According to the World Inequality Report, the poorest 50% of the population own just 2% of total wealth, with an average purchasing power parity (PPP) of $4,100 per adult. By contrast, the middle 40% of the population own 22% of total wealth (PPP of $57,300 per adult), and the top 10% own 76% of total wealth (PPP of $771,300 per adult).
So it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise that when Reddit user Yiga_Blade_Master asked everyone else on the platform to share the most out-of-touch things they have ever heard, many people recalled the words of the rich — if you zoom out, it’s as if some of us live in a different world.
Co-worker: “You’ll be able to buy a home once you get your inheritance”
Me: “I won’t have an inheritance, my family isn’t well off”
Co-worker: “Of course you have an inheritance. Everyone’s parents leave them an inheritance. I’m sure they’re just keeping it a secret from you to surprise you.”
Said to me by my co-worker who’s parents are both doctors, while my mom had recently been laid off and my dad was too sick to work.
Sitting with a coworker in our lunchroom. She is venting about having to work two jobs, and not being able to afford all her bills, and in general how exhausted she is. One look at her and you could tell she was at a breaking point.
One of the bosses replies with “I can relate, I had to spend Saturday taking my sailboat in and Sunday closing up the cottage for the winter, nothing but work…”
That was the quietest the lunchroom had ever gotten.
We got in touch with Yiga_Blade_Master, and the Redditor agreed to have a chat with us about their now-viral post.
“I got the idea for it randomly,” they told Bored Panda.
“I was just scrolling through r/AskReddit and noticed that none of the questions at the time were all that intriguing, so I spent around 15 minutes trying to think of something that was actually interesting.”
At an old job, i had a breakdown because i had not been paid in six weeks and literally was unable to eat and was walking to work because i could not afford gas. boss found me crying and told me i was being “petty” for wanting my money and asked me “why don’t you just live off of your savings?”. i was a 21 year old recent college grad who wasn’t getting my paychecks, what savings???
I’ve had a boss try explaining to me that raises wouldn’t improve employee morale because most of the staff don’t actually care what they’re paid and are more interested in rewards like a pizza party.
I asked who her landlord was that allows rent to be paid in pizza parties.
A potential client talking about their work in an equatorial country: “We’re just about at the point where we can start charging the locals for water, which is very exciting.”
I declined the job.
Regarding the responses received, Yiga_Blade_Master spotted a prevalent theme.
“I’ve noticed that a lot of the replies have been business-related,” they said, alluding to all the stories about bosses being unable to empathize with their employees’ financial struggles, potential partners openly bragging about exploiting their clients, and other corporate shills.
I’m a public defender. This happened to my colleague and not me, but I was there. A client (who the court deemed indigent in order to get a public defender) was in court for failing to pay a fine. Her lawyer (my coworker) explained to the judge that the client was out of work and did not have the money. The judge told her just to go to the ATM upstairs. Like… this b***h couldn’t understand people not having money. Or she thought that ATMs just gave anyone money. No idea. Local gossip says that her daddy bought her her seat on the bench when she finally passed the bar after failing it at least 3 times.
I once wanted to gift a friend a gig ticket. She was a young mum at the time and she didn’t have any spare cash to spend on herself or to go out and do anything fun. She was very hesitant to take it and it was 100% my idea.
My other friend who was in her 30s at the time;
“I think she’s manipulating you, I just don’t believe she can’t afford a ticket! I mean there’s ALWAYS money!”
This woman had never lived away from her parents and was from a relatively wealthy background.
She also said; “People who haven’t got money really only have themselves to blame for not managing their finances better”
Had to have a chat with her about how not everyone comes from the same background and some people go to bed hungry daily.
When I was interning at a museum early in my career, my husband and I were house-hunting and put an offer on our home. One of the interns I worked with came from a very very rich family (think old money oil baron type). He didn’t have to work, he just enjoyed learning history and traveling around to different internships for fun. He asked me what steps I needed to take to buy the house and I mentioned our mortgage paperwork. He sneered and looked at me like I was the dumbest person alive and said, “don’t mess with a mortgage, just buy it outright! It will save you money in interest!”. OK dude, as a 25 year old supporting myself, I am just going to pull $400,000 out of my a*s.
There was a manager that would carry in two very large designer bags each day. You would never see the same bag twice a week. At an appreciation lunch for a side project, she complimented our group for doing so much that year on such a small budget. She said, “The monthly budget for this project is what I spend on shoes each month. I know that sounds like a joke, but no, it’s actually almost exactly my shoe budget.”. Yeah, the monthly budget for that project was also almost exactly my take home pay.
Interestingly, researchers have long observed that high-power individuals tend to be less sensitive to the emotions of others — they are less willing to consider others’ perspectives. They are less able to accurately infer others’ emotions.
We know this in part because of a series of experiments led by Michael Kraus, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in which subjects were asked to look at pictures of faces and indicate which emotions were being expressed. The results showed that the more privileged the judges were in terms of income, occupational prestige, and material wealth, the less able they were to accurately identify emotions in pictures.
Lolll gotta love when kids do stuff like that.
I worked at a deli in college and had a high school-aged coworker. She was so sweet but genuinely didn’t understand why I never had money… because, according to her, I could “just use a credit card!” When my coworkers and I tried explaining that you have to pay those back, she dug her heels in even deeper and insisted she’d never had to pay them back so that must not be true.
She was super quiet the rest of the shift and never brought it up again. I can only assume she asked her dad later that night. Hopefully he uh, illuminated some things for her.
The sad part is that I’ve heard similar stories from other folks working with (privileged) teens. Through limited fault of their own, sometimes they really don’t get it.
I had an old boss that grew up very wealthy. During the pandemic, when everyone was working from home, we had a lot of employees mentally struggling because they lived in small apartments and didn’t have the room nor ability to have a good office set up, and were in general going stir crazy. My boss, on the other hand, moved out of his apartment into *one of* his parent’s large homes on a lake so he’d have more space while being stuck at home.
He said “I don’t know what you’re all complaining about. If you want a bigger place to live, just move. I did and it was easy. It’s not as hard as you think.”.
“If your wife wants a Range Rover, why don’t you just buy her one?” I just stared at homie and said “Man, we operate in different worlds”.
I bought my first condo (one bedroom, pretty small, in a city) in my early 30’s. My uncle made a comment about how *he* bought his first place – a house! with multiple bedrooms *and* bathrooms! – a year after he graduated college, and how mind-blowing he found it that my generation was so behind compared to his.
Ridiculous enough when you consider inflation + the average salary at the time (1982 vs. 2022), but even more ridiculous once my grandma told me that she and my grandfather gifted him the money for the down payment.
That bias also manifested itself in simulated job interviews. During a role-play, subjects were asked to estimate the emotions of the experimenter, who had acted out a range of moods, including amusement, anger, contempt, disgust, embarrassment, happiness, jealousy, surprise, and worry. Again, upper-class study participants had a harder time reading the emotions of strangers. And it wasn’t that they didn’t pay attention, either; they were simply less in tune with their fellow human beings.
I was doing a low paid social service internship and a rich kid joined our team because he wasn’t allowed to access his trust fund unless he did a year of community service. We were all fresh out of college in s****y apartments and our boss encouraged us to apply for food stamps since we all qualified. Rich kid who was new to town turned to me and asked where I hire my housekeeper. I thought he was joking but he was serious. Pointed out I have never had one in my life and certainly cannot afford one on our wages. He asked how I keep my house clean without a housekeeper.
“You won’t be happier at work if we pay you more, but we need to figure out why workplace happiness is so low” coming from a guy that made 10x what I did, and was born into old money.
My inlaw grandparents when we we negotiating to buy our house.
Note:they are retired and her grandfather was a new York lawyer.
GP: “they are asking 400? Just offer them 200k cash they’ll take it”
We informed them we don’t have 200k in cash.
My ex was a doctor. He worked very hard for a long time to get there and was paid accordingly. He worked with (but was not their boss or employer) several medical assistants – most of these women were $15 an hour employees, where he made at least 10x that. They worked together all day and were super close, still are as far as I know. During this time we built a new house. The MAs would joke about us having a party sometime, but my ex was uncomfortable with the idea because we weren’t really party people but mainly because our house was pretty over the top – very large and expensive, and he didn’t feel comfortable highlighting the drastic difference in pay, when none of them really knew what he made. He would often take them out for dinner and drinks and would always cover the tabs, he would call in lunch for everyone, etc but he felt like our house was almost embarrassing when some of them were raising 3 and 4 kids in a 2 bedroom apartment. Again, he didn’t control their pay, they were all employees of a clinic. Anyway, I was telling one of my friends about how awkward and embarrassed he felt about it and how he wasn’t sure what to do – My friend then said “He really should host a party for them! If they see your house it might inspire them to work harder and make more money!” It was almost a caricature of a republican talking point.
If there’s one takeaway that the author of the Reddit post walked away from the discussion with, it’s that affluent individuals have problems grasping the realities of the common folk.
“It’s kinda hard for rich people to understand how life would be without the vast amount of money.”
I was working as an architect for a practice with HNWI clients. I was making small talk with one of them (both of us in the mid 30s, him born into one of the richest families in England). I was saying how the flat me and my husband were renting was being sold so we were looking for another flat to rent, but everything is very expensive. He then said something along the lines of: ‘ I don’t understand why you don’t buy a house. That way you will not have to pay rent every month and you will have much more space than in a flat’.
Talking to a boomer in-law, and he was complaining how he started out earning less than $2.00 an hour “flipping burgers” as a teenager back in the 60s, and got a pay raise a year or so later to over $2.00. I pulled up an inflation calculator and pointed out that he started off making the modern day equivalent of over $18.56 an hour…. And the got a raise to nearly $20 a year later. He waved his hand dismissively and said “I don’t believe in that inflation c**p”. .
I went to a really rich catholic high school. I got in on merit. In my grade 10 math class it was the classic case of “put D kid next to A kid and hope A kid pulls them up”. During a work period I heard this exchange.
“I’m so mad at my dad” “What did he do?” “He got me the wrong car for my birthday!”
I wish I was kidding. It sounded so cliche and from a movie I thought that they were making it up to see if I was eavesdropping. I don’t think she had her licence by the time we graduated.
My coworker, fresh out of school, was really confused why so many people took public transportation to commute into the city.
Turns out her parents paid for a personal driver for her and that’s how she got to work and back. Not an Uber, a car service. She had no idea what it cost, probably never thought about it, just figured everyone else preferred the subway/bus to having a personal driver.
About 20 years ago my boss sat us all down and talked about an investment that he thought we would be good for us. I don’t remember what it was. The thing I remember is him saying “you can put that spare $100 each week into the investment”. Crickets chirping. Meeting ended. Nobody had a spare $100 a week. I was living hand to mouth myself and I did the payroll so I knew what everybody else was earning.
Another one back in the late 80’s early 90’s bosses wife worked in the office too. She commented one day that a certain shop had lovely blouses there were only $100. Lol. that was a third of my weekly pay. I suspect the comment came because we didn’t wear lovely blouses because we could not afford them.
Dude went to school with couldn’t understand why I couldn’t afford the exact present he wanted, during his month of “we’re not friends and more so im going to sit next to you and pout” I had said I discovered my mom had been alternating between having her pills one month, and mostly noodles/hotdogs in the house, or not having her pills, and a fridge with various kinds of meat and some vegetables to make more than just noodles. Kid goes: “well if you’re poor then your mom should make more money that way you can quit whining”. Teacher got fired for sending him to the office when his mom threatened to sue the school over it.
I had a customer at work (where we make barely above minimum wage) tell me to not bother buying a second house and it’s more hassle than it’s worth.
I’m sorry mate but I can’t actually afford to buy a first house never mind anything else. They are lovely people but have too much money and no idea.
When I told my dentist I was not looking forward to having braces as an adult in my late 20s he suggested I just take a 6 month vacation. As if that was something most people in their late 20s can do at the drop of a hat. The cost of braces themselves isn’t cheap, and I’m saving every spare cent in the hopes of maybe one day being able to buy a home, but sure why dont I just quit my job and head to Cabo? I’m sure I’d have a great time and it would be worth blowing my life savings and having to restart my career to avoid being seen in braces.
Made a new friend and he asked if I went on annual holidays as a child. I explained that we could never afford to go abroad but every few years we would take a trip somewhere within the country.
He said he had a similar experience, his family went to Croatia every year but they could only afford it because they didn’t have to worry about paying for accommodation because his parents owned a house over there.
I was also shopping for a wheelchair at the time and struggling to find one I could afford. He said I should get an electric one because it would suit my needs better. I explained that there was no way I could afford it because they were upwards of a grand. He didn’t understand, kept asking me when I was getting an electric wheelchair, and when I said I couldn’t afford one he would just say “But they are so worth the money!”.
My ex-girlfriend and I were celebrating our 5th anniversary and one of our birthdays at a fine-dining restaurant. Degustation for $250 per person. We sat down and there’s quite a bit of time between each course, and we got chatting with an older couple sitting across from us.
The wife explained to us “we’re trying somewhere cheaper tonight, and the experience isn’t too bad! I wouldn’t do it again, but it’s nice to know that there are less expensive options so everyone can enjoy the experience every now and then.”
Like b***h, if this is cheap wtf is the expensive experience like?!.
I am a consultant. Once I had the opportunity to have a meeting with someone who was the head of a massive family business, she was a billionaire. We were discussing selling candy in large amounts on the internet and a couple of us were discussing pricing.
She said out of nowhere “well, people buy bananas on the internet right? What does a bunch of bananas cost? $25? It’ll be fine.”
And then she went back to her phone and never said another word.
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