I tend to agree with your attitude. As a teen I saved up around $50 over a year to afford broken components to fix up to assemble my first PC. I learned how to do this from books I got from the library. I used that PC to teach myself a lot more and it catapulted me into a career. I moved from a developing country to a developed one. I now support my mother and grandmother financially.

It's tough being poor, the only way out of it is focus and self discipline, if you're lucky you can focus on something you enjoy. Fortunately we live in a modern world where obtaining information is relatively cheap and we have a market economy that does reward merit, not perfectly but it's certainly the opposite of slavery. The industrialized world is so good that our only real problem is too many options, like alcohol, cigarettes, unhealthy food, online games, consumer bling and consumer debt options. Unfortunately this means we still need self discipline, but there's certainly no lack of opportunity out there.