Warning: If you are accustomed to reading my stuff and know my normal tone, just a heads up, this one isn't really...funny. Sorry.

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Anyone who travels as much as I do will find that their life becomes a series of epiphanies, and not all of those revelations are warm and fuzzy. You will eventually come to the point where you have to wrap your head around the "Haves" and the "Have Nots" of this world and figure out a way that you can mentally come to terms with all the disturbing things you witness. I am talking here about poverty, and by extension, wealth.

We are taught early on that matter can be neither created nor destroyed, it can only be transmuted and moved around. As I journey on this earth, I can’t shake the notion that wealth operates in the same way, and that in order for me to live like this, in the manner which I am accustomed, someone else is consequently forced to live like this, far below the poverty line.

I picture a map of the world. Reminiscent of a mad scientist’s operating table from a sci-fi film, there are all these tangled, tentacle-like tubes running from points all over the globe, and they all lead straight back to America. Straight back to me, as I suck the prosperity and quality of life from all these people and places, so that I can live by my pampered, American standards. Why should we have so much when others have so little?

When I visit all these developing countries, and I see living conditions like the tent cities in Johannesburg or the street beggars in Kathmandu, it always crosses my mind that perhaps what I am witnessing is the terrible flip side of the equation. That, again, for me to live the way I do, these people are forced to live the way they do. If I was the protagonist in a dystopian fiction film where the predicament was presented in such reductive, menacing terms— Ryan, for you to continuing living the way you do in America, these people must continue to live here in this impoverished, destitute way— what would my decision be? Could I step up and become the hero? I certainly haven’t in my own life. What would being the hero even look like? Am I prepared to singlehandedly take on World Hunger?

To put things in perspective for you, when I encounter a beggar like the one in the photo above, and I am dressed from head to toe in clothes from Patagonia and gear from REI, with a mirrorless camera around my neck and tens of thousands of dollars of lenses in my backpack, it always occurs to me that I am usually carrying on my person more wealth than this individual will ever know in his entire life.

I remember being ashamed, and having the unbidden, bizarro thought flash through my head, that thank goodness this man is blind and can’t see me. But everyone else in the world can— see us, that is— as we parade through their streets and villages, wearing our fancy clothes and dragging our bulging American suitcases and wallets, and I often wonder why local citizens don’t just murder us in our sleep.

Everything about the blind beggar in the photo above struck me as almost biblical. I was reminded of my TIME IN REHAB, and later in AA, when I was constantly assaulted with all these different platitudes. One of the most infuriating among them being, “God doesn’t give anyone more than they can handle.”

I always thought, “Really? Then he must have taken one look at me and decided I was so pitiful and helpless a soul that he would give me almost no hardships in this life, whatsoever. I was given a great family, a great upbringing, a great education… so I must rank pretty low in God’s estimation of capable individuals. Whereas this guy here, sitting on the ground, crippled with glaucoma, he must be one step away from sainthood. So capable of "handling things," this man, he is clearly God's favorite.

In Nepal, a similar philosophy was explained to me, that of Hinduism and the concept of reincarnation. A person who constantly makes bad decisions and lives a shitty life with low morals standards, has a soul that isn’t very advanced, and he might be punished next time around by being reincarnated as a lowly grasshopper. The fact that you and I both exist as humans, that means that we are both somewhat advanced already.

Well, if that is the case, and a higher being wants to reward me for a life well-lived, before they run off and make me human again, I have a request: please make sure you make me an American human again. Otherwise, based on many of the places I have been and the things I have witnessed, I think I’d prefer to be a mindless grasshopper than a cognizant human in a good many other places in this world.

Thank you.

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If you're ready to further contemplate homelessness and poverty with me on a local level, join me right HERE in Dallas, Texas. Or, you can read about MY BIOLOGICAL BROTHER, who is currently homeless in Portland, Oregon.