01
When I was a child, I lived on my grandfather’s farm. I could sit anywhere on the ground, and sometimes I would kneel to play. After returning to the city, everything changed.
People in the city look at children in the country with discriminatory eyes. I also sympathize with the children in the city for their many bad rules. To put it nicely is to love being clean, and to put it happily is to be a sissy and not free.
The discrimination chain needs to be maintained at a price. To defend their discrimination against country folks, the city people must dress cleanly, speak beautifully, know a few more words, be more knowledgeable, and do not urinate anywhere.
02
How much does a meal cost? What size is the right house to live in? This question is really hard to say.
People are extremely poor, food is leftovers, or simply bark and weeds. If you eat like the Asians after World War II, you can basically spend no money.
A little wealthier, such as today’s construction site workers and truck drivers, earn 50,000 to 60,000 yuan a year and eat as much as there are fried chicken burgers and beer cola on the side of the road. This kind of life is the same as that of farmers decades ago. Dream of.
Ten times richer than a truck driver, becoming a class with an annual salary of more than 600,000 yuan, the range of choices for food suddenly decreased. The roadside fried chicken burger is greasy, the cola sweets are high in sugar, the tableware is not clean, the table and the floor are always dirty. Eating vegetables and fruits also began to worry about pesticide residues, and also worried about the unhealthy ham sausage and canned food, and the antibiotics and hormones in the eggs. Basically, you will eliminate all kinds of fly restaurants, and you will not eat unhealthy food.
At this time, you will find restaurants and street stalls full of streets, more than 90% have been eliminated by you. In other words, the range you choose is ten times less than that of a truck driver.
If they were ten times richer, this kind of people would seldom eat anything casually, and even seldom order takeaways. Their health is already very valuable. If you go to some remote towns or industrial areas, you may not find a place to eat. Even if a street is full of small flies, he will drive 15 kilometres to the CBD to eat.
For this kind of rich man, his freedom to eat is actually only one per cent of that of a truck driver.
Similarly, go out to stay in a hotel. Once the class status rises to a certain level, most people will only be willing to stay in hotels with four stars and above. Cheap hotels are definitely not considered.
03
Once a person becomes wealthy, the choice of food, clothing, housing and transportation becomes very small. He needs to use consumption to show his class.
Even if he is not interested, his life circle will make him feel pressured. People of higher classes are unwilling to waste time and interpersonal relationships with people of lower classes. If you mix in that circle, you have to follow the rules of the circle.
For the slightly richer, clothes and bags must be brands that the public knows. No matter how rich it is, it is a brand that the public rarely knows, but the upper class knows.
The richer people will choose custom-made products without a brand, or very few high-end brands. If this brand opened a store in a remote city, it would have to be eliminated directly.
It only takes a month for the poor to renovate their houses. It takes half a year for the middle class. The rich renovate the villa, usually 2 to 3 years, even the entire villa is demolished and rebuilt.
If you buy a villa every few years, countless hours will be wasted just by decorating it. No matter what kind of furniture, we will pick and choose and compare various plans again and again.
Of course, asset allocation must also be exquisite. Any country must have consultants to allocate which assets. Have to hire a lawyer.
Then he was anxious all his life: how to make his assets appreciate instead of being eaten up by various government regulations. The turmoil of various policies, the fall and fall of the stock market, and the rumours of the international situation made him extremely vigilant.
The poor may not care about these at all.
04
When a person gets wider, his face changes. Because this face must be worthy of his magnanimity.
Every action, every word and deed, must reflect that he is an upper class. High aristocrats (including upstarts) are very concerned about this.
Parenting is also an important indicator. If children have sports hobbies, they must also be equestrian, kayaking, sailing, parachuting, diving, tennis, etc. If conditions permit, take an aeroplane driver’s license.
Many of the children’s new generation careers will go to investment banking, consulting, and charity. There are also much private equity and virtual currencies. People in this circle have to constantly show off how much they know. They work hard to learn a lot of knowledge. The more they seem to be taller, the more they have to learn. Western thought history, economics, contemporary physics, financial investment, academic circle information, Celebrities gossip, programming languages, and world media are all to talk about. But they usually don’t know the processing of displacement gears, how to build cupolas, they don’t know how to measure the white mouth of grey cast iron triangle iron, and they don’t study the debugging and maintenance of injection moulding machines. Because these are low-end industries, not high enough.
Once a person is defined as a high-end class, he basically has to live in this cocooned circle. Harvard and Yale graduates, if they go to Foxconn to do assembly line management and design construction machinery, they will feel shameless. If they go to Wall Street or McKinsey or go to Africa to do charity, they will be considered normal.
Therefore, their employment scope and professional direction are very narrow. Even their options for college entrance examinations are very narrow.
This kind of life is really pitiful.
05
Once a person is rich, it is easy to worry that others will take advantage of him, so he is particularly alert. This kind of worry is not superfluous. In fact, many people are staring at other people’s money and status, hoping to get something cheaper.
Therefore, the interpersonal relationship of the high-end class is very delicate and shrewd. The comfort and trust of ordinary market culture and the relationship between neighbours in Hutong are difficult to produce among the high-end class.
This is true even in love and marriage.
Former BBC reporter Mike Jie has an article: «Every step of the rich is full of risks.» Why do some enchanting and sexy beauties dancing in bars fail to hook high-end men?
Because high-end men are wary of lower-class women.
What is the result of this vigilance? The answer is isolation. In other words, only play with people of similar class status.
In such a small circle of «class matching,» there is very little room for choice. The first is that the number of high-end classes is inherently very small, and the probability of being suitable in all aspects is lower. The second is that if there is more property, it will be very particular and more difficult to integrate.
Therefore, the more high-end class, the less satisfied will be in marriage and love.
Even if they are satisfied with each other, because the high-end people are warier, and more calculating in terms of property and interests, there will be more stories of all kinds of intrigues.
06
It’s good to have enough property, but too much trouble. Too much trouble taking care of the property, less time for thinking and enjoying.
It is reasonable for Shakyamuni to let him give up his wealth and let the monks observe the «precept not to catch money.»
Many wealthy people could easily escape in troubled times, but with too many possessions, they are reluctant to give up their possessions and continue to make big money, so that they miss the chance of survival. Of course, you can’t blame your property, you have to blame your bad headfirst.
When a person has a superior class consciousness, he will always want to distinguish himself from ordinary people. Most of the goods and services in society are made for the ordinary class.
So the more money you have, the more you have to choose is not a bigger one, but a smaller one.
Whether it is too much concern or a smaller range of choices, it means that the degree of freedom is reduced.
Maybe you feel that you are financially free one day, but then you don’t have much freedom anymore.