I have spent most of my working life in the bottom quintile and even though I sing along with Queen's 'Keep yourself alive' I pretty much take survival for granted. I think most people do. "Just been trying to survive" is nonsense for most of America, has been for about a hundred years. In 1951, a distant relative of mine wrote the 4th edition of an economics textbook (which I now own). In it, he quotes a sociologist E. A. Ross from 1905 who sums it up well.

"The master error of the social Darwinists is to see in the economic struggle a twin to the struggle for existence that plays so fateful a part in the modification of species. The fact is, the scramble for money or place, though it be as desperate as the fight of clawed beasts, has ceased to be a clear case of life or death. Only on the bottom steps of the social ladder do men compete from hunger. Above them men work themselves into the madhouse or the grave, not for bread, but for jam on the bread."

DU's Jeremiads are so determined to wear sackclothes and ashes and proclaim 'woe, misery, and doom, life in America just sucks', that even to proclaim that we have some options or it's not that bad are taken to be clear signs of trollery. Since when are progressives supposed to see only the dark side of everything? Like progressive = pessimist to the fifth power.