Oh yeah, your circumstances embed in your consciousness. I'm assuming you're too young to have met many people who lived through the great depression, especially as adults. The ones who fought through those years of incredibly bleak poverty had it stamped on their psyche. This is where the old meme comes from of a grandma giving a kid a dollar and saying don't spend it all in one place. We were laughing about this in the 90s.

Edit to add- if you ever watch the show hoarders you can see what poverty mentality can cause. If you see an old person who can't let go of a scrap of paper, they likely learned that from their depression era parents. This is all US centric of course.

I make really good money these days. I live a comfortable life in a middle class neighborhood with a larger house than I need. I pay for it all myself and I still have money at the end of the month for healthcare, fun, retirement, and can pretty much buy anything I could want on a normal day to day basis.

I still have issues with things like buying groceries or leaving lights on. I can drop hundreds of dollars on something useless online while grocery shopping and still be calculating the unit price per once on crackers.

Brain always goes for that price/oz amount.

Annoys me when sale tags don't also have it.