The more money you get, the more empathy you lose. This phenomenon has been studied, but not enough. Even if you started off poor, if you become rich you being to think you’re smarter and better than everyone else, even if you really only got rich because you were lucky, which is most rich people.
True. I do wonder if there’s not some element to it which works the other way round. Many rich people spend their excessive wealth in order to distance themselves from communities. Private mansions outside the city, yachts, private islands…
Now there’s also plenty of reasons for them to obscure their activities. Not only because some of them are morally abject but mostly because they can’t let anyone notice that they’re entirely unremarkable. But there must be something that makes isolation appealing to them and being an unremarkable part of a community seem horrible. Though maybe that’s just a learned trait under capitalism.
I’m not rich but I enjoy my isolation. While i live in town, I’m on 1.5 acres and it’s pretty dense with vegetation. No one can see my house from the road. It’s like having a little hideaway. I don’t really identify with the other people in my town. In fact, when I do interact with them I just come away depressed by how shallow they all seem.
I live in the US where rampant consumerism is the norm.
isolating is appealing because other people are hell.
the people in my ‘community’ are complete assholes when you invite them into your home. so you stop doing it. I don’t need an endless series of mini lectures about how ‘disappointing’ my choice of dishware is. i have no idea what the ‘quality’ of a dinner plate is, but my community is full of people who AGONIZE about this shit all day long.
I’d be more amendable to my community if it wasn’t full of incessantly nit picky weirdos who criticizes everything you own and everything you do and always tell you how you are doing it wrong or why you aren’t doing it like they would do it.
the few times i ever felt nice in a community was around people who just didn’t care about stupid bullshit. But… that never lasts very long, because the nitpickers always invade and start picking everything apart.
The more money you get, the more empathy you lose. This phenomenon has been studied, but not enough. Even if you started off poor, if you become rich you being to think you’re smarter and better than everyone else, even if you really only got rich because you were lucky, which is most rich people.
True. I do wonder if there’s not some element to it which works the other way round. Many rich people spend their excessive wealth in order to distance themselves from communities. Private mansions outside the city, yachts, private islands…
Now there’s also plenty of reasons for them to obscure their activities. Not only because some of them are morally abject but mostly because they can’t let anyone notice that they’re entirely unremarkable. But there must be something that makes isolation appealing to them and being an unremarkable part of a community seem horrible. Though maybe that’s just a learned trait under capitalism.
I’m not rich but I enjoy my isolation. While i live in town, I’m on 1.5 acres and it’s pretty dense with vegetation. No one can see my house from the road. It’s like having a little hideaway. I don’t really identify with the other people in my town. In fact, when I do interact with them I just come away depressed by how shallow they all seem.
I live in the US where rampant consumerism is the norm.
isolating is appealing because other people are hell.
the people in my ‘community’ are complete assholes when you invite them into your home. so you stop doing it. I don’t need an endless series of mini lectures about how ‘disappointing’ my choice of dishware is. i have no idea what the ‘quality’ of a dinner plate is, but my community is full of people who AGONIZE about this shit all day long.
I’d be more amendable to my community if it wasn’t full of incessantly nit picky weirdos who criticizes everything you own and everything you do and always tell you how you are doing it wrong or why you aren’t doing it like they would do it.
the few times i ever felt nice in a community was around people who just didn’t care about stupid bullshit. But… that never lasts very long, because the nitpickers always invade and start picking everything apart.
Where do you live that people hate you for your dishware?