The Brutal Truth About Growing Up In The Top 1%

September 21, 2017 9:36 AM

Well there's brutal and then there's *brutal* Nicolas Cole, Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Digital Press bares his soul to reveal the hardships he endured growing up as a child of 1%ers.
posted by humph (142 comments total)

Well, folks, I went into this optimistic that it wasn't going to be exactly what I pictured.

So much for that.
posted by selfnoise at 9:42 AM on September 21, 2017 [32 favorites]

If you enjoyed this article, hit that *clap* button below

Where is the *eyeroll* button?
posted by Elly Vortex at 9:45 AM on September 21, 2017 [34 favorites]

So I deliberately chose interests where [My father] had absolutely zero influence, forcing me to figure it out on my own and earn my own success. A harder road, but for me a more fulfilling one.

This is commendable. So far as it goes.

I believe he is earnest, but when I got stabbed and couldn't afford the hospital bills, I had to file for bankruptcy. What are the odds he would ever have to do that ? If my wife gets cancer, she and I are fucked. What are the odds he would be ?

But, it's still poverty tourism.
posted by Pogo_Fuzzybutt at 9:45 AM on September 21, 2017 [46 favorites]

The author, pictured here contemplating the pain of it all.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:46 AM on September 21, 2017 [7 favorites]

This such bullshit it's hard to know where to start.

There's a gigantic difference between a rich person slumming it, knowing that they can always go crawling back to their wealth if they really need to, and someone actually struggling to survive, no matter how much the rich person really, really wants to live like the common people.

And his list of "flip-sides" is simply incoherent and self-contradictory. His first two points declare that there are no excuses and you have to work harder and be smarter...but his last three points are that you know you don't have to work and can just easily coast through life?

I think that’s just part of who I am. So I deliberately chose interests where he had absolutely zero influence, forcing me to figure it out on my own and earn my own success.

This is just delusional. There are no areas where being rich doesn't help, especially since he apparently chose to slum it and go it alone in Chicago, the city where his wealthy family lives and works. And he chose to go it alone to become...a pro WOW gamer and a video game blogger? And then founded Digital Press, "an exclusive thought leader agency" that turns "CEOs into Thought Leaders". I'm sure his name and wealth played no part in that.
posted by Sangermaine at 9:47 AM on September 21, 2017 [69 favorites]

You have to work harder. You have to be smarter.

Oh shove it up your pinched arse. You don't know jack about work.
posted by Miko at 9:49 AM on September 21, 2017 [48 favorites]

You will never understand
How it feels to live your life
With no meaning or control
And with nowhere left to go.
You are amazed that they exist
And they burn so bright,
Whilst you can only wonder why.
Rent a flat above a shop
Cut your hair and get a job
Smoke some fags and play some pool
Pretend you never went to school,
But still you'll never get it right
'Cause when you're laid in bed at night
And watching roaches climb the wall,
If you called your dad he could stop it all
Yeah
posted by signal at 9:49 AM on September 21, 2017 [168 favorites]

aw shucks I cannot afford the tiny Stradivarius to play for him
posted by supermedusa at 9:51 AM on September 21, 2017 [37 favorites]

I learned the difference between doing something for external success and money vs doing it because you love to do it by playing World of Warcraft. Imagine growing up in the neighborhood I’ve described and saying, “I want to play professional video games” to my peers, parents, teachers, and authority figures. I got laughed at — by everyone. But I loved what I was doing and I believed I had a future in it, so I worked my ass off to become one of the highest ranked 3v3 World of Warcraft players in North America, and one of the most-read gaming bloggers on the Internet in 2007.... I could have leveraged my dad’s relationships and gotten a silver platter to just about anywhere — but I didn’t want that. I wanted to earn it for myself.
I think that’s just part of who I am. So I deliberately chose interests where he had absolutely zero influence, forcing me to figure it out on my own and earn my own success...

It boggles. Talk about being phenomenally blind to your own privilege. Exhibit A in the case of people who think they hit a triple.
posted by Miko at 9:52 AM on September 21, 2017 [69 favorites]

I mean, yes, I have actually a lot of sympathy for the pathologies that very rich people develop, and I think the solution is to tax the fuck out of them so that they're not so rich. It's not, in this sense, a very hard problem - no one should have enough money/power to live a life that is radically, radically different from the common life, nobody should have enough money/power that they always get whatever they want, nobody should have the kind of money/power that they don't need to do ordinary human things like cooking and cleaning, nobody should be so rich that they essentially never hear a hard no or have to consider others' interests. What's more, nobody should live the kind of life where they know, deep down, that they have far more than they even sort of need while other people are suffering - it breeds self-delusions and cold-heartedness.

It's really destructive to people to force them outside of the common life of humanity, whether that's through exclusion or through putting them on a pedestal. And that's why I support taxing these assholes, closing the loopholes they use and basically taking away their stuff in order to fund the common good.
posted by Frowner at 9:54 AM on September 21, 2017 [181 favorites]

A lot of his flip-sides are things everyone has to deal with anyway. The poor are blamed for being poor at every opportunity. The poor have to say 'yes' to every chance to work harder and be smarter and sleep less. Just look at the long line of pundits complaining about welfare recipients who should be flipping burgers.

Good on his parents for making him sleep on an air mattress. Good on him for not using his dad's name to get a leg up. Good on WoW for teachign him how fucking currency works. But yeah, still not feeling a lot of sympathy.
posted by maryr at 9:54 AM on September 21, 2017 [30 favorites]

The rate of depression, addiction, and suicide among rich kids and teenagers is horrifying. For the kids who end up in those lanes, they almost certainly would have had better lives if they'd been born less affluent. I'm pretty much a bring-on-the-class-war kind of guy myself, but there's still a good human story to be told about the suffering that being born into massive wealth can bring on those who don't have the constitution for it.

And, for the first quarter or so of this article, I was actually hopeful that maybe he was writing that story.

But no, it's just another "I grew up in a billion dollar mansion, but I'm still a self-made man" poverty-face self-aggrandizement.
posted by 256 at 9:54 AM on September 21, 2017 [61 favorites]

That bravado you see the movers and shakers and business moguls in the world have? Imagine that in 7th graders, except it’s filled with false confidence, arrogance, and is often seen as “being spoiled.”

yES

THAT'S BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT IT IS EVEN IN ADULTS
posted by poffin boffin at 9:54 AM on September 21, 2017 [58 favorites]

the PAIN, the AGONY, i can't believe we have to spend time on dad's boat again, when will our suffering END
posted by poffin boffin at 9:56 AM on September 21, 2017 [21 favorites]

I'm having a hard time squaring this...

1. Because you have access to the best everything, there are no excuses. If you fail, it’s YOUR fault.

...with this:

3. For one, you realize (again, at a young age) that you really don’t have to work very hard. You have no incentive to work, actually, because your dad’s friend can get you an internship or a full-time job, no problem.

So, if you fail, it's YOUR fault, but it doesn't really matter because your dad's friend can get you an internship or a full-time job, no problem. So fail away!

Also, this is beyond parody:

Confessions of a Teenage Gamer challenges those stereotypes and shows how a kid from a wealthy family with every opportunity at his fingertips ended up finding himself in a video game.

I look forward to the inspirational Oscar-bait starring Ryan Gosling.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:57 AM on September 21, 2017 [16 favorites]

Well look at what we have here! A brand new target for my hate machine! It gets a bit worn out if you hold it on the same target for too long, so it's nice to rotate the target list every now and then.

I'll be back to you, Trump, in a couple of days or so.
posted by aramaic at 9:58 AM on September 21, 2017 [9 favorites]

I did like that listed the advantages of top 1% wealth.
posted by zippy at 9:58 AM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

i don't want to clap, where is the button i press to electrocute him with a mild but nevertheless stinging shock
posted by poffin boffin at 9:59 AM on September 21, 2017 [35 favorites]

Also, the security that being rich provides - knowing that you will never be homeless, knowing that you'll never lack medical care, knowing that your kids will be fed and educated - is very, very valuable, and that's why it should be provided to everyone by the state.

The security that he benefited from is fantastic, but it is only a zero-sum situation because we let it be that way. Everyone can't have a diamond-studded gaming console/soylent dispenser installed in their fur-lined home gym, or whatever the fuck this guy has, but everyone can have clean, safe, secure housing, sufficient and good-quality food and reliable access to medical care. When you have those things guaranteed, you don't really need, like, a personal photographer on call or your own publishing company.
posted by Frowner at 9:59 AM on September 21, 2017 [54 favorites]

fur-lined home gym

this seems hygienically problematic
posted by poffin boffin at 10:01 AM on September 21, 2017 [28 favorites]

I never asked to be a hero...
posted by adept256 at 10:03 AM on September 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

Why is he living in a shit apartment? Has he not come into his trust fund yet?
posted by Thorzdad at 10:03 AM on September 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

The rate of depression, addiction, and suicide among rich kids and teenagers is horrifying.

Is that actually true? I'd be curious to know whether rich kids were more likely than less-rich kids to have issues with depression, addiction or suicide. (I think stats on depression would be hard to verify, because rich people are much more likely to have access to accurate diagnosis and treatment.)
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:03 AM on September 21, 2017 [38 favorites]

this seems hygienically problematic

Did you see the photo linked above? I cannot imagine that this guy owns anything that isn't both very expensive and deeply hygenically problematic. It's amazing that he can put all that effort into his appearance and surroundings and still be basically look like a walking squick. That photo is like something out of an erotic China Mieville fanfic.
posted by Frowner at 10:04 AM on September 21, 2017 [11 favorites]

The rate of depression, addiction, and suicide among rich kids and teenagers is horrifying. For the kids who end up in those lanes, they almost certainly would have had better lives if they'd been born less affluent.

I'm not at all convinced that these kids would actually have had better lives if they had been born less affluent. The article holds this class of problems up as "look at these problems the 1% have!" without actually contemplating the idea that everyone else may have the same problems (albeit with cheaper black-market drugs instead of questionable prescriptions for trendy designer pills). If that's so, the observation is just that being wealthy doesn't cure this class of problems.
posted by allegedly at 10:06 AM on September 21, 2017 [7 favorites]

Depression, drugs and suicide... thank goodness when I deal with those things I do it without the burden of money.
posted by munchingzombie at 10:07 AM on September 21, 2017 [60 favorites]

A lot of his flip-sides are things everyone has to deal with anyway.

Frankly, "a lot" feels like a far too kind qualification. This guys is tremendously self-centered and has no concept of people outside of himself. What he's describing are all problems seen as much (or more) by people who don't have a limitless pile of money to fall back on like he did.
posted by tocts at 10:09 AM on September 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

The fact that this dude thinks this is meaningful, meaty, introspective, and revealing confirms all of my worst impressions of the 1%.
posted by spindrifter at 10:09 AM on September 21, 2017 [15 favorites]

I thought the accompanying photo at the top of the essay was Cole with a silver spoon in his mouth.

I look forward to the inspirational Oscar-bait starring Ryan Gosling.

I can't wait to see Gosling convey the struggle of celiac disease AND newfound online fame! - "I also published my first book, a memoir called Confessions of a Teenage Gamer, detailing what it was like growing up undiagnosed with celiac disease and at the same time becoming a nationally recognized gamer."
posted by gladly at 10:10 AM on September 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

I suppose growing up never having to face the consequences of your actions is how you end up with the DeVos and Shkreli's of this world. There is something unhealthy in that.
posted by adept256 at 10:11 AM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

You know what guys, I'm desperately trying to hold on to some tiny shred of empathy for the problems of the wealthy here and y'all aren't making it very easy.

FWIW, I looked into some stats for North America and interestingly found that, while suicides are more common in wealthy neighbourhoods, it's actually the people who are earning less than the median for the neighbourhood who are at elevated risk.
posted by 256 at 10:11 AM on September 21, 2017 [19 favorites]

I thought this was going to be satire. Instead, well, it was like that line in the interview with the Mooch, about Bannon trying to suck his own cock. That is to say that is was more than just masturbating his ego.

The only problem unique to the 1% is guilt over the amount of money they have. Everything else is just a different version of problems that other have.
posted by Hactar at 10:12 AM on September 21, 2017

there are no excuses. If you fail, it’s YOUR fault.

Except there are, really, in the end, no real consequences. Unless your family dynamics are seriously fucked up, you're not going to end up on the street or in jail, or with some chronic untreated potentially deadly medical condition. It's the safety net, and the awareness of the safety net, and the blindness to the awareness of the safety net (because who ever really thinks about air?) that underlies the whole ridiculous thing.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:13 AM on September 21, 2017 [16 favorites]

Martin Shkreli didn't grow up at all rich. Whatever his pathology is, it's not that.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:14 AM on September 21, 2017 [7 favorites]

TL;DR -- Fuck this dude.
posted by briank at 10:15 AM on September 21, 2017 [6 favorites]

It must be tough to fall into that crack between our very American worship of a) financial success and b) scrappy bootstrapping self-made entrepreneurs. How can you be both if you inherit wealth? So you have to convince yourself it's otherwise.
posted by gottabefunky at 10:16 AM on September 21, 2017 [11 favorites]

Imagine growing up in the neighborhood I’ve described and saying, “I want to play professional video games” to my peers, parents, teachers, and authority figures. I got laughed at — by everyone. But I loved what I was doing and I believed I had a future in it, so I worked my ass off to become one of the highest ranked 3v3 World of Warcraft players in North America, and one of the most-read gaming bloggers on the Internet in 2007.

well, it's no "the Aristocrats!" but as punchlines go, I'd say he's earned that clap
posted by prize bull octorok at 10:17 AM on September 21, 2017 [12 favorites]

To me the problems with privilege aren't so much "I have depression and substance problems, totally unlike other people" but rather "I've had to learn to ignore other people's suffering, I've had to learn to justify inequality, I don't know how to grocery shop or run a washing machine, I can't come to terms with anything but the very finest and most rarified possessions or experiences, I don't know how most people live", etc. When you have a lot of unearned privilege, you develop a lot of bad mental habits because you have to justify it to yourself.

As I've mentioned here before, I worked in coastal China for a while, back when you basically couldn't convert your earnings in yuan back into dollars - there was no real point in saving much if you weren't staying long-term, since most contracts specified that you could convert no more than, like, 10% of your salary when you left. And since my jobs provided housing, electricity and water, I had very little to do with my money except spend it. And man it fucked with me. In the moment it was fun, because except for very, very expensive things I could just buy whatever I wanted. And in fairness, I didn't spend my money on anything evil, just fancy food, tailor bills, music, souvenirs and a few really frivolous houseware purchases (especially frivolous because there was no way I'd be able to take those things home). But it was very weird and isolating, and it gave me a false impression of my needs - I began to feel like I needed all that stuff, like I could not be happy if I could not buy without budgeting, or if I could not buy the best thing on the market. It took me a long time to shake the bad mental and financial habits engendered by those years.

Now, I wasn't making tons and tons - although I was making about 1.5 times the median Chinese urban wage - but because my expenses were so low and my commitments were minimal, it was extremely destabilizing.
posted by Frowner at 10:17 AM on September 21, 2017 [25 favorites]

I was at a high school in the 90s that got written about nationally for a heroin epidemic. It wouldn't surprise me if rich kids have higher rates of addiction because in my experience their parents give them credit cards with basically no limits and never ask what Johnny or Susie are spending literal hundreds of dollars a day on. Although the same bias exists with addiction counting as with depression counting - rich kids will get treatment so they'll show up on a sheet somewhere where the kids from my old neighborhood can't just freely get all their drugs and never have the support system for rehab.

It was also stunning to me what they thought big huge problems looked like. One friend ran away from home (where he had his own wing of the house and a private entrance) because he got everything he wanted in the car he got for his 16th birthday except the leather seats. He cried and raged for days about how it showed his parents don't listen and that they don't love him. Another friend got into a screaming match her parent on the phone because she spent hundreds of dollars at a mall store without checking her balance and he hadn't deposited the few thousand he sent her every month yet (as well as paying for her house, school, car, etc). She was distraught that he made her be embarrassed in front of the cashier when she wrote a check and it wouldn't clear (so she just handed over the credit card). She would bring this event up later illustrating how her father doesn't keep his word. They are 100% convinced their problems are super real - and there are some issues of parents throwing money at kids instead of love - but coming from a trailer park? from watching my parents work out how we were going to eat and keep the lights on? It was super hard for me to empathize with them.


fur-lined home gym
this seems hygienically problematic

A friend's dad gave me a ride one day. He's driving some luxury car. I feel unworthy to even touch it - and so what to my horror do i see? WHITE FUR FLOOR MATS!! i held my feet off the floor of the car the whole ride and tried not to get my poor person mud all over his exquisite impractical car.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 10:17 AM on September 21, 2017 [23 favorites]

Well a lot of these 1% kids are raised by Youtubers now, like everyone else. These kids are very alone, then suddenly it is fashionable for young, wealthy women to either major in family studies, or skip college to focus on family, because the 1% realized they can buy in home daycare, and maybe end up with a healthy family via marriage. That depends on who they pretend to love, to get that. For many 1% kids, their lives are shipped off to boarding schools, or like the guy above represents, a 6:30 am to midnight "human doing" adventure. Money, fashion, art, influence these things are a hard sell to lonely kindergartners, but later on, junior high school maybe, they realize they have to take the win they can get. If there is no intimate human contact, no love, no home really, then there is the win.

One thing about them though, they are narcissists in training. I knew a kid who when to George Washington University. He was on scholarship, he was in the Truman Dorm. The Truman Dorm had the highest rate of STD's collectively in the United States. This was anywhere, any slum town, any down market area. The hallways smelled of vomit, continually. They may say this has changed, but our school of diplomacy echoes the habits of the 1%, whose needs our diplomacy really serves. Their inhibitions were systematically erased, preparatory to whatever any outfit wanted of them to do, to serve their either governmental or corporate overlords. At the time GWU was the most expensive school in the United States.
posted by Oyéah at 10:20 AM on September 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

This had me thinking about the eternal nurture vs. nature debate, and the documentary The Queen of Versailles, and how wealth corrupts.

Guy seems to be in the top 1% of the 1% ers?
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:22 AM on September 21, 2017

Oh and fuck slumming poverty tourists for fucking ever. The rich kids who walked around entitled and rich were annoying, but the kids who had money, security, etc but pretended they didn't? They had absolutely no problem taking from the actual poor struggling people around them. They'd let people buy them drinks and dinner, they'd allow people to give them video games stuff and other electronics (instead of them selling it) because they put on the air that they don't have anything. They talk about being "broke" which really means they've spent their "fun" money and they'd have to buy $100 less in art supplies that month if they spent any more. Meanwhile all the rest of were "broke" as in we were seeing if we could get a full round of antibiotics from the leftovers people didn't take, and we were eating $5 goulash for an entire week, etc. One of these people complained to me once that everyone treated them differently when they knew they were rich and that it just wasn't fair - as if taking the tiny amount people have and calling it friendship is the right thing to do.
posted by I'm Not Even Supposed To Be Here Today! at 10:23 AM on September 21, 2017 [28 favorites]

The closest I've come to knowing a true 1%er was the best friend of a former roommate who was himself a spoiled suburban kid. His friend was a trust fund baby, not a true trustafarian, although he did take a whack at the local campus alternative paper. (I don't think that it lasted very long after that.) Even though he had a girlfriend who later became his wife, he seemed oddly disconnected from people in general; I got into an argument with him once because he watched me playing solitaire and said that I wasn't playing by the rules, and wouldn't accept that, as long as I was playing consistently by my own rules, it wasn't cheating because the only person who had to agree with my rules was me. He did actually have a job at least for a while, at the social service agency where I used to work, and I had an interesting conversation with his wife once in which she described how at one point she was trying to figure out how they were going to pay their bills that month, and well into the conversation, the guy said, "Oh, wait", walked out of the room, and came back with one of his trust fund checks, which by itself was equivalent to their joint earnings for the past three years.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:32 AM on September 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

I guess that I think that growing up is hard, and carving out an independent identity is hard, and this stuff is tricky for everyone and really difficult for some people no matter how many advantages they have. And I can see how, if you have pretty much infinite advantages, you could think that all your privilege was somehow causing it to be difficult, but it's not. It's just that your privilege isn't shielding you from the normal difficulties that humans face, the way it's shielding you from a lot of other things. So I'm not downplaying what this guy is going through, because it's real and it's hard. It's just that everyone else is going through it, too, and he isn't dealing with some special hardship caused by the fact that his neighbors own Ferraris.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:33 AM on September 21, 2017 [15 favorites]

no see the hardship was that he had to drive a 16 year old beemer, like an ANIMAL
posted by poffin boffin at 10:34 AM on September 21, 2017 [17 favorites]

That's true. That is definitely a human rights violation. Has anyone alerted the UN?
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 10:36 AM on September 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

Does he ... does he realize that Medium is public?

It's one thing to wallow a bit in the privacy of your own journal, but seriously... if you're going to let that shit hang out on the Internet... get some perspective, dude.
posted by Kadin2048 at 10:38 AM on September 21, 2017 [17 favorites]

Nearly 12 years since a guy who was a literal heir to a baronetcy told me that I couldn't possibly understand poverty as well as him since his family funded an orphanage in Uganda. Finally, I've heard someone more clueless about their privilege.

I hope this guy wakes up cold in the middle of the night ten years from now with the sheer cringe of having put this into the world in his own name.

Y'know, that or the guillotine.
posted by threetwentytwo at 10:40 AM on September 21, 2017 [26 favorites]

"WHITE FUR FLOOR MATS!! i held my feet off the floor of the car the whole ride and tried not to get my poor person mud all over his exquisite impractical car."

Don't be silly. You just have your white fur floor mats replaced with new ones daily like all normal people.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 10:40 AM on September 21, 2017 [12 favorites]

There are more advantages, but those are the big buckets

This would have been fine if that were the last sentence.
posted by TedW at 10:41 AM on September 21, 2017

Les Inconnus did a sketch about the French version of this 26 years ago: Auteuil, Neuilly, Passy. There's an English Wikipedia page on it. Still relevant. and hilarious.
posted by fraula at 10:44 AM on September 21, 2017

I had a college classmate from oil money -- IIRC, she got a million dollars on every birthday between 18 and 25 to give her some time to get used to handling money -- who seemed to be a decent person. And I don't think it was just because she was very smart, or because her beloved grandmother remembered what it was like to not be rich. I think it was partly because she was as plain as a mud fence in a way that nothing, no amount of money, was going to fix. Studied history, I think; alas the shared house used nicknames and I can't remember her wallet name and Google fails me.

There is one problem the 1% have the rest of us don't: they can look at the whole world going wrong and realistically feel like it's their fault for not fixing it. Or for breaking it in the first place.
posted by clew at 10:53 AM on September 21, 2017 [12 favorites]

That bravado you see the movers and shakers and business moguls in the world have? Imagine that in 7th graders, except it’s filled with false confidence, arrogance, and is often seen as “being spoiled.” But the seed has been planted, and tends to eventually grow into the business bravado everyone celebrates later in life.

Not everyone celebrates that, because lots of us see it as spoiled arrogance. It doesn't "grow into" anything else except an entrenched sense of entitlement. The two most recent Republican presidents are excellent examples of it.


You have to work harder. You have to be smarter.
. . .
For one, you realize (again, at a young age) that you really don’t have to work very hard. You have no incentive to work, actually...

He's so very confused.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 11:00 AM on September 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

He haphazardly gets at a significant point, which is that the super rich, due to lack of adversity, may not develop a robust self that they can count on for real confidence throughout their lives. The super poor might not either for totally different reasons. People in the middle of the bell curve, though, have more of an opportunity to develop robust selves.

I consider this a real hazard and not a "boohoo poor wittle wich kid" hazard. Between a frail self stuck in the cycle of poverty and a frail self stuck in the cycle of wealth, I'd prefer to be the latter, but more accurately I'd prefer to be neither (and fortunately was born into neither).

It would have been a better article if he had stuck to this point instead of buttressing himself up with stories of adversity that don't contain any real adversity. I mean, three years on an air mattress? A shitty desk?

Then again, if we accept his haphazard point that his ego is frail due to lack of adversity, then it follows that he would exhibit signs of a frail ego such as aggrandizement of his origin story. There are opportunities yet for him to face real adversity (life finds a way!) Who knows.
posted by a_curious_koala at 11:01 AM on September 21, 2017 [8 favorites]

Did anyone else think that this would be a giant plug for his video gaming blog? I'm sure he learned about marketing at his daddy's knee.
posted by Soliloquy at 11:02 AM on September 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

Here's a good piece from the Atlantic about the possible psychological perils of growing up in a hyper-affluent community (warning: detailed discussion of suicide), which cites some research that suggests there are similar mental health risks for kids living in extreme poverty and extreme wealth:

"Luthar’s data come from school districts where families have median incomes of more than $200,000, and private schools where tuition is close to $30,000 a year. Her research suggests a U‑shaped curve in pathologies among children, by class. At each extreme—poor and rich—kids are showing unusually high rates of dysfunction."

She chalks this up to two shared phenomena: (1) extreme pressure to perform in very specific ways, and (2) a deep sense of isolation from their parents.
posted by materialgirl at 11:02 AM on September 21, 2017 [10 favorites]

...they can look at the whole world going wrong and realistically feel like it's their fault for not fixing it. Or for breaking it in the first place.

Well, they theoretically can. Very few of them seem to actually feel that.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 11:04 AM on September 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

Hahahahaha, his book is self published. Like, literally he is the publisher. This is a fucking PR piece for his terrible (presumably, given the quality of the article) self published book. Completely awful.
posted by codacorolla at 11:13 AM on September 21, 2017 [19 favorites]

I worked for a while in a school where most students were very wealthy. (I actually checked this dude's bio to see if he'd gone to that school, because his description sounded so familiar.) As someone who grew up in a decidedly middle-class town, there was all kinds of stuff about this school that shocked me. The amount of pressure these kids -- young adolescents -- felt from their peers and parents was insane. Sixth-graders would have panic attacks (like, had to be sent to the nurse) over a B on one assignment, because it might prevent them from getting into Harvard. They'd describe siblings who went to our very good flagship state school as failures. (I'd also hear parents talking about their own kids -- kids I knew and loved -- as failures. At twelve.) These kids had access to trouble that I couldn't have dreamed of -- absentee parents and booze/prescription drugs are not a good combo. Many kids had a limited ability to work through challenges because they...didn't really have challenges, so they'd just never developed those skills.

To be clear: it is way worse to be poor, and the advantages this guy discusses are very real -- most of those kids are going to land high-paying jobs, lots of them will coast, and all of them will have an enormous safety net for the rest of their lives. But there are drawbacks that I'd never considered until I saw them firsthand.
posted by goodbyewaffles at 11:17 AM on September 21, 2017 [18 favorites]

The day I graduated college, I was off my parents payroll.

Boo fucking hoo, you narcissistic entitled prick. Life is such a bitch.
posted by strelitzia at 11:22 AM on September 21, 2017 [8 favorites]

Now, a little over 4 years out of college, and I can confidently say that the life I have built for myself, I built on my own. Yes, I am eternally grateful for what positive things I was exposed to growing up in a privileged environment. Yes, I realize my parents’ influence on who I am as a person is not to be taken for granted. Yes, I realize I have been given a lot more than other people in life

The cognitive dissonance is strong in this one.
posted by rtha at 11:24 AM on September 21, 2017 [11 favorites]

If you're poor and you fail, you don't worry about it being your fault, you worry about dying from starvation, crime, or a million other problems that disproportionately affect the poor.

I would not begrudge anyone their riches but for the fact that we as a society could guarantee that everyone had food to eat, a bed to sleep in, and healthcare for their illness, but do not.
posted by blue_beetle at 11:26 AM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

It's bad to grow up with shallow, terrible people as your parents. It's bad to grow up in status-obsessed communities that lack any kind of moral center.

And that's why mixed-income communities are better for everyone! Working there convinced me that raising kids in a rich town is a seriously bad idea, no matter how good the schools are on paper.
posted by goodbyewaffles at 11:36 AM on September 21, 2017 [9 favorites]

The one thing the poor and rich have in common is their belief that their fortune is entirely their own doing. Both are entirely wrong.
posted by FakeFreyja at 11:48 AM on September 21, 2017 [16 favorites]

You have to work harder. You have to be smarter.

This is where I stopped reading. Fuck this guy and his "poor little rich kid" bullshit.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 11:54 AM on September 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

I mean, yes, I have actually a lot of sympathy for the pathologies that very rich people develop, and I think the solution is to tax the fuck out of them so that they're not so rich.

See? Problem solved.

You think it's hard growing up with money? Give it away, give it all away. Ta-da! No money, no problems!

(My teenage years were spent in a boarding school with people who were hilariously wealthy. And really the rich kids fell into roughly four groups: Stupid-to-normal kids who had shitty parents but whose last name was some house-hold product or object. Stupid-to-normal kids whose parents were pretty great but still rich enough to see to it that the kids got all the helps they needed. Smart kids whose parents were totally present (these were the ones who today are doing good things.) And smart kids whose parents were just parking them - these kids had the good coke and the invites to Area and Limelight and who basically were crashing their lives in ways that, for a teenager, were fascinating! I'm in touch with none of them and look back on those years with deep perplexity.)
posted by From Bklyn at 12:01 PM on September 21, 2017 [11 favorites]

This guy is a bad Bret Easton Ellis novel waiting to happen.
posted by mudpuppie at 12:05 PM on September 21, 2017 [16 favorites]

I just vomited so hard from reading this article that my digestive tract reversed itself and poop came out of my mouth.
posted by duffell at 12:09 PM on September 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

My reaction is different from other reactions here. I appreciate what an incredibly clueless piece this is, but it seems obvious to me that the most offensive part of it is his phrase "extremely unique." What is the point of privilege if you don't learn to avoid such a locution?
posted by Mr. Justice at 12:19 PM on September 21, 2017 [6 favorites]

This reads like a McSweeney's article written from the point of view of the Billy Zabka character from Back to School.
posted by Atom Eyes at 12:20 PM on September 21, 2017 [6 favorites]

The rate of depression, addiction, and suicide among rich kids and teenagers is horrifying.
Is that actually true?

yeah and nah, I suspect.

A good friend of mine went to high school with a guy whose dad ended up becoming enormously wealthy (owned office towers etc). The guy (the son) was a junky by the time he hit his twenties, a serious "lost soul" type -- always talked about making it "on his own" as an artist, never really managed to get out of bed in the morning. He even slept through 9/11 (was living a few blocks away at the time, finally woke up mid-afternoon because the phone kept ringing, his mom wondering if he was alive).

Anyway, I remember a few people talking about him, shaking their heads at what a mess he'd made of the kind of opportunities everybody dreams of having, and the conclusion was rather simple. He'd managed to grow up without developing a passion for anything. Blame his dad's money, blame his dad's absence, blame his mom's alcoholism, blame him, blame whoever -- he really could have done ANYTHING he wanted (race cars, climb mountains, make movies, hang out in Hawaii, ANYTHING), but instead he chose nothing. Nothing at all.

Sad case, I guess.
posted by philip-random at 12:24 PM on September 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

I grew up in the bottom reaches of the 1% and experienced absolutely none of this and am today pretty average.

I know someone whose parents are literal billionaires. She ran away at 16, started off waiting tables, put herself through night school for undergrad and grad school, and now is a successful scientist.

In conclusion, the 1% is a land of contrasts.
posted by miyabo at 12:26 PM on September 21, 2017 [7 favorites]

I grew up in the bottom reaches of the 1%

what defines the bottom limit of the 1%? There are after all 70,000,000 1-percenters in the world.
posted by philip-random at 12:31 PM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

SIR, THE MONOCLE FACTORY IS ON YOUR LEFT.
posted by clavdivs at 12:39 PM on September 21, 2017 [11 favorites]

He'd managed to grow up without developing a passion for anything.

Lots of people grow up without developing a passion for anything; this is hardly just a rich-person problem. It's just that when you aren't rich you need to make money somehow, so you have a baked-in reason to get out of bed in the morning.
posted by breakin' the law at 12:43 PM on September 21, 2017 [21 favorites]

I can't remember the day, long ago now, when I realized, "Bill Gates was never going to lose! No matter what!".
posted by Chitownfats at 12:55 PM on September 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

what defines the bottom limit of the 1%? There are after all 70,000,000 1-percenters in the world.

From this Investopedia Article:
In the USA, according to IRS data for 2014, the top 1% of AGIs started at $465,000.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 12:55 PM on September 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

This is why we need a 100% death tax, and a 99% effective marginal rate on everything over $1 million.

(You didn't build that, Nick.)
posted by klangklangston at 1:04 PM on September 21, 2017 [13 favorites]

Now, a little over 4 years out of college, and I can confidently say that the life I have built for myself, I built on my own.

I...whu...how...

Who paid for college, you twit?
posted by desuetude at 1:12 PM on September 21, 2017 [9 favorites]

As for mental health and the rich, there's just been a study into children's mental health here in the UK, which has been in the headlines because of the high proportion of 14-year-old girls with feelings of depression or sadness, 24%. The relevant thing for this discussion is "Generally, 14-year-olds from better-off families were less likely to have high levels of depressive symptoms compared to their peers from poorer homes." (NCB briefing)
posted by paduasoy at 1:16 PM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

You think it's hard growing up with money? Give it away, give it all away. Ta-da! No money, no problems!

Exactly. I grew up in the middle-to-upper-middle class (depending on which point on my childhood) and am something like a 2-3% with several 1% friends now (tech industry, of course).

Can rich (or mostly-rich) people have problems? Of course! No one is immune to depression, cancer, illness, heartbreak, etc.

But rich people ARE immune to many of life's other problems. And even the ones they are not immune to, they have the best hope of surviving (best healthcare, etc --- not that it will help everyone).

And the obvious proof of this is what I quoted --- literally ANY rich person can become not rich if they want. How many choose that? So any talk about the "problems" of being rich is absurd. There are problems that all humans have, so its not a problem-free life --- but its the MOST problem-free life you can have, which is why almost no one gives it up.
posted by thefoxgod at 1:31 PM on September 21, 2017 [11 favorites]

I would just like to point out that globally, the top 1% consists of anyone earning over $32,400.

Privilege is relative.

Also that guy is an asshat.
posted by ananci at 1:36 PM on September 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

His other think pieces are equally as dire:

This Is Why Men Should Not Be Intimidated By Attractive Women

Have you ever seen a girl who acted like she had it all together and was better than the world and nobody could touch her, fall flat on her face?

posted by daybeforetheday at 1:37 PM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

This does remind me of the apparently universal truth that when you are in your 20s and just barely starting to figure out how the world works, every tiny bit of progress you make feels like an angels-singing epiphany and you are definitely the only person to ever figure it out.
posted by Lyn Never at 1:47 PM on September 21, 2017 [17 favorites]

Yes, honestly the thing I miss most about being temporarily 2% (besides the cheeses, oh, the cheeses) was the sheer security of knowing that if a problem came up in whatever I was trying to get done, I could almost certainly spend my way out of it. Moving, for instance--what a difference between knowing that you can pay for unplanned hotel stays, the replacement of broken things, an extra day's rent, whatever, without any meaningful strain and...not knowing that.

Mom gets sick? Buy a last-minute ticket to see her, no problem.

Etc. There's just not that sick terror you get when you see something going wrong and know you have no ability to fix it properly and wonder what the long-term consequences will be.

That is not a feeling you have growing up in any other class (and especially not if you are poor, a status I passed back and forth out of as a kid), and no one in their right minds would give it up except under extreme moral pressure.
posted by praemunire at 1:49 PM on September 21, 2017 [18 favorites]

He'd managed to grow up without developing a passion for anything.

Or he had some pretty significant untreated mental illness... I don't know about you, but all the folks I've ever known with drug addiction problems had developed those problems seeking a coping mechanism for their untreated depression (bipolar and monopolar), anxiety, schizophrenia, et cetera et cetera et cetera.
posted by palomar at 1:56 PM on September 21, 2017 [10 favorites]

I would just like to point out that globally, the top 1% consists of anyone earning over $32,400.

This is the sort of thing that my Baronet scion used to come out to justify his privilege, and its meaningless. It doesn't make dirt poor westerners any less skint.
posted by threetwentytwo at 1:58 PM on September 21, 2017 [13 favorites]

So in other words, the kids of one per-centers are the equivalent of muggle Draco Malfoys.
posted by oceano at 2:00 PM on September 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

You have to work harder. You have to be smarter.


Oh man, thank you. I needed that laugh.
posted by A Terrible Llama at 2:07 PM on September 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

I would just like to point out that globally, the top 1% consists of anyone earning over $32,400.

You hear that, single mom working two jobs to make enough for rent in that one bedroom apartment and staying up at night wondering how you're ever going to pay off that credit card bill? You're really rich, so quit complaining.

You're totally in the same boat as the rich, if only you weren't too entitled to see that.
posted by FakeFreyja at 2:10 PM on September 21, 2017 [29 favorites]

Like, this is seriously an advertisement for this cadre of terrible ideas and his book. Here's a few select quotes from his consulting firm site linked in the FPP:

"Getting talked about is PR. Establishing yourself as a trusted voice in your industry is Thought Leadership."
— Nicolas Cole, Founder & Editor-in-Chief

Presumably he is quoting himself here.

Describing his business, "We work closely with you to take what you know best and craft it in a way that attracts readers on written platforms like Quora and LinkedIn. By building a foundation here first, you are able to establish yourself as a leader within your space. And because we know how to write things that people want to read, major publications, blogs, podcasts, and conferences will begin seeking you out to continue sharing your knowledge with the world."

Soooooo... you do all the work, and you pay them to give you pointers and post it to sites? What is this guy, an academic journal?

Also, "AN EXCLUSIVE THOUGHT LEADER AGENCY ... Specializing in hand-crafting powerful written content that resonates with millions of readers, we extract your best stories and most valuable lessons and share them with your target audience in a way that builds trust and credibility, extends reach and exposure, and positions you as an authority in your industry. ... It's time to tell your story."

The pitch, such as it exists, seems to be that they guide to you to craft completely worthless clickbait, and then have their SEO people position it in a way that gets shared. I have to assume that this piece of shit article is getting squarely dragged across the Internet, so while that's a SORT of advertisement for his business, it's definitely not a good one.

No sympathy for this asshole, and 'what he's built' seems to be a book that his daddy paid to have published, and a consulting firm that does nothing.
posted by codacorolla at 2:15 PM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

Also, in the most charitable interpretation of his business, he's basically creating a service for other wealthy people to fake the process of becoming respected in a field. Someone should tell him that Harvard University already exists.
posted by codacorolla at 2:19 PM on September 21, 2017 [19 favorites]

"We work closely with you to take what you know best and craft it in a way that attracts readers on written platforms like Quora and LinkedIn. By building a foundation here first, you are able to establish yourself as a leader within your space. And because we know how to write things that people want to read, major publications, blogs, podcasts, and conferences will begin seeking you out to continue sharing your knowledge with the world."

Oh, that's what's up with him. He's just not very bright. Bummer! How's he going to live with himself?
posted by glasseyes at 3:21 PM on September 21, 2017

There is one problem the 1% have the rest of us don't: they can look at the whole world going wrong and realistically feel like it's their fault for not fixing it. Or for breaking it in the first place.

Objection. Assumes facts not in evidence.
posted by RolandOfEld at 3:54 PM on September 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

There is one problem the 1% have the rest of us don't: they can look at the whole world going wrong and realistically feel like it's their fault for not fixing it. Or for breaking it in the first place.

I've known a few 1-percenters in my time and trust me, none of them would ever feel this way. They look at the whole world going wrong and realistically feel that the poor are to blame to for everything. How could they not be? There's so f***ing many of them.
posted by philip-random at 4:29 PM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

Our society rewards certain insufferable behaviors by granting access to wealth*. With that wealth comes power, and with that power comes the ability to continue or escalate the insufferable behavior without consequence, which grants access to further wealth. The children of these people would likely exhibit similar behaviors, by nature or nurture (or both.)

Many people are wealthy without being insufferable, and so they presumably don't run around doing awful things or calling attention to themselves. Many people are insufferable without being wealthy, and without the ability to protect themselves from consequences they limit or hide their insufferable behavior.

In essence, I don't think wealth causes bad behavior; I simply believe bad behavior makes it easier to acquire wealth, that wealth makes it easier to continue or escalate the bad behavior, and yet more wealth can then be acquired. When I think about "the 1%", then, I don't think about the wealthy or the insufferable; I think about the people who fall into both categories.

That's my two cents, anyway. I'd better hold on tight to that two cents, before an insufferable wealthy person takes it from me and tells me it is my fault for not holding on tight enough.

*Theft is insufferable, and can be used to gain wealth; deceit is insufferable, and can be used to gain wealth; exploiting people is insufferable, and can be used to gain wealth; willful ignorance, greed, entitlement, narcisissm, over-confidence and similar traits can be indirectly used to gain wealth, as a person with one or more of those traits is more likely to feel okay about using theft, deceit and exploitation to gain wealth; you get the idea.

**I got sick of typing "insufferable" so I'm taking a break for a bit
posted by davejay at 5:02 PM on September 21, 2017 [6 favorites]

Geez, everybody. Did this guy just fire you or something? Maybe you should stop polishing up your guillotines for just a sec and think about this:

It's true that alienation hits every class, but from reading the article, this guy was *extremely* alienated as a kid due to pushy-ass parents, teachers, maybe most of his peers, and maybe just about everybody.

Regarding him saying "you have to work harder and smarter", he meant school. And expectations. Always the expectations.

Maybe his writing style seems a bit insufferable. Maybe the headline is ridiculous (he probably didn't write his own headline). Maybe he didn't go into enough detail about what all else he went thru when he was sleeping on the stupid air mattress. But I'm sure he went thru more than that.

It does not feel good *at all* to suddenly sink in life like that. It can even be terrifying. Just because you're used to roaches on the wall doesn't mean that he was. And it may not have been forever, but it may have felt that way at the time.

Also, not everybody can just "go back to dad and mom". At least not without a whole lot of shame on their part, and resentment on both sides.

Of course he hasn't had a lot of the hardships and terror that a lot of poorer people have had. And maybe he is an awful person. But not knowing anything about him other than the article, I find the reactions to this article extreme. That's all.

( I'm not a one or two or even twenty percenter, for the record.)
posted by serena15221 at 6:04 PM on September 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

Maybe the headline is ridiculous (he probably didn't write his own headline).

It's Medium, so he did. And he didn't suddenly sink, he cheerfully pushed off from the yacht as a lark.
posted by codacorolla at 6:29 PM on September 21, 2017 [9 favorites]

Also, not everybody can just "go back to dad and mom". At least not without a whole lot of shame on their part, and resentment on both sides.

Having the luxury to choose whether to fall back on your 1% parents or not based on how much you're willing to suffer for your pride is a luxury that, gee, uh, 99% of people do not have.

You're giving an awful lot of undeserved benefit of the doubt to this rich dude whining for book PR about being a sad rich kid who totally made it all his own ... as a professional gamer, which he was only able to do because of his circumstances.
posted by tocts at 6:56 PM on September 21, 2017 [10 favorites]

If you're poor and you fail, you don't worry about it being your fault, you worry about dying from starvation, crime, or a million other problems that disproportionately affect the poor.


And then people will say it's your fault.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 7:15 PM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

It does not feel good *at all* to suddenly sink in life like that. It can even be terrifying. Just because you're used to roaches on the wall doesn't mean that he was. And it may not have been forever, but it may have felt that way at the time.

We're not magically observing his unfiltered consciousness at a young age; we're reading his later composed account of his experiences, and so have a right to expect perspective and self-awareness.
posted by praemunire at 7:40 PM on September 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

Maybe his writing style seems a bit insufferable. Maybe the headline is ridiculous (he probably didn't write his own headline). Maybe he didn't go into enough detail about what all else he went thru when he was sleeping on the stupid air mattress. But I'm sure he went thru more than that.

Yabbut this isn't his journal or his blog or his therapy session, it's something he's putting out there in front of god and everybody like it's sheer, unmitigated brilliance and proof that people ought to hire him. And he's not a teenager - "my life has been privileged but also has its difficulties!" isn't, like, a useless insight, but it's not proof of profound self-awareness when one is in one's mid-twenties. If anything, it's a perfect illustration of rich-boy syndrome - he really, really thinks that the laziest, most light-weight reflections are extraordinary proof of his own brilliance, because he's grown up with an ideology which says that obviously people like him are the best and the brightest, the hardest workers, the best-educated, etc.

I mean, this is not a particularly compelling piece of writing on any level - it's not lyrical, it's not novel, it doesn't make good use of detail, it's formatted as lists, it doesn't really say much that's new, it contradicts itself but does not address that contradiction, it shows a lack of self-awareness and a lack of social awareness* and it doesn't even really explore the potentially interesting and sympathetic story of what I assume was the actual work he has done to support himself. Pull me in by giving me details about your experiences and reflections, don't just allude to theme! Show some self awareness about how most people in their early twenties can't afford their own place in Chicago, even if it feels like a come-down to you!

If you're going to say "look at my brilliant insights and hire me because of them", you'd better bring some brilliance, is what I'm saying.

*The biggest single thing he has going for him is that if he gets sick, he can rely on his family to help him access care, and he doesn't seem to understand this. I know a lot of people whose financial lives were derailed in their twenties by unexpected medical expenses - that's huge. Now, I personally think it's great when parents can, within reason, help their kids to achieve financial stability, and I think that most parents would want to help their adult child if the child fell on hard times. If this guy got sick and couldn't work and his parents started paying his medical bills and rent, I would view that as an entirely reasonable and appropriate use of their wealth. It's just that having this rock-solid guarantee is something that very, very few people have, and it makes a huge difference, and he hasn't given any thought - in this age of the ACA - to that fact.
posted by Frowner at 7:40 PM on September 21, 2017 [12 favorites]

Also, kids from every class (ooh! I said a bad word!) have unreasonable and unrealistic pressure on them to succeed. It's a thing that happens. Some of them do, and they get books and movies and self-help books made about them sometimes. But most of them don't. They get sick or injured, or someone in their family does, or they're evicted, they become homeless, they miss a bus an don't get a job, a million things can happen. This guy isn't revealing a 'brutal' truth. It's not even brutal. 'My parents had expectations and I was worried i might let them down' is not brutal. It's called childhood, you silver-spoon motherfucker.

You became a pro gamer, hey? Did you sell your BMW to buy the gaming rig? Or did you just hand over the credit card? Was it difficult, backbreaking labour to install the dual graphics cards? Or did that Indian-looking dude at the computer store do it for you, he probably has a name, like Sandeep or something, they're all called Sandeep those guys, amirite. You don't know shit, you fucking gormless greedbag. I have so much less money than you that we're basically a different species and I don't know shit about having a hard life, except that you are not fucking having one.

GET IN THE SEA.
posted by prismatic7 at 8:00 PM on September 21, 2017 [8 favorites]

Yeah, I want that two minutes of my life back.
posted by nanojath at 8:08 PM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

But not knowing anything about him other than the article, I find the reactions to this article extreme. That's all.

Really? Although I sincerely try to curb my snark output, I find the tone of this thread to be spot on.

So what if maybe he was extra-alienated, burdened by high expectations, and that failing to live up to those expectations might result in "a whole lot of shame on their part, and resentment on both sides". And so what if might have downplayed the the difficulties of living a spartan life in that "studio apartment on the north side of the city with no air conditioning, a $15 desk from Good Will, and an inflatable mattress". (If I speculate about the possible unspoken hardships, I won't be able to keep the snark in check.)

In the end, I cannot conceive of an equation where the total of all of his life difficulties makes a perceivable dent against the tremendous privilege he was born into.

And that bullet list of the horrors of he endured in this privileged environment, including

• I thought everyone was smarter than me.
• I felt like I would never be good enough.
• I hated myself.
• I was constantly depressed.
• I was constantly compared to other kids,....
• The star athletes were closet pill poppers.
• Kids overdosed.
• Kids committed suicide.

Will someone let him know that the above issues are unfortunately as common as dirt among high school studens.

Finally, his smug cluelessness is galling.

"Truthfully, I learned how to do that [work for the things he wanted] at a very young age. I tell the story often, but I’ll mention it here again: I learned the difference between doing something for external success and money vs doing it because you love to do it by playing World of Warcraft. Imagine growing up in the neighborhood I’ve described and saying, “I want to play professional video games” to my peers, parents, teachers, and authority figures. I got laughed at — by everyone. But I loved what I was doing and I believed I had a future in it, so I worked my ass off to become one of the highest ranked 3v3 World of Warcraft players in North America, and one of the most-read gaming bloggers on the Internet in 2007."

Someone should tell him that all kids, everywhere who declare “I want to play professional video games” to peers, parents, teachers, and authority figures, get laughed at. But in 2007, being able to devote the necessary time and resources to become "one of the highest ranked 3v3 World of Warcraft players in North America, and one of the most-read gaming bloggers on the Internet" wasn't an option open to all.

"So I deliberately chose interests where he [Dad] had absolutely zero influence, forcing me to figure it out on my own and earn my own success. A harder road, but for me a more fulfilling one. ... the life I have built for myself, I built on my own."

It's difficult to fathom how he can be so unaware of all the extra tools he can call upon to "figure it out on my own" and address his various issues, beginning with a top-of-the-line education.

This article is entirely out of place in a world where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is growing by the day, threatening god-knows-what levels of chaos in society. Clearly, the 1% doesn't appear overly interested in learning about the issues that the 47% deal with on a daily basis. Is it really to much to ask that they simply acknowledge their privilege without adding some qualifying "but" re the burdens that come with said privilege?
posted by she's not there at 8:34 PM on September 21, 2017 [11 favorites]

Regarding him saying "you have to work harder and smarter", he meant school. And expectations. Always the expectations.

When women and minorities say that they had to work twice as hard as their white male counterparts they are also talking about expectations. Always the expectations.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 8:55 PM on September 21, 2017 [11 favorites]

Geez, everybody. Did this guy just fire you or something? Maybe you should stop polishing up your guillotines for just a sec and think about this:

I'm sorry, I was busy knitting.
posted by Madame Defarge at 9:00 PM on September 21, 2017 [26 favorites]

Two things struck me about this article: First, it seems a sincere attempt to inventory the advantages he had and challenges he faced, which is what makes it so remarkable he did such a bad job. Second, the most underlined passage is some generic pablum about learning hard work from his parents, so a lot of people are taking this at face value.

I didn't quite put together that he's mid-20s though. Meh. I probably would have shared my life lessons with people in my mid-20s if I thought anyone was listening, and they would have been embarrassing too.

It does not feel good *at all* to suddenly sink in life like that. It can even be terrifying. Just because you're used to roaches on the wall doesn't mean that he was. And it may not have been forever, but it may have felt that way at the time.

I had to re-read the article to see what I missed about the sinking in life part, thinking he mentioned a bout of depression of something. I didn't miss anything. He slept on an inflatable bed.

I'm upper middle class background. I did that (well, a piece of foam but whatever). You do it when you leave college. It's not terrifying. It doesn't feel like forever. It's part of your self narrative.

OK, I am projecting. It was part of my self narrative. Move out of the house, start working my way up the ladder. "Things are on track" I thought as I lived in my one-bedroom, sparsely furnished apartment in a high crime area. (They were, incidentally. It was all fine.) It's also lot of people's self narrative, including quite wealthy who are interning or going to grad school. And it sure seems how he approached it.

The rate of depression, addiction, and suicide among rich kids and teenagers is horrifying. For the kids who end up in those lanes, they almost certainly would have had better lives if they'd been born less affluent.

As usual, poor people have it worse:

For example, an individual with family income less than $10,000 (in 1990 dollars) is 50% more likely to commit suicide than an individual with income above $60,000.

A general rule of thumb is that any time you hear about a rich person problem (other than "insider trading" or "having to dock your yacht in Rhode Island to avoid Massachusetts tax" I suppose) it's worse for poor people once you look at the numbers.
posted by mark k at 9:13 PM on September 21, 2017 [10 favorites]

I went from spending my senior year of college living in a penthouse apartment downtown Chicago, to a studio apartment on the north side of the city with no air conditioning, a $15 desk from Good Will, and an inflatable mattress.

What kind of fucking loser is this guy that he couldn't afford a cheap metal bed frame and a cheapo mattress from the back of a truck at Swap-o-Rama? And where did he go to school again? And what kind of worthless piece-of-toilet-paper degree did he get at the end again?
posted by tully_monster at 9:24 PM on September 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

And then founded Digital Press, "an exclusive thought leader agency" that turns "CEOs into Thought Leaders". I'm sure his name and wealth played no part in that.

I thought (leadered?) the same thing!
posted by juiceCake at 12:00 AM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

What kind of fucking loser is this guy that he couldn't afford a cheap metal bed frame and a cheapo mattress from the back of a truck at Swap-o-Rama? And where did he go to school again? And what kind of worthless piece-of-toilet-paper degree did he get at the end again?

I get a "I was so privileged, I never learned about the Craigslist free section" vibe. That's real, and in some ways stunting. He may have felt like his parents made him work hard, but they also deprived him of some basic life skills. I taught a basic life skills class to some college juniors - they were terrified of raw chicken because they thought it would kill them, so they refused to cook at home.
posted by Toddles at 3:03 AM on September 22, 2017 [7 favorites]

The biggest single thing he has going for him is that if he gets sick, he can rely on his family to help him access care, and he doesn't seem to understand this.

As a corollary, I bet his teeth are in great shape, and that he has no awareness that dental care is something poor people often cannot afford at all. It's a problem even for working people, as the dentist industry seems to have responded to the existence of dental insurance by raising their charges for services to far beyond what that insurance pays.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 3:25 AM on September 22, 2017 [14 favorites]

As a corollary, I bet his teeth are in great shape

Similarly, he probably had decent relatively-unstressed prenatal health, didn't grow up drinking leaded water or breathing heavily-polluted air, not only had access to but was probably forced/cajoled/enticed to eat nutritionally-complete meals every day, and went to schools that could afford exercise time. They're playing on the easy level at every available layer of life and think it's actually some kind of inherent greatness.

All "thought leaders" should get into the sea.
posted by Lyn Never at 8:16 AM on September 22, 2017 [12 favorites]

So, I grew up pretty solidly upper middle class among kids who were also pretty solidly upper middle class and a few kids (and a few family members) who were sort of lower end 1%ers. My family never had enough money to never have to worry about money, but I definitively (and depressingly, when I was 17) belonged to that demographic that was too rich for Finanical Aid and too poor to pay cash for college tuition. So I ended up at my last choice college because they gave me an academic scholarship which seemed like the worst thing that ever happened to me at the time and yes, wah, wah, world's tiniest violin.

I felt that way, in part, because I ended up attending boarding school (ironically on some financial aid) for high school among kids who were actual 0.1%. They certainly never had to accept the last choice. They always got to choose. And the experience was a real mind warp, because it caused some fairly major redefinition of wealth for me personally. Like, I'd previously thought of wealth as "Because her dad's a surgeon at the local hospital, Caitlin has an in-ground swimming pool and gets to buy all of her school clothes at Bennetton" and I learned suddenly that, actually, there was a whole other level of rich kids. Like rich kids who were all "Mark flies to school on a private jet, plays soccer with the King of Jordan and will receive 17 million as spending money for high school graduation."

I will admit to you that I did occasionally feel sorry for some of those rich kids when I was a teenager because it did seem like a higher proportion of them had shitty, negligent parents and weird psych baggage and a drive toward no-fucks-given self-destruction/obliteration that I'd up to that point only associated with the actually poor kids in my public school. A lot of them really liked my parents, who were frequently cash-strapped and surfing the vicissitudes of early 90s corporate downsizing at the time, but they were around on evenings and weekends, genuinely interested in what was happening in kids' lives, sympathetic and, like, available for a hug and come to my school plays and tell me I'm awesome and they love me stuff. Normal middle class parent stuff that I always thought was dorky then. They loved that because it wasn't like their families. And I remember, much later, in college, telling a friend that I was of the opinion that the only teenagers I was ever actually afraid of when I was a teenager were the ones with nothing to lose and the ones with everything to lose because they weren't afraid of anything at all.


Also, not everybody can just "go back to dad and mom". At least not without a whole lot of shame on their part, and resentment on both sides.

Yeah, but this is where this dude's argument really falls apart for me. Because even if your billionaire dad wants you to bootstrap it after college, you have the connections you made at your first choice, Ivy-Caliber college and you have no debt. Which is huge. No debt. And even if you decide to go off and spend the rest of your life working for a no-money non-profit or making conceptual art about dialectics out of poop or whatever "Common People" meets St Francis "forsake my family and my wealth " act you want to pull at twenty-five, you're still going to reap the benefits of a family that will always pay your medical bills and pay your legal fees and (this is a big one, as I get older) you 'll never have to worry about saving any money or putting something away for the future because at the end of the day, you're covered. Your kids are probably covered. And unless you are an absolute financial catastrophe (and that does happen) or come the actual socialist revolution, your grandkids are probably covered too.

Real 1%er wealth is not just knowing you're comfortable right now, but that you always will be. That you never wake up in the middle of the night and worry what might happen if you get cancer or your kid gets cancer or if you lose your job at 55 or your savings runs out.

I'm 41. I have a decent salary, a loving family and I've always been reasonably comfortable. But these are my real fears. This is my real life. And I follow my rich friends from high school on social media and we still hang out sometimes, but this is the part they'll never be able to understand.
posted by thivaia at 8:35 AM on September 22, 2017 [8 favorites]

Nice to see everyone here piling on and erasing this guy's experience because he's rich and can't possibly have ever struggled with anything or know the true meaning of work.

I'm sure he's a jackass and doesn't deserve to be patted on the head but it saddens me a bit to see this litany of hatred.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 9:02 AM on September 22, 2017 [2 favorites]

Rich people's experience of themselves as having earned everything they have through hard work and just naturally being the best at what they do is an experience that screams out for erasure.
posted by praemunire at 9:06 AM on September 22, 2017 [12 favorites]

yeah don't hate on the professional World of Warcraft player/Thought Leader; there but for the grace of God go we
posted by prize bull octorok at 9:14 AM on September 22, 2017 [5 favorites]

But we're not, like, piling on a guy who's telling us his troubles in a bar, or our friend's new boyfriend, or even the new hire in the next cubicle. If some guy were all "I grew up really rich, but these pretty awful things happened to me and my friends, and then I did THESE THINGS to try to earn my own way", and people were all "shut up WHINER", that would be pretty mean, and you would probably want to know someone relatively well before you responded with "but you had, like, dental care and really a studio on the north side of Chicago* is not exactly like living in a van down by the river".

But this guy is advancing a political position. Also making a case for hiring him to write your clickbait because he has such great ideas. When someone advances a toxic political position with the obvious intent that it be widely read by people outside his own orbit, that calls forth a different response than a private conversation or personal post would.

*Part of what I can't get over about this is...look, the north side of Chicago is the richer side. That's not to say that there are no awful apartments there, but I bet he's talking about, eg, Andersonville or somewhere fairly pleasant, because I know from parents, and while they will tell you that you have to get your own desk and air mattress, rich ones are deeply unlikely to let their progeny live somewhere actively filthy and dangerous. Either his connections/inheritance/whatever got him a job where he could afford a tolerable studio or his parents helped him out, that's all.

You would only think "right out of college I had my own studio all to myself in the more affluent part of a major city with many attractions, this was a huge privation" if you standards are loony-tunes.
posted by Frowner at 9:42 AM on September 22, 2017 [11 favorites]

Nice to see everyone here piling on and erasing this guy's experience

Hey, you know that thing where you use the language of the oppressed to "turn it around" on them and score rhetorical points? It doesn't actually score any rhetorical points. No one who didn't agree with you before agrees with you now just because you said they're "erasing" his experience, as though that's remotely applicable to what's going on here. This guy laid out his experience, and we are laughing at the actual things he said. No erasure has been necessary.
posted by Etrigan at 10:13 AM on September 22, 2017 [20 favorites]

Ok so, there was a time I knew the son of an ultra-rich family. Son had just graduated from a great school, was smart, and wanted to earn his own way.

For five or or so years after school he picked up internships and junior positions with some name firms, and then he had to look at resumes from job applicants.

He had no clue. He didn't know how to read a resune because he had never had to write a resume, and because the path of all the applicants was entirely alien.

He thought he had gotten his jobs on merit - he was smart, and he did go to a great school, but the internships and jobs had always just been offered to him, no resume, no application. Because his dad was super rich and super connected and son had met the CEOs at multiple exclusive business events while tagging along with pop. And just maybe these CEOs also wanted to be in dad's good graces too.

Poor kid (and I mean this) had no clue. This was just his world, and it wasn't until he had to look at resumes from regular folk that it because clear (to me, if not him).
posted by zippy at 10:17 AM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

The biggest single thing he has going for him is that if he gets sick, he can rely on his family to help him access care, and he doesn't seem to understand this.

YES. he has never and will never have to choose between healthcare and some other basic but necessary human need like food. he'll never have to put aside his own health needs in order to feed his kids.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:46 AM on September 22, 2017 [3 favorites]

and like. obviously neither will many of us here, but we're not earnestly blathering on about how built ourselves up from nothing, all alone in the world.
posted by poffin boffin at 10:50 AM on September 22, 2017 [3 favorites]

Weirdly, the thing that jumped out at me in this article is when he describes going from his awesome penthouse in college to "sleeping on an air mattress for 3 yrs" because his parents stopped funding him. Is this a white lie for the sake of narrative? Why wouldn't his parents ease him into this by making him live in the dorms or with 5 roommates like other college students do? If you want your kid to learn about living like a middle-classer, that's a weird way to do it.
posted by nakedmolerats at 11:07 AM on September 22, 2017 [2 favorites]

Just because you're used to roaches on the wall doesn't mean that he was.

there's an actual term for this kind of belief about how the identical level of pain and deprivation is actually genuinely worse for the upper classes, subjectively, right? because they feel it more, being delicate and sensitive, not coarse and rough? because they are capable of being humiliated and degraded, not like the rest who can't mind it because getting used to ugliness means you either enjoy it or don't notice it?

I am most familiar with the concept in very spectacularly racist contexts but I feel like there's a more globally applicable set of phrases. cannot think of them right now to save my life. but it reminds me very much of the kind of chivalry that is only applied to the prettiest and most unblemished of girls, because the ability to be shocked and wounded by e.g. sexual assault or rude language is one of the finer feelings that you get from the precious combination of good breeding, youth, and virginity. if you've already been bruised by life, what is the use of wasting protection on you -- who cares if more mud splashes on a dirty shirt.

it's a very 19th century sentiment but obviously didn't die there, or ever.
posted by queenofbithynia at 11:35 AM on September 22, 2017 [18 favorites]

Why wouldn't his parents ease him into this by making him live in the dorms or with 5 roommates like other college students do

maybe because he said "Mom and Dad, now that I've graduated, I want to take this very fine diploma you paid for and use it to write garbage that I will publish on Medium.com under my own real name, so that you and everyone connected to me will suffer from great embarrassment, which, as we all know, is as painful to the rich as diphtheria is to the poor"

and his parents said "How about we starve you out by withholding free money until you fold and get a regular job in an office making much more money than you're worth, like everybody else your age and class" and he said No, because he had some gumption. no talent, no brains, but a little gumption.

there, my generosity stores are depleted for today.
posted by queenofbithynia at 11:39 AM on September 22, 2017 [3 favorites]

it's a very 19th century sentiment but obviously didn't die there, or ever

There is a concept in First Amendment law of the "libel-proof plaintiff"...someone whose reputation was so bad prior to the supposed libel that it could take no damage from it.
posted by praemunire at 12:53 PM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

No need for sarcasm, Etrigan. I wasn't attempting to inappropriately recycle any language. It upsets me to see this guy put his own experience on the line and -- to quote your own words -- Metafilter's only response is to "laugh at the actual things he said." If you think that the majority of people who are responding to this guy's article are doing anything besides shitting on it then you're reading a different thread than I am.

That counts as erasure in my books. Someone upthread even said that this article "screams out for erasure."

If you or anyone has such a problem with this guy's naive and somewhat pathetic little diary entry, it makes a whole lot more sense to me to ignore it. Empathy will only help; it can never hurt.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 12:57 PM on September 22, 2017

That counts as erasure in my books.

You're free to define words however you want, but please refer back to how no one else is convinced becaues you've cleverly used a word that means something significantly different in its typical use.

If you or anyone has such a problem with this guy's naive and somewhat pathetic little diary entry, it makes a whole lot more sense to me to ignore it.

Physician, ignore thyself.
posted by Etrigan at 1:02 PM on September 22, 2017 [7 favorites]

Privilege means that privileged people can and do have difficulties in life but those difficulties are not because of their privilege, or at least not in the same way that oppressed people face institutional barriers because of their oppression.
posted by nakedmolerats at 1:41 PM on September 22, 2017 [2 favorites]

makes a whole lot more sense to me to ignore it. Empathy will only help; it can never hurt.

No. Silence can be interpreted as agreement.

And it's really a bit much to ask anyone—most especially those who don't have a tiny fraction of the writer's advantages—to empathize with someone who seems unable to even recognize his privileged station in life.

Really, we're all just doing our part as "villagers" to help bring up this young man, who apparently missed some basic life lessons. When he brags about how he's making his way in the world all by himself/without relying on his folks, he needs to hear an immediate and emphatic "bullshit!" from the masses. In fact, an empathetic response re the downsides of life in the upper 1% would be squandering a teachable moment when what he really needs to hear is "cry me a fucking river".
posted by she's not there at 3:23 PM on September 22, 2017 [6 favorites]

It has been said up-thread, but bears repeating: when you tell a story about yourself a good response might (might!) be empathy; when you explicitly make an argument which has political meaning then it is completely and totally valid for people to argue back. Unfortunately for this dingus his argument was poorly conceived of and poorly delivered, so it's not so much an argument as it is a dunking-upon. For those of us in the lower 99 it's always refreshing to reverse the usual order of things, but regardless this is a bad argument that should be (and has been) roundly refuted.
posted by codacorolla at 3:37 PM on September 22, 2017 [4 favorites]

this guy put his own experience on the line

this guy wrote an advertisement for his Thought Leader SEO Writer-Blogger 21st-century rich idiot hell-career; it's OK to slag on it
posted by prize bull octorok at 3:38 PM on September 22, 2017 [6 favorites]

Empathy will only help; it can never hurt.

what do you think you just read a thread full of? empathy is a necessary tool for the critic; you can't be really effectively mean unless you understand the other person pretty well. empathy's not sympathy!

empathy's not pity either. pity, the forgotten virtue, is what he requires, but I don't think he knows himself well enough to ask for it. I would try to dredge up some if he did, though.
posted by queenofbithynia at 4:24 PM on September 22, 2017 [9 favorites]

I get a "I was so privileged, I never learned about the Craigslist free section" vibe.

I was in a roach-filled studio on the south side of Chicago decades before Craigslist was a gleam in Craig's eye. Before Archie, Veronica, and Gopher. We had the Reader. And, of course, Swap-o-Rama. And we had furniture.

No. Fucking. Excuse.
posted by tully_monster at 5:17 PM on September 22, 2017 [3 favorites]

Totally agree. If you can't figure out how to cruise the good neighborhoods on bulk trash night, you're at a loss.
posted by Miko at 7:08 PM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yeah, it is empathy that makes me want to dope-slap this guy. I had a lot of disadvantages as a kid, and also some advantages. I didn't get where I am today all by myself. I got a lot of hands up and stand on a lot of shoulders, and most of those hands and shoulders belong to people who I never knew and will never know, but I can recognize the roles they played in cutting a trail for me, just like my mom did for me, and her friends, and the teachers I was lucky enough to have, and the friends I was fortunate to have in school, and etc. and so on and etc. I'm not mad at this dude because he has money; I'm pissed that he's still blind enough to buy into the bootstrap narrative and parrot it, and sorry if my form of empathy (which, in case you didn't know, doesn't mean I pat his hand and say there, there, dear and doesn't mean he can escape criticism and dope-slapping) seems... unempathetic to some people, but too bad. This is angry empathy, I guess.
posted by rtha at 8:36 PM on September 22, 2017 [4 favorites]

People I love may die young, and my son's future be trashed, because of the actions of politicians either beholden to people like this or who are members of the same class. You'll have to excuse my lack of empathy.
posted by emjaybee at 9:40 AM on September 23, 2017 [4 favorites]

Empathy will only help; it can never hurt.

Empathy is putting yourself in someone else's shoes. Empathy is also pointing out to a rich kid, "you got those shoes for free. Hardship is not having shoes."
posted by zippy at 10:38 AM on September 24, 2017 [1 favorite]

Cole edited the original article with a response to what he called the colorful collage of insults.

Probably worth relaying to detractors on here:

Thank you for proving exactly what I believe is a topic worth talking about.
You see, when you grow up in a wealthy environment, you aren’t allowed to speak up about how you ever feel insecure—because you have money.
You aren’t allowed to say that you’re going through the same human fears the rest of the world goes through—because you have money.
You aren’t supposed to ever complain or talk about what it is you don’t have—because you already have so much.
But the truth is, we’re all human. And growing up in wealth made me realize, at a very young age, that money doesn’t change any of those human capacities we share. We all struggle with adolescence. We all struggle to be heard, to follow our dreams and feel understood. And while certain classes don’t struggle with them on a monetary level, what we do share in common are the emotions that come with this journey.
posted by therubettes at 5:01 PM on September 25, 2017

Frankly I think this is more worthwhile to pull out, if you're going to pull out a quote:

I have no trust fund. When I finished college, I didn’t take a dollar from either one of my parents. All of the opportunities I have found for myself since, I did by building myself here, on the Internet, writing.

Which is to say: this guy still doesn't get it. He honestly thinks that because his parents only supported him with wealth 99% of the world couldn't conceive of till he was through college (paid for by them), his success has been totally made by himself.

Stop trying to give this guy a makeover. He's had massive privileges in his life, and he thinks that the normal human shit everyone else deals with largely without those privileges was somehow unique to his privileged upbringing, or made worse because he had effectively infinite money.

There's plenty of worthwhile discussion that could be had of the problems of growing up wealthy, but this un-self-reflective douche isn't capable of it.
posted by tocts at 5:57 PM on September 25, 2017 [4 favorites]

Also, this is a press release for his company.
posted by codacorolla at 6:17 PM on September 25, 2017 [3 favorites]

Oh my. Well, bless his whiny entitled little heart.
posted by theora55 at 8:54 AM on September 28, 2017 [1 favorite]