Their life is about getting enough money to put food on the table to feed their children, and that’s it.

Burstyn’s remark underscores a narrow, necessity-driven horizon of life shaped by poverty: work and daily decisions are reduced to securing basic survival for one’s family. The blunt “and that’s it” emphasizes how economic precarity can crowd out aspirations, leisure, education, and long-term planning, leaving little room for self-actualization or civic participation. Implicitly, the quote critiques social conditions that normalize this constriction—suggesting that for many people, “life” is not a realm of choice but a continuous triage of needs. It also carries an empathetic note: the focus is not moral judgment but recognition of the exhausting, repetitive labor of getting by.