People from lower-middle-class backgrounds carry a unique set of behaviors and mental habits around safety and security that wealthy people simply don’t have on their radar. Your brain becomes a constant calculator, running numbers in the background while you’re trying to focus on other things. You learn that money isn’t just numbers in an account but represents time, sacrifice, and security. The real tragedy isn’t that lower-middle-class people have to think about these things. It’s that we’ve created a society where so many people have to expend so much mental energy just to feel safe.