Ask Lemmy

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

At the time, the "Supermarket Scanner" story painted a picture that, while blown out of proportion, is a truth about the way some people interact with the world when they have money and power. They don't see the same things that I do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarket_scanner_moment

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:

https://www.npr.org/2016/10/25/499213698/whats-it-like-to-be-rich-ask-the-people-who-manage-billionaires-money

The blurb quote is good:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When someone couldn't understand why I got my tooth pulled instead of getting a root canal. (It's way cheaper to get it pulled here.)

Long before I started getting hungry. Now that I am hungry it is time to eat the rich.

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.