No

Yes, I wasn't allowed to beat up poor people.

I didn't grow up poor but I was certainly violently abused and didn't get proper nutrition. But it never felt like my body works like whatever a normal person's body works anyways, especially not my digestive system. I only recently learned I was actually the second child that somehow made it after the first didn't and my mother was on strong antibiotics when I was born. It feels like I'm god's science experiment. I'm torn between wishing I wasn't born and wanting to live out this weird existence till it's over out of some flavor of spiritual curiosity and whatever is left to enjoy.

Now that I made it past my mid-20's it feels like I'm watching time collapse in on itself. Going back to all these old places, seeing the same cycles play out in somewhat different ways, feeling it all unfold from more of an observer point of view now. I participate in this world as much as I do what I can for myself and that's all. I guess it's somewhat less depressing from that standpoint.

Not really poor but I didn't have lots of things children of my age took for granted.
Until age 8-9 or so, I can't remember too well, we didn't have a bathroom or a washing machine.
Usually we only had electricity at night since we only had an electric generator and could only be used when really necessary. As a luxury we had a black & white TV and a cassette player, of course anything like consoles or computers was completely out of the question. For some reason I never had sandwiches or anything to eat at school like all other children had.
I remember everything being really boring most of the time.

Thinking about it I was kinda poor but that gave me more appreciation for things I guess.

>>25282
Thinking about your post, my mother had me really late, when she was 43 yo, that probably fucked me up at some degree.

>>25281
Not everyone gets to be batman.

Yes

Yes, I didn't get a chance to guillotine the rich.

I've sort of been on both ends of the spectrum and in between. In my childhood I've lived in a small condo and lived in a nice two floor house on a culdesac in a friendly area. Not exactly rich but we were well off. I was also dumped off and abandoned in a rather poor country, taken in to live in a run down home that doubled as restaurant, and for a while stayed in a literal mud hut without running water or electricity.

Neither side has particularly nice memories. The more well off side involved moving a lot and never having a sense of stability. My father was more interested in upgrading to a better house every few years than the idea of laying down roots. As such I was never able to form meaningful relationships with people around me since I'd be yanked away before long over and over. Doesn't help that he cared more about money and material items than he ever did about me or my mother. Even after my parents divorced and I went to live with my mother, things didn't change since she tried to do the same with our homes. At one point she mutilated the house we were in so she could rent out 'rooms' to a half dozen people. A few in the garage, one in a space made from her room, another in our walled off porch, another two in the spare room. Living there was loud, dirty and stressful. My room there was practically a closet, and the whole place became infested with cockroaches. We did eventually move to a better place and leave the renter thing behind, but because she's terrible with money, after some bad moves we lost everything and she declared bankruptcy. I had only been working for about two years but was now having to pay for the shitty and expensive apartment we got stuck in. She sold off mostly anything she had of value to help, and I didn't exactly have much myself. Meanwhile my dad only got richer and richer and had no interest in helping us out. Instead growing up he saw his visitation rights as a chance to get some cheap labor out of me and do odd jobs around the various houses he started to collect. I've never actually had a father, just a boss.

Being moved around so much, changing schools so often... After a while I just stopped trying, gave up trying all together and turned into a ghost, there but not there, unseen and unnoticed by anyone. I skipped school regularly just to stay home playing video games. When I was there I wouldn't do anything and just wait for classes to end so I could go back to my room and flip on that ps2. During the time at my last school, I never talked to anyone, never made friends or anything. I grew used to this, grew to prefer solidarity. Part of me still envies people who grew up having brothers sisters friends and real families, but that wasn't meant to be for me. Every time I try to intermingle with people it just feels wrong. It's like I'm putting on an act to try and pretend to be like them, I say and do what I've learned from TV, movies, and human observation. After all, I was raised by TV and thought everything I know from it. I'd tell people what I assume they want to hear, what might make me seem funny friendly nice ect, but I can tell it's not fooling anyone. No amount of smiling nodding and saying witty things could ever change that. I can almost see it in their eyes when people talk to me that they think I'm a freak or something, that maybe the only reason they're giving me the time of day is because they pity me. Even in the very rare instances I've been invited to hang out with people, I just feel like a third wheel the whole time. I did have a friend of sorts that latched onto me leaving high school, but he was only interested in using me for personal gain. I cut them loose after getting tired of being treated like shit and drained of what little money I had.

Now I'm over 30, my dad's a millionaire and loves to rub it in my face every chance he gets while randomly reminding me how he wont leave me a single cent, and my mom hasn't worked in over a decade and keeps pissing away her disability checks at the local casino, convinced she'll strike it big one of these days. The once peaceful town we live in has turned into a poor miserable crime ridden ghetto. My dad and the other rich assholes on his side of the family wont lift a finger to help us, even my uncle who I've been keeping company over the last few years and helping with whatever he needs, but things are okay. I still work a dead end job but all things considered I'm not doing too bad, Compared to the average person in the US at least. I've got a small savings and the only debt I have is on a half paid house, which for better or worse seems to be more than a lot of people can say these days.

Poverty is certainly no fun, it limits your options in this life while making everything hard and stressful. I never had the option of going to college and instead dropped out of high school and started working right away.
...but is wealth isn't great either. I've learned that you don't get rich without being a greedy self centered piece of shit, that money corrupts, and it's used to control and manipulate people the world round. It's also never enough. As rich as my dad is, he'll forever be in my aunt's shadow. He envies and despises his sister for having more than him, and she looks down on him for being lower class. My father has alienated his entire family, has never had friends, and the only women he can get now that are willing to put up with his abuse are blatant gold diggers. I don't envy him the slightest.

>>25287
>I don't envy him the slightest.

But you would have done something completely different with that money, right?
He could stop his shitty life and go to live wherever he likes doing whatever he likes for the rest of his life. It's not money what harms people, it's people that couldn't be happy in absolutely any situation. I think the normals can fall for that shit even more often, because they have the habit to live their lifes around an exhausting struggling with others that they call "social life".

>>25288
Certainly. I like others can think of all sorts of things to do with that money. Starting up /th/ for example, opening a business, or leaving country behind to go live in japan and start a new life. But I don't envy how he got it or what it cost him. He's tortured himself physically and mentally, working himself to the bone obsessively since childhood to get what he has. He might be a piece of shit, but he's certainly earned what he has. Although I'm not blind to the fact that trying to avoid being like him and take a different road has left me in the same place all the same, just without the money to go with it.
I find money just messes with people, it goes to their heads and turns them into shitty people. I've noticed not just around family but daily like and at work, that the more well off people are the more arrogant rude impatient unsympathetic and disrespectful they are. It goes without saying poor people can exhibit these behaviors too, but I feel they're more prevalent in the rich. Money is power after all, and with that power you can get away with all sorts of things. These people develop a sense of elitism, act better than others around them, and lack respect for others or their environment. They have little reason to care as consequences diminish as one's funds rise. A $500 speeding ticket might mean a poor person with $50 to their name has to struggle for weeks, possibly go into debt, or go hungry for a while to pay it off. But the same $500 would mean little to a person with $5,000,000 to their name, so there's less insensitive to play by the rules. It's not just the law of course, with enough money people can be bought off and made to do almost anything. This can go to a person's head and change how they see the world. The same way I see people of average to low income here take the internet, electricity, clean food/water, having a roof over their head and more for granted. I lost half my body weight after coming back from that country, to a place where people worry about eating too much.

Maybe having enough money to live out one's dreams would be nice, but they say far too often people who win the lottery end up miserable because of it. It destroys families, friendships, marriages, and can result in the winner being endlessly harassed or even threatened by people who want what he has. If you do someone manage to avoid letting the money go to your head and try to be a decent person, you'll just make it that much easier for people to take advantage of you. You'll have a hard time trusting anyone because for all you know anyone you meet might just be after your money. Besides, with nothing left to really strive, life can get pretty boring. You don't get that joy and appreciation for that rare gift or thing you had to save up for if it's all just handed to you. It's like a drug for these people that they can't ever get enough. Take it from someone who's got hundreds of figs, the effects do wear off. With some of my first figs I admired every bit of them, The detail and craftsmanship and found there to be something almost magical about them, skip ahead a few years and before I knew it I was tossing figs in a stack, not taking them out of their boxes and barely even looking at them. I think my dad's become the same way with cars since for a while now he'd buy them just to toss them in storage and never use them, and now he's getting there with planes. Another example would be getting rich in a video game to the extent that you can buy every item available. Once that happens, where do you go from there?

In my experience rich people are much cooler and nicer than poor people, but if they were from a poorer background and then got rich maybe they would be worse people.

>>25289
>You'll have a hard time trusting anyone
I already do.
>where do you go from there?
You could become a philanthropist. If I was rich I'd buy tons of bluerays of shows I want a second season of and give them out for free.

>>25280
50k~ total for 3 person family. We were not too far from the poverty line but life wasn't too bad. I lived with my grandma and parents sent down money at times. State covered my insurance growing up. Plenty of food, never went hungry. Never got all the new games growing up but I got a lot of consoles and just waited till the games became used.

The worst part was not being poor, the worst part was having mentally ill toxic family members. Every single day there was some sort of screaming or verbal abuse. It got so bad, I had to go to the mental hospital because I threatened to kill myself. Family was not terrible but extremely toxic and hard to be around. To be honest, I had to learn about life in my latter teens from the internet. You know, how to budget, how to save, how not to get into debt, how to manage college. All from the internet. Sad really. My only guidance in life were people at worship or my uncles. Dad's mom (other grandma) was sweet too, along with my grandfather, but I didn't see them all the time. Too busy paying off debt.

I don't blame my family too much for the toxicity though. There was a lot of incestuous rape, killing, and violence in my family history.

Just the latter mainly, I had an abusive father, and my mother left over 20 years ago to follow her career/dreams. She didn't even come home for her parent's funeral, I was the one taking care of my grandparents until the end. I still talk to her, and she asks me for money at least once a year. Guess that career she left everything/everyone behind for hasn't worked out so well.

>>25289
what was the poor country you lived in for a while?

>>25361
A country in south America called Guatemala.

Both. Didn't realize it until later on, though. I guess it's because even though I faced enough of it to fuck me up, it wasn't bad enough to be immediately obvious. It wasn't until my mid-teens that I realized that what I went through was not normal.

Like I lived in trailer parks and the hood when I was a kid, I lived with just my mom since my parents divorced and dad was always deployed anyhow, and I didn't have half the possessions that other kids had, but I didn't consider myself poor then. The way my childhood self saw it, my basic physiological needs were met and I had some possessions, so I was okay. Even though it wasn't a whole lot: some legos, a couple video games, and a computer so out-of-date that it couldn't access the internet (not that we could afford an ISP).
Or I got beaten and considered "retarded" by most adults I knew, but since the damage wasn't obvious enough to be seen as a sign of abuse, I never saw what I went through as abuse either. The only adults who never gave me hell were biological relatives and teachers. Stepfathers, babysitters, mom's boyfriend of the month, pretty much everyone else seemed to hate me. Hell, I remember being 6 and feeling like everyone hated me.

...Fuck. I've been trying not to dwell on this anymore, but thinking about this again makes me wish I would have gotten help back then.

I grew up poor when I was young, my dad got destroyed in the tech bubble burst and was out of work for a while. It wasn't too bad, lots of butter + pasta meals or stuff like mustard sandwiches, but livable. My dad was able to work really hard and dug himself out to the point where my family is now comfortably middle class (not that I live with them anymore).

I don't know whether I should describe myself as being abused or not. My mom wasn't great to me; I have early memories of getting stuff thrown at me, things like that. I wasn't a great kid growing up and acted out some as a teenager, but she did get physical with me a couple times, ripped up my baby photos, told me I make her want to kill herself, stuff like that.

everyone who was exposed to extremely common and widespread media sources was the victim of an abusive relationship with an important authority figure during childhood. kurt vonnegut described like this: when he was a little kid people would sing songs together and dance and entertain each other, but by the time he was older anyone who cut loose like that in public, even at a party, would be the subject of ridicule and negative comparisons to hollywood media celebrities. the big media outlets have subjected the western world to a multigenerational demoralization campaign and its worked pretty effectively.

>>25494
This is progressing further, the lock-in of this arangement is getting tightenned. For example, my gamer dickhead friend would have these kinds reactions to the whole idea of open source games.

>did you grow up poor

No, my dad makes a middle class income however he has a blue collar job and no education.

>did you have an abusive childhood which led to you being fucked up

My dad was always doing something and had very little time or interest for me. He used to smack me to punish me which I don't actually have an issue with in and of itself and he used to force me to do chores which again I don't have an issue with but he never showed any warmth to me or compensated me for the chores in anyway to counter it so I always say him as cold and like a boss you don't like, not like a father at all. Eventually my parents divorced and that was that.

I used to think my mother was caring and that she loved me but over time I have come to think that maybe she doesn't and it's just that she doesn't hate me. She doesn't hate me but she never shows that much warmth for me, she never asked me about what I like or made any kind of attempt to interact with me, hug me or get close to me as you would to a child. She just left me on my own, and that was another issue, even though we were middle class they did not spend much on me, my room was incredibly spartan and they never took me anywhere. My childhood was incredibly boring. I can't actually remember my mother ever trying to comfort me or anything like that either, maybe if I went to her she would hold me but that was it. Even as I got older, our relationship turned more into the kind a man would have with an older unrelated woman he lived with, I might talk to her about something and I often had to do the manly tasks for her but again, nothing really nurturing or caring came form her. It just had not occurred to me until quite recently that this is not really how mothers are meant to be.

What's worse is that I am actually the oldest of 5, and none of my siblings are treated like I am. I've seen them laugh and joke with my father and my mother goes out of her way to do things for them and spends money on them and bought them toys and asks them what they want. And all of my siblings care for each other and are close to each other too, even though I tried to be a good older brother to them I am not a part of that, I tried really hard to be a good example to them but they all ignored me and are now falling lower and keep falling, and yet my parents still love them and not me.

It's actually started to trouble me recently because I want to know what it's like to be in those kinds of relationship, but it's one of those things that can never be brought, can never be made, can never be redone. It's probably the only thing that I can never experience no matter what I was to do and it's one of the things that I am starting to want most as I get older.

>>25494
Yeah that could be it, or it could be getting beaten by my mom and slammed repeatedly head first into concrete as she screamed about wanting to kill me.

>>25481
that's definitely abuse

I grew up poor, yeah. But then again everyone around me was poor so I didn't really feel it that strongly at the time. By any metric I'm still poorer than the average person, but seeing the attitudes and behavior of the richer people in my country makes me disgusted, so I'm somewhat glad I didn't become like them. Wealth changes you as a person and very few can resist not becoming arseholes as a result.

>>25652
Fucking hell you're almost a carbon-copy of me, except I only had one sibling that was also abusive.
I think we older brothers get treated like that because we were maybe an unwanted birth. For anything I should be grateful of my parents, is of not making me not care about life and others in general.
It is liberating, but sad, in a way...