It appears the OP misses being flogged by life.
You’re confusing being poor with being young.
j666, if it makes you feel any better, “poor” misses you too. In fact, “you” are welcome to come and visit any time – oh, and bring your wallet and checkbook. Trust me, I’ll keep them safe. 
Fuck that. Poor sucks.
Expand your lifestyle. Buy a boat (Break Out Another Thousand) or a Ferrari. Then you can be broke again but at a different level. Same shit: always struggling to make ends meet. You can still talk shit about The Man. But your The Man won’t be the same The Man as your po’ folk.
Keep it real: drink canned beer and smoke ditch weed instead of that primo medical clinic kush.
Good tune choice for the OP’s subject, Siam Sam.
Why didn’t you take your earnings and buy a #1 at McDonald’s instead of spending all of your money on fancy leftovers? Back in my day the homeless ate beans from a can.
I guess that’s progress of a kind…
I hover at the official poverty level for a single man and at least for the present, I’ve never been happier or more satisfied with my life. I should have been a bum for the past fifty years. If you want to relax hit rock bottom.
They say money can’t buy happiness, I’d like the chance to prove those assholes wrong.
Anyone who makes a statement like this was never poor. You can’t miss being poor. I walk 5 miles a day to a job for 9.75 an hour and Friday I get laid off and now I have to work for 8.50 an hour but at least it’s only 3 miles away. I hate my life as of now but how in the world can you hate yours when your biggest worry is what kind of cookies you can buy. I can’t even afford generic cookies.
So go back.
If you say the problem is that you miss certain things, we’ll have to take your word for it, of course.
Have you considered, though, that the real problem may be that you feel uneasy because you no longer feel contempt toward those who are making a decent living?
Maybe you feel that you’re no longer “fighting the good fight,” or something like that.
Or perhaps a more likely (and less specific) possibility is that you no longer identify with any commonly expressed viewpoints and find yourself in a sort of “grey zone.” At the least, I think it can safely be said that you’re feeling torn between two worlds.
OP and subsequent replies are well worded but the thread title is, IMO, what’s causing some of the reactions of rejection seen in this thread.
See, there’s “poor”, and then there’s poor. I grew up poor. We aspired to “poor”.
I was just thinking about this, before saw this thread. I just got this fancy new antenna, because my roommate for some reason likes to watch over-the-air TV. Me, I’m happy to watch my shows off the internet. You know, where I have essentially all the movies and all the TV shows at my disposal instantly anytime I want. And I can watch them on my stupidly big 65" plasma TV.
It made me think about when we finally got a TV when I was about 13. It was a 13" black and white that got 2 stations. Well, more like 2 and a half as, one didn’t come in most of the time. This wasn’t the 50s or anything, this was the mid-90s. It could be plugged-in in either the living room or kitchen, as the rest of this cockroach infested trailer still didn’t have electricity two months after moving in.
Of course the furnace was in the part of the house without power and it had an electric blower. We bundled up and got by, but the then the pipes burst (I guess we were supposed to leave the faucets running or something). So now we had no power in two-thirds of the trailer, no heat, and no running water. And the hallway was flooded.
So I went to school with dirty clothes, because we couldn’t afford the laundromat. Normally we’d wash them at home in the tub, but that was obviously out of the question. As you might imagine, all my fellow students we completely understanding of the situation, and in no way used this as way to further ridicule and belittle me. I mean, before my clothes just didn’t fit properly, now they also smelled bad.
But at least school was warm. And there was food at lunch time. Most of the time that’s all I’d eat in a day. We rarely had any food in the house. And when we did it’d be something ridiculous like a fifty pounds of potatoes. We also used to have tons of spices for so reason. We (as in my sisters and I, no one else was ever really home) would carve out the potatoes and fill them with seasonings and boil them. We called them “flavor potatoes”. They were awful, I don’t know what we were thinking. Would have better to eat the damn things raw.
Yeah, there’s a lot I don’t like about my life now. Like, for instance, I don’t like my job. But I could go in tomorrow and quit, and I have enough money put away to live for months while I look for another job. Or, you know, just take some time off. I have that option. It isn’t a case of “force my way through months at a low paying job, in a dingy work environment, with an abusive boss” or starve.
But I won’t quit because it isn’t that bad. Just a bunch of idiotic bureaucracy and micromanagement. But I’ll take that any day, over shaking the roaches out of my shoes before I put them on. You can keep that shit.
I think I’d take arrogant asshole. I dislocated my shoulder and can’t work for a while. I cannot afford surgery because I am not very employable because of my physical limitations with the shoulder, but I can’t ever earn enough to afford the surgery - I have had this problem for 13 years. I would not have this problem if I was not a blue collar worker.
Well look at all the stories of people who have won the lottery and how it messed up their lives.
Exactly - that’s why he rich are lobbying to pay higher taxes and get back to the simple life. They miss being poor too.
Like others said, that’s just being young. Rich kids hang out drink, drug and have sex too. Just that their booze, drugs and women are more expensive.
Fuck being poor. I never knew how poor we were growing up. It got better when I got into my teens and never had to deal with the years of poverty my siblings did. Our parents were able to keep many things from us. But later I did feel the soul crushing weight of not having enough money to pay everything off each month. Robbing Peter to pay Paul every day. The stress is like a cancer eating away at you. Fuck that. There is nothing to be nostalgic about. I make decent money (although the governor is hoping to take that away) and my girlfriend does better than that. We are by no means rich but we don’t have to worry about making the mortgage. It doesn’t feel like life is kicking me in the balls every minute of the day. Why would I look at that as something to miss?
That’s not poor. Poor is renting because no one in their right mind would sell you property. Poor is not being able to afford seltzer at all and drinking rusty water out of a tap. Poor is not being able to afford even the generic store brand cookies and Kebler is the brand you get maybe at Christmas because you can’t afford better, or maybe that’s what someone left at the food pantry.
I miss smug congratulatory self-indulgence.
Maybe it is because I grew up in a white-collar house, but personally I didn’t see anything simple about having to decide between penne with tomato sauce or spaghetti with tomato sauce or plain penne or plain spaghetti. And I was living a lot better during my grad-school years than many people in the same country were.
Luxuries!