Unfortunately, your anecdote and also what I have seen and experienced in my own life is that it often is a lack of character. Saying that is controversial, because it seems to be saying those who are in poverty are less than, but that's not what I mean. What I mean is that character includes a lot of things about a person, including their world view and what things they think are important in life. The truly sad thing I've observed is that poverty is generational because children form so much of their world view and their own character from that of their parents, and it is the parent's lack of character that leads to and keeps them in poverty more than anything.

Poverty is a vicious cycle, and it has different causative factors and outcomes for different people. Inner city poverty and rural poverty share many common things, but are very different situations. I've seen both. I have been broke, but I've never been poor, and the difference largely had to do with my upbringing and my own personal character. To a large degree, my very belief that I could overcome being broke and didn't need to become poor is a component of that very upbringing.

People in poverty feel defeated, that there is nothing that they can do which will resolve their situation. They exist in a concentric sphere of negative feedback loops, where the only dopamine hit they can find to make them feel "okay" even for a little bit is found in illicit substances, meaningless sex, or conspicuous consumption that earns them the adoration of their peers. These are the high points of their life, and yet none of them help to break the cycle, they just reinforce it.

It's not enough to throw money at the problem. Poverty must be arrested, like the putting on of brakes. At a certain point in life... people are basically unsavable themselves and too set in their ways, but they can be convinced to save their children. The only effective program I've ever seen to actually combat the cycle of poverty was based on providing pre-teens and young adults in poverty with funds, education, and resources that their parents could not take advantage of or interfere with. Something as simple as providing thorough financial literacy education and a place where pre-teens could bank and their parents couldn't steal from them was very effective, especially when combined with no-cost after school programs which kept them off the streets and out of abusive and dangerous home situations for further education and mentorship. Unfortunately programs like this are contentious and very very expensive to operate and hard to scale. The program I observed had 40 kids in one neighborhood and took nearly 200 volunteers to pull off and 10 paid staff, plus facilities.

When I look at the situation as a whole, it's obvious to me that one of the single biggest factors in why this has become such a serious issue in the Western world is due to the breakdown of the nuclear family. Single-parent homes aren't in the financial position to spend time focused on their children's mentorship and education in the way that a two working parent home is, simply put. And educational outcomes, life outcomes really, are heavily tied to having parents which value education and good financial literacy and ensure that their children value those things as well, regardless of how many dollars are in their bank account or stuffed in the mattress.

EDIT:

To a large degree, how you think about the poverty problem comes back down to the classical philosophical question of nature vs nurture. The reality has always been that life is a little bit of both. But when it comes to poverty, enough time in those circumstances can effectively destroy someone's mental health and make them incapable of escaping. They become effectively addicted to escapist dopamine rushes and impulses, without any ability to plan for the long term. It has real, serious, negative mental consequences for adults and children both. But children can be saved, adults are often a lost cause. The best thing we can do is focus on breaking the cycle so the next generation of adults is better off than the current generation.