I come from a family where both parents have always made minimum wage. I wasn’t deprived as a kid — I had a pretty comfortable life and wouldn’t ask for anything different if I could do it all again. My parents just had to make a lot of smart, austere financial decisions (and got incredibly lucky with the housing market).

Since I moved to the city for university (which I was able to do because the Australian welfare state is amazing), the “privileged” lives and exorbitant wealth I’ve seen has been simply staggering. I won’t soon forget the time some guy was complaining to me about how his parents bought him a BMW for his seventeenth birthday instead of a Merc.

These are people who are usually oblivious to the reality of life in the working class and the importance of day-to-day financial decisions for people in lower socioeconomic bands. They don’t understand that “no I can’t go out for coffee because yes seriously $3.50 is a big deal for me.” They tell me I’m lucky for living so close to the university when they have a 45-minute commute ahead of them, forgetting that I’m living in a dilapidated matchbox isolated from my family and far away from the land that I call home. They just don’t understand responsibility in quite the same terms that I do, and it’s maddening and frustrating and relieving and empowering.

There’s something great about learning how to make a small amount of money go as far as possible (that’s why I used privileged in scare quotes above: I don’t necessarily consider it a positive thing). To make a perfectly dorky analogy, it’s like using the Deprived class as your first Dark Souls experience. You have to figure out how to work in circumstances which are even more difficult than usual, where you have so few resources and are so challenged that even the slightest upgrade feels like an enormous win. And when you finally start a new character as a Knight or a Thief or whatever, you feel like you have a genuine advantage while still understanding the struggle of those taking the hard road. Being poor is difficult, but it forces you to learn a set of budgeting skills and instills in you a great sense of solidarity with others in those circumstances, and I wouldn’t change it for the world.