>I respect property rights now, of course, because my belly is full.
We lived in the middle of nowhere. I hitched rides to school from friends, neighbors, and rarely family. There was no store to steal from, so I stole food from the school.
I was on free lunch, so I'd steal an extra hamburger, sell it for half price to a kid for 50 cents, and I would use that to buy a can of soup when I could get someone to stop by the store. That would be my dinner that I cooked over a wood burning stove since I could warm up that bedroom but the kitchen was missing a wall and was _cold_ (between 20-40 Fahrenheit, but, again, poor, so no good warm clothes). My dad would give $20 every now and then, and I'd use that to buy potatoes that I'd heat in a toaster oven.
A plain potato, a school lunch hamburger, and usually a 50ish percent chance for can of soup was what I ate. I was skinny and hungry. A few years later, I would be able to eat regularly (and now I am doing more than ok), but it took nearly two decades to be comfortable throwing out a plate of food; the poor, hungry kid in me wasn't sure when the next food would come even though I now had food aplenty.
I was broke and not in a position to help myself as much as I was studying and building my skillset, not absolutely despondent.
Why didn't you just steal food?
That's what I did when I was poor. There's a store the size of a city block a 5 minute walk away from me, there are tons and tons of food stacked up in that store, any type of food you could want, and I'm going to go bed hungry? That didn't really make sense to me. I never went to bed hungry.
I respect property rights now, of course, because my belly is full.