- Sex
- Wanting to act on liberal political leanings (to what extent you want to call this “liberal guilt”, to what extent “naive optimism”, and to what extent “doing good work” is up to you)
- Sex
- Wanting to be a big fish in a small pond (in their chosen profession)
- Sex
:dubious:
As stated, it probably really doesn’t happen that much. The only person I’ve ever really known to to do this is a doctor’s daughter I know that moved out of her parents’ cushy home and life and actually became a street urchin-type that hung out on 4th Avenue with her hair in dreadlocks and no place to sleep at night. She got over that phase really quickly, though, as I expect most sane people would.
Fun is fun and people is people. Rich people have a huge spectrum of ways to have fun, from golf and opera down to fishing, going to football games, etc.
Poor people only get to select from the cheap end of the spectrum, but that doesn’t mean that what they do isn’t fun, or that the people who do it aren’t worth talking to.
Near where I live is Fraser Island, a huge sand island with beaches that take several hours just to drive part-way along. People go there to enjoy the nature, but many (most?) go to fish off the beach.
People who would be considered working class go there, and camp on the beach for accommodation. People who are stupid rich go there and stay in relatively modest accommodation (fisherman’s dwellings, mostly - there isn’t really any high luxury accommodation for regulars) all for the fun of lining up in the surf shoulder to shoulder and fishing, bullshitting, and enjoying the experience. Egalitarian fun is not just an affectation - it’s actually fun. The difference is that the rich can also enjoy ridiculously expensive pursuits as well, and they often do both. It’s not as though you are only allowed to enjoy opera or football.
As to the rich teenager who decides to abandon wholly the privileges of wealth, that didn’t seem to be the flavour of what the OP was talking about. But I guess that is often about rebellion, just like Alex P Keaton rebelled against his hippy parents by becoming a conservative.
I can’t say I’ve personally encountered anyone in the situation you describe, but I’ve known a few kids from well-off homes who voluntarily choose to work at fairly menial retail jobs long after the “learning to appreciate the value of money” or “understanding how fortunate you are” or “most people actually have to work for their money”-lesson learning stage is well and truly over.
That’s most likely because they don’t have the capability or desire to succeed. Just because your parents are wealthy doesn’t mean that you get anything out of it but a bedroom. Some parents send you to public school, send you to college if you want, but not if you don’t, and then hand you $1000 and say “Good luck” as they push you out the door. That they could afford to give you $1,000,000 doesn’t mean they will.
And many kids get that $1,000,000 (or more like a monthly stipend), and simply blow through each check within 12 hours of getting it. They have to work a job waiting tables or whatever, because otherwise they’ll starve for the next 29 days.
The correct answer is usually “drugs”.
It’s difficult to answer the OPs question without defining what “rich” is and what is considered “slumming”. Is billionare Warren Buffet slumming because he lives in a relatively modest (for his income) house? Should people only associate with those of a similar income bracket?
Because they are lazy fuck-ups?
Edmund Blackadder said it best:
I think the poor people are cool. They have gritty experiences that build character and interesting stories that give them an edge. They make dirty, grimey art and fashion and music. Their language takes shape in such a way that an outsider may not even understand a word they are saying, but they can of course still understand the language of even the most hoity toity rich folks. Not to romanticize being poor…the drawbacks of poverty are obviously awful. But if one is rich, they can slum it without having to put up with the pesky drawbacks of poverty.
Also, I always wondered why rich people need so many rules. Common sense should tell one how to behave in polite society. No need for all of this, “Start with this fork, then, this spoon”. You should have developed the kind of character that tells you how to behave without offending, without all of these ‘rules’. By the time you rack up all of these rules and rituals, it must be boring to put up with, and wonderfully freeing to go slum it in the ghettos.
But, as much as I love the ghetto, one of the funnest times of my life was in Vegas with a man for whom money was no object (my boss, not a romantic interest or anything).
Also, I have another friend that not only loves being what I consider ‘rich’ but also takes pains not to spend any time at all in the ghetto. We wanna see him, we gotta come to his element!
The you become one of those douchebag hipsters in Brooklyn who dropped out of law school so they can shop in thrift stores and talk about starting bands or becoming actors while they wait tables and tend bars.
Much of the rules of the upper-middle and upper classes are for identifying themselves as part of that class and for excluding others. The upper classes spend a lot of time and money isolating themselves and building a kind of fantasy world sphere of bullshit where they can be superior. It often results in a sort of “Preppy Handbook”* cultural uniformity.
Take the college I went to (education being one of the key indicators of social class). There was a certain sameness to nearly every one who went there. I remember a girl visiting from another school commenting on how nearly every single guy at the fraternity party we were at seemed to be wearing a Ralph Lauren oxford shirt, jeans and a beat to shit baseball cap (this was 1994, I don’t know how they dress now but I’m sure it’s the same as each other).
After awhile, it just gets boring hanging out with the same interchangeable carbon blobs, going to the same parties, talking about the same stupid stuff that ultimately has no real meaning.
*This is an actual book one of the partners in my first job had on his desk. It goes into great length about the “right” schools, bars, vacation spots, Madras patterns, even personality types of living a WASPy/JAPy lifestyle like something out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel.
What the hell is a Madras pattern?
The “Preppy Handbook” was a sort of joke book, but gave the general outline of what was considered acceptable at the time. I seriously doubt much of it would fly today.
I think the answer is usually Family Dysfunction (sometimes followed by drug/alcohol addiction). I could have had a free ride to college if I’d been willing to put up with (and able to survive) another four years of verbal and emotional abuse. I chose fredom, thank you, and it was the right choice. So I lived in a run-down Latino neighborhood while my brother went to the uppitiest of colleges.
But most of my life has been much happier than his, and I’m please with the majority of my choices. He is now making the same mistakes with his kids that our parents made - and living the same miserable, hocked-up life our Dad did.
Sad.
Bottom line - when you’ve spent you whole life among people who judge, berate and compete with you, the discovery of a world of humans who are understanding and fun to be with is limitless joy. Who wouldn’t choose good friends/kind neighbors over mean girls and jerks?
ETA: Madras is a sort of pastel plaid, always with just one too many colors in it. Madras_quilt
Back when the drinking age was 18, after the prom and the dinner and everyone standing around in tuxes and ball gowns, where did the prom goers go afterward? Why, to the tackiest, smelliest dive bar in town, for cheap pitchers of beer, pickled eggs and bags of chips, and to feed quarters into the juke box. That’s a minor example of slumming, isn’t it?
This isn’t the same thing, but an awful lot of people who live in McMansions in the suburbs seem to get their names printed in the police blotter in the paper when they’re arrested at 3 a.m. on a street corner on the south side. Like some Kennedys used to do. Not so much “slumming” as just driving their Corvettes through a slum. (I should think with so much money they could have deliveries made to their mini-palaces.) If they’re interested in slumming it up with ladies of the evening, though, I could see driving downtown.
Old movies from the 30’s often featured the rich going out slumming among the ‘real’ folks. The purpose of this seemed to be a device to make the rich, bored ingenue meet a real manly man, a man who worked with his hands doing honest labor. She would then look around at her rich, bored men friends on her yacht and realize a real man of the people was the superior choice.
I’m going to Waffle House in a tuxedo on the morning of my wedding. Does that count?
The driving urge is “nostalgie pour la boue”, as described by Tom Wolfe in “Radical Chic” and also defined here:
"…nostalgie pour la boue, is a longing for the gutter, a “compulsion that comes over people when they have, for complex reasons, a need to immerse themselves in self-degradation. It’s usually a mix of drink, drugs, and weird sex until the soul is obliterated by the abused flesh”. "
Oooo, fun.
The “Radical Chic” experience was a milder form of nostalgie pour la boue, in which wealthy liberals rubbed elbows (but not too closely) with Black Panthers. Hilarity ensued.
Sounds like my recent trip to Vegas.
I think that basically describes nearly everyone I went to college or ever worked with.
What about the kids of the rich rejecting college? Rob Mondavi (great grandson of the founder of Mondavi wine) dropped out of Stanford, to persue snowboarding.
This while his dad was worth somewhere north of $120 million!
This kid had everything… yet dropped out of one of the most prestigious colleges in the USA!
Also, didn’t Adrian Veidt give up all his inheritance money to prove to himself that he could “make it” on his own?
Not everybody has the desire or ability to graduate from college. Just because your parents had that ability and desire doesn’t mean you will (though it does increase the odds that you will).
People have different tastes in leisure activities. A rich person might like something that is usually associated with poor people.
My guess would be “some do, some don’t”. Rich people don’t all think alike, any more than poor people or women all think alike.
The problem I see with that lifestyle is that while it may be a lot of fun for a young person, as you get older it gets increasingly isolating. Your old friends leave town, or drop outta contact and young folk who live this way increasingly don’t really want to associate with/are creeped out by the 40 or 50 year old geezer who still lives in a shitty basement apartment collecting Magic: The Gathering cards and smoking pot. As for getting dates … well, you would mostly have to give up on that. If you are a guy, most women appear to have no interest in guys who live like that beyond their 20s or so (dunno what the female or gay equivalent is like, all of the folks I know who chose this path were straight guys).
Yeah, I’ve a few friends who did this more or less, but I can’t say it brought them a lot of happiness. The longer you live like that, the harder it is to simply decide not to.
A “sequel” is in the works. True Prep
Those people still exist in large numbers. Who do you think buys all the Lily Pulitzer schwag?