Children who were told 'we're not poor, we just don't waste money' carry a specific relationship with abundance that follows them into every restaurant, vacation, and grocery aisle for the rest of their lives

The restaurant had white tablecloths. I remember that because I was eleven, and white tablecloths meant this was the kind of place where you didn't ask how much things cost — except that I already knew you did, just not out loud. My mother had dressed us in church clothes on a Saturday. My father drove past the parking lot once before pulling in, which I now understand was him doing a final gut-check about whether we could actually afford this. And when the menus arrived — heavy, leather-bound, no pictures — my mother leaned over and whispered the phrase that would follow me for the next thirty years: We're not poor, we just don't waste money.

She said it like she was handing me a compass. Like it was the most important navigational tool I'd ever need. And in a way, she was right — it did guide me. It guided me through every grocery aisle, every vacation booking screen, every moment of hesitation before ordering something that wasn't the cheapest option on the menu. What she didn't tell me — what she couldn't have known — was that the compass only pointed in one direction, and that direction was away from abundance.

The Architecture of Almost-Enough

Here's the thing nobody talks about: there's a difference between being raised poor and being raised in the careful middle. Children who grew up hearing "we can't afford that" learned one kind of lesson — a blunt, sometimes brutal education in scarcity. But children who grew up hearing "we don't waste money" learned something more complicated. They learned that resources existed but were conditional. That abundance was technically possible but morally suspicious. That the line between comfort and recklessness was so thin you could cross it by ordering a side salad you didn't finish.

The distinction matters because it shapes a fundamentally different relationship with having. When you're told you're not poor, you internalize that wanting isn't about access — it's about character. You could have more. You simply shouldn't. And that "shouldn't" becomes invisible architecture — the walls you build inside yourself that look, from the outside, like discipline or good sense or modesty, but feel, from the inside, like a fist that never quite unclenches.

A landmark 2013 study published in Science by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir found that scarcity — even perceived scarcity — creates what they called a "cognitive bandwidth tax." The mental energy spent managing limited resources literally reduces the brain's capacity for other decisions. But here's what struck me when I first read that research: you don't have to be objectively scarce to experience the tax. You just have to believe that waste is a moral failing. The bandwidth tax kicks in not when the money runs out, but when the vigilance begins. And for children raised on "we don't waste," the vigilance never had a start date because it never had a reason to end.

The Grocery Aisle as Emotional Minefield

I'm in my forties now, and I make enough money that the organic avocados should not cause me to pause. But I pause. Not long — maybe two seconds. Long enough to pick one up, check the price per unit, and run a calculation that has nothing to do with my bank account and everything to do with my mother's voice saying we have avocados at home. The fact that we did not, in fact, have avocados at home was beside the point. The point was that wanting the avocado in front of you — the ripe one, the ready one, the one that would cost $1.79 instead of waiting for the ones at Aldi to go on sale — was a kind of failure.

This is what I mean about the specificity of this inheritance. It's not a fear of spending. It's a compulsion to justify spending. Every purchase becomes a small courtroom in your head: Is this necessary? Could I get it cheaper? Am I being frivolous? And the judge in that courtroom is always, always a parent who loved you enough to protect you from want by teaching you to want less.

Research published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology has shown that childhood socioeconomic experiences shape adult spending behavior even when current financial circumstances have dramatically improved. People who grew up with financial uncertainty — or financial vigilance, which is its own form of uncertainty — tend to experience what psychologists call "resource slack sensitivity." They are hyper-aware of the gap between what they have and what they might need. The gap doesn't close when the income rises. It just gets furnished differently.

I think about this every time I stand in the produce section doing invisible math. Not the math of what I can afford — the math of what I deserve.

Vacations That Feel Like Trespassing

A friend of mine — someone who grew up with that same "we don't waste" compass — once told me that every vacation she takes feels like she's getting away with something. Not in the exciting sense. In the anxious sense. Like someone is going to tap her on the shoulder at the resort and say, Excuse me, ma'am, but people like you don't stay here.

I knew exactly what she meant. Because the "we're not poor" framing does something insidious to your sense of place in the world. It tells you that you belong in the middle — not at the bottom, but certainly not at the top. And when life carries you somewhere above that middle, some part of you keeps looking for the correction. The market crash. The unexpected bill. The moment the universe remembers you were never supposed to have this much ease.

The resentment people feel after decades of doing the work — of earning, saving, carefully not-wasting — isn't always about being unappreciated by others. Sometimes it's about being unable to appreciate what you've built for yourself. Because the apparatus of vigilance you were raised with has no off switch. It doesn't know how to sit on a beach without calculating what the beach is costing per hour.

I went to Italy two years ago. First real vacation in six years. I spent the first three days doing conversion rates in my head every time I ordered a cappuccino. On the fourth day, I ordered a glass of wine at lunch — not dinner, lunch — and I felt a flush of something that took me a moment to name. It wasn't pleasure. It was guilt. Not because the wine was expensive. Because it was unnecessary. And in the household I grew up in, unnecessary was the highest form of waste.

What It Looks Like from the Outside

People who carry this particular relationship with abundance often get praised for it. They're called responsible. Sensible. Good with money. And they are — in the way that someone who checks every lock three times before bed is good with security. The behavior works. It just costs something invisible.

A study from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology found that people who experienced childhood economic uncertainty were more likely to exhibit what researchers call "stockpiling behavior" — not hoarding in the clinical sense, but a persistent need to have enough. Enough food in the pantry. Enough in savings. Enough backup plans that the backup plans have backup plans. The study noted that this behavior persists regardless of current income level. The anxiety isn't about the number in the account. It's about the feeling that the number could change at any moment.

And that's the cruelest irony of the "we're not poor" upbringing. The intention was to protect children from shame. To reframe limitation as choice. To say: We are people who choose wisely, not we are people who go without. But the message that landed — the one that burrowed into the nervous system and stayed — was this: Abundance is for other people. Comfort must be earned and re-earned. And if you relax your grip for even a moment, everything you've carefully built will prove to have been as fragile as it always felt.

The Restaurant Test

I still do the thing with the menu. You probably know the thing. You scan the prices before you read the dishes. You identify the cheapest entrée, then move one or two items up — the same math that lower-middle-class families run instinctively, even decades after the math stopped being necessary. You order water and wait to see if anyone else orders a cocktail before you allow yourself one. You calculate the tip before you've decided on your food because you need to know the total before you can enjoy the meal.

And here's what nobody who didn't grow up this way understands: it's not that you can't afford the expensive thing. It's that ordering the expensive thing would mean becoming someone your parents wouldn't recognize. Someone who wastes. Someone who forgot where they came from. Someone who got comfortable — and comfortable, in the household of "we don't waste," was always one degree away from careless.

I've been thinking about this more since reading about people who reach retirement and realize that the life they saved for so carefully never quite arrived. That the abundance they deferred — the nicer restaurant, the longer vacation, the bottle of wine that wasn't on sale — was never coming because deferral itself became the point. The saving wasn't a means to an end. It was the end. And the identity of "person who doesn't waste" had quietly consumed the identity of "person who lives."

What I'm Learning — Slowly, Imperfectly

I don't have a neat resolution for this. That would feel dishonest, and also — honestly — a little wasteful. What I have is an awareness that arrived late and is still settling in: the voice that says we don't waste money was trying to keep me safe, but safety and fullness are not the same thing. You can be financially secure and emotionally starved. You can have a well-funded 401(k) and a life that tastes like the second-cheapest thing on every menu you've ever opened.

I ordered the expensive wine last month. A forty-two-dollar glass of something I couldn't pronounce. It was, frankly, not noticeably better than the twelve-dollar option. But that wasn't the point. The point was that I ordered it without doing the math first. Without checking the total. Without hearing my mother's voice — which I love, which I miss, which shaped everything good and everything cautious about who I am — telling me that someone, somewhere, would have made a smarter choice.

Maybe they would have. But I'm learning — slowly, imperfectly, one overpriced glass at a time — that the smartest choice isn't always the most careful one. Sometimes the smartest choice is the one that finally lets you unclench. Not because you've forgotten where you came from, but because you've decided — for the first time, maybe — that where you are is enough. That you are enough. That the abundance your parents couldn't quite name was never about the money at all. It was about the permission to stop counting.