Affluent Co-Opting
Sam Sykes ~ 08/21/2024
I don’t want to entirely shit on rich people, usually people are rich, or at least not poor, because of competence. It’s an unpopular opinion, but poor people are generally just bad decision makers and morons coupled with tough circumstances. The working class is different, they make too much to get the handouts, and make too little to live well. The upper class is constantly co-opting working class culture. They love to feel like a real man. Look at Senator John Fetterman in Pennsylvania, the guy dresses like a typical paver, electrician, metal scrapper, and drywaller, but in reality, he is just a Harvard-educated trust fund baby. The unemployed rubes and co-opting richies don’t care that Fetterman is a fraud, it’s all about optics. Food seems to be constantly trended into the upper classes. Whatever ingredients TikTok calls for to make its fad recipes also create varying temporary shortages. Some items, like select seafoods and steaks, never return to affordable prices and stay forever out of reach for the working classes.
Costly Crustaceans
There are several types of seafood that were once considered too poor or cheap, but eventually worked themselves into the upper-echelon of gastronomy. Lobsters are the most popular example of this phenomenon. Everyone knows the story about prisons off of America’s east coast being given lobster for several, sometimes most, meals. It seems like lobster quickly exploded in price near the end of the 1800s when it began to obtain “fancy” status. Oysters have waned in popularity through history, but also became cemented as more of a luxury around the same time as the lobster. Staying in the world of seafood, sushi is another one of those cheap and easy street foods that became quite a gourmet experience decades later. Most Sushi joints in the U.S. closed after the Japanese killed a bunch of soldiers in Hawaii during WWII. When it eventually returned, it came back as not only a food, but an expensive experience for those that could afford it.
Faux Rebels
Food is one thing, but the weirdest way the rich have “adopted” working class culture is by stealing social indicators. This is a modern problem that gets more odd and confusing every year. Why are kids whose daddy makes half a million a year covered in tattoos? Tattoos used to be reserved for bikers or war veterans, but at some point between 90s grungers and 10s Hipsters, retarded tribals became a cornerstone of douchebag culture and our modern chicks are covered in the stupidest of shit. Skinny flowers and cursive writing will define a generation of rich sluts. Might as well throw in the transparent glasses frames and shitty bobs too.
The rich kids chasing the rebellious and lively image of the working class seem to have also taken up smoking. Ironically, working class kids have abandoned smoking for the more convenient, discreet, and cost-effective vaping. Cigarettes are an unnecessary hassle with today’s technology. The only reason to smoke a cigarette is so you can bother everyone around you with your “badass” habit. I guess the only way to show an edge for these country club kids is to fake with tattoos and a pack of Marlboro Reds. Society has made them so desperate to stand out from their supportive, milktoast upbringings filled with all the trappings of wealth. Big homes, SUVs, and lack of truly traumatic experiences fill our rich kids with shame. They are so desperate for abuse, or the appearance of it, that they have helped the therapy industry explode. Professional mental help used to be reserved for the people that really needed, disturbed patients and public masterbators. Now we have droves of young men that just graduated from their 60k a year college feel the need to pay some beta-cuck 150 bucks an hour to talk about how their daddy didn’t support their dreams of becoming a DJ. “Take some SSRIs and I’ll see you next week”.
Food and Shelter
Thrifting started as a really cool, non-profit way to provide second-hand clothing to those less fortunate, but now, it's full of young women “hauling” all of the merchandise. A used clothing store already has quality flow issues without rich chicks coming to buy all the oversized sweatshirts and ironic t-shirts. Thanks ladies. You could buy whatever you want with daddy’s credit card, and yet, you choose to buy up all the working class’s inventory. They did it with clothes and now they’re doing it with housing. Opting to take more trips and buy more crap than to invest in homes, stunted high income man-boys wait till their past a mid-life crisis to start families. They enjoy the condo life, putting the cost to own one through the roof. Especially, for your average blue-collar worker with a small family.
Frivolous spending and a refusal to grow up for children of wealthy upbringings has led to a raping of the middle and working classes. These assholes steal the futures and cultures of a romanticized harshness. Eager for status as someone who struggles despite their cushy childhoods, they desecrate their bodies, pump smoke in their lungs, steal clothes and housing from the poor, and fetishize trauma. A world full of Fettermans, LARPing as a member of the common men.
