Penury:
- : a cramping and oppressive lack of resources (such as money)
especially : severe poverty- : extreme and often stingy frugality
[Merriam-Webster]
Noted in “Why men don’t age like wine,” Ed West, Wrong Side Of History:
To those of you too young to remember TV from the 1980s, Blake Carrington was the silver fox from Dynasty who tricked my generation (born 1978) into believing that men age like wine, when they clearly don’t. He was married multiple times, an alpha male signal, but it’s alpha because very few men can afford it. Rather than living in a neo-classical mansion surrounded by women in shoulder pads, the typical divorced man is far more likely to end up above a kebab shop living in penury.
