The rusted kettle, warming over a stove whose fuel had to be counted, made an argument before any adult could name it: deprivation can enlarge a child's inner estate, because each object invites attention, invention, and use rather than instant replacement. Nothing arrived prepackaged. That was the point.
Plenty often impoverishes memory. Hedonic adaptation makes repeated comforts fade into background noise, while dopaminergic reward prediction is sharpened by uncertainty: a blackberry found beside a path, a match saved for evening, rain that cancels an outing and forces a game indoors. Friction did useful work there. With few toys and no ready-made entertainment, children build scripts, negotiate rules, and attach episodic memory to smells, thresholds, weather, and minor risks; cognitive psychology calls this self-generated elaboration, and it tends to leave denser retrieval cues than passive consumption. Scarcity can also injure. Cold rooms, hunger, and isolation do not become gifts by being remembered fondly. But a safe limit on options has a different effect. It turns a stick into equipment, a walk into reconnaissance, and boredom into a workshop for agency. The cottage was not virtuous because it lacked things. It was legible. Later abundance can remove the pauses in which desire acquires a shape, leaving possessions plentiful but weakly encoded. A dark window, one lamp, and the unspent silence: that may be the wealth adulthood keeps trying to buy back.
