When did you realize that rich people live in a world of their own?
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.
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.
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.
I had a temporary relationship with a rich semi-celebrity and lent a thumbdrive and they took it assuming I was just giving it to them… in fact they assume a lot of what people do ,paid and not paid, is just in service to them and cannot accurately gauge what to do in interaction not involving servitude.
They also had a bowl of change they didn’t want assuming just giving it to someone such as myself was ‘more money than I’ve ever seen’. …like they don’t understand the difference between homelessness and regular working people on a wage. They just assume we all blur in together.
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.
A very rich friend of mine decided that they wanted to “take time off” and travel the world. She called her travel agent (10 pm on a Saturday) and got them to build a world trip by Monday afternoon. That Friday she got on a plane and just left for 9 months of travel. There was never a sense of this being a big deal or extravagant but more of a quirky whim.
It was then that it occurred to me that while we live on the same planet we don’t live in the same world.
I was working in a restaurant and one day a regular invited us to his place for after work drinks. He opened the front door into a monumental hallway with beautiful winding stairs and a large mosaic monogram with his initials on the floor.
We went into the main living area with a professionally decked out open kitchen, a 20 person dining table and a seating area with 4 large Chesterfields. The whole room is filled with art and antiques.
He asked me if I wanted to pick a few bottles of wine because of my good taste ( I’m a trained sommelier). He then guided me to his library and opened a secret door that led into the wine cellar.
Every large winehouse in the world was represented and he insisted on picking whatever I wanted. The sheer amount of stacks of Mouton Rotschild premier Cru, Tenuta Dan Guido - Sassicaia… We opened 4 bottles that would’ve cost about 10.000 euros together. No sweat.
He told us that despite the nice kitchen he never cooks. He goes to restaurants every day and on the weekends he hires top chefs to cook for his guests.
Then he asked us if we would like to go and have lunch in Milan, the next day (I’m from Belgium). He chartered a heli and had extra space for 3 persons.
He’s a modest guy. Rides his bike everywhere and makes his money selling real estate. He only sells high value property like castles and works one day a week. He’s not extremely talented but admitted he’s just lucky.
I realized that to become rich, you need money. Whether it’s your own or someone else’s doesn’t matter, you just need a lot.
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.
I don’t remember when I learned they were different, I didn’t give them much thought, but this podcast was incredibly eye opening. Not just learning that rich people were in a different world, but the scale of that difference:
The lives of the richest people in the world are so different from those of the rest of us, it’s almost literally unimaginable. National borders are nothing to them. They might as well not exist. The laws are nothing to them. They might as well not exist.
But one story illustrated it amazingly. Basically she talks about going with some family to some island that was in another country, and the whole way they saw no customs agents whatsoever. They just drove onto the tarmac at an airport, got on a private plane, flew to another country and went about their day, and at no point did the subject of passports even come up. They just violated international borders and it was a regular tuesday to them.
And also just the existence of the general purpose assistants was amazing. These are people who are paid to do whatever it takes to make these rich people happy, and they routinely break the law on their behalf, and it’s never mentioned. The clients have total deniability as well as the ability to get just about anything they want.
The job could be, “help me figure out where my wallet went” (from overseas when it’s 3am for the assistant) or “help me show my friends a good time” (without mention of any laws). There’s a whole industry of enablers that are paid not to say no or tell them there’s anything they can’t have.
I have to admit, my exposure is limited to the ones who try to.influence the situation based on their position and title. Never met the likes of what you described. That was both fascinating and morbid at the same time.
I think it was 4th grade social studies when we learned about the industrial revolution, oil tycoons and the Pinkertons. Later re-inforced by AP European History in highschool.
Rich people have historically always been pieces of shit.
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.
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