Worth the read.
It’s hard to comprehend what it’s like to grow up like that.
It’s shit. Granted we weren’t as flashy like that, but replace everything immaterial in your life with something material, remove all of its value, and convince yourself that being surrounded by worthless baubles makes you happy- there’s the key difference there for the inevitable “LOL I’D SURE BE HAPPY IN A PRIVATE JET” comments, we’re hunter-gatherers at heart and the pursuit will always be more rewarding than the meal.
Replace all of your friends with gimme-gimmes. If they aren’t, their families are. You go to hang out with them and their uncle comes along. He educates you on his business idea and you compare it to everyone else’s. Your friend is visibly embarrassed and won’t speak to you again, but that doesn’t have much of an impact because you’ve gone through so many in the past year alone that you’ve made a game of guessing what they’re going to say. If they don’t have an uncle, it will be their business idea and all hell will break loose if you don’t believe in a fourteen year-old’s vision for a nightclub on. a. zeppelin. mate.
Replace the women you meet with gold diggers. Gold diggers are different from gimme-gimmes because gold diggers aren’t bought by object, only by status. They’ve fetishised money and caste to a religious level and if you don’t bring them both their eyes shut off and their exit will be marked with such a profound 180 in personality that you’ll incrementally lose the ability to trust people. Either you’ll give up and accept hollow relationships with women who love your name but don’t know the person behind it or you’ll take to dating crazy women, as they’re rubbish at bluffing.
Replace parents with staff and parenting with bribes. Congrats, you have someone washing your clothes and cooking your food. They’re not allowed to look at you or speak with you unless it’s in a tone that’s incredibly demeaning toward themselves. They wouldn’t want to anyway because they too know they’re cooking and cleaning for you and they hate that. They didn’t want to grow up to have that job, but they do and their best response is to take it out on you. You’ll overcompensate, cook fucking feasts before you hit age ten just to say “you don’t need to do this for me”, but if they don’t they’ll be punished so they do. You’re left with five mums and five dads, none of which would bat an eye if you were to choke on the sandwich they made for you even though you’ve made it as clear as you can that you too can and would like to make a sandwich if they wouldn’t keep locking the kitchen doors.
You can go anywhere in the world and see nothing at all. Travel is a hotel room, and the only thing separating Paris from Beirut is the kitschy shit on the walls. If you go outside, you risk being kidnapped. That’s not paranoia, that’s a thing. It’s a thing you actually have to worry about because someone who isn’t you has made you a target of people you don’t know so that they can feel good about their own choices in life. If you do manage to get away from the hotel, every single person you meet sees you as a foreigner no matter where you are or what language you’re speaking. Again, Paris, Beirut, your own city. You are different and they will let you know this in more ways than Disney has dalmatians.
Life is meaningless. You can be anything you want or nothing at all. There’s no challenge, there’s no game, there’s no "if I do this and this and this I’ll have the biggest damn boat EVER inadecade ". If you want a boat, you buy a boat. If you want to be a doctor, you become a doctor. If you want to suck dad’s money teat, drink your fill and you’ll become whatever he wanted you to become when he planned your birth for the explicit purpose of carrying on his name and his business and has made this very clear in his only real interactions with you.
But if you want to be anything but what he wants you to be or something equally prestigious, god help you. Be a doctor but no hospital will take you if you go into public medicine. Psychology is fine but if you work with crazy people you’ll be disowned. Animals, lovely. Work with cute ones and have someone under you to clean up after them because if they shit you’ll find them dead the next morning.
Only have an abstract view of family, of worth, of ethics, and of normalcy. Hesitate before you say anything to anyone who isn’t of the same background because at best you’ll come off as either a compulsive liar or nutter, and at worst as someone different. Consider every action from a dozen different angles before you undertake it because on some level your brain doesn’t quite understand the idea of consequence and you don’t know if something is wildly risky or just fun.
Keep a spare change of clothing in your backpack and duck behind a tree every time you’re out of sight from your house. Change your accent, it’s as telling as anything. Change your vocabulary, your interests, your hair, your name if you can pull it off. Walk through the field to get to the council homes to get to the shoddy street to get to the better street to get to the school, even though you’d otherwise just walk down the street to the school from your own house. If “friends” follow you home, you’ll be outed the next day and have to take another year of boarding school because they’ll make your life hell unless given time to forget you.
Escape your family, escape your childhood, escape your country, escape you. You’re still branded for life and anyone who is the least bit perceptive can smell you from a mile away. Have your failed relationships because you wanted love and she wanted a steady cheque, your failed friendships because you wanted acceptance and they wanted insurance, and your failed life because no matter what you end up doing the voice in the back of your mind says “Do it well, do it shit, you’re covered.”
Break out entirely, burn every bridge you’ve ever crossed, sweep that one girl who’s just warped enough to not get blood on her teeth off her feet, run away to a city where you can guarantee no one will ever recognise you, and maybe just maybe you’ll have a place and a person and a purpose just tangible enough to let you breathe for the first time in twenty-one years and think, “What now?”
I feel like I want to explain the opposite side. Where you come from poverty but managed to go somewhere with it.
Growing up in poverty is shit. Granted everyone knows that, but poverty is rarely rewarding and it ruins most people. If you’re one of the harder working, lucky, individuals then you may find your background humbling, but that’s unlikely. To most of us who have come from poverty into wealth, our backgrounds are just a burden and a tool.
Yet some of the things you say about being rich remind me of how it is to be poor. While you can travel anywhere and experience nothing, I couldn’t travel anywhere and still experience nothing. When I was at home, I stared at the same blank 4 walls daily, and when I went into the world I was a foreigner to the majority of the population. You see, being poor has a stigma. Everyone else with a basic level of perception can tell you’re poor. You have an aura of being lower than them.
Similarly you mention that relationships and the like become abstract and meaningless. When you’re poor it is the same. Those gold diggers and gimme gimmes? They’re the people us poor people also grow up with. The exact same people. They don’t just do it to you. The second you show any level of wealth as a poor person they will be there as a “mate” or friend to suck it all away. You just got your welfare or benefits? Bam, they’re around for a beer, or to go out, or something similar. You earned some money via a back alley odd job or won a small lottery? Let’s go celebrate with champagne at the pub!. While it may be tiny amounts you earned or won, it will go very fast with these people around. Not only do they ask you out, no, they will enter your home and eat the little food you have, but when you visit them they have none. “I forgot to shop”. No they didn’t. They either never had any to begin with, or they hid it from you. Poor people are very cunning at saving every little bit of wealth. It gets very petty very quickly and becomes a series of mind games to see who you can fuck over the most. Family, friends, colleagues, whatever. You, and the rest of your poor family and friends, are in a game of trying to take the most from each other while losing the least. Everyone will be very diligent about debt, tabs and claiming benefits, credit and the like, but will never remember their own debts.
Then we have the issue of future. You say you must take a specific job or type of job? So must poor people. Why you ask? Crabs in a Bucket. If you aspire to be more than them they will either drag you down by peer pressure because of jealousy, or they will drain every penny you earn because they are vultures. Either way they will beat you down and force you back to their level. You must either be one of them, or not. You cannot be on their level while earning enough to be “normal”.
Let’s discuss “normal” now. When you’re poor as a child you cannot have everything the other children have. A car? Good luck. The newest games console? Those are for rich kids. Regular food? Going out for a meal? Trips to the cinema? Christmas presents? All for rich kids. A coat in the winter? Sometimes. New shoes when the soles of your old ones fall through? Perhaps, but you’ll have to spend a few weeks with your feet getting wet in negative (Celcius) temperatures. As you get older you realise the importance of stealing. You have to steal to get by. What do you steal? Anything, everything. From who? Everyone. Of course, most aren’t daring enough to steal something big, but anything from a few pounds on a friends table, to a keyboard from your school/ workplace, to a pair of shoes from a shop will do. Want a coke? Too expensive, let’s just steal it from Woolworths. “Does anyone need a drink? I’m just gonna steal some from that place”. Yes, this was a normal statement between my friends when we were younger.
Everybody sees this. The fact you are poor is clear. You are different, and everyone who isn’t poor can tell. This is a major point, so I’m mentioning it again. The feeling that you are less, that you are worthless and that other people are looking down on your is very very real. When you’re much younger it is a different story. The middle class/ working class kids don’t understand why you’re so poor. Why do you only have one parent? Where is your car? Why don’t you have a PC? You don’t have a maid? As a child you repeat the mantra “That’s for rich people only”, further cementing your differences.
As for ethics and normalcy? You don’t have either if you’re in poverty. “Normal” is what rich people are. “Rich people” is anyone who can afford basic living standards. Ethics are obviously out of the window. It’s a competitive environment where you’re all lions trying to tear the throats out of each other. You all know it, but you must cooperate to survive, but if you can just get a little bit more by being uncooperative, you will.
Now, I mentioned I left poverty? To be normal now hasn’t solved the problems my childhood wrought on me. I’m still very competitive, I see everything in terms of gain and loss, people are still very abstract, relationships are tenuous and my culture does not match the people I am working with, and yet because of my success I can no longer return to my past people and integrate with them. This leaves me between a rock and a hard place. I cannot integrate with the “normal” people, nor the people I grew up with. Remember you said that you feel like a foreigner? I do more now than ever, and similarly I only socialise with the international community, further isolating me from my home culture. If I grew up normally I’d be a typical xenophobe.
Also, you sound British. I am too. I have to change my accent when I go from place to place, people from my home consider me “posh” if I speak as I would away from them, and “normal” people consider me “chavvy” if I speak as I would at home. Poverty is shit. Growing up poor is shit, and becoming middle class after doesn’t undo it. You’re left with the scars of being poor, one of those being your family that you left behind because of their constant begging for money.
The good news is that the competitiveness and lack of ethics and care for others has allowed me to be very practical in how I deal with people, and allowed me to further excel where others would not. There are some upsides, but I’d rather have had a real childhood and become a well rounded adult than a power hungry, money grabbing, borderline sociopath that I have become. Perhaps one day of my life I’ll be able to sit back and think “I’ve succeeded”, but until then I will keep doing whatever it takes to get there.
When it was compared to having a cheat code to a video game you just got that makes the game boring.
Pretty much exactly that. It’s having a god mode cheat enabled where every hit is a kill and every kill gives 999.999 points, but at the same time the person standing behind you says that you have to kill more baddies than they did and they spent their entire life holding down the fire button with a piece of tape.
I’m not sure to be honest. My dad’s family is somewhere in the lower nine digits, my mother’s family is three different families and all of them are probably in the upper eights. Mind you though that almost all of that is wrapped up in things, so as far as liquid worth goes they just sort of have a blank cheque mentality where money is either something that is or something that isn’t.
The big disconnect is in the kind of money. My dad’s family belongs to a scene where you’re measured by your power, sort of like that old Roman adage that you’re only rich if you can buy an army. That sort of hyper-competitive dynastic environment is way different from being a famous musician.
There really is a jump between the 7s/8s/9s/0s. I’ve a few friends from millionaire families, they’re more or less indistinguishable from my middle class friends. One is somewhere in the 8s, she’s kind of… pocket rich? Thinks like 9s but something off about her life. My one 0s friend, her world is absurd even to me. I invited her to come stay with me for a spell a few years ago and she said “Oh sure, I’ll just buy a house nearby.”
Source:
http://www.reddit.com/r/rage/comments/12uigr/rich_kids_of_instagram_im_pretty_well_off_but/c6ykr35
Enjoy the read.
