Comment on How do wealthy people know if the people they meet are wealthy or not?
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day agoI don’t think this answer truly internalizes how some of the ultra rich live. Yes, many are living a normal looking life, going to their jobs and doing a lot of the same activities that the upper middle class do. They generally eat at the same restaurants, have the same hobbies, and enjoy the same television shows that the rest of the middle class does. Often they go to the same live events (sports, concerts, plays, stand up comedy) that middle class people do, and often don’t bother with luxury boxes or things like that. They’re members at the same gyms, and might plot out the same run trails as normal people.
It’s just that they tend to fly private instead of commercial, stay at very nice luxury hotels unique to that particular location rather than the chains you’ve heard of. They have multiple homes. They’re members of clubs that require a lot more money to keep up in. They have lots of paid staff, both seen and unseen, smoothing over their day to day lives, washing dishes and laundry, maintaining houses and cars and landscaping, making reservations and doing paperwork on their behalf, etc.
The form of stealth wealth isn’t that they’re all among us doing normal things, with no obvious indicators of wealth. It’s that they often aren’t even around us to begin with. So the sheer amount of time that they’re around non-rich people, and actively interacting with non-rich people, may be a tiny portion of their time. Even if they do a lot of the same stuff we do, and go to a lot of the same places we do. They do it in ways that don’t necessarily interact with us directly.
chahn.chris@piefed.social 23 hours ago
That’s a fair take, vacations are for sure a place where the rich splurge, but at those status type hotels you will also find a lot of not rich but affluent folks as well so it’s harder to be sure just because you’re there that you’re interacting with a truly wealthy person.
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
Kinda depends on the price of the place, right? A $500/night hotel might have a few upper middle class folks on a splurge (a honeymoon, some kind of points-based play on their credit card, etc.). A $2000/night place filters out the merely rich and leaves only the ultra rich. And a $10,000/night place isn’t even accessible as a bucket list item for even the 1% but not 0.1% types.
chahn.chris@piefed.social 17 hours ago
I have stayed at my share of 2k+ hotels and I can promise you not everyone at these is rich. It filters yes, but there are definitely aspiring people who aren’t good with their money there too.