vacate. On paper it was a rental assistance case, and if I had treated it that way, I would have missed the actual problem.
Both adults are credentialed healthcare professionals. Their household income had been interrupted for an extended period by a serious family medical situation; the kind of thing that takes one earner out of the workforce entirely and puts strain on the other. They were not people without skills, work history, or motivation. They were people whose earning capacity had been switched off by circumstance and had not yet been switched back on.
One of them was ready to return to work. There was a real job available; not a lead, not a maybe, an actual opportunity waiting. But the position required a current professional credential, and the credential required passing an examination. The authorization to test was already in hand.
The examination fee was $450.
That was it. That was the entire distance between this household and a restored income.
They Had Already Done the Work
This family had not been waiting for someone to rescue them.
They had applied for workforce and employment programs. They had pursued rental assistance. They had engaged eviction-related services and legal support. They had done nearly everything that conventional resource navigation asks a person in crisis to do, and they had done it while managing a medical situation that would have flattened most households.
The problem was not a lack of referrals. They had plenty of referrals. The problem was that not one of them removed the thing actually blocking the path.
The Presenting Problem Was Not the Underlying Problem
Rent arrears was the symptom. Eviction was the threat. But the underlying disruption was interrupted earning capacity, and the household already possessed the asset needed to fix it; professional training and experience that was sitting there, unusable, behind a testing fee.
So I stopped asking what this family qualified for and started asking a different question: what would actually have to change for this household to become stable again?
The answer was concrete. Pay the fee. Take the exam. Earn the credential. Take the job. Restore the income.
But the whole plan was stopped at the first step by a few hundred dollars.
What We Did
The resource center paid the examination fee.
Not because the family needed money, everyone who walks through that door needs money, but because of the specific role that particular expense played in the household’s recovery. It connected to an existing skill set, an existing authorization to test, a defined credentialing requirement, and a real employment opportunity.
Paying part of the rent might have delayed the crisis. Paying for the exam had a chance at changing the trajectory.
Those weren’t mutually exclusive, and we didn’t treat them that way. The family continued pursuing rental assistance and other supports, because removing a bottleneck doesn’t protect a household while it recovers. There is still time between testing, credentialing, onboarding, and a first paycheck. Assistance functions as a bridge across that gap.
What This Case Taught Me
The presenting problem is often not the real one. A Notice to Vacate is clear. It pulls all the attention. But the less obvious problem was the one worth solving.
People in crisis may already be doing everything they can. Another referral was not going to help this family. They were drowning in referrals.
Look for existing capacity before assuming dependency. This household had training, experience, and a job waiting. The intervention didn’t create capacity. It unblocked capacity that was already there.
Small barriers can have enormous consequences. A few hundred dollars stood between a trained professional and a working credential. Once an eviction happens, the costs multiply; deposits, application fees, moving expenses, transportation problems, job disruption, and the difficulty of finding anyone willing to rent to a household with an eviction on record.
Nothing in a family’s life is siloed. Housing, employment, healthcare, caregiving, licensing, legal exposure, and public benefits were all tangled together here. No single program represented the whole problem, which is exactly why no single referral solved it.
Where Things Stand
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to write this up as a success story and it isn’t one yet.
The fee is paid. The exam has not been taken. The credential has not been earned. The job has not started. The family is still in the vulnerable stretch between the intervention and the income, still pursuing rental assistance, still at risk.
What I can document is the intervention itself: a family facing eviction had a credible path back to financial independence, one small expense was blocking that path, and we removed it. Whether it works is a question I will only be able to answer by following this case through testing, credentialing, employment, first paycheck, and housing.
A Different Measure
Community organizations tend to count dollars distributed, referrals made, applications completed, households served. Those numbers are real, but they measure activity rather than change. The better question is: what was made different because we recognized the bottleneck and acted to relieve it? For this family, that fee bought more than a testing slot. It bought a trained professional the chance to go back to work, and it bought a household facing eviction some time and some possibility.
The most important intervention is not always the most obvious one. Sometimes it’s the one that changes what happens next.
