This think piece is less about “what ‘relief’ for the poor should really look like” than why our generosity fails to give relief. Here, Josh Makalintal (University of Innsbruck) and I use relief goods as an entry point for illuminating unreflexive, unempathetic, and exclusionary practices of care and provisioning in times of emergency and disaster. We ascribe this impoverished culture of giving and helping to legacies of classed understandings and attributions of human dignity, which regard the poor as people who matter less and therefore require and deserve less. We consider what it means to think in terms of life rather than survival, and invite a critical reorientation from thinking of the poor to thinking from the poor.