The point is that “feeling” like you live paycheck to paycheck because of personal financial decisions and being forced to live paycheck to paycheck because you have no other choice are entirely different things.

In other words, just feeling like you live paycheck to paycheck is a rather privileged position to be in because you can fix it by making smarter choices. Meanwhile there are people who actually have to live paycheck to paycheck because they have no choice.

To distill further; self reported data in absence of hard statistics only provide a partial picture and shouldn’t be relied on to draw conclusions or make decisions.