You left out 18 years in that story so it's hard to tell.

My entire direct family is on welfare and was half my life. My parents spent a significant amount of time in mental hospitals while I lived with various aunts and grandparents (sometimes trailers, sometimes in a farm house. I liked the farm house though).

Yeah. Lots of privilege.

Living in a farm house sounds like privilege compared to trailers :)

Anyway, no need to defend yourself against random internet people.

In the end it’s all down to hard work and a bit of luck (the people not doing the hard work part will never be in a position to make use of the luck).

Yeah I did let myself get worked up.

We actually ended up loosing the farm house to the bank. I say farm house because that's an easy way to describe it, but it was really just a house on the edge of another farm in the middle of nowhere. Lots of peace and quiet. :)

I think what they meant was not needing recruiters puts you in a relatively well-off and thus "privileged" position.

If you earned your privilege, how does that not make you privileged nonetheless?

If you earned it, then it isn't privilege, by defintion. Unless you consider being born a hard worker as being privileged, in which case the word is meaningless.

I think people are using the word in different ways. The person you are responding to is using it as a description of the current state.

So the person is misusing it.

It's certainly different from what seems like the standard usage in the past few years, but I woudn't say it's a misuse. Here's is google's dictionary definition

"a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group."

In this case, the "advatange" would be 'able to find job without going through recruiter' and the 'particular person or group' would be 'the group of people who (through their hard work or otherwise) are sufficiently talented/and or secure enough in their career'

Anyway it's sad this this word has such a negative smell attached to it now, thanks to people using it to shame people on the opposing side of internet arguments.

> Because I worked literally every day from the time I was 17 in high school until I got a full time job.

Frankly, the recruiter route is simpler and has a higher success rate than what you did.

Well, yes. It wasn't planned though. I just needed money while I was in school. Parents wanted to charge rent and I wanted to buy a car.

What year was that?

Which part?