May be an incident where they could not understand how much things they take for granted cost to the normies, a flagrant disregard for morals or ethics, a blatant show of arrogance or disconnectedness, or anything yould like to share.
Perhaps for perspective, because ‘rich’ is relative and I am always surprised how hard it is to forget that every person/class lives in a world of their own.
When I was studying, I had to work to support myself, coming from a working class background. My whole time at the university was like visit mandatory courses, study, work and use weekends to study some more/do classwork. My parents could neither help me financially or with advice.
I meet a study friend from a normal ‘middle class’ background on the street. He would spent many weekends to do short trips, go sailing, visit family, … perfectly fine and I am happy he could afford to live like that. During our conversation he mentioned casually, that he was going on a multi week vacation, because ‘Sometimes you just need to get out and see something else.’. He didn’t mean it in bad faith, I just felt like shit because at that time I haven’t had vacation for multiple years.
Now, I am perfectly fine with my friend living a good life. What really gets to me, though, is that for example the middle class takes all their privileges for granted and nowadays you can suddenly read in newspapers discussions, if it is still worth to go work if you cannot even afford to buy your own flat/house. Where I live, working class couldn’t afford to buy a flat/house for decades now, but there was never a discussion whether it would still be worth for the working class to work. The discussion is more about how to force the working class to work more for less.
In fifth grade at a private school in Florida, I told a kid our Apple IIe didn’t have a joystick.
A few months later he was flabbergasted I didn’t have one already.
I hadn’t even asked my parents for one. It wasn’t enough of a priority for me. (When I did get one a few years later it was with my money.)
We had a computer at home and were definitely not poor. But I stood out as the relatively poor kid there.
Long before I started getting hungry. Now that I am hungry it is time to eat the rich.
I was in a contemporary fine art market and I just hear visitors mentioning about owning a hotel in such a casual way, like how one would talk about owning a car.
The first security job I ever worked was for a rich girl’s 21st birthday party at her house, my main duty was making sure nobody went to the stables and bothered the racehorses. I heard one of the kids say that her dad owned 2 Toyotas & her mum owned a Subaru, and I thought maybe they’re not so different from me after all because my parents have the same cars. Turns out she was talking about owning the car dealerships.
Pffffffff
If I was drinking water I’d need to shower now
I realized rich people just sort of assume they’re going to get help when they ask for it, so I started behaving this way and people are so much more helpful.
Like, here’s a poor person:
What the fuck is going on with the air conditioning in my room? I paid $150 to stay here and I think there should be air conditioning in my room and this whole fucking vacation is a nightmare and I’m gonna leave the nastiest review if you don’t …
The poor person immediately assumes it’s a fight.
Here’s a rich person:
Looks like the AC’s gone out in my room. Could you please send someone up to take a look at it?
They just assume, from the get-go, that they’ll have full cooperation. It doesn’t cross their mind that someone might fight them on it.
I’ve found that this approach works wonders.
And even things that aren’t already “part of the deal” so to speak. Like:
You don’t happen to have a stand-up lamp I could put in this corner do you?
Like, a poor person would never even conceive that they could get extra furniture in that hotel room. A rich person just assumes all the resources available are at hand to help.
The staff will then go to their own office, or grab the stand-up lamp out of the lobby, something like that.
I dunno. I believe in social and economic mobility, and I think rich is a feedback loop between attitude and outcomes.
Good point. I do think the hotel might charge for the additional amenities though. The ac thing they’d probably just switch your room. But yeah, from personal experience, not being a dick gets you some milage.
Isn’t that just called “being polite”?
It sounds like you’re just describing asking nicely vs. being an asshole. Poor people can have manners, too. Rich people can be assholes.
What you’re describing has nothing to do with poor vs rich.
Your belief in social and economic mobility indicates this is your cooping mechanism.
You are finding a way to blame poor people for their inequality. That’s a much better example of the difference between poor and rich thinking.
Jesus h Christ son, the dude is sharing their experience
He’s claiming to know others minds. That’s not experience.
It seems to me like they are saying, I seem to notice this behavior among the wealthy, and it seemed to me like they were behaving this way because of a general expectation. Then they tried engaging with the world using this new seeming realization.
Of course we can’t read others minds but in this example they took an experience they perceived and tried using / mimicking said behavior and they are saying they noticed results.
I hear what you’re saying but I don’t think your assessment is accurate
I argue this isn’t an observation on one’s monetary wealth but rather their self worth.
The topic of the post isn’t about how to act rich but rather how the rich act in ways that differ from those without that status. Anyone can have a high self worth.
Claiming that people who are poor earn it by having lesser self worth is a way to blame the poor for being poor.
It is a dangerous line of reasoning that I felt worth pointing out.
I hear what you are saying but I don’t think their intention is to blame poor people for being poor.
As someone who grew up in poverty and has managed to claw my way out (still lower middle class, but above the median household income for my state just barely with my partner) I can relate to the anecdote the post described.
Going out to a restaurant when I was younger I would never have complained about anything. I’ve seen wealthier friends complain about too much butter on their toast…. Another anecdote, but I think there is some legitimacy to what the poster was trying to describe.
Poverty is looked down upon and with it often times comes a sense of self loathing. Acknowledging this is not blaming the poors for their own plight in my opinion.
But again I do see what you are pointing at.
Working retail in highschool in an area that is fairly low income but also intersects an area famous for celebrity vacation homes. The rich families would buy $1000 iPads for spoiled brats without any kind of breakage protection (after screaming at the retail workers for the screen not being indestructible, of course). The poor families always spent extra for protection because they valued their devices and couldn’t easily afford another one.
If the poor families are buying $1000 iPads then I don’t think they’re that poor
I bet they have microwaves too!
Luxury computing devices are the same as basic cooking tools, you’re right!
A tablet is not a luxury device.
The poster also does not say that poor people buy the high end tablets but rather that when they do buy devices they opt for insurance.
Rich people see a tablet as a disposable item that they can afford to replace.
Poor people see a tablet as an investment that must be protected.
Fair point, I read OP’s comment as saying everyone in this shop is buying the ludicrously expensive models, re-reading it’s not clear if that’s what they actually meant
When I was paid to fly to the company owner’s summer home with a new computer so the owner could remote into the office from his summer home.
I was given a months pay for two days of work, the owner just wanted the computer working when he got to his summer home.
So yeah, that was when I saw someone just throwing money at a problem untill it went away.
Heh. He probably used it a total of a week too.
He used it for a few years, but then it was replaced again
Newly admitted psych patient who was seriously invested in getting their personal sheets out of the belongings that came in with them. I didn’t really get it but I don’t understand like half the things that supposedly make people happy so whatever. I go to inventory the belongings real quick so I can get their sheets before they go to sleep.
So it turns out the family sent them with a full set of queen size silk sheets. We had to wrap the fitted sheet around the mattress and then some to get it to fit. Also in the bag were several (understatement) brand new brand name electronic devices. The clothes were also brand new and when I had the secretary look them up and there were several items that each could have paid my rent.
I had no idea what to do with all of it. Most of the clothes and the sheets were fine for the patient to have, but we don’t allow electronics out on the unit. We have a safe for valuables like phones and wallets and stuff but it was only a little bigger than a microwave and this person’s valuables would have filled it several times over.
It was like a real-life version of that scene from spaceballs where they find out they’ve been lugging the princess’s hair dryer across the desert. Not the indignant yelling obviously but just the first part where they open it up and just need to comprehend what’s going on for a second. It was especially jarring considering that most of my patient population is homeless. So like they’ll bring in everything they own (they don’t really have anywhere to leave it) but even when it doesn’t fit well in our storage it’s not usually 20 pounds of luxury goods that I have to figure out where to safely put before I’m on the hook for whatever the fuck all that cost.
Best part about the whole thing was that the chief complaint was capgras delusions. This family set this person up with all of this stuff to send them to the hospital and the pt literally thought they were all fakes. Like literally fake aliens or clones or whatever. Like damn that was some irony.
One of the kids in elementary school is very kind giving away paper when the teacher does surprise quizzes. May fortune always bless that person’s soul.
On the opposite end, there’s a lot of kids that play with their food/ snacks and chuck it around other kids and they consider that fun. My kid brain couldn’t get it that time, all I thought was it is sacrilege to food and I can’t do it because it’s already hard to get by with enough food to eat.
All of it clicked in 4rth or 5th grade when you start to see more, sometimes subtle, variations of these privileges happening all around.
When I was in the second grade, I went to a classmates birthday party that they invited only some of the other kids in my class and I was lucky to go. Growing up we were pretty poor but still happy, so I was dressed in old good will clothes. After the party, I overheard the mom tell my dad don’t bring me around anymore because we weren’t in the same financial class as them.
I can only assume that was difficult to process as a kid.
When I was in my mid 30s driving back from Florida after closing out my dead mom’s apartment and so forth, I picked up a hitchhiker.
He was a rich person parasite kind of. He would work as a bartender where daughters of wealthy families partied. He charmed them and became their boyfriend, and that’s how he survived. He was smart and industrious with clever business ideas so he charmed the daughter’s dads as well kind of. When he was tired of grifting them he just disappeared. I picked him up at the start of his latest disappearance.
So anyway, yeah, during a 10 drive he clued me in to how wealthy people are offered services regular folks don’t even conceive of.
Care to elaborate on what those services are?
Going to Russia paid by the KGB to get water sports documented to be blackmailed later, all in exchange for some licenses and a few rubles.
I used to do security consultancy work and had to explain to a Chinese half a billionaire that if he wanted his daughter to go to university in Australia and have a regular student experience he couldnt buy her a penthouse apartment and an AMG Mercedes. “But she always has THE BEST!”
I had to explain to him that if he bought her a brand new Corolla, and rented her a “nice” apartment that she would still be considered as a “rich kid” and treated differently by all the other students.
Once I spelled it out to him that Miss insert really common Chinese surname here would be much safer in a kind of shitty flat with a used car and a reasonable monthly budget he still had trouble wrapping his head around it. I had to explain the concept of hiding in plain sight, we set her up with a chinese-australian bodyguard who was “An old family friend” she could take to parties and so on. Her “regular” appartment got better doors and beefed up locks, coached her on her “cover story” that dad sold all his investments so she could go to school in Australia.
I was in a developing country and the taxi driver I guess wanted to practice his English with me. Starts asking me questions about the city I live in. I start mentioning some tourist traps and other spots I like and it just clicks in my head “this guy earns about ten dollars a day there is no way he is ever getting a visa, a plane ticket, or the money to be a tourist in my city”.
I am in the +99% of humanity in terms of money. Sure in the West I am at most upper middle class but for the bulk of the world I am disgustingly wealthy.
There are exceptions. I’m in a semi developed SEA nation and I’ve heard of simple drivers who have German luxury cars at home because they’ve used the information they overheard from their bosses in the back to invest in stocks. Essentially third party insider trading. Apparently there’s loads of stock manipulation going on here.
When I briefly dated a rich woman. She would drop hundreds of dollars on a whim and knew somebody at every club and restaurant to get us to the front of the line, the best seats, etc. It was like watching someone live in a dream world where they could get almost anything they wanted instantly. Sometimes I miss that feeling before remembering the full not so great reality of it, though
Sometimes I miss that feeling before remembering the full not so great reality of it, though
Tell us!
Nothing particularly interesting. She was just a very possessive person and I’m pretty independent. So I tried really hard to make it work because honestly I wanted a sugar mama to support me through college. But we just weren’t compatible :(
Yeah, I’m getting ready to stop scrolling “All”. It’s becoming more depressing than Reddit or Facebook ever was. US Presidential Election year rage bait is back in full swing I guess and Lemmy isn’t immune. I might lean more back into my hobbies, personal projects, and games while keeping my news feeds on a weekly review.
