| ▲ | wahern 13 hours ago | |
> Arguably the ability of people to see how the wealthiest people are living is going to create exactly that sense. Nobody is seeing how the wealthy live. They're seeing caricatures of how people imagine the wealthy live, or sometimes the extravagance of the nouveau riche living out those fictions. And even when they get glimpses of actual wealth, like all forms of entertainment (including rage bait) they're seeing highly compressed slices that only superficially reflect the fictions. And the same is largely true for every class and group depiction. People forming expectations based on digital content (social media videos, but even "news" stories and narratives) are bound to be confused. Over time their expectations simply won't match the way reality unfolds, but they don't understand why. This helps drive conspiracy theories, both on the left and the right; narratives are concocted to explain the fictitious universes people are living in. | ||
| ▲ | EA-3167 12 hours ago | parent [-] | |
"Wealthy" is extremely relative, which is why people here think of SV oligarchs, but people in a very poor part of the world might see the standard of living of the average middle class person in another country as wealthy. For example the people in Fnideq, Morocco can see how people in Ceuta are living directly, and media deptiction (including quite accurate ones) of how people live in Spain. Now while you or I would find both to probably be a significant lifestyle downgrade, to a destitute young man in Fnideq it's literally tempting enough to risk their lives to bridge that gap. Wherever you are in the world you now have a window into the possibilities, the lifestyles, the leisure, the lack of humiliating poverty that others experience. It's not just human nature to see that and want it, it's primate nature. | ||