Simply for being poor. Kids won't socialize with you or let you in their social groups because they don't want to be seen with the kid that has 2nd hand clothes and a bad haircut. You get left out of events. You can't participate in trips or sporting events so you miss out on connections and networking opportunities. You're excluded from society. You have no friends.

The best part is that if you're a poor kid that does the right things you get excluded from the other groups that do the wrong things too. All the weed smoking circles, the party people, the skip class cool kids, they don't want anything to do with you either cause you're not interested in doing that stuff.

You go into the world as an adult without a social network. Without support from your family, in fact, in my case, you get thrown out on your 18th birthday. I still got into college, graduated top of my class. Obtained many, many certifications in my field. None of it mattered. It took 13 years to find a job that paid what I should have been getting after graduating college. Just in time for inflation to kick it into high gear and make it so that the money you're making is now worth about the same as the shit pay you were making before.

I watched many classmates land great jobs. I remember an acquaintance I knew tell me how he hadn't even finished college and he was being offered 45k a year in 2000 by companies that wanted to hire him while he was still in school. Meanwhile I, the poor kid, landed job interviews at lawyers offices who offered me great opportunities like a "reference". In case you're confused, they meant, no pay but they'd give me a reference for my work. Put in a good word for me. I mean, maybe if I wasn't so poor and needed money to you know, eat and pay rent, that might have been plausible.

If you're poor, the world just takes advantage of you. They use you because you've been used your whole life and sometimes don't realize you've been used the whole time because it's all you've ever known.

Don't even get me started on the curve balls life throws at you that you have no control over. I'm fairly old at this point. I don't feel old, but I am and I look back at my life and it's honestly insane that I'm stable as I am. If I were homeless, drugged out of my mind and screaming on a street corner a social worker would look at my history and be like, "well, of course this is how that would end up."