Happy Fortunate People
July 29, 2022 9:19 AM Subscribe
"It didn’t occur to Hamish until then that you could end up in medical school against your will. For Hamish, getting into medical school was like releasing a breath he’d been holding his entire life. But once there, he found himself surrounded by people for whom it represented nothing more remarkable than the result of mild exertion; they accepted it as a blasé part of their destiny. It was like finding out they were hyperflexible or had the genes that made them able to discern the stink of their piss after eating asparagus. Maybe that’s the way it worked for some people. Maybe for them, there was an order to life, a logic that could be easily traversed, whereas for Hamish, life was like leaping from ice floe to ice floe, drifting for weeks or months or years with no land in sight."
A new story by Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life and Filthy Animals.
A new story by Brandon Taylor, author of Real Life and Filthy Animals.
This so beautifully captures the wonder and anxiety of first moving to NYC and the awkward cross-class interactions you end up having. Thanks for sharing.
posted by airmail at 10:27 AM on July 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by airmail at 10:27 AM on July 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
He must have been accustomed to sifting the vague preferences of strangers into something textured and understandable. It was like an epilanguage, drifting as it did above words, referential, a symbol of a symbol, an abstraction of an abstraction. Notions
How any deeply intuitive person feels half the time, waiter or not.
Hamish did not respond. The muscles of his jaw tensed. He tasted, briefly, copper and heat.
How I feel when someone out of my class unintentionally makes me feel small.
Acting was one of the great joys of his life because it didn’t come easily to him. He’d enjoyed the feeling of getting better with iteration. The collaboration.
Interesting inner view of some of the flaws of being wealthy. Empathy for Other.
Yes.
Ok, I'll stop quoting all the good bits now. Beautiful read.
posted by liminal_shadows at 10:30 AM on July 29, 2022
How any deeply intuitive person feels half the time, waiter or not.
Hamish did not respond. The muscles of his jaw tensed. He tasted, briefly, copper and heat.
How I feel when someone out of my class unintentionally makes me feel small.
Acting was one of the great joys of his life because it didn’t come easily to him. He’d enjoyed the feeling of getting better with iteration. The collaboration.
Interesting inner view of some of the flaws of being wealthy. Empathy for Other.
Yes.
Ok, I'll stop quoting all the good bits now. Beautiful read.
posted by liminal_shadows at 10:30 AM on July 29, 2022
it’s certain people that can SMELL asparagus pee
I do believe that is the case. I can smell it, I suppose the proof would be for me to smell the asparagus pee of someone else who can't smell their own asparagus pee, but haven't got around to that yet.
posted by StickyCarpet at 10:42 AM on July 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
I do believe that is the case. I can smell it, I suppose the proof would be for me to smell the asparagus pee of someone else who can't smell their own asparagus pee, but haven't got around to that yet.
posted by StickyCarpet at 10:42 AM on July 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
It's the quadrant! There are people who produce and smell, people who only smell but don't produce, people who produce but don't smell, and those who don't produce and don't smell! I think most are in the first group, less in the next two and a pretty small % in the last.
posted by Carillon at 11:30 AM on July 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
posted by Carillon at 11:30 AM on July 29, 2022 [6 favorites]
I’m a college prof now and currently comfortably ensconced in the middle class, but I grew up in a family in the Deep South that was barely hanging onto middle class by our fingernails, until my parents divorced when I was 10, after which my mom and I were most definitely poor. I’m a fairly well-adjusted guy, but I still carry with me a lot of the socioeconomic anxiety of those years, the class markers, the unsettled unease with money that sometimes manifests as a desperate acquisitiveness and sometimes as a desperate frugality, etc.
Some years ago, I was in a multi-year relationship with a cardiologist who came from old money. His parents paid his way through college and med school, so he graduated debt-free. IIRC, he made about $600k/year. His friends, most of whom were also cardiologists, were also all extremely wealthy. They were all so at ease around casual consumption, and so insulated from the socioeconomic reality of the other 99% of the people in the world, it was like we were from different planets. I think it was a key component in why we eventually went our separate ways.
It’s kind of uncanny how the short story in the linked article captures some of the underlying dynamics and insecurity of a mixed-class relationship. It’s also terribly depressing, because those are the same dynamics that define some of the most critical problems with our social cohesion and politics, and the privileged 1% lack the self-awareness to see (or even care) how their self-actualization is often built on the backs of other people.
posted by darkstar at 11:54 AM on July 29, 2022 [13 favorites]
Some years ago, I was in a multi-year relationship with a cardiologist who came from old money. His parents paid his way through college and med school, so he graduated debt-free. IIRC, he made about $600k/year. His friends, most of whom were also cardiologists, were also all extremely wealthy. They were all so at ease around casual consumption, and so insulated from the socioeconomic reality of the other 99% of the people in the world, it was like we were from different planets. I think it was a key component in why we eventually went our separate ways.
It’s kind of uncanny how the short story in the linked article captures some of the underlying dynamics and insecurity of a mixed-class relationship. It’s also terribly depressing, because those are the same dynamics that define some of the most critical problems with our social cohesion and politics, and the privileged 1% lack the self-awareness to see (or even care) how their self-actualization is often built on the backs of other people.
posted by darkstar at 11:54 AM on July 29, 2022 [13 favorites]
I am of the general opinion that if a person hasn't personally experienced a particular hardship, they have no default mental framework for appreciating the difficulties that hardship brings. There are some people, some very empathic people, who just get it automatically, and they are the saints of care. Everyone else either has to struggle with mapping someone else's pain through their own pain (a sloppy job at best), or has to just take folks' word for it.
Like, I've been dirt poor, and depressed, and neurodiverse, and visibly queer. I grok those. But I haven't been Black, or disabled, or a woman, or an ESL speaker, or any of a dozen other kinds of not-the-default.
The worst one, though , is rich -> poor. If you haven't dug for coins in the couch to try to pay the electric bill or buy some frigging bread, you have no fucking clue what that's like and how difficult it is to survive. With money you can overcome (or at least soft-patch) almost any other adversity. But not having money means you're fucked.
Someone coined the term "affluenza" for this disease of just not understanding what real life is like.
Maybe we should at least make sure billionaires know what it's like to be hunted.
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:05 PM on July 29, 2022 [17 favorites]
Like, I've been dirt poor, and depressed, and neurodiverse, and visibly queer. I grok those. But I haven't been Black, or disabled, or a woman, or an ESL speaker, or any of a dozen other kinds of not-the-default.
The worst one, though , is rich -> poor. If you haven't dug for coins in the couch to try to pay the electric bill or buy some frigging bread, you have no fucking clue what that's like and how difficult it is to survive. With money you can overcome (or at least soft-patch) almost any other adversity. But not having money means you're fucked.
Someone coined the term "affluenza" for this disease of just not understanding what real life is like.
Maybe we should at least make sure billionaires know what it's like to be hunted.
posted by seanmpuckett at 12:05 PM on July 29, 2022 [17 favorites]
"Maybe we should at least make sure billionaires know what it's like to be hunted."
You can be extremely wealthy with no money worries at all with, let's say, $20 Million. The difference between that amount and a billionaire is that a billionaire has >50x as much.
posted by coberh at 1:39 PM on July 29, 2022
You can be extremely wealthy with no money worries at all with, let's say, $20 Million. The difference between that amount and a billionaire is that a billionaire has >50x as much.
posted by coberh at 1:39 PM on July 29, 2022
Just chocablock with insights and quotable quotes.
posted by blue shadows at 5:13 PM on July 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
posted by blue shadows at 5:13 PM on July 29, 2022 [1 favorite]
This was weirdly tender and it sort of softens the social critique. But I like that, because, damn it, there are people like Hamish and Soren out there, people on opposite ends of the privilege scale who are nonetheless still capable of some kind of human connection together.
posted by coffeeand at 8:25 PM on July 29, 2022
posted by coffeeand at 8:25 PM on July 29, 2022
You can be extremely wealthy with no money worries at all with, let's say, $20 Million. The difference between that amount and a billionaire is that a billionaire has >50x as much.
Even at like $4m you are so different from the rest of society it's not even funny, but there just aren't that many people in the US with that much money. We are talking 1m households or so at most, out of 120m households in the US. And if you take out the number who are 65 and older (who maybe made some of it via pensions and savings), it shrinks even more.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:36 AM on August 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
Even at like $4m you are so different from the rest of society it's not even funny, but there just aren't that many people in the US with that much money. We are talking 1m households or so at most, out of 120m households in the US. And if you take out the number who are 65 and older (who maybe made some of it via pensions and savings), it shrinks even more.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:36 AM on August 1, 2022 [1 favorite]
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posted by Grandysaur at 10:15 AM on July 29, 2022 [6 favorites]