Too cynical

A killjoy on "Prea sărac" podcast

The space of critique can sometimes feel suffocating. Words can come out too mean or too soft, and I never seem to hit the right notes. But still, I’ll try, with one disclaimer: critique means I care. I care about the subject, enough to write, listen, and think about how it could have been better.

“Too much personal storytelling.” That was my first thought while listening to Prea sărac, the new 30,000-euro podcast from DOR and Recorder. The topic is urgent; even devastatingly necessary, as even the narrator reminds us, Romania remains one of the poorest and most unequal countries in the EU. Yet the deeper I went into the episode, the less I understood what it was trying to say. The problem isn’t that the subject doesn’t matter. It’s that the story doesn’t.

Photo by Brittney Weng on Unsplash

The podcast begins with the narrator’s memories of juggling jobs and student debt, a relatable emotional anchor. Then it moves to another character, Corina, who, by any definition, is not poor. She says she’s been “poor” for a couple of years, drives a car older than 2017, and now manages to save 2,500 lei a month. That is not poverty. That is middle-class insecurity, the fear of slipping. Yet the show frames it as a story of survival, of resilience against the odds.

The insertions from specialists are much needed but insufficient. Vladimir Borțun’s interventions are short; sociologist Daniel Sandu’s feel oddly detached, culminating in a confusing line about how the problem with gambling isn’t the abundance of păcănele but the “magic within the system.” Perhaps it was meant as a critique of how capitalism promises easy wealth but it lands without clarity or force.

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Instead of confronting structural inequality: wages that don’t match living costs, unaffordable housing, a shredded social safety net, the podcast turns scarcity into a mood, a vibe. Poverty becomes a lifestyle texture, softened by music and vulnerability. We are invited to empathize, not to question.

But empathy can be a trap and sympathy, a knife.

In this kind of storytelling, we feel with the characters but not for anyone beyond them. It’s not solidarity; it’s emotional self-care for the educated class. When Corina says she now saves money in a joint account called “the good life,” the show treats it as a triumph. Yet that “good life” is still defined by individual effort, not collective security. The moral remains the same one capitalism whispers: if you work hard and stay optimistic, things will get better.

It gives cruel optimism — as Lauren Berlant described it, the attachment to fantasies of the good life that persist even when they destroy the conditions of living.

I don’t want to be insensitive, but my critique comes from disappointment. It feels like such a missed opportunity to talk about how capitalism breeds inequality, poverty, and exhaustion.

The podcast could have shown how close most of us are to the edge: that we have more in common with people sleeping on the streets than with billionaires who own the world. Instead, it offers the comfort of recognition: look, even the diligent ones struggle. The structural becomes psychological. Inequality becomes a feeling.

And the ending seals it. Poverty is presented as a necessary experience, something that teaches resilience and gratitude. That framing is disarming. It tells us suffering refines us, instead of revealing that it shouldn’t exist at all.

I don’t want to be the eternal killjoy, but this is what happens when empathy replaces politics. We learn to admire survival instead of demanding change. When poverty becomes a podcast aesthetic, it stops being a problem to solve and turns into something to feel good about.

Maybe it meant to be like that and the next episodes dive exactly into this topic and I will happily eat my words.