I think if you’re genuinely poor, you do feel it. It’s a level of instability that just fundamentally undermines your sense of security on multiple levels (food security, job security, health security etc). Sure there are those that cannot afford the frills in life, or they have to occasionally make sacrifices in order to make ends meet. Even wealthy people probably have times of financial difficulty if they have some unexpected financial loss, or a massive unforeseen bill forcing them to sacrifice a few of their luxuries or whatever, but when you’re actually poor, you have nothing left to sacrifice, you have nothing to fall back on, you end up walking a fine line of making difficult choices of whether to buy food to feed your kids, or pay the electricity bill to keep them warm (and you can’t have it both ways), and your mindset is about surviving the next week, there’s no planning for the next month, there’s no contingency planning for what if the car breaks down. I think that’s what people don’t get. I understand that the middle class can experience hardship, but I firmly believe there is a distinction between middle class hardship and being actually poor, and that’s not because I want to “gatekeep” poor or undermine other people’s experiences of hardship (because at the end of the day it’s all relative) but the OP who wrote this was not writing from a position of ever having truely been poor, because when all your needs are met, and you have the things you want, and you have the luxury of poor just being a matter of perspective, you’ve not really experienced poor.