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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
There was this new kid at (public) middle school we kinda started feeling sorry for. He was always dressed nice. Had an excuse for PE. Had a special lunch from the cafeteria because of dietary needs. Turns out his parents were super specialized doctors or surgeons or something. After a couple of months he said he could have one of person over at a time after school. I went over first on my skateboard. He had one that he didn’t know how to ride, so he walked. We get to his house and they have this amazing view of the water and mountains. A fucking indoor pool and jacuzzi. Green house in the middle of the entryway with tropical plants. The mom greeted us and makes us leave our skateboards outside, take off our shoes, and told us the house rules. She asked me what my parents did and was just kind of deadeyes when I told her (boring, middle class work). We went to his room that had a goddamn computer in, most households didn’t have anything like that at the time. He had his own private phone line, cable tv, and tons of plastic model cars and planes. He had an RC Car. I was blown away and then he shows me their entertainment room with a giant projector tv, air hockey, a film projector and screen, and a bunch of other shit I can’t remember. I feel like I spent about an hour there before the mom found us and sent me home because they were having dinner? Gee thanks lady, I guess you don’t want the poors coming back for free food. Or your son to have any friends. My other friends went over there (one at a time!) with the same results. Looking back, I guess his parents were trying to research what other kid’s parents might be wealthy enough for their son to hang out with. or maybe for them to entertain/socialize. It was pretty gross.
Now that I think about it, I had a “friend” like that. He wasn’t super wealthy, but when most of us were broke ass people living in apartments with one TV in the house, he had this nice modern house with a pool, gated driveway, and a housekeeper who would pick him up from school and walk him home.
My mom was kinda friends with the housekeeper, since we’d walk the same route home as they were picking us up from school, and that’s how I became acquainted with him.
I remember going to his house once and we played his turbo grafx in his room for a bit… well more like he played and let me watch. He seemed pretty disinterested with it. I never got invited back or anything.
omg, the rich kid letting you watch…ugh, been there. that kid at my school had the nicest skate board you could buy and never once road it. Meanwhile we were mowing lawns to buy plywood for ramps, smoking weed, and chasing girls. I wouldn’t have traded his isolated life for mine, but I doubt he ended up going through the tough times me and my friends did. Tough times don’t build character, IMO, they just increase resentment towards the system.
the culture of the wealth gap (or intentional moat) has always been there, embedded in our everyday lives from birth to death. Temporarily embarrassed millionaires indeed.
I’ve yet to realize this. The majority of rich people I know don’t come off that way. The exceptions aren’t the majority just because they’re in the spotlight more due to the damage they do cause.
This guy I knew came from a wealthy family and would squirt half a bottle of ketchup on to a separate plate for one helping of fries. He couldn’t understand why we had a problem with him wasting so much of it.
It was when trumps one daughter told the story about how her dad was explaining to her as they walked from the limo to the hotel or the reverse that the homeless guy begging was wealthier than them because he had so much debt.
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