disorganized rambling on class

[amw]

Something i find myself bumping up against semi-frequently in my life is a different sense of class than many of the people i interact with. I am not sure where my sense of class developed, but i wonder how much my childhood in the UK had an influence

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[geminiwench]

I remember playing GoldenEye 007 as an early teen, and then I was 21 or 22 and someone made a Live Action GoldenEye video with real people and cross hairs and the occasional blood-splatter and I was like, "WOAH! NOPE!!" and 100% stopped all Kill 'Em All games. It changed my brain to move from pixels to humans and I can't unsee it now

[dadi]

I never ever understood this class stuff. My family came from so many different backgrounds - rich czech jews who lost everything, hungarian farm workers without own ground, austrian post office workers, polish chambermaids...my parents worked hard to buy a small place in Munich periphery and felt very bourgeois but I still went to the crappiest high school in the area and never had any brand clothes or stuff. That wasn't even such a big issue in 60ies Germany, or maybe I simply was too caught up in my own mental misery to see it. I always felt outside of class stuff until i went to live in italy, where, while piss poor, I kind of entered this expat status by default and for a while moved among the rich who behaved exactly like you described. After that, I generally considered myself a leftist unclassifiable but now I probably live a very middle class life...?

[amw]

I used to think i was "beyond" class, at least during my 20s or 30s when i moved out and my friends and colleagues came from "all" backgrounds. But i've changed my mind on that a bit now, because i think the way people were brought up perceiving class makes them react to the world differently... and that includes people who were brought up in a sort of "class denial" environment, which i think many Americans and Canadians are.

I guess in modern terminology people talk about "privilege" in a similar way to how Brits of my age talk about class. You might say that privilege is more of a nuanced way of looking at inequalities in society, but i think it's almost too nuanced, because you can get into these wokeness spirals where everyone is acknowledging everyone else's privilege and nothing is actually getting done. There is something to be said for having a broad brush, when the issues really do affect large swathes of the population.

The interesting thing about class in the UK is that it's not just about wealth per se, it also

[dadi]

It is certainly interesting to discuss this from all the different points of departure and growth!

[sweetmeow]

I recognize much of what you describe

[siglinde99]

It’s an interesting brain dump. Frugal definitively means different things to different people. I think I’m frugal (and in many respects I am), but I’m not nearly as frugal as you for material things. OTOH, I can’t imagine going on an overseas holiday any more, or just packing up and travelling the way you have done

[amw]

I am not sure that my frugality is related to my social class - i certainly take it far further than anyone else in my family! - but modesty... perhaps.

It's interesting how "class" (if that's what this is) doesn't always get passed down to the children. When i look at my sister and me - and to be fair i haven't spoken more than a few words to my sister in over a decade - i get the impression she is much snobbier than i am, despite earning far less money and having far less "high flying" jobs.

I wonder what experiences in life create that sort of difference in outlook? Maybe for her it started in school, where when i had problems in school the parents thought about sending me to a private school but in the end i stuck it out in state schools and survived okay, despite a fair bit of bullying and rough times. My sister had problems later on and went to a Montessori highschool, which definitely gave her a bit of a superiority complex imo.... but of course that's just my perception, which is fed by my political views that private schools

[siglinde99]

School and the connections you make there definitely do have an impact. My son played hockey with a bunch of kids who went to the nearby private school. He wanted desperately to go there (or to an even pricier private school) but I refused. Still, the kids he hung out with remain his best friends, and it was through one of them that he made the right connections into the business world.

My daughter’s biggest influence was undoubtedly the social workers and psychologists she relied on especially in high school. She went to a specialty arts school but ultimately studied social work and loves her career working with kids needing mental health support.

they might both have ended up in the same place as adults, but I have zero regrets about keeping them in the public school system. Even though I wasn’t happy my daughter chose the arts school, she did make good friends there and being around all those kids who might be considered weirdos in regular schools was good for her. She said it was the first place she ever felt normal.