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I come from a working-class background. As a kid, I was aware that I had less than a lot of my peers did, through no fault of the effort of my own parents, who worked very hard to provide everything they could for me.

But the fact that my parents are good, smart, hard-working people didn’t mean that they were financially successful. That’s not how the world works. And we dealt with a lot of hardship when I was growing up.

It was very clear to me that a lot of the kids that I was friends with occupied a different class position than I did. That included when my dad had to change careers. He was doing circuit-board design for a lot of my childhood and was very talented — in high demand, but not well paid. He opted for trucking, moving around machinery and scrap metal. At my first job, I was wearing my Sears and Roebuck to get into dumpsters and pull out scrap metal. We called dumpster diving “getting in the box.”

I was the first person on either side of my family to ever graduate from college. Growing up with this acute understanding of my class position, I was told that the solution was ambition: “You’re going to be the one to make it. Graduate college and get a good paying job, so you don’t have to work like we worked.” And I kind of bought into that mindset — the way to take care of yourself is to take care of yourself in this rat race of capitalism. The only thing you can do is try to get yours.

I also was raised with progressive values. That’s tough to square. It’s tough to take that individualist position and also have the view that everyone should be better off. They aren’t really compatible, and it produces cynicism. I had this view of society as it should be, but it was unobtainable — so instead you’ve got to take care of your family and the people close to you.