Cracked.com: 5 Ways The Middle Class is Taught to Despise the Poor

[BobTheSubgenius]

22. Cracked is an under-rated site, IMO.

Their fact-checking is sometimes lax - like their claim that two Amerinds crossed the Atlantic to arrive in Europe in 60BC - but their 'opinion pieces' or editorials are usually good-to-great. This one in particular.

I had a VERY skewed view of life and economic realities until I lived on my own. I thought our family was fairly poor, and it was retrospect that made me realize that never EVER missing a meal, two cars and my mother never working outside the home wasn't actually poverty. We just happened to live in a school catchment area that encompassed some of the most prime land in Canada. (today, a starter home in that neighbourhood is $5M)

OTOH, I almost always lived my life according to precepts that the article's first paradigm seemed to criticize. I believed, and still do, that life is about the time you're given to live it, not the "things" you fill your house with. My last year of employment was 1988, and I made $70K that year. The next year, I made under $20K and was so much happier, I can't even tell you.

No matter how much money you make, it will never buy back one second of the time it took from your life to make it.