Everything is relative, and trauma not dealt with is passed down.

I was not raised wealthy. Laying in my bed, in a room in a 2br public housing apt I shared with my two brothers, I could hear my parents fighting over money at night. I used to daydream about a rando giving us money and in my vision of how that would go it was never that we would have stuff, it was just that my parents wouldn’t have to fight over it anymore. I was homeless when I left home, sleeping in my beater broke down ass car and taking showers in public showers. I joined the US Army because I ran out of options. Just to give my broke ass credentials. It wasn’t the bottom, but it was close.

I am wealthy now. I live in a wealthy neighborhood. My kids go to a public “rich kid” school. They’re both teenagers, so I have a fairly good knowledge of the neighborhood kids since our house has always been the hangout house.

It’s weird. Being rich is sort of exactly what I thought it would be. We don’t argue over bills. My wife was not crazy town poor, but she was definitely lower middle class. We are both extremely frugal. We torture them dollars. I ain’t goin back. My kids have never known that world cause we hit the job lottery and the money showed up right before the first one was born.

Anyway.

All these kids are the exact same kids with the exact same problems as the ones I knew growing up, but the parents have more money and therefore more tools to help support their kids. The only real difference is the trauma of being broke as fuck isn’t there but it’s replaced with the pressure of expectations. When I was a kid if I had gotten a job as a mail delivery person, that would have been seen as a total success on my part. Life long stable job with a retirement at the end. I fucking won the game of life. For rich kids, that would be seen as an abject failure.

It’s not that they don’t have empathy. It’s that their entire community is economically high performers. Everyone they meet in their lives fucking won the game of capitalism. The only regular humans they run into wait on them or teach them. In their minds, how hard can it be? They know all these normal looking people and they’re all rich as fuck so how hard can it be?

Because that’s the mind fuck. Rich people aren’t better than you. Some shit went their way and that’s the difference. Elite earners don’t work harder than janitors. And so rich kids grow up in that world and it’s just normalized. It’s not a lack of empathy, it’s that they internalize it as “normal”.

Then a middle class kid runs into them and sees them as lacking in empathy.

You’re right though. It is more luxurious. I let fruit rot on the counter because I won’t eat it after I buy it because if I eat it I won’t have it anymore. These fuckers eat all my oranges and blueberries because that’s what they’re for. Rich assholes.