TLDR at the bottom
The other morning, I attended a breakfast. I was originally lead to believe that it was a networking event run by a non-profit that teaches youth entrepreneurship skills. For context, while my father was somewhat wealthy, I had a very ordinary childhood. My mother and father co-parented me as a middle class kid. I attend public school and work minimum wage at a fast food restaurant. I’m now a senior in high school. I wasn’t spoiled or showered with money, and never really lived a life of luxury.
So that morning I arrived, found out that this networking event was in fact not that, and that this was actually a fundraising event, meaning that the entire room in this five star hotel was filled with some of the richest and most influential people in my province. The morning started with a breakfast. The food was fantastic, and there were literal butlers (YES REALLY) serving it. Once we had all eaten, there was a panel relating to the green economy with 5 panelists (4 were higher ups at smaller firms from carbon capture startups to recycling companies. In an incredibly ironic twist, the 5th panelist was the national GM of “renewables and energy solutions” from our old pal Shell. You just read that right. An oil and gas executive on an environmental panel)
While I was at my table during the breakfast and panel, I heard the wealthy and rich talk, and I frankly had to do a double take. They dropped astonishingly high numbers left and right. 6, 7 and 8 figure numbers were mentioned casually, almost as if such a sum was an insignificant trifle. It was as if they were in a different world, isolated from the reality that 99% of us face. These are our bosses, the presidents and the chairpeople that we work for, that have the power to make changes in their companies and the world. Yet they live in such a different world that is so separated form the rest of us that they can never really understand the world around them.
Witnessing this has taught me several things. When I have children, I too must raise them not as spoiled brats but as an average middle class family. More importantly however, it showed me that because these people do not experience the same life that we do, they cannot walk in our shoes, and are therefore incapable of making the systemic changes necessary to reduce inequality.
To drive this point home with irony, after leaving the rich behind in their 5 star hotel, I got on public transit and commuted back to school for an hour. I had a shift at work later that day for $16 an hour, a far cry away from those 8 figure sums I’d been hearing about just their morning.
TLDR: rich ppl live on practically a different planet, and can’t change because of it.