I totally feel grateful for my dishwasher. I also feel grateful for my washer and dryer. I have lived without these appliances. Maybe that's why.
Looking at statistics for the country as a whole hides a lot of regional variance. People may use those numbers for all sorts of things, but the comparisons have no effect on lived experience.
NO effect? Am I misunderstanding you? I doubt this very much indeed. Even if you live in an extremely expensive part of the country, if you make $120K, dollars to donuts you are experiencing some privileges that someone making 20K is not--unless perhaps you are in the throes of bankruptcy/foreclosure.
I often hear people making 100K+ per year talking about how close to the financial edge they are. I do realize that they have much bigger mortgages than I do, and that some have large debts that I do not (we are debt-free other than the mortgage). But I look at their cars, their iPhones, their vacations, and how they clothe and feed themselves and I don't really feel that they are that close to the financial edge. I was a little surprised to read about the Food Stamp Challenge, where people try to feed their families on the "food stamp budget of $1-1.25 per person per meal per day" (so, about $130 per week for a family of 4) to make a point about how hard this is. That's about my food budget; actually, I think I probably spend less.
