Because assuming you'll go back to the former state means that you've decided you're unable to learn.
If you live your life a certain way and it ends up with you being homeless or poor, sure, living life that same way will end up with you being homeless or poor again.
Now if you learn (that blob of grey matter in your head is great at this by the way) from your past mistakes, there's a chance you can avoid that.
Let's say I'm a homeless guy who ended up being homeless because I lived far far above my means and gambled away my savings.
I suddenly get a $10000 from a lottery ticket I found in the street.
I could immediately buy a suit, rent a car and go stay in a hotel and live the high life for all of 2 weeks. I could go to a casino and get that glorious rush I remembered so fondly for a few hours.
And then I'm back on the street.
Or I could learn from my mistakes and go buy a nice cheap business casual outfit ($100), pay upfront for a room with housemates/students for a few months (6 months - $300/month in a cheap area = $1800), buy a cheap prepaid phone ($80), car ($2000) and couple of weeks gas ($100) then put together a resume and start looking at jobs. If I'm not an appealing worker, I can potentially go to community college for a few months and get qualified doing something useful while also getting federal aid. I'll have around $5920 left over so I'll allocate $920 for a few sets of clothes and general things that a human being needs and put the other $5000 either in the bank or into education.
This hypothetical sounds so divorced from reality, it's kind of tough to imagine that anyone would think of it as reflective of poor people's reality.
I'm saying, if you're living on $800 a month, and you get that sweet, sweet EITC money, you're going to use it to buy a new sofa, since your brother puked all over your sofa one night and you could never really get the smell out, and get all your bills current.
You might say that the stink of puke is worth putting up with, and the hypothetical poor person should pay for two credits of an associate's degree at the community college instead, which, ok, education is great, but the real reality is that for a lot of people, it's just not possible to work harder or earn your way out of poverty.
Not because of bad choices (e.g. living high on the hog from their magic $10,000 lottery ticket), but because low-end jobs in this country are unlivable and there's a whole cottage industry built up around screwing the poor with extra fees on every transaction they face throughout the day.
The solution isn't to tell poor people to put up with the puke smell and work their way through a 20-year associate's degree two credits at a time, so they can make 30c more. The solution is to make the economy work for them, as well as it works for those of us posting here.
If you live your life a certain way and it ends up with you being homeless or poor, sure, living life that same way will end up with you being homeless or poor again.
Now if you learn (that blob of grey matter in your head is great at this by the way) from your past mistakes, there's a chance you can avoid that.
Let's say I'm a homeless guy who ended up being homeless because I lived far far above my means and gambled away my savings.
I suddenly get a $10000 from a lottery ticket I found in the street.
I could immediately buy a suit, rent a car and go stay in a hotel and live the high life for all of 2 weeks. I could go to a casino and get that glorious rush I remembered so fondly for a few hours.
And then I'm back on the street.
Or I could learn from my mistakes and go buy a nice cheap business casual outfit ($100), pay upfront for a room with housemates/students for a few months (6 months - $300/month in a cheap area = $1800), buy a cheap prepaid phone ($80), car ($2000) and couple of weeks gas ($100) then put together a resume and start looking at jobs. If I'm not an appealing worker, I can potentially go to community college for a few months and get qualified doing something useful while also getting federal aid. I'll have around $5920 left over so I'll allocate $920 for a few sets of clothes and general things that a human being needs and put the other $5000 either in the bank or into education.