Talking to privileged people is often frustrating
Talking to privileged people is often frustrating
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The attitude around hard work here is fucking weird.
Worked outside lawn and garden at Lowe's this year. During the spring it's the shittiest job in the store, even working on an asphalt crew wasn't as hard. Worked my ass off, got the respect of my coworkers when the lazy young guys were reviled. Within 2 months they fired the lazy day guy, gave me his full time slot and sweet schedule. The day I quit the gm was waiting on me to get with him concerning a raise. Same gm started where I was 8-years previous. The assistant managers were clocking $90K and every one of them started at the bottom. My agm had only been there 6-years.
Every shit job has been like that for me. At the very least I got lateral promotions into jobs I'd rather be doing. Also there's what I call the Hawkeye Pierce Theory of Work. Make yourself irreplaceable and you get loads of slack when you fuck up or fuck off.
While it can be malicious I do wonder if in some cases its outright ignorance (albeit caused by a total lack of any real empathy), If you get everything handed to you then you percieve yourself as having 'earned' it with almost zero effort therefore life must be easy right? And if you're doing so great with how little effort you had to put in then anyone doing worse than you must just be incredibly lazy right?
Having interacted with a lot more privileged people since I immigrated to central europe, a lot of it is ego protection. These people tend to live in a bubble, where they're surrounded with people like them. Having to interact with less privileged people tends to put their life and opportunities in stark contrast and to prevent their psyche from cognitive dissonance, they have to embrace such ideas in order to soothe themselves that they deserve where they are.
Guess my ego is strong enough to know that my readiness in college and finding jobs was highly dependent on the support my family gave me…
How is it not luck that my parents cared about my academic success from early in life? That I didn’t need to have a side job during college? Or the more subtle knowing that, whatever happened, I was always welcome back home, so I could take more risky career moves without fearing to end up in the streets?
Sure, I “worked hard”, aka studied in college, applied for a bunch of jobs, applied myself in those jobs and had the luck (again!) that my effort was rewarded. I know rich kids that took too much for granted and didn’t get very far. But they still have a roof over their head and as many warm meals as they feel like.
Oh no, it's actually almost always ignorance.
And it's not even that they have everything handed to them in a literal sense (e.g. "here's a credit card with no limit") but that they are handed opportunities others would not get (e.g. "let me introduce you to my friend who's high up in x company/industry that could land you a job") and assume that it's due to their skill and not zip code and social circle.
There is still something to be said for malice, and general unrelated entitlement though.
"It's not what you know, it's who you know, that will get you ahead in life."
-- someone
It's always survivorship bias. They survived, and they think the things they did was the reason they survived.
This is only my own personal experience but my parents became middle class when I was a teenager and I started going to private school and having my material needs much more easily provided. During college (UK college, so US high school equivalent) almost all the mates I made were working class and I became much more aware of the struggles people faced. University onwards this only deepened and I was well into anarchism by the time I hit 20. Realising I was being financially abused by my parents, distancing myself from them and living most of my adult years as a working class person for the most part and also being homeless a lot of the time of course really helped to open my eyes. Before I started getting that true awareness I wasn't prejudiced or judgemental toward working class people, but as I say I just lacked that real awareness of how society is structured to keep people struggling and marginalised in various ways. If I'd stayed in that middle class bubble I feel I could well have been just like these young middle class people who seem to think people are on an even playing field, for the most part
The ignorance and maliciousness are in a feedback loop; one required for the wealthy to have self esteem.