Eigenzeit and Existential Prohibition: Poverty as an Ontological Consequence

This paper advances the thesis that poverty is not a socio-economic condition but an ontological consequence: the result of systematically withdrawn Eigenzeit. Poverty emerges where the world can no longer be bound, where action is organized without bearing, responsibility without world, and time without irreversibility. The point of departure is the concept of Eigenzeit developed in earlier work as the non-delegable instantiation of world-time in action. Eigenzeit names the condition under which life becomes structurally viable at all, because decision irreversibly binds world. The paper argues that modern systems of work, markets, and social security structurally undermine this condition. Wage labour replaces world-binding with procedural time; social security systems administer the loss of Eigenzeit without being able to remedy it. Poverty thus appears not as a lack of resources, but as a permanent impossibility of living Eigenzeit. This impossibility is conceptualized here as existential prohibition: not as repression or exclusion, but as the structural prevention of viable world-binding. Neurodivergent existences do not function as a special case in this analysis, but as early indicators. Through them, what applies more generally becomes visible: where Eigenzeit is systematically rendered impossible, it is not only individual biographies that collapse, but the ontological viability of societal orders themselves. The paper does not propose reforms; it marks a limit: poverty is not solvable as long as the world is merely administered. The analysis developed here does not arise from detached observation, but from long-term operatoric research in which Eigenzeit was systematically blocked under real institutional conditions.