This is what class rage feels like
![[Post New]](/jforum/templates/default/images/icon_minipost_new.gif){kind=icon}
Anonymous
| I think one of the biggest things people with money are often lacking is consideration and perspective. They need to remember that those around them, even those in similar jobs, don’t always have the same amount of money. So be conscience of that. If you do go out to lunch or dinner, don’t just split the bill evenly when someone ordered fillet and someone ordered a salad. This happened to my sister. She was temping and trying to network so was part of this women’s group. All the women had jobs, some had very good jobs. They went out to dinner one night to discuss a book. It was a pricey restaurant. Not crazy expensive but way more than my sister was accustomed. She ordered a salad and no alcohol. It was like $16. Everyone else ordered full meals and drinks. They split the check evenly. My sister paid like $75. She was so upset that she spent so much and barely ate. No one bothered to notice that she ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, was temping, and didn’t order anything to drink. Everyone just assumed that everyone had the same thing and could spend the same. This type of thing has happened to me too. People will want to go to trendy and expensive place for drinks but I can’t afford that. Or they won’t have cash to tip so ask you to put in their share and they’ll pay you back. But they never do because for them $5 or $10 doesn’t mean anything. Be thoughtful and cognizant of those around you. Be aware that not everyone is as fortunate financially as you. That in itself goes a long way. |
Anonymous
Um, I was told (by two different people, the boss and the RE agent) how much the salary is and how much the rent is. Should be enough for a college graduate to arrive to some conclusions. |
Anonymous
NP. Whatever you need to tell yourself. This is how generational wealth works. |
Anonymous
Well the pandemic is a special case of elites abusing the rest of society. Closing schools are the ultimate example of elite cluelessness. |
Anonymous
Agree and maybe this wasn’t clear to the author at first. If you’re not from NY you might think many peers are scraping by on a similar level to you, and then it makes your own choice seem less crazy. And by the time you get the MFA it’s late to pursue medical school or whatever and you have made this quite wrong turn into a career that was never going to be tenable but you didn’t realize it. Sucks. But what this author needed/still needs to do is probably get out. |
Anonymous
This. The 'just send your kids to private' sent me over the edge. So now their kids are going to have yet an additional edge - they were in in-person school for 18 months; mine in fully virtual. |
Anonymous
Stop complaining and get busy. No one is stopping you from making more money. People are dying to come to America. Some become multi millionaires within one generation. Their kids go to private. |
Anonymous
As a former private school parent I found private schools to be a bastion of mediocrity and privilege. |
Anonymous
Not PP, but…ok? As opposed to everywhere else, which are bastions of mediocrity and lack of privilege? |
Anonymous
I find with most privates, 1/3 are rich and dumb. 1/3 are middling and 1/3 are smart and capable. It's this last 1/3 that you're competing against. Not the whole school. |
Anonymous
Sure. Because we all know every single private school is just like every other private school. |
Anonymous
|
I literally started life in an orphanage. Bounced around foster homes and then was adopted later at 4. Grew up in a good home but saw there were some money struggles and decided that that was not going to happen to me so I did very well financially. Took some time but achieved my financial goals and NOW do my dream service job were I get paid very little but make a huge difference in the lives of folks. My kid’s private schools/college/grad school are/were covered. Our very nice house has been paid for. Those I work with might not be aware of how much I have except that I always cover the bulk of any meals we may get as a team (would pay for everything but some folks insist on putting in too) and that I am well versed in finance and the law. Don’t talk about money around my colleagues but would never lie about it either.
Sometimes it takes a plan involving different timing than one would like to get somewhere. Furthermore, for all her disdain about folks with resources, I can almost guarantee someone in those families’ histories really rolled up their sleeves and dug into a turd pile to find their diamond. She should judge how “unfair” things are with those efforts included in the calculus. For her own peace of mind, she should also get out of NYC. She sounds a bit masochistic to me. |
Anonymous
|
As a child I remember being told many times by my parents to pursue my passion, with all the implications that if I did so then everything would fall into place and I'd have a successful life. This was a common mantra among the boomer generation, and for someone like my father it was very easy to say, as he had a clear passion for a certain field and and he worked extremely hard at it. His hard work was second nature to him and one that must have been effortless as he genuinely loved his field. He did achieve quite a bit of success, which allowed him to provide very well for his family and we had the comfortable upper middle class life of the 1980s-1990s with private schools, a nice house, European vacations, Volvo station wagons and elite colleges for the kids. It allowed my mother, when she decided she wanted to go back to work, to be a history teacher at a nice girls' private school where her income was secondary to the point of having something to do that she enjoyed, and admittedly was very good at. And my parents now have an extremely comfortable retirement.
But there are two problems. The first is that not everyone has a clear passion or the drive to succeed in it, and not every passion pays well. I received a superb education but I never really had any strong calling to a particular occupation or profession. I more or less drifted through college without a purpose, majored in a soft liberal arts subject, and then found myself wondering what to do, and because I just didn't know, I randomly fell into a graduate program in a field that was mildly interesting but without a real clue as what I'd do afterwards. For my parents, it almost didn't matter as long as I was getting a good education at good schools, and they continued to assume everything would fall into place. In my second year of the grad program, I started to panic as the reality of the future hit me. I was going to have to get a job. And live. And the salaries of the industry the program was training me for was not... great. I started looking much more closely at the long term outcome of the program's graduates, even in mid career 20 years later they were not living the lifestyle I'd grown up. Meanwhile, around me I was watching friends coming out of professional schools or MBA programs walking into six figure salaries, and wondering why I hadn't done the same. I was just as intelligent, yet somehow I'd missed figuring out what they'd clearly long realized. I ultimately lucked out because I took the old fashioned way to success. I married well. But I still occasionally wonder what life would be like if I hadn't. And I still do wish my parents had been much more proactive in sitting down with me over the years and being frank about career choices and the tradeoffs you make rather than blithely assuming everything will work out as long as you do what you love. I will not make that mistake with my kids. |
Anonymous
Cool story. And what an inspiration you are. Hope you don't break out into too much of a sweat while "occasionally wonder[ing] what life would be like" if you hadn't "married well." 
|
Anonymous
| Intriguing. I think the point PP's father wanted her to grasp was that she should work very hard at something. Whatever she worked very hard at would be her true passion manifesting. I find it hard to believe that there is nothing you enjoy putting a great deal of effort into doing, especially given your impressive parents. |