So what is the working class mindset?

Hi there, I have recently been asked a really good question by one of my readers Amanda, she wanted me to explain to her what the "working class mindset" was; given that she has come from a rather rich family, it was something I thought I would try to explain as it can be hard for rich people to understand what it means to be working class. I did do a piece on the issue three years ago but I think it is time to revisit the concept of being working class. Firstly, let's start with the definition of what it means to be working class: "the social group consisting primarily of people who are employed in unskilled or semi-skilled manual or industrial work." This definition used to be simpler a generation ago - if you were well educated and highly skilled, you would use your brain to earn a living like a doctor or a lawyer. If you were uneducated and had no skills, you would then use your muscles to earn a living like a manual laborer. But these definitions are not that simple in the real world: take a taxi driver for example. He's not using his muscles to operate the car, which could be defined as a piece of machinery which requires some level of skill to operate. He may also need to figure out how to find passengers via an app on a smart phone, but do we classify taxi drivers as highly skilled professionals like doctors and lawyers? No, we would consider them as working class. But we can spend ages trying to define who is and who isn't working class in 2021, one obvious way to identify a working class person is to see if they have a working class mindset, but what exactly is that? So allow me to try to explain that to you now using my very working class family as an example. 

The hardship is real and can even be quite extreme for some.

My mother had a really difficult childhood and she experienced hardship on a scale that was downright cruel - she had six siblings and back in those days, having that many children was completely normal. There simply wasn't enough money for a big family given that my grandfather was just an uneducated odd job laborer - my mother told me that he tried to start a small business by buying items like handkerchiefs and hair clips in bulk and then selling them door to door. The profit margins were so thin and some days, he would walk from street to street, from dawn to dusk and not even break even. My mother was so malnourished when she was a child - she was so painfully thin; she told me how a teacher once felt sorry for her and gave her a bottle of cod liver oil, but it tasted so vile that she couldn't bring herself to drink it. But my mother was lucky, when she was about 6 years old, her older sister fell sick and because the family was so poor, they couldn't afford the medicines and by the time they rushed her to the hospital, she died soon after. My mother saw her sister die as a child because they were simply too poor to buy simple things like nutritious food and medicine to save a sick child - that's the kind of experience that you never forget and it will always cloud your judgment as an adult. Now what my mother suffered as a child was pretty extreme but post-war Singapore in the late 1940s and 1950s was a very impoverished place and her experience wasn't unique. So how has my mother's rather traumatic childhood affected her as an adult for years, even after she got married, got a stable job and moved into a lovely house? 

What is the psychological impact of this kind of hardship?

The key thing that I have observed from my mother's behaviour is her fear of running out of money - this has little to do with one's bank balance but rather, this is a reflex, default response after having been in such a situation like witnessing your sister die as you were too poor to save her. That awful experience has scarred her for life I'm afraid. Allow me to explain it this way: I have just spent a lot of money on a new suit from Jermyn Street near where I work - after all, I have received my first pay check from my new job so I wanted to buy something to celebrate. I thought I was going to get a shirt but I ended up getting the suit instead. Mind you, the suit I picked was very expensive (well nothing from Jermyn Street is cheap - it is one of the most expensive places in London to shop) but I have two main reasons to treat myself to such an expensive purchase. Firstly, even if I spend a lot of money today, I am confident that I will keep on earning a lot of money every month with this new job so it's not like this pay check is a one-off windfall but something I can now expect at the end of every month. Secondly, I believe that if I buy such an expensive suit, I will feel good when I wear it and in turn, I would project a lot more confidence when I deal with people at work dressed in this very fine suit. So I believe that it is a worthwhile investment from that point of view, then I don't feel like it is a waste of money to buy such expensive clothes. Now someone like my mother would never buy something expensive or luxurious like that because she would rather save the money for a rainy day; even if she has a lot of money in the bank, she is very reluctant to spend any of it.

How does this mindset affect one's attitude towards money?

You might think that this kind of behaviour is relatively harmless but let me illustrate how it can have far reaching consequences in the long run. My husband and I have accumulated quite a lot of money during the lockdown since we're staying at home a lot more and we can't travel, so I'm currently looking at options to invest that money we've built up. There are a range of options from low risk to high risk options - if you simply keep the money in the bank account in a typical British bank, you will get about 0.1% interest a year and your money is totally safe but the rate of return is painfully low. There are options which promise to deliver 50%  and even higher rates of return (for example with Forex trading) but the risk factor is much higher. You could make a massive gain or you could lose your original investment. A working class person like my mother would be so consumed by the fear of losing her money that she would opt for the option with the lowest risk, even if it means getting no interest at all by keeping all that money in a current account. However, that's why the poor stay poor - they never even give themselves the opportunity to access more lucrative options. Do rich people always make big money when they participate in such high risks investment schemes? No, obviously not - they will win some and lose some. But unless they're very unlucky, even a mixed result of "win some and lose some" will usually leave them much better off than if they simply went for the no-risk/low-risk option of keeping the money in a current account in the bank - it is a calculated risk I am willing to take because of potential rewards are huge. 

But what's wrong with this mindset?

At this stage you may think, "hey there's nothing wrong with your mother's working class mindset - she is a woman who doesn't spend money on expensive clothes and she is very careful with her money, surely that's a good thing and you are the one wasting money on luxury items and taking huge risks with your investments here." But let's analyze the implications of such a mindset: in refusing to spend money on yourself and being so extremely risk averse when it comes to any issues with your money, you then stop investing in yourself. Let's take going to university for example: it is a massive investment. You're not only paying for all the tuition fees and the costs associated with housing, travel, food, etc for those three or four years, but you're also depriving yourself the chance to work full time in that period - hence it is a combination of the money spent and the opportunity cost as well. However, people do go to universities regardless because they believe that it will pay off - they will get through the degree programme, they will graduate with good results and they will then have a better chance of getting a good job upon entering the working world. Someone who is extremely risk averse may take a step back and say, "that's too much of a risk with an uncertain outcome - I may struggle to pass at university, I may hate the course, I may have a bad exam in my finals and then end up with terrible result, but even if I get through all that, the degree may not make that much of a difference in the working world in the future. There is just no guarantee, no certainty that the degree will be worth it, I think that I'm not going to bother with university at all."

The consequence of the working class being risk averse.

Nonetheless, it is evident that graduates are more likely to find jobs more quickly than non-graduates and earn more over a lifetime but because this is not a straightforward issue and there are so many variables involved, it makes choosing not to go to university a logical and sensible choice for those who are risk averse. In the UK, the percentage of working class students who do go to university are much lower than those of middle and upper class backgrounds. There are a whole range of factors of course but this risk averse attitude when it comes to such a big long term investment in one's future does play a major part in explaining why many working class people in the UK do not go to university; when you look at the top, elite universities, working class students become extremely rare. In a report by the BBC, only 2% of white working class male students make it to the top group of universities in the UK - so much for white privilege, in fact in the UK, it is your class identity that determines your future rather than your skin colour. Thus Asian and black students with middle/upper class parents are far better off than white students with working class parents. If your parents are risk averse when it comes to investing in their own education, then they are unlikely to want to invest in your education - I have friends with working class backgrounds who have had to fight tooth and nail with their parents to go to university; this is not because their working class parents were trying to sabotage their futures by depriving them of a degree, but they then default to this risk averse stance whenever it involves money - we go back to this fear of running out of money. 

Death by a thousand paper cuts as a result. 

Let's look at the big picture here: if you keep saying no to new experiences every time because you are afraid of running out of money, then you are denying yourself the opportunity to grow and learn. When I was a child, some friends asked my parents if they wanted to join them on a tour of Europe. My parents said no, it's not that we can't afford it but we shouldn't be wasting precious money on fancy holidays like that. I remember arguing with my parents that it would be an educational experience for me to visit Europe and my mother replied, "don't be a spoilt brat - if you want to learn about Europe, you to the library to read a book, you don't need to get on a plane go to Europe. Or you can just watch a documentary on Europe." You might argue, okay so that's just one holiday you didn't get - no big deal, right? But this is when we have this 'death by a thousand paper cuts' scenario - whilst saying no to that one expensive holiday may not have doomed me to ignorance for life, but if this is your default response every time someone asks you to do something interesting that costs money, then you'll be deprived of so many valuable learning experiences that you would have become a different person as a result. There is a big opportunity cost when it comes to refusing to spend money on your personal development and education. Whilst you can't expect one nice holiday experience to change your life forever, you should constantly invest in having such educational, beneficial experiences like that in order to nurture young minds.

Delayed gratification: reward now or more reward later.

I don't want to make working class people come across as stupid or irrational but this facet of their behaviour can be explained by the concept of delayed gratification. So if you go to university at the age of 18, you would spend the next three years as a student, not earning any money (or earning very little whilst working part time) whilst paying out a lot in terms of your tuition fees and living costs. But if you were to start working at the age of 18, you would probably be able to get an unskilled or lowly skilled job as a security guard. There's an old man who sits at the entrance of my local supermarket and I swear he does absolutely nothing - I have even seen him sleeping on a few occasions whilst slumped over on his chair. I suppose the staff would wake him up if there was an emergency, but I was dismayed at the fact that he didn't make any effort to enforce the mandatory wearing of masks when it was the law. But then again, he's probably paid so little that he can't be asked to get into an argument every five or ten minutes with the next idiot who refuses to wear a mask. So yes, if you leave school with no formal qualifications, then you could probably still get a job like that but that security guard is probably paid about £9 an hour (that's just barely above the current national minimum wage of £8.91 an hour) - now you may think, hey that's £9 an hour for doing practically nothing and I can even sleep on the job! But then again, that's a job with no prospects and the boredom factor is very high - that's why it makes a lot of sense to pursue further education and training to improve your chances of getting a more interesting, fulfilling and lucrative job in the long run. That security guard I mentioned above is an old man, it's probably too late for him to retrain to do anything else but for a young person at just the age of 18 - it makes absolutely no sense to pick a job like that as a career choice. 

How hardship can make you choose instant gratification over a reward much later on

However, why do some working class people have an issue with delayed gratification then? Well, in the case of my mother's experience, her family situation was as awful as it could get - after her sister died, my grandfather died too. Yup, he literally worked so hard try to put food on the table, he worked himself to an early grave, leaving my grandmother with six children to bring up on her own. I still can't get my head around why such poor people insist on having so many children, only to subject the innocent children to so much suffering and hardship.Thus under such circumstances, my mother simply couldn't consider the possibility of going for further education - no, the short term needs of putting enough food on the table were far more pressing than any long term considerations of improving her career prospects. She was constantly in survival mode after her sister and father died.That was why my mother (along with so many others just like her in that generation, who found themselves in the same situation) chose not to pursue further education and started working in their late teens. So in the short run, sure they were able to a very pressing need to put food on the table but this is a hard choice - you can't have your cake and eat it. What then happens is that working class people get extremely defensive about having made such a choice: according to them, it is never their fault: they would blame society, they would blame the government, they might even blame their own parents but they would never take any responsibility for the predicament they find themselves in. They might even use rhetoric like, "what is wrong with being working class? Are you looking down on working class folks like me? Without us working class folks doing all these lowly paid jobs, nothing in our society will function. How dare you have this attitude?" That's when I back off as I am not looking for an argument. 

But answer the question: what's wrong with being working class? Are you looking down on them? 

I come from an extremely working class family yet I have been able to attain social mobility to become a lot richer than my parents. I was a bright student so I went to the best schools in Singapore, that meant that a lot of my classmates I grew up were just like me: they were a) intelligent and b) working class. Thanks to social media, I can actually spy on what some of them are doing today. I'm now 45 and my former classmates and I have had plenty of time to prove ourselves in the working world: so amongst the cohort of these intelligent working class kids I went to school with, some are ridiculously wealthy today whilst a small handful are struggling to make ends meet, then there's everything in between the two extremes of course. So it's not like these people were born with a low IQ, they're not stupid and all of them did make it to good universities, yet some have achieved not just social mobility but have become crazy rich Asians whilst a few others have ended up very poor - why? You could say that there was an element of luck of course but that would only be the case if you won the lottery. A person who manages to earn millions over the years by establishing a successful business doesn't rely on luck but has clearly made some very wise decisions and conversely, those who have ended up very poor did make some very poor decisions along the way. You could call it foolishness, immaturity or even bad judgment that led them to make those bad decisions, but the way I see it, they were hampered by their working class mindset that held them back from attaining the success that their peers achieved so I'm simply analyzing this difference.  

That's not fair - rich people don't have to worry about money!

No, it's not fair at all. Life is so unfair. Firstly, if your family is rich, then that fear of starving to death, that fear of poverty induced hardship simply isn't there because you know that there's always some money which you can access to deal with any kind of emergencies. Secondly, having access to that kind of money gives you confidence - when a rich guy turns up at university, he knows that his parents can easily afford to pay for his education; even if he flunks this degree, no worries - his parents can still pay for him to do another course at a different university. But if a poor guy's parents have to use all their life savings to pay for his degree, then the poor guy may think, "I can't possibly take this kind of risk, what if it doesn't work out at university? What if I fail? Then my parents would be left with absolutely nothing, this is their life savings! I'd better not go to university." Do all rich kids do well at university? No, there are so many other factors that determine how they perform at university (such as how intelligent the individual student), but the fact that they're more willing and able to give it a go means that they are more likely to succeed. Imagine if I have two classes of students of the same size: I give every student in class A a lucky draw ticket and with class B I only give one in four students a ticket. Which class is more likely to win a prize in that lucky draw? Obviously class A would walk away with more prizes because statistically, their chances of winning are greatly influenced by the fact that they have more lucky draw tickets than the students in class B. Will every student in class A win a prize? No, that's not guaranteed but overall, when you compare the number of prizes won by each class it's still evident that class A will walk away with far more prizes this way.

Toil or leadership? What is your role in life? 

To put it bluntly, the working class are paid for their toil whilst those in management are paid a lot more for their leadership - thus their education would reflect the role they are being prepared for. Those who are working class are thus taught how to obey instructions, how to memorize rules and procedures that they have to follow, how to complete allocated tasks quickly and efficiently and how to achieve consistent results when replicating the same task over and over again. Whereas those who are prepared for management and leadership roles are encouraged to be bold and creative, to come up with their own responses and solutions to tricky situations, to think independently and have an opinion. Allow me to share with you an incident I witnessed at my local supermarket - the Chinese saying 輪不到你開口  (literally: it is not your turn to open your mouth, meaning: nobody gives a shit what you have to say so shut the hell up) comes to mind. There is a section in my local supermarket where they introduce new products on a trial basis to see if the customers like them, I always take a look there to see if they have any interesting new products. So I saw this young worker asking his manager a question, "this is a really nice product, but it is on the lower shelf, why don't we put it on a higher shelf so it is at eye level, then more customers will notice it?" The indignant manager rolled her eyes and gave him the 輪不到你開口 look and said, "do you remember where I asked you to put that product? The bottom shelf. Good, you remembered, now just do as you're told and report back to me when you're done." This is a clear case of 輪不到你開口 because this worker was paid to follow instructions rather than offer his opinions or tell his managers how to do their job!

輪不到你開口: nobody gives a shit what you think, so just shut up!

So what do you think is going to happen the next time this young worker tries to offer his manager a suggestion? He would probably be scolded and told to shut up, she might even go as far as to put him down to remind him just how far down the food chain he is. He would eventually realize the true meaning of 輪不到你開口 and just follow instructions. I did feel sorry for this guy because his manager is barely a few years older than him and since she also works at the supermarket, she probably is paid peanuts as well - a bit more than the younger guy but not much more! One could even argue that she was teaching him a valuable lesson about social skills: it is important for him to understand how to get along better with everyone at work, if he genuinely thought he could swan in there on his first week and start calling the shorts by telling the managers what they ought to be doing instead as if he was the new boss. If you were optimistic, you might react to this situation by saying, "this guy is new, maybe if he works hard at the supermarket, after a few years he can be promoted to become the manager and then he would be in a better position to implement his own ideas about product display?" However, this would be like trying to grow a flower in the Sahara desert - yes it is technically possible to do so but your chances of succeeding are very low because of the very harsh conditions which are hardly conducive to the flower. Thus when working class people are subjected to this 輪不到你開口 situation over and over again for years, they would lose the will to try to be creative and inventive hence they would just default to doing as they are told instead. 

What kind of working class education is my nephew getting in Singapore?

This is why I am extremely concerned about my nephew's education - he is a very hardworking student and I know he spends many hours revising, however, his idea of revising is simply to memorize the entire textbook and notes. However, that's hardly going to get him through a difficult A level exam where students are presented with a case study they have never ever seen before and expected to think on the spot, analyze the information they have just been given then apply what they know to the complex questions which require a lot of critical thinking. My nephew can't get his head around that concept, he would read the question and then latch onto a word like 'inflation' - then he would just regurgitate everything he can remember about inflation from his textbook instead of actually trying to tailor his answer to the question at hand. My nephew's education in Singapore has prepared him for a very working class role in the working world where all he has to do is follow instructions rather than exercise any kind of critical thinking; obviously, I'm frustrating and angry about that. Please note that I'm not blaming my nephew but I am blaming the system - my nephew has been woefully let down by a terrible education system that is geared towards producing worker ants rather than future leaders. So even when my nephew is offered the chance to offer his own response to a complex question in an economics exam, he still thinks that the 輪不到你開口 rule applies regardless, so he would default to what he has memorized from the textbook. I don't know if it is too late to teach him to think independently, or if his brain is already too damaged by the awful, fetid Singaporean system. Please don't get me started, I can get quite emotional about this issue. 

The desire to conform and the fear of being different 

One other aspect of the working class mentality is this desire to fit in and by the same token, this fear of being different from everyone else. Allow me to demonstrate where this mentality originates from: working class folks tend to do jobs where they are required to wear a uniform. Think about the staff working at your local supermarket, their uniform allows customers to easily identify the staff. At a crowded train station, you can also easily recognize the staff on duty because of their uniforms. When you go to a fast food restaurant, again the staff are all dressed in their uniforms. I remember witnessing how a manager at a restaurant told off a waitress because she broke the rules of the uniform by trying  to look different by using necklaces, bracelets, earrings and accessories in her hair. Her job as the waitress was to blend in, be instantly forgettable, rather than stand out by trying to look prettier or cuter than the other staff members and customers. Now contrast that to my situation in banking, whilst there is a corporate dress code to look formal for work, everyone dresses differently and it's not like the company tells us what to wear or even gives us a uniform - on the contrary, we're allowed to express our personalities through the image we create with our clothes. Since I work in sales, I like to look and feel like success personified when I walk into the room and that means dressing very well. This is why my parents were always so appalled at the way I would deliberately dress to stand out, to get people's attention because I wanted to feel special - I wasn't interested in fitting in at all, I wanted people to notice me. My parents thought I was thoroughly mad to even feel that way, but I don't expect them to understand it since they are so extremely working class. 

Case study: The British film Billy Elliot 

I'm going to use a very British example - mining used to be an important industry that employed a lot of people, the industries that made the UK rich were mostly fueled by local coal in the early days. Entire towns would be built where there were major mines, with the mine being the main employer in that town - sure there were other services like a post office, maybe a pub, some shops, a church and a local school but even those businesses would be serving the local mining community. If you're unfamiliar with this aspect of British society, I recommend the classic film Billy Elliot which was about a young boy who wanted to become a ballet dancer, growing up in a depressed mining town in the 1980s. Such towns were painfully poor of course but there was a sense of belonging in the community, that everyone in the community were there for each other and took care of each other even if they were all painfully poor. These mining communities did have a strong sense of identity and even when the miners went on strike in the mid-1980s (as portrayed in Billy Elliot), the community rallied together to support the miners as they fought to keep the mines open. The price one has to pay to enjoy this sense of community and belonging in such communities is to conform - you needed to do what everyone else did and in exchange, you were part of their big happy family. But if you dare to do something like cross a picket line during a strike, you were immediately ostracized in that community. That's why part of the working class mentality is to simply blend in, keep one's head down and conform - that's always been really hard for an outspoken person like me, but I've never had a working class job before, so this is one aspect of their culture which is foreign to me. 

But can we blame working class people for having this mindset? Is it their fault?

The problem with this response is that if you really believe that none of this is your fault, then you've done nothing wrong and there's nothing you need to change. But if you take that stance, then you'll never change your behaviour to break out of that cycle of trapping poor working class people in poverty. This is when I like to use the famous speech by Will Smith about fault and responsibility - the best line from that speech is, "fault and responsibility do not go together - it sucks!" Basically, Will Smith pointed out that there are so many instances when it is not our fault that things go horribly wrong in our lives, but it is nonetheless our responsibility to fix it and resolve the problem. If we get stuck in this cycle where we refuse to fix the problem because it wasn't our fault and we expect the person we blame for causing the problem in the first place to come and fix the problem, then you get stuck in this cycle where you're just angry, you're in pain and nobody is fixing the problem. I've seen so many working class people come up with the most ridiculously excuses not to go to excuses, such as "oh there are hardly any other working class students there at the university so I don't feel like I belong there. That's why I don't feel comfortable about the idea of going to one of those elite universities." Whilst the lack of working class students there may be 100% true, whose responsibility is it to make you feel like you belong there? Is it the responsibility of everyone at the university from the staff to the students to roll out the red carpet and make you feel like a VIP there? Or is it your responsibility to be charming and friendly, to make those people you meet there like you and want to become your friend? Thus in this case - we really need to borrow some of Will Smith's wisdom to arrive at our answer. 

Whose responsibility is it then to sort out these problems?

I work in banking in London and I stand out in so many ways, good grief, where do I even begin? My parents are painfully working class. I'm often the only Asian person in the company and on top of that, I'm also usually the only openly gay person. I'm also quite autistic as well with Asperger's syndrome, on top of that, I am an immigrant who didn't grow up in the UK. Is it my fault that I am so different from everyone else I work with? No, it isn't my fault. But is it my responsibility to make sure that I win their trust and respect, so they will say, "Alex is a great guy to work with"? Oh yes, that's definitely my responsibility, 100%. After all, if I gave in to the excuses that it is not my fault, then what am I left with? There's a huge difference between giving excuses and just getting on with cleaning up the mess you have before you. But allow me to talk about my autism and how I am dealing with it - autism sucks, it sucks to be autistic. But let me tell you what sucks even more, it's when your family members try to distance themselves from your autism. When my nephew got his autism diagnosis, the first thing my parents did was to claim, "nobody in our family is autistic!" I then replied, "I'm totally autistic and the two of you (my parents), your autism is off the scale, like you're the most autistic people on earth. We're definitely the most autistic family in Singapore, no family in Singapore can be as autistic as we are. I'd be very surprised if my nephew didn't turn out as autistic as the rest of us." What did my parents do? They went into complete denial and started blaming my brother in law's family for the autism - my point is simple: playing the blame game doesn't solve the problem. I preferred to look my nephew in the eye and say, "hey I am just as autistic as you, you're not the only one who is autistic - Uncle Alex is 100% autistic as well and so it's okay to talk about autism with me." 

Being honest vs being defensive 

I tend to associate this refusal with taking responsibility with the working class mindset - the less you have, the more insecure you tend to be and the more defensive you become. It has been pointed out to me that it is extremely easy for me to wear the autism hat and publicly declare, "My name Alex and I am totally autistic." After all, I am a former national champion gymnast and triple scholar who went to a top university in the UK and then subsequently built a very successful career which has allowed me to accumulate a vast amount of wealth - an autistic adult who is working as a security guard at a supermarket might find it a lot harder to admit to being autistic if he is already feeling extremely insecure about how little he has achieved. Rich people find it a lot easier to have this level of honesty when it comes to their own shortcomings - I recently spoke to a friend Paul (not his real name), I've known Paul for quite a while already so I asked him if his son was going to university. Paul quite honestly told me that his son was quite stupid and had messed up his A levels, so he was probably going to Brighton University. We have a league table in the UK for our 131 universities and Brighton is currently ranked 120th out of 131 - they will accept students that all other universities have rejected. The fact is Paul is fabulously wealthy, like he is crazy rich, he makes so much money it is unreal. So even if Paul's son is a total idiot, guess what? It doesn't matter - it's not like daddy doesn't have enough money to support his son even if his son turns out to be totally useless. Would a poor, working class parent feel as comfortable in admitting the same thing, would they dare to admit, "yeah that stupid son of mine, he's a total idiot, he's probably gonna flunk out of school" with total honesty? I doubt it, even if they address the matter, they will start making excuses and blaming others.     

I have to constantly check my behaviour and choices, since I have working class roots.

I'm not claiming that rich folks are morally superior because of this tendency to be more honest about their shortcomings - I'm pointing out that when you have plenty of money, you tend to be a lot more relaxed and less defensive when things do not work out, when things do not go according to plan; such as in the case of Paul having a son who turns out to be a total idiot. I actually find Paul's honesty quite refreshing and that has been a defining feature of our friendship. That's probably why I am completely comfortable with the idea of telling the world I am totally autistic whilst my parents will deny to their dying breath that they are autistic. But here's the thing: since I am totally aware that I am autistic, I am able to catch myself when I do something autistic - by the same token, when I am about to make a decision about money, I would then automatically question myself, "am I allowing my working class roots influence my decision making process?" I suppose this is no different from my friend Tom who happens to be colour blind - whenever he is getting dressed, he would ask someone who has normal vision to double check his choice of clothing, because he is aware of the situation with his colour blindness. Whereas for someone like my parents, I don't even think they are even aware about how working class they are and how that affects their behaviour - the thought that they may act quite differently from those who are not working class has never ever crossed their mind. There's quite an element of navel gazing on their part so I have witnessed a lot of that as a third party observer and that's why I am determined to avoid making that same mistake. 

So in conclusion, some closing thoughts. 

Some working class people simply don't have a choice in the matter - they're born into a working class family, they grow up working class because they were never given a chance to attain social mobility and they will die working class - so they embrace it and celebrate it because that's just what they are, they never had and never will have a choice in the matter. Whereas working class people like me who were fortunate enough to have attained social mobility through a combination of social skills, education and luck, well we might feel quite differently about having a very working class mentality. Actually, I do play the working class card sometimes at work - I would point out that some rich kids get every single opportunity handed to them on a plate whilst I had to fight to earn everything that I own because I started with nothing; this kind of story usually starts with, "my father doesn't even speak English!" So yeah, whilst I risk the wrath of discrimination for coming from a working class background, I also gain a lot of credibility in playing the working class rags-to-rich card, even if I enjoy a standard of living these days that is anything but working class. I could go on and on exploring other aspects of the working class mindset but I think I have covered most of it - what do you think? Have I been biased in only covering the negative aspects of the working class mentality? Are there positive aspects of the working class mentality that I have conveniently ignored? Do you identify as working class? What is your understanding of the term working class mentality? Leave a comment below, let me know what your thoughts. Many thanks for reading.