The common narrative i see on comments here is poverty or escaping abuse. I'll throw in my own story -- same narrative -- escaping poverty. We grew up poor, to

The common narrative i see on comments here is poverty or escaping abuse. I'll throw in my own story -- same narrative -- escaping poverty. We grew up poor, to the extent that we went to bed hungry at times. Thankfully it wasn't so extreme that we were homeless. There is something worse than poverty though, it is the abusers. People who want to exercise power over you because they see you are vulnerable or because they realize you have few choices. This is worse than the poverty in many ways. You might typically think this is a pay-day lender, but in my experience it was more subtle -- it was usually a bureaucrat. Sometimes it would be a school administrator refusing to enroll you in a class for no logical reason. A school administrator who didnt want to print your transcript for this reason or that. Sometimes it would be a doctor's office giving you an urgently needed appointment in 3months, when you know well they have earlier dates. A doctor's office refusing to give you your medical records or trying to charge you money if you want to print your test result. Sometimes it is a hospital refusing to give you a prescription for a generic drug even though that is all your rx plan supports, but you're not allowed to speak to the doctor to change the rx. It was the system, and it happened all the time. Being where I am now, I can talk with my wallet. My expensive PPO plan can go to a different doctor. My expensive school district answers parents' emails almost as we're "clients." Heck, if something really bad happened i throw down a hundred dollars and go out-of-pocket on some required medicine. If something really bad happened, i'd find a lawyer and force the bureaucrat to act in a fair manner. I think there is a lot of PTSD from a childhood spent in this state and those of us who went thru it want to ensure they never ever have to go thru it again, and want to ensure their children dont have to go thru it. Thankfully, tech in the US gives decent opportunities to up-shift on the economic ladder and the anxiety acts as an accelerant to do so, because you can see the ghosts behind you. The hard thing is realizing that its all gone and you've already escaped. You're not going to be back in that situation because you're so many rungs past it.