Unsteady income in young adulthood linked to thinking problems in middle age

Does anyone even say that?

It's not rich people stacking the deck, it's nature. The rich just happen to have a lot more tools (money) available to deal with that deck.

> It took a tremendous amount of strength and faith in myself to ignore literally everyone I knew and do what I thought was best.

You even touch on it here, so clearly you are aware that your struggles had nothing to do with rich people (except maybe tangentially) but with the environment you were in. That's what people talk about when they talk about the deck being stacked against someone.

I'm not entirely sure it's unnecessary. Not everyone can live an upper middle class lifestyle.

My main message is that there's culture changes that can and must be enacted within those communities or individuals that will provide opportunity.

"By now you won’t be surprised to learn that I first became aware of how important growth and protection behaviors are in the laboratory where my observations of single cells have so often led me to insights about the multicellular human body. When I was cloning human endothelial cells, they retreated from toxins that I introduced into the culture dish, just as humans retreat from mountain lions and muggers in dark alleys. They also gravitated to nutrients, just as humans gravitate to breakfast, lunch, dinner and love. These opposing movements define the two basic cellular responses to environmental stimuli. Gravitating to a life-sustaining signal, such as nutrients, characterizes a growth response; moving away from threatening signals, such as toxins, characterizes a protection response. It must also be noted that some environmental stimuli are neutral; they provoke neither a growth nor a protection response. My research at Stanford showed that these growth/protection behaviors are also essential for the survival of multicellular organisms such as humans. But there is a catch to these opposing survival mechanisms that have evolved over billions of years. It turns out that the mechanisms that support growth and protection cannot operate optimally at the same time. In other words, cells cannot simultaneously move forward and backward. The human blood vessel cells I studied at Stanford exhibited one microscopic anatomy for providing nutrition and a completely different microscopic anatomy for providing a protection response. What they couldn’t do was exhibit both configurations at the same time. [Lipton, et al, 1991) In a response similar to that displayed by cells, humans unavoidably restrict their growth behaviors when they shift into a protective mode. If you’re running from a mountain lion, it’s not a good idea to expend energy on growth. In order to survive — that is, escape the lion — you summon all your energy for your fight or flight response. Redistributing energy reserves to fuel the protection response inevitably results in a curtailment of growth."

In other words, living in a constant state of survival (as unsteady income might cause), severely restricts a person’s capabilities to grow in a healthy way.

While I get your point, I don’t fully agree with this statement. The anti-intellectual strain is pretty common in India as well, it’s just a bit warped. There definitely is a fetish for getting into a good college and getting the right/prestigious credentials, but actual education (grounded, multi-disciplinary, non-rote-based) is many-a-time sneered upon, at least in my personal experience. I was lucky enough that my parents encouraged reading (they sometimes strained their finances so that my sister and I could get good books). A lot of my peers did not share or appreciate the necessity of reading “outside the syllabus”.