The politically incorrect Q&A about dealing with very rich people

Hi guys, allow me to deal with a topic that is close to my heart: dealing with rich people. I had a weird experience with this growing up as my uncle (ie. my father's older brother) is one of those crazy rich Asians whilst my father was a humble primary school teacher. This massive disparity in the wealth status between the two brothers was too much for my father to deal with so he dealt with it by pretending that his rich brother didn't exist for many years. Like we weren't even allowed to go visit my uncle and I think it was a missed opportunity - for example, I remember my sister getting a part time job when she had just graduated from university and was looking for a better job; it would have made complete sense for her to have approached my uncle then to say, "hey could I work part time for you? You have a great company - I badly need some credibility and work experience. Besides, you're my uncle so how about a little bit of nepotism for your niece please?" Nope, my sister never did that because my father would never allow her to do that, just in case she became impressed with my uncle's immense wealth. Now recently, I started a new job and I'm working with a lot of crazy rich people - I recently attended a house warming of one of my directors and he has a massive house with his own pool, a massive lake, stables for the horses and not one, but two tennis courts. I then had a Skype conversation with my family and I told them what it was like working with these super rich people, then sure enough all my father's insecurities about his older brother came out in the conversation. I'm not going to deal with that per se here but I'll like to do a Q&A instead. 

Q: Do rich people look down on ordinary folks? Would t hey make fun of you for being poor or not as rich? 

A: Oh this is the kind of loaded question that my father would typically come up with. You see, if we take the stance that the rich person by default would look down on the poorer person, then you're making the rich person the villain in this case and creating an impression that the poorer person is an innocent victim; however, this simplistic assumption doesn't help us understand the complexity of the situation. I'd like to look at the situation in a different way: when you put two people together in a social context, then it is up to each individual to get the other party to like them. This then boils down to having the right social skills in order to establish rapport: so we may have a situation whereby the poorer person has very poor social skills and fails to establish rapport with the richer person in this situation. Objectively, I would place the blame on the poorer person on account of his poor social skills, but often people in that situation would turn around and claim, "it's not my fault, that rich person is a snob and he's looking down on all poorer people like me, I'm 100% innocent, I didn't do anything wrong at all." Regardless of how rich or poor you are, we still need to use our social skills when meeting people, making friends and trying to establish rapport. This is even more vital when you're poor as having really good social skills can prove to be a vital advantage in the working world. So in my father's case, I'm afraid he is severely autistic and has absolutely no social skills at all; it is a pathetically tragic situation when he tries to blame others. To make matters worse, he would never ever take any responsibility for his faults and mistakes - he is a deeply flawed individual. 

Q: Has your father experienced discrimination for being poor? Maybe he has had bad experiences in the past. 

A: Look, my father isn't that poor - he's doing okay, he is a retired school teacher with a decent pension but he certainly isn't rich like his older brother. He is guilty of making fun of people who are poorer than him and that's something he has done since I was a child; the irony of course, he is terrified of richer people making fun of him or looking down on him. I still struggle to figure out why he has reacted by making fun of people poorer than him, just to feel better about himself. So the act of making fun or looking down on someone poorer than you is not something that rich people would do by default; so some people like my father can quite easily find someone poorer to make fun of. If I felt that I was too fat, then I would look into dieting and doing more exercise to lose weight - simply making fun of someone fatter than me wouldn't take inches off my waistline. Likewise if I felt poor, I would look into ways I could better organize all my investments or improve my sales figures to earn more commission, so I could make more money - simply making fun of someone poorer than me isn't going to put more dollars in my bank account. However, if my father wanted to become more rich, he had to leave his job as a teacher and go find more lucrative employment or start his own business - I seriously doubt that he would have been able to do that, so he stuck to what he knew best by teaching until he retired. Since he couldn't become any richer, he resorted to making fun of poor people to make himself feel better about having a big brother who was ridiculously rich but now he has the cheek to turn around and accuse snobbish rich people of looking down on him? He's simply assuming that all rich people are doing exactly what he is doing to his peers who are poorer than him - go figure. 

Q: What kind of relationships do you have with your colleagues who are super rich? Do they look down on you?

A: Good question - I have this colleague whom I've referred to as 'young Dave' (not his real name) in recent posts and he is a remarkable salesman. In August, he closed a deal which earned him about US$1.66 million in commissions and we are estimating that he would make between 9 to 11 millions (in USD) in 2021, possibly more - oh and did I mention that he is only 23 years old? Yeah, when people are bitching about how hard it is to make ends meet during the pandemic, here we have a 23 year old making 8, possibly 9 figures in 2021 during the pandemic. So immediately my father got worried that I would have a bad working relationship with Dave because Dave would look down on me, Dave would be racist and Dave would make life difficult for me at work - none of which was true of course and of course, I had to tell my father that he was completely wrong. Of course, my father was thinking about just how insecure he felt having a crazy rich older brother and yeah, Dave makes a lot more money than I do. I must confess that sometimes, I feel quite intimidated by Dave but I am curious to learn from him as well. The fact is Dave actually treats me very well with the utmost respect, he is extremely polite and friendly to me as I am part of the team - now I am aware that there may be an ulterior motive of course, some of Dave's biggest clients are Chinese and I have been in a position to help him further develop his relationship with those clients because of not just my ability to speak Mandarin fluently but also my understanding of Chinese business culture. Thus it has been the polar opposite of what my father has assumed: he couldn't be nicer and friendlier to me I swear - Dave has been a joy to work with and I want to take credit for that as well. 

Q: But that's not quite the same as a real friendship, is it? He is clearly using you, he has an ulterior motive. 

A: So even if Dave has an ulterior motive when he is being so incredibly nice to me, the bottom line is that he is still on his best behaviour: he is friendly, respectful and polite. I have to also point out something that's probably quite obvious: unlike my father, Dave is extremely intelligent. Oh yeah, you don't accidentally make ten million dollars at the age of 23 by luck, Dave has an insane amount of business acumen. So even if Dave doesn't like me, he has done a cost benefit analysis of the situation and came to the conclusion that I would be far more useful to him at work as a friend and ally and any personal satisfaction or glee that he may derive from looking down on me is so little compared to the amount of help I could potentially offer him with his Chinese clients. So yes, I am aware of the fact that he does get something out of this working relationship with me but what's wrong with that? Would you invest any time, energy and effort in a relationship that you would get little or nothing out of? Likewise, from my point of view, I am intrigued by Dave - I want to know what makes him so successful as a salesman so I can learn from him and hopefully sell like him. So by the same token, I also have an ulterior motive to want to get along well with Dave and thus I have made a genuine effort to become friends with him. I don't think we have enough in common to become best friends but we have enough mutual goals to make this a fruitful, mutually beneficial working relationship and that is actually a pretty good basis for him and I to get along like two colleagues with an excellent working relationship. Thus this is a far cry from what my father had imagined. 

Q: So these rich people only nice to you because you're useful to them, don't you feel like you're being used?

A: Well in this context yes, it's called having a job. I do receive a rather generous salary at work you know, I'm not doing this for free. Why do you think these people are paying me good money to work for them? It is because we all have the common goal of making loads of money - that's a very practical reason to go to work! I don't want to be poor like my father, I want to be crazy rich like these people I work with and I have found a simple way to make them like me by proving just how useful I can be to them. I would like to point out that it is possible for a person like me to form genuine friendships with these rich people but it is down to me having enough in common with them to want to forge a friendship with them rather than just a good working relationship like the one I have with Dave. And yes, I've formed some genuine friendships along the way with people who are way richer than me (I'm not exactly poor either as I work in investment banking). However, I have enough social skills to control the situation: so I either have a good working relationship with them (like I do with Dave) or I have a genuine friendship with them. I never let it turn toxic - this is what I am good at. I suppose my father is worried because I have seen him get really badly bullied as an adult at work because of his very poor social skills. So adults like him do get bullied all the time in the workplace no matter how old they get if they do not have the social skills to develop the right kind of relationships with their colleagues. I'm sorry that he had to go through that but I'm also equally thankful that I am not as autistic as he is - I happen to have developed much better social skills.

Q: But are rich people only willing to make friends and hang out with other rich people, will they shun the poor? 

A: Hmmm, that isn't true. I think we all want meaningful, fruitful relationships and we don't want to waste our time on relationships that have little or nothing to offer. When I meet someone, I am not exactly interested in how much they earn but I am more interested in whether or not we have something in common so we can use that as a basis to establish some kind of connection. When rich people get together, they're not actually comparing how many sports cars, diamonds, yachts, private jets, properties and servants they have - in fact, openly bragging about your wealth is quite a taboo and only the nouveau riche would commit that kind of social faux pas. Instead, rich people are a lot more subtle in this aspect - they use their powers of observations to try to figure our how rich (or otherwise) you are - it would be little things like observing the kind of shoes you wear or your accent or even the way you respond when they name drop something that only rich people would be familiar with, like "I last ran into her when I was in Gstaad, it was actually rather late in the season and I didn't think that I would be seeing my people there but there she was, with her new boyfriend." Now Gstaad happens to be one of the most expensive and exclusive ski resorts in Europe, located in Switzerland, the rich ski there specifically to avoid poor people (or even upper-middle class folks like me). Is this practice cruel and unkind? Perhaps, but we have the right to seek friends we have something in common with and if you're poor then you're unlikely to have anything in common with these rich people if you simply cannot afford to do the lovely things they enjoy.

Q: But it is still hard for rich and poor people to get along if they have nothing in common, right?

A: Not all rich people are obsessed with spending their money on very expensive experiences, take myself for example: two of my passions involve activities that aren't that expensive. I adore the Welsh language and gymnastics, so I'll gladly spend ages chatting to anyone in Welsh whether they are rich or poor - that doesn't matter as long as that conversation takes place in Welsh. Likewise for gymnastics, I train at two gymnastics clubs: my Sunday afternoon session costs £13 and my Wednesday night session is £15 - that's not prohibitively expensive so it doesn't exclude anyone but the very poorest. So by that token, I am interested in meeting people I have something in common with rather than with people who are as rich or richer than me (but may not share any of my interests). So some hobbies like winter sports can be prohibitively expensive, others like learning a foreign language (one of my passions) needn't be. I can either learn a language like Italian by flying out to Tuscany, staying at a luxurious holiday villa for a month whilst hiring a private tutor or I could simply learn it online, at home, for virtually nothing. Likewise for gymnastics, I am always stunned when I see videos of gymnasts from poorer countries in places like Russia or India training on terribly old, worn out equipment but somehow still managing to perform really difficult skills in spite of the total absence of decent equipment. I look at them and I think, "if this is what they're capable of with such poor equipment, imagine what they could achieve if they trained at my gym!" I would never mock them for being poor - I admire their tenacity and determination to triumph over adversity. 

Q: Could you give your father the benefit of the doubt - maybe he has had some very bad experiences dealing with rich people that has seriously clouded his judgement about interacting with rich people?

A: My father often assume the worst case scenario because my father is severely autistic, he has very poor social skills so he had been bullied all his life. When he was a child he was bullied by his classmates and siblings and when he was an adult, he was bullied by his colleagues. So now he is retired, the pandemic has suddenly justified his default stance of staying away from people - he now has a valid reason to avoid all social contact with anyone so instead of being a reclusive old man with no friends, he is now a responsible citizen doing everything he can to stop the spread of Covid and setting a good example for all to follow. The worst case scenario for a relationship is for it to turn toxic, when one party bullies the other but that's an ultimate worst case scenario. In most cases, most people simply realize that you have nothing in common with the other party and then proceed to just ignore them. There's this guy at my gym I shall refer to as Mr Cross (obviously not his name). The only time I have spoken to him was about his bad habit of crossing his legs when he twists, but for some reason, he didn't respond well to the criticism and he got very defensive, claiming that crossing his legs would make him twist faster. He's totally wrong of course and I know more about gymnastics than he does but I backed off as I wasn't looking for an argument. I simply thought, fine do it your way then, see if I care if you sprain both ankles when you land your twists with your feet crossed. So the situation with Mr Cross is more typical when we find that we don't get along with someone. Thus after that incident, we have simply chosen to ignore each other in the gym. We are not friends (and never will be) but we do simply leave each other alone and hence there's a peaceful truce. 

Whilst this case study involving Mr Cross doesn't involve wealth being the cause of our conflict (I have absolutely no idea what he does for a living though I suspect that I am a lot richer than him), for some reason I have failed to establish a friendship with him despite the fact that we're both gymnasts training at the same gymnastics club. Just because we don't get along doesn't mean we have any conflict, I can't imagine us becoming friends but by the same token, we're not actually fighting or looking to antagonize each other. There is an uneasy peace but a peace nonetheless and the complete absence of conflict with Mr Cross. My point is simple: even if a rich person crosses paths with a poor person and realizes that they have absolutely nothing in common, then in all probability they would just ignore each other the way Mr Cross and I just don't speak to each other. The rich person would not try to bully the poor person - the fact is rich people have loads of money to buy things to have fun with, they can go to the mall and indulge in some retail therapy, buying anything they fancy there which can bring them pleasure and fun but by the same token, poor people have no money to go shopping and so they're far more likely to seek out other ways to feel empowered. I may treat myself to a new outfit or some new shoes if I wanna feel good about myself - that does cost a lot of money. Poor people may instead resort to bullying another person to get that same thrill of empowerment. So actually rich people are less likely to become bullies than poorer people. Thus my father's assumptions really have no basis at all, apart from all his own insecurities.

Q: Have these experiences changed the way you interact with those poorer than you? 

A: Allow me to share with you another situation which was quite the opposite: I was at a party hosted by one of my directors and when such rich people throw a party, they don't do the organizing themselves. No, they hire a professional events company to take care of every aspect of the party from the catering to the decoration to the entertainment to the invitations. So when I was trying to arrange a taxi to take me back to the train station after the party, I got talking to a helpful member of staff whom we shall call Melissa (not her real name) who was worked for the events company. Whilst she was very friendly and respectful (given that I was a guest and she was a member of staff serving the guests), she said something really quite stupid. Oh dear. I won't repeat what she said but my first reaction was, "see Melissa? This is why you're working 10 hours today serving these rich people instead of drinking the finest champagne out on the terrace - you're stupid and ignorant." That was what I thought but did I say any of that to her? No, I abide by the rule of "calling someone stupid doesn't make you any cleverer." I did however realize that I was wasting my time chatting with an idiot and I should go back to the party to talk to some really rich people - hey, maybe I can learn something interesting or useful from these super rich people but I was never going to learn anything from Melissa. So maybe, I've done a 'Melissa' with one of these very rich people before, but they were never going to inform me on the spot that I've committed a social faux pas and they would just silently judge me (the way I did Melissa). Even judgmental people like me don't like conflict. 

Q: But admit it - you are still looking down on Melissa, aren't you? You think she's poor and stupid. 

A: That's exactly how I would have treated someone like Melissa a few months ago before I started this job. Note that I didn't hesitate to have a chat with her even after I realized that she was just working there and not one of those crazy rich guests at the party. It was only when she said something really stupid that I decided, "right, I now have the choice of either telling you why what you said is factually incorrect and how it would never ever work in the real world, or I could terminate this conversation now. Given that I don't know how you would react to a lecture about economics 101 about how the real world actually works, so I'm just going to end this chat and walk away instead. I'm unlikely to ever run into you ever again Melissa and thus I shall not try to correct you even if you were spouting rubbish." Please note that I had never been disrespectful or rude Melissa for simply being poorer than me - after all, I am part of two communities where no one cares how rich or poor you are. Firstly, I am part of the adult gymnastics community and Welsh speaking in London. I gain acceptance and respect in these  communities by being good at gymnastics and Welsh whilst how much I earn or I do for a living is really of no interest to them - essentially there are various ways you can judge a person you've just met and depending on the context, I may not find out what their jobs are (and consequently have some idea of how much they earn) until quite a bit later as it is simply not relevant to what we share in common. As I don't suffer from my father's insecurities about being poor, thus this is simply not an issue that clouds my interactions with the people I meet. 

Q: So you're saying there's no correlation between wealth and respect in your eyes? 

A: Yes indeed. Allow me to give you an example of one such interaction: there's this young man we shall call Jones (not his real name) - he is training to become a stuntman and in order to get on the stunt register in the UK, you need to pass a lot of exams so that's going to take a while especially since the pandemic caused a lot of delays in his exams. He is an absolutely brilliant gymnast and I'm sure he would make a great stuntman one day; I did find out there other day that he is making ends meet by working a rather terrible job (which I shan't describe, just in case anyone could use that information to identify him). So it is obvious that Jones is poor - well, at least he will be until he can complete those exams and get decent work as a stuntman. Would I look down on Jones just because he is poor? No, I wouldn't for a few reasons: firstly, I got to know him through the adult gymnastics community so he has already won my respect with his gymnastics and that's clearly an area that we're both passionate about. Secondly, he is a young man - he has plenty of years ahead of him in his adult working life to figure out what he wants to do, whether he wants to follow through with the exams and work as a stuntman or if he would one day try his hand at something else altogether, he has plenty of years to do all that. So I am happy to give him the benefit of the doubt and not make any assumptions - there's a lovely saying in Chinese: 拭目以待 it means to wait and see, so in the case of Jones, I'm willing to say, let us 拭目以待 and see what the future holds for him. It would be a different story if Jones was already my age as I am already 45 now - I don't have that much time left in my working life, but Jones has time on his side and I am happy to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

Q: Jones is young but what if you met someone your age or older who is poor, would you look down on them then? At what point would your patience run out with poor older folks then? 

A: I think this really depends on the context - allow me to talk about someone else from my gymnastics club, we'll call her Rachel (not her real name). She didn't stand out as a gymnast to me, her skills were pretty average and she can manage the basics, but apart from that, she just seemed like your typical recreational gymnast - someone who does it once in a while, doesn't take it that seriously and isn't looking to compete. Then one day after training I saw her leave the gym with a white cane and I realized, holy shit she is blind?! I asked Rachel about it and she said that she has an eye condition which renders her 'legally blind' - she can see a little but it is extremely limited and she is reliant on her other senses when doing gymnastics. Gymnastics is a bloody hard sport when you have little or no vision because we're so dependent on being able to see what we're doing for our brains to orientate ourselves, to make sense of where our bodies are when we do these multiple twisting somersaults. I could never do the skills Rachel performs with my eyes closed - I think I would just freak out if I couldn't see where I was going. So with that new piece of information, Rachel had gone from a very average recreational gymnast to a superhero in my estimation: context is everything. I believe we need to measure someone's achievements against the conditions they are given to work with - thus any kind of evaluation of a person's achievements would have to be based on what they were given in the first place, this would take into a whole range of conditions like their intelligence, their upbringing, the education they received and the opportunities they had been given. 

I'm not trying to be evasive on that question but I think it is important to be fair to everyone if we're subjecting them to our judgment, especially if that judgment happens to be harsh. I have written a post a while ago about some of my Singaporean peers who were academically brilliant but really struggled to make the transition to the working world and have ended up struggling to make ends meet, despite having been great students who aced all their exams. On the other end of the spectrum, I've met working class people in the UK who have come from very poor families and have had every odd stacked against them when they were growing up - yet somehow they have managed to achieve a lot with very little help along the way. Then there those who have achieved a lot but they have also received so much help from their very rich parents along the way so it hardly seems fair to make any kind of  comparison without such a comparison being deemed unfair to at least one party. So with someone who has triumphed against the odds like that, I tend to view their success the same way as Rachel the blind gymnast. It is not just an arbitrary measurement of simply, "how much wealth do you currently have? How much did you earn in the last 12 months?" We need to have a far more comprehensive approach to such a complex matter and I know it may seem like I am not giving you a straight answer but I hope the case study of Rachel the blind gymnast will make it very clear how we should never adopt a 'one size fits all' approach to such complex issues which involve passing judgment on the accomplishments of others when the context is very important!

So that's it from me on this topic, what do you think? Do you know people who are extremely, crazy rich? What kind of relationships do you have with them? Do you feel intimidated by their wealth or is that not an issue at all? Would you feel comfortable working with or befriending someone who is a lot richer than you? Why is my father so paranoid about being bullied by richer people when usually, we merely arrive at an uneasy truce (such as in the case of Mr Cross) when we simply ignore the people we don't get along with? What about people a lot poorer than you, do you feel you can form meaningful relationships with them in spite of the differences? Have you ever met anyone like Melissa and how would you have dealt with her, if she said something stupid to you? Please leave a comment below - many thanks for reading.